From nails and teeth to stones and branches to arrows and spears to guns and cannons to missiles and bullets the human condition has evolved. Along with us, however, is our twin called violence, sitting on our side waiting patiently for the bells of carnage to be heard, clandestinely shrouded in the inner bowels of man, released with the call to arms that mutates us back to the animal world we claim to rule, not be part of. For violence knows that she will eventually reap what man sows, commandeering entire armies of enraged men to become exactly that which human morality and religion stands firmly against.
Through the cross-hairs of a rifle or the aiming of a weapon man stops being man. He who fires and aims has become beast while he who is fired upon is but a subhuman target, losing all personality and humanity. The human hell turns man into beast, Jekyll turns into Hyde and the world becomes a bastion for the demons running rampant in the human condition. Atrocities become accepted, rapes become desirable, carnage fills the air and humanism erodes more and more with each new devastation of land and man.
The human hell legalizes those most heinous crimes our civilization condemns. It makes heroes out of war criminals, replaces justice with destruction and executes devastation upon innocence. Murder and cold-blooded execution are given the legal justifications never granted in society. The losers of war become war criminals while the victors become war heroes, to be honored and rewarded for the crimes against humanity they helped perpetrate. War presidents are given full reign to decimate tens of thousands of civilians and to make toxic entire nations, ruining countless lives in the process.
Death, destruction and misery enliven the energy that feeds from human blood. The animal inside us awakens with the adrenaline rush of death and survival. Hatred, anger, animosity and revenge are spawned as our animal selves usurp our human minds. Humans become worthless, their lives easily taken, their deaths expected. Entire cities are sacked, children and women are murdered without impunity, human morals and virtues are made extinct. Human hell makes monsters of entire peoples acquiescing to the crimes against humanity being committed in their name.
The enemy is hated, though he is unknown. The desire to kill him grows, though he never hurt us. Unleashing pain upon him and his people is ingrained into our minds, though we fail to realize he is as human as us. The human hell blinds us to a humanity we once possessed, unearthing our animal passions that, combined with our human intelligence, causes a weapon of death and destruction, unrepentant, unrelenting and unforgiving. The human hell makes man the incarnation of evil, released upon civilization, thrusting decimation upon our own kind.
It is evil born of man that our religions warn against. It is our violent selves our scribes write about. It is man at his worst that we must fear.
The development of stereotypes, differences in beliefs and racial identity, the arrival of fears and ignorance, ethnic and cultural complexities, different goals and ways of seeing the world, auras of superiority along with competitive pressure for land, food and resources contribute to the ever-growing need to unleash the human hell onto our environment.
Genocide and ethnic cleansing have, along with war, been a part of the virus we call human violence from the very beginning of human understanding. Entire groups have been extinguished, entire regions cleansed of humans. It goes on today as much as it did sixty years ago. Our history has been marked by genocide after genocide, ethnic cleansing after ethnic cleansing, war after war. After every atrocity cries of 'Never Again' rise as if this time humanity will learn its lessons. Yet, as we know too well, the cries go mute as the deaf ears of mankind once more tremble with yet another thunderous blast from a hail of bullets and missiles wiping out an entire grouping of people.
In the unrecoverable echoes of our lost humanity can be heard wails of 'Again and Again,' never learning from our atrocities or the evil born within us. War, that most dastardly of all human hells, as old as our first pioneers and as dangerous as the most venomous human to ever walk among us, has created Holocaust after Holocaust, monopolized by no group of humans, distributed to all corners of the globe, regardless of skin color, ethnic makeup or religious beliefs.
War is hell on Earth, affecting humankind throughout time and space, inconsequential to the perceptions we might have or the delusion we might live. War makes demons of our soldiers, free to roam alongside evil as it infects once placid men who respected human morality in peace but exterminate its principles in war. Through war humankind returns to our primitive selves, becoming the smartest of animals, capable of exterminating its own kind and setting free the misery that has befallen every generation of humanity from the time of first beginnings.
The absurdity of human war has yet to be stopped, for we have yet to fully understand who and what we truly are. Inside us lie the answers; in knowing the animal world lays our salvation. We claim ourselves the epitome of modernity, of civilization and of knowledge, but ape like creatures prone to violence is our reality, intelligent, sure, self-destructive, you bet. War has never ceased, and there is no reason to believe that is one day will. War is violence, and violence is humankind. Our reason is no match for our animal passions; our younger, analytical mind is easily clouded by our older, primitive one.
The salvation to the greatest symptom of our disease has been at our hands since the first human opened its eyes. Yet over the course of our brief stay on Earth we have been made blind, thanks to our own devices, to a reality that is as humbling as it is frightening. Our egos refuse to listen, see or touch that which emanates from all corners of the globe. We fear knowing that which for centuries has been denied, afraid that we will see that we are not what we once thought ourselves to be.
The human hell will continue to linger and determine our fates. It will continue to maim, murder and decimate. For as long as we have walked this now scarred Earth the demons running in our veins have dominated us, corroding our societies and humanity, manipulating us toward unleashing the great evil living within us. In the end, the human hell called war will be our demise as our inability to comprehend who and what we are will crash with the ever-expanding lethality of our technologies. From rocks and sticks to mutually assured destruction, our violent selves have never changed. Except today's version of yesterday's rocks and sticks could conceivably annihilate entire regions and indeed the entire surface of the planet.
Warfare is ingrained inside the human condition, unrelenting and dominating. We have yet to exorcise this most terrible demon from our wake. Humanity and violence are conjoined twins, it seems, inseparable brothers thriving off each other. Where man goes violence and war soon follow; where violence is found man will most certainly be found. In all regions of the globe, in all peoples and societies, violence lingers about and controls us, from spousal abuse to declared war among nations. All it needs to resurrect itself from outside the crate that lies hidden in our mind is a war like leader eager to launch the trumpets of war. All that is needed for violence to release its most toxic cancers upon our civilization is for good men to do nothing upon the calling of the masses.
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