Has modern culture lost touch with the warrior ideal?

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DOVER BEACH
-Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

PUK-A-PUK

Puk-a puk the sajint say,

Do puk-a-puk when I do.

An’ we scrunch in bunch

On truck an’ sajint is who

Make front from all, he jump

An’ jump we too an’ run an’ squat

An’ wait an’ sajint he make fist he pump

An’ run we too an’ come thing house

An’ sajint finger make he point an’ inside do we go

An’ ha we laugh, make we ha ha when break

We glass an’ break we walls ha ha

An there we see thing wife hide

An’ thing baybee. Sagint he say puk-a puk

An’ guns we take an’ puk-a-puk thing wife

She scrunch floor down an’ too baybee.

An’ red is floor an’ thing baybee is squash

An’ insides come like snake with blood

An’ mix with thing wife red an’ thing he come

An’ howl and scream an’ we make puk-a-puk.

Now thing he too on floor an’ red an’ sagint he say puk-a-puk

An’ puk-a-puk we do. So ha say sajint, ha ha ha

An’ ha ha ha we do. An’ sajint he say good, is good.

But now is baybee blood on shoe,

An’ sajint say my shoe must shine

An’ so I wash my shoe from blood

An’ now my shoe is fine

So the death of the baby(and its mother) was less important than having clean shoes.

That is to say, they did not matter at all, except for the sport of killing them.

There is the fabled warrior honour.

@sand, i like what you said and how you said it. so true.

If we're going to quote poetry anyhow, here's a nice one by Wilfred Owen, a poet who fought (and died) in WW I. Apparently he was killed in the last week of fighting. The title is derived from the Roman poet Horace, and means: "It is sweet and fitting [to die for one's country]".

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

The costs---cultural, social, economic, and even military---of WWI far outweighed any perceived gain. It was for the most part nothing but senseless slaughter, and I often cringe (even more than 90 years later) to think how many of Europe and America's best and brightest gave up their lives, only to have the worldwide idiocy repeat itself 21 years later.

did no one else notice that this guy is equating women to property? women are not objects that can be owned and therefore taken from another person......THEY ARE PEOPLE!! hello????

this thing is either a sociopath or a troll.

don't feed the trolls.

Or a protector of the commonweal and the community.

I owe a great deal to American warriors who fought the Fascists in WW2. Ordinary folks, who had to step up and do a necessary task.

I owe these people a great deal. It was their effort that kept me from ending up as a cake of soap on some Nazi's sink.

ruveyn

One often sees this argument, or some variations thereof, popping up in this kind of discussion, but I'm not sure if the truth is as simple as this.

Firstly, the Second WW probably would never have taken place if the allies in the First WW (among which the US) hadn't been so keen on humiliating their defeated enemy Germany like they did; putting the sole blame for the war on Germany, and the demand for massive reparation payments in particular, effectively broke the spirit of the German people and crippled their economy for years, paving the way for Hitler's rise to power.

Secondly, the American motives for getting involved in the Second WW seem to have been motivated largely by self-interest. The German U-boats destroyed American trade with Europe, and the Japanese were a major threat to America's Asian interests. I don't think self-interest is a bad thing in itself, but please let's not perpetuate the fairy tale of Roosevelt's major incentive being his taking pity on the Jews and other persecuted peoples of Europe. He could probably have cared less.

Thirdly, the majority of American forces in Europe were drafted, people more or less forced into service. I'm not absolutely against the draft in wartime, but to my mind it isn't quite as laudable to do something you're forced to do as to do something out of your own free will.

Fourthly, the reviled "Reds" had their fair share in the defeat of Hitler too. Hitler wasn't destroyed by Roosevelt; instead he was destroyed because both Roosevelt and Stalin were breathing in his neck, on two seperate fronts.

I'm not bashing America here. They did a good job in Europe, and I'm very happy not to live under Nazi rule. We must, however, look at the facts with an objective eye and not heap undue praise on the US.

You see, in history there is no black and white, only infinitely many shades of gray, some lighter, some darker.

To get back on-topic, I don't think you can reasonably be either for or against wars and the men (and women nowadays) who fight them. Wars have an infinitude of possible causes and can be justified by an equal infinitude of reasons, and to de-clutter the right reasons from the wrong ones is an ethical "calculation" so complicated that few if any people can pull it off. I for one can't.

If it weren't for the warriors, many of us would be living in squalor. The old fashioned warriors fought with bravery and heart. They served their tribes. Now it seems like soldiers are basically in it for the benefits, but that is not to say all of them are self-serving.

The warrior heart was a necessary component for justice. Anything can be used for good or bad. I think we have lost touch with the Warrior Ideal. It is more rational to be self-serving. However, for the greater good, I think it is more rational to be willing to die for a cause. But to come to that conclusion, one must first think with their heart.

I have to agree with dddhgg.

On my maternal side my family left Bremen Germany in 1924. The coming second world war was already sensed. They got the hell out and came to Canada.

On my paternal side my family left the Elsaß region in 1789 when French revolutionary forces entered the area to take force French culture on them. It wasnt even an invasion; they already controlled the area.

My ancestors fled to Switzerland and Bavaria, and eventually to south Russia of all places. It might be surprising to non Europeans, but yes, blond blue eyed people can be refugees too. Moot point though.

The point is, what led to the first world war was a good deal of unfairness and cruelty from both sides, and each side was screwing each other around for hundreds of years. Germany was pretty harsh on France in a war, and at the conclusion of WWI France took the opportunity to kick them back even harder. They even insisted that the surrender be signed in the same rail car as the earlier war.

Revenge revenge revenge. Neither side learned a lesson and we ended up with World War II. Hopefully that lesson sticks.

I'm not a European so I shouldnt really pontificate, but I see the European Union as being a good thing. Its time to become one people. Eventually 'I hope that all humanity can become one and this racial/ethnic nonsense can go the way of the dodo bird.

Hitler was a master at bringing out the Warrior heart. He steered it to the evil side tho.
Let us not forget his genius.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwmJ2A4J5PE[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYh_nUeSV3M[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYh_nUeSV3M[/youtube]

They did far more than their fair share- the Soviets had by far the greatest death toll of any combatant nation, most of the actual fighting was done on their territory, and they were the ones who halted the Nazi war machine, then turned it back, and then liberated most of eastern and central Europe from Nazi rule.

Keine lust translates to no energy and the lyrics are about a morbidly obese person having no desire for sex.

It is a very strange match to that video.

Deer and boars are not people.

ruveyn