Monday, December 19, 2005

Are you a potential war criminal? Take our quiz!


I consider myself a student of history. And, like most males who consider themselves students of history, that means that I know a shitload about war, atrocities and genocides. It's not true that history is simply a litany of bloody conflict, but that is the most interesting stuff, at least for a dude. I've read avidly about all manners of mass slaughter, ancient and modern. Be it the trenches of the Great War, the clinical death factories of the Nazi state, the frenzied blood-lettings of Rwanda, I am routinely horrified and titilated by the cruelities of the past. At the same time, of course, I am mulling over my own moral superiority to the perpetrators of these disgusting crimes. Surely, I think, were I to find myself holding a machete over the head of a weeping Tutsi tribeswoman, or marching through Lithuania with the Einsatzgruppen or riding into a vanquished city with Gengis Khan's horde, I would, at the very least, refuse to kill or, hopefully, try to save lives. I am made from purer stuff than these antique murderers.

That was before I drove to work yesterday.

I work at a shopping complex (also known as a mall, but the stores aren't connected and there's no food court, so let's stick with shopping complex) and yesterday I had to drive across seven or eight nautical miles of "shopping complex" parking lot on my way to work. As you can expect, on the last Sunday before Christmas, it was a fucking zoo. I had to crawl at motorcade speed as legions of soft-middled, fanny pack bedecked, shopping zombies waddled in front of my car. And my inner Heydrich rose from the morass. I had to fight an overwhelming urge to hit the gas and send these sack of gravy pinwheeling through the air. Now, I get those kinds of feelings all the time, but in this case, I was already a little late for work and the blood was thrumming in my veins and it occured to me that I could rather easily kill some of these people, and that was with me just being a few minutes late for work! Imagine how I would react in a war situation, under the threat of bombing, or minutes away from a strom of metal at the front, facing people who were even more dehumanized to me as the people in the parking lot. It occured to me at that moment that, in all likelyhood, I would have made a fine war criminal. That's a scary idea, and one I would much like to prove wrong. But I don't know any way to do that other than to get myself into a war/genocide type situation, then try to avoid doing any murdering. Too bad I'd probably get killed by my crappy soldiering before I had a chance to find out.

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