Should Men Be Allowed to Serve in the Military?

10 min readIt is pretty obvious that the Russian soldiers who are currently engaged in destroying Ukrainian cities – and then raping, murdering, and torturing their way around that country – are men.
And for sure it is not Ms. Putin in the Kremlin organizing these atrocities.
While the Russians are the current reigning world champions of male brutality, this disease is clearly global. Wherever you look on the planet, there appears to be a continual flow of images of armed people, often in Darth Vader outfits, assaulting defenseless, unarmed civilians – and again, almost all the people doing the assaulting are men.

It might just be a white, US-American cop shooting a black guy in the back for some issue with his car taillight….

Or it could be other guys annexing Kashmir or Crimea or Tibet…. 
The sight of whole apartment blocks being destroyed in Ukraine is just mind-boggling – unless, of course, you happen to be one of those unlucky ones to have been on the receiving end of similar violence from US-American bombs and missiles in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan or, by courtesy of Saudi Arabia, in Yemen. In fact, the US “Is the World’s Gun Store” – as a result of which “tens of thousands of people are violently killed and injured by firearms in war zones around the world.” Or maybe you suffered the indiscriminate urban bombardments by the Russians in Chechnya or Syria….
Can you imagine? In Moscow like every other “civilized” city in the world today, people are sleeping on the streets because they have nowhere to live. At the same time, the Russian military is razing whole residential neighborhoods!

The madness is everywhere.  

And what about all the street killings in the Philippines organized by Duterte…. Oh, right. Now to be replaced by Marcos 2.0. Or the horrors in Myanmar or Cambodia? 
And there are some really nasty specimens letting rip in Africa too. Sudan is perhaps the continent’s poster child for a misogynistic military killing machine. Or is that the horrors in Ethiopia? The sight of state gunmen of the apartheid state of Israel attacking the mourners of a woman they probably assassinated the day before catches the zeitgeist perfectly. 
Yes, today the Russians are rightly exposed as real monsters in this new Tik-Tok age, where every war crime is on someone’s phone. But if you read Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky – and even if they are only half right….

The genocidal horrors that history will lay at the feet of the USA will easily balance the scales of Russian crimes.

The US will have plenty of company in the dock. Like the British, the French, the Belgians, the Germans… to name but a few.
You can read a taste of these horrors in a recent Foreign Policy article by Howard French, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, “The Echoes of America’s Hypocrisy Abroad.” Or in Caroline Elkins’ “Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire.”

It is fair to ask if there is any nation-state, anywhere, that is not essentially a crime scene?

To confirm the maleness of it all just look at this account of wartime sexual violence. The current war in Ukraine is no exception as reports of the “huge scale of sexual violence inflicted in Ukraine emerges.” What The Economist refers in discussing “Sexual violence in conflict” as “War’s other victims. The scale of an unspeakable horror.” Even when the men are being raped, it is still the men doing the raping. 
Of course, it is not just in wartime this male sexual violence occurs. 

The #Me-Too Movement has brought incredible recognition to the plight of survivors around the world, yet still “every 73 seconds, someone is sexually assaulted in the United States, and every nine minutes, one of those individuals is a child.”

Meanwhile, “only 25 in every 1000 perpetrators end up in prison.” Seems misogyny is similarly ugly in “the People’s” Republic of China too. 
A recent Lancet paper describes the “Global, regional, and national prevalence estimates of physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner violence against women in 2018” and concludes that “relationship violence” affects more than a quarter of women. 

It is like a global tsunami of testosterone-fueled, psychosis on the loose. 

Yes, from our history books we learn that these same men have been raping and pillaging their way across the earth for centuries.
Now it is different. Putin’s regime is openly discussing the use of nuclear weapons. His foreign minister is explaining that “The risks now are considerable…. The danger is serious, real. And we must not underestimate it.”
North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is making the same nuclear noises. That is Mr. Kim Jong-un of course. 
As The Economist describes it, we are in “A New Nuclear Era.” The nuclear stockpile on the earth is now growing again for the first time since the end of the cold war.
In “A new age of global war,” The New Stateman describes this new era.

“The Third World War, a possibility that few people outside military and strategic think tanks have taken seriously since the end of the Cold War, is now the subject of anxious discussion among more and more of us.”

By the way, what is all that Korean business about you might wonder? Well, once upon a time Korea got split into two when the US and the Russians replaced the Japanese rulers at the end of the Second World War – and took half each, “temporarily.” Then the Man in the South unilaterally declared independence, so the Man in the North invaded and soon the US-American and Chinese men joined the brawl. 
After killing about 3 million people, they stopped fighting at almost exactly the same place where they started. After two years of haggling, they ended with an “armistice” but not peace. The Man in the South refused to sign. They are still “at war” today.  
In 1953, by agreement, the post-war Korean peninsula was to be nuke-free. 

In 1957, the US broke that original agreement and put nuclear weapons into South Korea. 

Clinton managed to get the North Korean generals to Washington to try and resolve the impasse, but then in came Bush and told them to get lost. 
Then Bush made the North Koreans part of his “axis of evil” because they wouldn’t agree to the denuclearization of the peninsula. 
That is the same Bush who ripped up the Middle East because he didn’t like the way Saddam Hussein had threatened his dad, or something like that.

These are like squabbles in boys’ locker rooms. Or late-night dust-ups in a bar. This is the way the male ego does business. 

Now the whole area of the Korean Peninsula is bristling with nukes, with both South Korea and Japan keeping their options open for developing their own.  
Or look at the Ukraine story. Since the fall of the USSR, wise voices have been warning against expanding NATO westwards. They were sure it would end in tears. And here we are. 
If you know the Russians are nuts and have nukes, tread carefully. Duh! 
Especially when you know that they are sure you promised that you would not expand Western power eastwards by simply inviting the Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO.

It is just so difficult for that male ego to turn down the chance to give the other guy a black eye. And so primitive. 

The Russian mind is stuck in some bygone era, with their heads stuffed with fantasies of an Orthodox Christian God and some mythical glorious imperial past. So, when confronted by men whose heads are stuffed with different fantasies and myths that they feel threatened by, unconsciously they are bound to react.
Is that so difficult to grasp? The US spends nearly 85 billion dollars a year on its “Intelligence” community, another male-dominated entity. It can’t manage better information about what is going on than having us end up on the brink of a nuclear war?
As we have described elsewhere, the US-Americans did exactly the same in Afghanistan. Gorbachev wanted to negotiate with the US to create a democratic Afghanistan – so Russia could leave peacefully. But Reagan wanted blood. So, with Saudi money and their fundamentalist ideology, he promoted the necessary violent extremist jihadists to destroy the Russians, which they did. Before turning on the US, causing 9/11, the Iraq war, and then the 20 years – costing over 2 trillion dollars – that the US spent first removing the Taliban and then handing the country back to them. 
Talk about an own goal.

Except that now this epidemic of male madness is happening in the nuclear age and is threatening to destroy us all. 

Look at the current US-China competition. Two huge, mainly male, national egos, bristling with killing machines, squabbling to prove they are the most powerful dog on the block.
China’s defense minister has just warned that Beijing would “fight to the very end” to oppose any move toward independence for Taiwan. That is “the end” of you and me, you understand.
Perhaps the most dangerous untold story of the Ukraine war is the impact of the Russians reneging on their 1994 agreement “to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and abstain from economic coercion, the threat of force, or use of force.”
That was in return for Ukrainians giving up their existing nuclear arsenal comprising “an estimated 1,900 strategic warheads, 176 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and 44 strategic bombers.” If they had decided to hang on to their nuclear weapons, do you think Uncle Vlad would be messing with them today? 
Will anyone ever again give up their nukes? Ask Muammar Gaddafi.
Talking about Libya, misogyny, politics, and nuclear war, did you know that “barely acknowledged by the Western media, a planned attack on Libya using nuclear weapons, had been contemplated by the Clinton Administration in 1997, at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.”
Osho explains very precisely:

It is one of the most critical times in the history of man. Perhaps never before has man come to such a point – where something of an ultimate decision has to be made, a decision whether life is to continue on the earth or not.

“Single individuals have committed suicide; for the first time, the whole of humanity is going to commit suicide, totally – and not only humanity, but all living animals, trees, everything that has life. It is a tremendous decision, and I don’t think that people would like to destroy all life.
“That is where we can make a space for transformation, because if they don’t want to die, if they don’t want life to disappear, then the only way is that mankind has to change its ways, its lifestyle, its thinking patterns – because these are the things, the thinking patterns, the ideologies, the religions, which have brought man to this point.” 1
The bottom line is that we are not so far from destroying all life on Planet Earth. And the people who could prevent this from happening have been brainwashed into believing that they are not brainwashed. They believe that they freely choose to accept all the values of the particular society they happen to be born into. So, we are trapped in a misinformation loop and nothing changes. The men have been conditioned to “be a man” and compete to be first whenever possible, using whatever means available…. You probably know the routine… you must have met a few! 
As Osho explains, the woman “cannot understand what man goes on doing. Is he insane or something?”
The occasional man is alert enough to see what is going on and realizes that unless he goes through the transformation Osho is proposing and deprograms himself of these second-hand, male, chauvinist beliefs, he is basically operating like a robot.

Most men can’t help themselves. They are stuck in a retarded operating mode.

Wave a uniform at them, some guns, some fancy gadgets, and identify some “other” people as “enemies” – or worse – and we are good to go. You point, we shoot. Simple. 
And if that is a nuke, what to do. I do what I am told and press the button.
Planet Earth simply doesn’t have the time to undo all the damage that has been done to these male minds – which makes them such a lethal package. 
The evidence about the lethality of men, particularly younger men, is very clear – for example, from the mass shootings on the streets of the USA.

According to The Washington Post, of the 196 people who killed four or more people in a public place since 1966, only five were women. 40% of the total were aged 18 and 29, and another third were between 30 and 45. 

When you look at the overwhelmingly male, US military for comparison, nearly half of the total – about 600,000 people – are in this vulnerable age group of 25 or under. It is symptomatic of this whole insanity that women in Canada’s military describe how they face greater harm from comrades than the enemy! 
The same Washington Post article includes an interview with Vanderbilt University psychiatrist, Jonathan Metzl, who regards these young male brains as particularly liable to violence.
The article explains, “Teen and young adult males have long stood out from other subgroups for their impulsive behavior. They are far more reckless and prone to violence than their counterparts in other age groups, and their leading causes of death include fights, accidents, driving too fast, or, as Metzl put it, ‘other impulsive kinds of acts.’
“‘There’s a lot of research about how their brains are not fully developed in terms of regulation,’ he said. Perhaps most significantly, studies show, that the prefrontal cortex, which is critical to understanding the consequences of one’s actions and controlling impulses, does not fully develop until about the age of 25. In that context, Metzl said, a shooting ‘certainly feels like another kind of performance of young masculinity.’”
If the development of the human skeleton is not complete until the mid-twenties, it is not surprising that a part of the body as subtle as the brain takes at least as long to mature.
Eric Madfis, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma is quoted in the same article: “We teach boys and men that the only socially acceptable emotion to have is not to be vulnerable and sensitive, but to be tough and macho and aggressive.”

Humanity cannot allow all this to continue and maintain any claim to sanity – let alone long-term survival. Hence our original question: “Should men be allowed to serve in the military?” Cooking, cleaning, nursing, and maintenance roles… should be fine, just as long as they don’t have access to any weapons.

The continuation of life on Planet Earth now depends on it. It is like drunk driving – you guys simply cannot be behind the wheel. Period.
Will women be any less likely to provoke a nuclear war? Yes, the evidence is very persuasive, and given what is at stake there is nothing to lose.
As Osho again explains:
“Man has utterly failed. In three thousand years, five thousand wars – this is man’s record. Man has simply butchered, killed, murdered; he has lived as if only for war. There are a few days in between two wars which we call days of peace. They are not days of peace; they are only days of preparing for the new war. Yes, a few years are needed to prepare…. And again the war, again we go on killing each other. It is enough!

Man has been given enough chances. Now feminine energies have to be released.” 2

You can read exactly how those feminine energies can be released to resolve the problem of male violence in the nuclear age in the second part of this article: “Global Peace – Just Women’s Work?”
END
You can read these complete talks here:
1 Osho, The Last Testament, Vol. 2, Talk #18 – Be ready for Global Transformation
2 Osho, The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol. 07, Talk #10 – The Art of Surrendering

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The post Should Men Be Allowed to Serve in the Military? appeared first on OSHOTimes.