Nobility and necessity aren't the same thing- it's necessary to defend oneself, in and of itself, nobility is something else, it represents an ideal. That comes from the past, and typically from the Romantic age, in fact, in order to understand the basis for Nazism, one should understand idealists like Fichte and the Romantic age of writers who looked to the past- kingdoms, simple peasant life, rolling countrysides with castles and held that in esteem over the modern age. As an ideal, that doesn't really compare to industrial scale warfare. It's portraying something in quaint terms when the reality of it doesn't resemble that at all.

Look at the current civil war in Syria- whomever is defending themselves in that war, whatever case is made for the "defender", they die and look just as mangled and anonymous in death as the "aggressor", or like any other combatant in any other war.

Answering your question as asked, without explaining the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica ....


My opinion

Yes

They did when I was at school but that was about 40 years ago. The male children of my cousins had drill instruction and live fire on ranges when they were at school, they went on to be officers in the army just like their fathers.

I joined the ATC, (Air Training Corps) when I was about 14 and we got live fire on the local range with .303 Lee Enfields, I also shot indoor .22 with .303 Lee Enfields with a .22 rim fire conversion at the local police range. My father was the squadron marksman when in the RAF during WW2 and was sent to Bisley to shoot. Part of his duties along side of his trade was to dispose of un-exploded weapons by shooting at it.

The Syrian civil war is two fanatical nutbar sides doing what nutbars do, hardly a clear cut conflict of an aggressor versus a defender. I'm thinking of an ideal basic defensive scenario, such as Germany out of the blue attempting to roll over France for no better reason than "I want that". To not resist in some way would be more ignoble than to fight. It is both noble as an ideal and as a necessity regardless of the conventional weaponry used.

Noble: having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals

Regardless, I think I've gone off on a tangent enough here

How times have changed. I wish I had that kind of opportunity to learn as a kid.

Doesn't that say something about the subject matter at hand, though?

As per David Grossman's book on the subject from which I'm paraphrasing (hopefully correctly), killing, even in warfare, is an act that is so wholly unnatural to human behavior that prior to Vietnam, only one in four of all soldiers involved in any conflict would fire at the enemy with the intention of killing. With the other 3/4ths being the same people who would not hesitate to run into a hail of bullets to save their buddies.

Now, I'm not condemning milsims as "murder simulators" like your local bleeding heart activist, as I am a somewhat avid fan of said sims, in the same way I partake in alcohol and the occasional cigar. The difference, though is that the risks of the latter two are well publicized.

In the end, games are just mostly for entertainment, but I feel that it would be awfully cavalier of us to brush off and chalk the possibility of whitewashing such a serious subject matter to artistic license. Especially for games where the term "most realistic" is featured liberally in their marketing campaigns.

War isn't a paintball game where your opponents fall down like they're shot by tranquilizer darts. People die in war...terribly...in ways they don't deserve. Yes, it's also filled with glitzy excitement, bright explosions, and heroic deeds, but I just feel that any celebration of these should be tinged with the notion that any war; no matter how righteous, justified, or necessary it is; should be viewed as a tragedy. Lest we grow too fond of it.

Besides, think of the children!



Agreed. Entertainment value aside, I think that its entirely possible, an extremely dangerous, for us as a society to develop a skewed perspective on when to employ violence to solve our problems.

I also recommend the TV movie "When Trumpets Fade", which depicts the meat grinder that was the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

There were weapons in my school as well.
But you got expelled if you were if caught with them. LoL
All joking aside
I Can see the logic from a militaristic nation like the UK.
Sort of like the Spartans agoge,


Edit, when I was very young six or seven.
I remember some army guys visiting my junior school.
They had decommissioned weapons and dummy grenades they let us hold the rifles and throw the grenades
I remember holding a sten gun I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I have a friend who grew up in Yugoslavia in his last year of high school they were taught how the fire an assault Rifle and lay mines.
I wonder did this happen in other nations did the army visit your school?

I think it's related to what we're talking about.

Noble refers to nobility- that's where that word comes from. It refers to the ideals and values of the aristocracy, which in the past, had its own sense of what that meant.

It seems that in the present, the word is often co-opted to mean anything of high value or esteem or importance in sort of idealistic terms.

But when you look at it, is defending your life really that? Or is it something existential? Let's say you are the member of the Tutsi tribe when the Hutus come over the hill and start slaughtering everyone. Defending yourselves doesn't really involve anything noble at all, you might use the same means to fence off the attacker as they are using to subdue your village. The film 300 of course idealizes and represents a certain image of the Spartans defending themselves, of course what it doesn't show is when it comes down to it, the Spartans weren't above clawing eyes out and biting or doing anything to murder an opponent.

Of course, war is sometimes couched in noble sentiments, that's an attempt to raise morale and get combatants to believe in the cause- everyone does this, Saddam's generals would do it the same as Soviet generals as North Korean generals or anyone else.

But the actual act of self defense- you would sooner not want to be under attack, but if you were, you're not really thinking like that at the moment. That's really what glorifying war does, it presents it in nobler sentiments.

Most computer games don't actually spend the time doing that. For the greater part, they focus on the action rather than on messages, whether explicit or more subtle.

We live in the safest period in human history*. Your chances of meeting a violent end or of being kidnapped, raped or force to take arms are a fraction of what they were 1000 years ago. Is it a complete coincidence that this safe world exists at the very time that games and film are able to portray violence so vividly?

*Its true. Statistically we adults and our children have never been safer. Our intuition that the world is less safe or that children need to be constantly watched and protected are due to the preponderance of reporting in our media of rare events that are actually getting rarer.

Kontact I thought this might be the case and yes, I'm using the modern definition of noble (ignoring the idea of a nobility caste completely). And yes, unless it's a simple case of a literal bear defending itself from two wolves on a strategic level the defenders understand what's at stake should they fail, and it's quite noble to not cave in and let everyone become a statistic, regardless of what you need to do to survive. If the Spartans had been required to stab every enemy Persian in the eye with a pencil it doesn't affect the consequences and responsibilities of failure.

Smokin_Hole makes a pretty valid point. Mass media is skewing people to think the world is more dangerous than it is on top of everything else.

Because when everything is sunshine and lollipops you don't find yourself glued to the TV/radio/news site for info on what's happening, you enjoy life.

That's bad for ratings/sales.



The Jedi Master

Well said Peally, and necessary, IMHO.

I'm not sentimental, so making war sound noble (i.e., sentimental) simply doesn't work on me. Sentiments don't move me, those things are all dressing up something, which is exactly what this topic about.


It's usually a matter of perspective- even the Germans when on the defensive towards the end of World War 2 were fighting for the existential survival of their state. This isn't a matter of being noble- you either had to fight, or you might have to surrender to the Red Army, or you might be executed if you didn't fight. When you see Hitler trying to galvanize young boys and old men to give their lives, he's going to be using the same sort of language in a do or die situation.

Truth be told, it's often more about circumstance than anything high sounding ideals.

Even in a cut and dried situation, suppose you're the bad guy and I'm the good guy coming to liberate the world from your tyranny, whatever the cost. You defending your country or your way of life begs the question as to what 'noble' means. It's about survival, not quaint ideals. Survival instincts (or hatred of the enemy) and nobility are two distinct things.

I recognize the value of propaganda, however- in as much as you want to get people to follow your words and rally them, you certainly would speak of war in those terms, otherwise, you're not really ready to get the people involved in your war.