For however many thousands of years of human history there have been leading up to the 20th and 21st centuries, all tribes and civilizations, at least in their eras of growth, ascendancy, and power, were Warrior cultures. They were not all bloodthirsty and barbaric, but they were cultures and civilizations that held the Warriors among them in the highest esteem. For most of human history, the life and survival of the tribes and nations (tribes writ large) have always been too precarious and vulnerable to the barbarians at the gates, or across the river, for pacifism and indolence to flourish, and the Warriors of every tribe in history have been most highly esteemed because it was they, fighting and defeating the tribes' enemies, who made the life and survival of the individuals and the tribe, and the avoidance of death and slavery, possible.
Without Warriors, the tribe perishes.
When the Warriors fail, when the Warrior ethos fades, the power of the tribe withers, and in time it is absorbed by new conquerors, or taken into slavery, or slaughtered, and becomes just grist for the archeologists who will excavate its traces centuries or millennia later...
... General George Patton once advised:
"Not every man can be a soldier. To be a soldier is the highest profession of life; [it] comes closest to being a life like Christ who gave life for others, as we may do."...
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Contributed by 1stCav on October 31, 2006 at 06:07 PM in |