I’ll be honest, I had a lot of trouble drawing this page, as I have with many others that depict serious violence in this comic. I often worry that I’m trading a fine line without knowing really which side people will think I’m on. But in a sense, this page expresses a deep-seated feeling I have about the broader direction a lot of things in the world seem to be taking right now. I won’t presume to lecture everyone about the ins and outs of my thoughts and feelings on violence – anyone who’s read this comic ought to know that I feel very strongly that force and violence of any kind is morally corrupt. Nor do I want to get into itemizing all the ways in which I feel like that belief is under assault, or get into the excruciating sophistry that we’ve all been taught to use to convince ourselves that everything’s just fine and that we should just not think too hard about it.
But as a writer, I find myself having to explore very disturbing things in order to write a convincing story, and the essence of western drama is, after all, tension and conflict. I’ve had to do some pretty scary research to write this story, and it frightens me to see how much of it is playing out in reality, even now.
At any rate, I’ll admit I feel kind of down at the moment as regards the prospects of human civilization and the direction it’s going. And it’s one of those things that only happens, as they say, in real life and great fiction, that I am simultaneously at a point in the story that takes this dim a view of human nature – as evidenced in this very page, I suppose. But you don’t have to be shooting someone in the head to be using violence against them, really. Force is even more profoundly corrupt when it’s used to pervert good intentions whether it means invading or partitioning another country as a supposed measure of defense, or staking an unjust claim to someone else’s hard-earned property to force them to do something that you think is good for them, or teaching children that the great virtue is in submitting to the people in our world exerting force over others to bending them to their will.
These are impulses encouraged by the kind of social order we’ve allowed to develop around ourselves, where we respect people who wield power and aspire to “change the world” by ruining other people’s lives and saying it’s for their own good. And people wonder why this generation is so obsessed with violent self-assertion, to the point of wars, terrorism, hijackings and domestic massacres in the heart of the so-called civilized world. It disgusts me, because it’s a medieval, might-makes-right mentality elevated to the status of a supposedly forward-thinking society. It’s so pervasive and accepted that I wonder if, in a thousand years, the civilizations on Earth then will view our time as a Golden Age or a Dark Age. All we can do is try to lay the groundwork for a better society after this one, and hope that some fragment of the truth survives to the future.
Anyhow, I’m in a strange place. All’s well, though, for me. I guess I’m just in an oddly contemplative mood. All one can do is have faith and keep moving forward.
Until next week – be well, everyone.
That’s what General Sedgwick said, in 1864.
Looks like Haulley’s in command now.
I beleive his exact words were supposed to have been “What are you men doing down in that trench, those Yankee’s couldn’t hit an elephant at this dis…”
Also, is it me, or are those rifles deadringers for the gauss rifle Simon Phoenix used in Demolition Man? Given the UNA handguns that looked like Deckard’s gun from Bladerunner, I have come to fully expect similar movie easter eggs.
I’m assuming it’s a Canadian-licensed G11 derivative.
You’re both right (see below). It’s a G11, which is also what was used as the model for the Gauss gun in Demolition Man, which is a guilty pleasure of mine. (You remember the days when the Libertarians were the good guys? Yeah, me neither.)
Yes I recognized the G11 when it was used as the tank killer energy weapon in “Demolition Man.” One of my favorites
😀
That’s one hell of a impact
To quote Patton, “When you put your hand, into a pile of goo, that used to be your best freind’s face… You’ll know what to do.”
High-powered sniper rifles. They carry rocket-boosted pistols, so it’s not out of line wi the universe, I think.
Considering Berrett ‘Light’ 50 cal sniper rifle can remove your entire head (if not torso) this is more or less real-world.
It was just the idea of the impact causing enough force to snap the goggles under his chin made my jaw drop.
Yeah; run away! 😀
Never underestimate your enemy.
And are those HK G11 assault rifles they are carrying? They surely look like it. Now I wonder what guns the soldiers from the Odessa pact use. I assume another riffle that in our timeline was just an experiment, as the HK G11 was. ^^
It IS the G11 Caseless Assault Rifle. You and the commenter above are both right – I gave them G11s, but I did it because of Demolition Man. Well done to both of you!
With war soft peddling it really doesn’t show just how horrible it really is. Like Star Wars which is rather clean for war with hand held pulse energy weapons and killer robots and useless armor.
Cause of death: Tempting fate.
Cause of death: overconfidence.
Just remember, when you are laughing in the face of death, that death doesn’t like people laughing at him…
I think you have to show violence or at least the results of violence if you create stories dealing with war. To do otherwise is sugarcoating it. It’s okay to be upset by violence, most normal people are, only a sociopath wouldn’t be. I’m really enjoy this run, its the details that make it great. I like how the sniper takes out the LT, (taking out someone who is pointing obviously giving orders is common). I can’t wait until the next one.
Thanks man, and you’re right. And I don’t shy away from the necessity of putting things in huber proper places in this story’s naturally, it’s still a fine line, but you have to be willing to walk it if you’re going to write remotely convincing fiction.
Exactly, think of the first few Mission Impossible movies, Cruise didn’t want gunfight showing people getting shot. To me that glamorises the violence more than showing it. The trick is to show graphic violence without making it idolizing it.
Lessons from German history:
Violence won’t get you anywhere.
Amen.
I’m not clear on how his goggles broke if they were around his neck? It would make more sense if he had them on his helmet.
The broke because originally, he was going to be wearing them. I drew the page last panel first, and didn’t notice until I’d posted it. These things happen in the topsy-turvy world of drawing an online comic on a deadline! 😀
This simplest fix would be put the goggles on in the third scene and change “Relax Sergeant” to “Goggles on Sergeant” since limiting your field of view just prior to tempting fate increases chance to fail.
Unfortunately, since humans don’t really change all that much despite advances in technology, I’m pretty sure violence and war will never truly “go away”.
In a sense, we’re hard wired for it – we’re apex predators and our only natural enemies are other humans, so it’s really really easy to backslide into it, especially when you don’t actually have any first hand experience with conflict.
Truth is we are unable to truly understand abstract notions or grasp big numbers unless we have personal experience with them, so you’ll always end up with a politician somewhere deciding it’s far easier to fight to achieve whatever goal they have in mind, even though they have absolutely no notion of what the effects of a war will be, not only on the men and women directly involved in it, but on the country at large.
This is why Stalin allegedly said that “the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” – he never had to face any of the millions of deaths he ordered, so for him they weren’t quite “real”, a trait shared by some of the other worst mass murderers in human history. “The end justify the means” is probably one of the most monstrous lies humankind invented and it’s especially sickening when you think how “fuzzy” some of those goals were and how much bloodshed was used to try to achieve them.
And even worse is the fact that, despite the fact war is merely socially acceptable mass murder, we’ve not only trivialised it through our fiction and news reporting but also elevated it to the point where we see it as “justified” and death in battle is “desirable” and glorious, when, in real life, it’s anything but.
Coming back to the comic though – that lieutenant was a pretty poor leader and a pretty poor soldier to boot, considering his complete lack of any trigger discipline – one of the first things they teach you in basic is that you never ever place your finger inside the trigger guard unless you’ve already lined up your rifle on your target and are about to take the shot. And looking back through the pages, he doesn’t seem to be the only one, at least half of the people in the Chinook seem to do it as well. Not to mention that, if he really thought this was hot LZ as he claims, he should have gotten his platoon to form into a defensive perimeter as they deplane – each of the soldiers sprinting away to form a semicircle around the loading ramp with each of them surveying a different fire sector, weapons shouldered and at the ready, either kneeling or lying prone to minimize exposure…
Instead, they strut off the loading ramp like kids getting off the school bus, weapons at port arms like they’re on the barracks ground and he stands around in the open pointing out the sights like he’s on holiday… yeah, he got that coming to him.
Also, Haulley’s not very good at this either, despite being a sergeant – he switches his weapon onto his left hand for no reason, which is a hard and awkward thing to do -if he really wanted his right hand free, he should have kept the weapon shouldered with the left hand on the forend so that it remains there, then released his right hand off the grip, since it’s far easier to simply raise one hand back to the weapon than to fumble around with it to try to pass it from hand to hand…
And finally, I’m agog at the accuracy of the enemy snipers, considering they managed to break the goggles the lieutenant had around his neck while simultaneously hitting him in the forehead. Must be one of them magic bullets, eh?
(Hope you don’t mind my nitpicking too much, but 8 years of military service do leave some marks, even if I’m merely army reserve and I’ve never been on any active deployments.)
In re: your former, what you say is sad but true. But human beings also have the ability to act with restraint and self-denial, a capacity that is underrated and underutilized, especially in a technological society that aims towards gratification of the physical over the ascetic. We could eliminate sociopathy in a generation if people stopped sleeping with sociopaths. But you can’t impose that kind of thing on people without crushing their own will – that’s the paradox of the human condition, one that people sidestep by saying “yes you can” and ignoring the plain facts.
As to your latter… All valid and very true! “Oops, he switches arms,” I said. “Aww, nobody will notice,” I said. “The shot should go through his goggles,” I said. “But then you can’t see his face. Aww, nobody will notice,” I said. The joke is on me, on this one. I should have known better than to slip one past the Fortele Armate. The scene itself is kind of an exaggeration – they shouldn’t actually be doing what I’m having them do, and wouldn’t be, if I hadn’t been trying to reinforce the foreboding of the event in the last panel. I might have gone overboard, but these are the risks you take.
I have NO defense on your point about trigger discipline, though. I simply drew it wrong, and you definitely got me on that one.
I’m not sure it works like that with sociopathy.
First off, it’s merely an umbrella term for several things, like “Antisocial personality disorder” or “Dissocial personality disorder”, and, besides, those are not traits inherited through epigenetics, they develop through environmental influences acting over pre-existing genetic factors, meaning that the best and easiest way to keep somebody from becoming one is simply to raise them into a nurturing environment.
Besides, the whole idea of controlling who people sleep with veers too close for my comfort to the idea of Eugenics, and we know how that one turned out…
Also, I’m not sure we should negate the utility of our more “animalistic” urges (things like aggressively, ruthlessness, egotism, etc.) simply because we’ve become capable of reason. They served our species well through its history as survival traits in a cold, hostile world and they’re a big part of what makes us humans. By all means, we should teach people to control them, but also teach them it’s normal to have them and don’t be ashamed of them as long as they’re not what drives them. Trying to pretend they don’t exist will only make them reassert themselves accidentally sooner or later, whereas knowing they’re there and channelling them with your reason can make the difference in a life-or-death situation, for example.
But then again , this whole conversation is purely academic, since the real world is hardly so clear cut…
Heh. I’m afraid I’ve become a bit pedantic on the subjects I know, such as the military, and most of the things I pointed out are details that don’t detract from the overall comic and are only visible to specialists, so don’t sweat too much over them.
The trigger discipline thing was the only big one that military people will spot each and every time, but most of the others are truly readily explainable through the LT’s incompetence as a leader. Also, I really meant it when I said he got exactly what was coming to him, because, as they say, “overconfidence is the handmaiden of failure”.
And maybe I was also a bit harsh on Haulley for switching hands – we get only snippets of action and who knows what he’s been up to in the meantime – there are plenty of unexpected things happening on a battlefield that could require you to do things “unorthodoxly”. An example that springs to mind was an Ops training in which, as we were jumping out of the truck, my team leader got his vest quick release caught on something and the vest came apart (which is what’s supposed to do- that feature is for saving your life if you end up in the water, since you can’t really swim with 12kg worth of vest clinging to you) and we spent the next 5 minutes in a ditch with him frantically trying to piece his vest back together and me watching over him and holding his weapon at the same time, before sprinting to catch up with the rest of the column, which, by that time, was a few hundred meters away, because you can’t stop 400 people in “enemy territory” for the sake of two…
Overconfidence is the handmaiden to failure… I like that. Or, as you might say, “Pride goeth before destruction.”
By the way, for the record, I was not, I repeat NOT, advocating eugenics, which I find particularly abhorrent among all the possible forms of violent coercion. I was just making an overly florid point that it’s incumbent upon the individual to exercise rational self-control, and that there sometimes feels like there’s less of that going than the members of a society founded upon the principles of the Enlightenment might hope for. There’s no escaping the realities of the world or of human nature, but knowing and recognizing them also requires, I believe, a large degree of self-mastery. It’s not an absolute standard, naturally – huamns are not perfectable, least of all in any of the Eugenic or socialistic “Environmental” senses that were tried in the XX Century, but having goals to strive for is the essence of adherence to a proper ethical code, and I think the standards should be set higher rather than lower. Personally, I think that the greatest standard is respect for the dignity and individuality of fellow human beings, and not treating them as objects, or as instrumental to one’s own schemes of wealth, power, or even propriety. I know that’s not what you were advocating, by the way.
At any rate, I don’t mind at all that you got into more serious military detail – mine is necessarily limited. Of course, this is more science fiction drama than true military thriller, so I allow myself much more leeway; though naturally, “God is in the details,” says Mies van der Rohe. (Had to get an architect’s quote in there.)
Sorry but now. Sociopathy is more spread out and not so easily diagnosed. There are gradations of it just like there are with other “disorders.” Now these people are missing something in their make up. Not all serial killers are psychopaths, not all psychopaths are serial killers. And in how Natural Selection works if it favors their traits more of them will live on to reproduce and get elected, lead armies, control scientific discoveries etc. dependent on their intelligence and self control.
I am a follower of Euthenics (good environment) over Eugenics (good birth) and environment can actually effect a psychopathic personality in a good way. Imagine that!
Considering that the ONLY thing that saved civilization from the Nazis was violence (ours against theirs), that’s a really, REALLY stupid lesson to learn from that bit of history. Violence got us freedom from Nazis.
To quote a famous anti-war author, Tolkien:
Unless you are willing to lay down a die when an aggressor attacks you, you cannot possibly mean this:
If you are willing to call the police, for any reason, EVER, you do not believe that.
There are exactly two types of transactions in the world: those that both parties agree on, and those that rely on force or the credible threat thereof.
If you view ALL uses of force as corrupt, then anyone who feels otherwise can simply come and take your stuff, even kill you, and there’s nothing your morality allows you to do about it. That’s insane. That leaves a world ruled entirely by the corrupt, always and forever.
The application of force has been used for great evil… and the application of force has stopped more evil than all the pretty speeches ever given. Force is a tool, it WILL be used by people for evil purposes is they think it will benefit them, and the only way it WON’T benefit them is if a counter force is ready to oppose them.
A bar with Superman as the bouncer will have a WHOLE lot fewer fights (like none) than the bar with no bouncer. You want the world to have as little violence as possible? Me too – and the way to achieve that is to make sure that aggressive violence is met with massive return violence EVERY SINGLE TIME – that being the aggressor is never beneficial.
So, oddly enough, if you abhor violence, to minimize it, you must be prepared to make massive, overwhelming use of it when necessary.
Well, that or convince everyone on the planet to never use it again. Good luck with that.
Great comic, though.
I take the Greek approach to violence – it’s a miasma that follows you, even when you use it for good, or in a way that is on some level considered justifiable. I would defend myself if in immediate danger, and if I saw someone else in danger I would, as Lytton Strachey once said, “attempt to interpose my own frame.” But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a profound moral consequence, nor that it has continuing and incredibly negative effects on those involved on all sides. In a sense you’re correct, vide the lovely paradox “It’s never right to speak of absolutes.” But at the same time, it’s all too easy to take the approach that force as a supposedly necessary evil in our time is just a matter of degree, and therefore can be applied to any situation at the discretion of those involved, or of a government or agency thereof, or of any kind of person who considers themselves to hold a monopoly upon force. That’s the kind of moral creep that leads to things being done that are legal, but immoral; and the sort of sophistry that leads people to ignore it or attempt to rationalize it away. Wars and conflicts may be worth winning, but they aren’t worth starting. You do make a good point that deterrence has been a significant means of enforcing international order, and even personal order through e arming of a population (which, paradoxically, I support) but even now we see its limitations. Like anything else it’s no sure guarantor of security.
Anyway, I’m glad you like the comic, and I really appreciate your taking the time to write such an in depth and thoughtful comment! I’ll have to consider it in greater depth, I’m sure.
On a completely tangential note, how did you do the boxes-around-the-text thing with the nice first letter font?
Underestimating and/or showing condescension for your enemy – universally fatal for millenia.
Well said.
Mathieu-
when I read your opening comments for this strip I worry about you a little. I too have a difficult time fathoming the world we live in. Every once in a while I contemplate 1930s and and early 40s Germany and wonder how did things get that insane and how would I have behaved had I been immersed in that society. It’s puzzling to me because on any given day I meet a ton more interesting and good people than bad. And just when I think the world has screwed me over someone out of the blue does something exceptionally nice for me. So then how do things get so out of whack? I just don’t know but I do see a lot of good in the world.
Denny, you restore my faith in humanity.
Although I sometimes falter, I still maintain a belief that good is stronger than evil, and though things sometimes seem to fly out of control, it’s those millions of tiny good things that people do that will drag us back to the right path, in the end. Having a whole species undergo a conversion of conscience is not an easy thing – it’s been ten thousand years so far, and we have a very long way to go.
Now past the age of 60, I have arrived at the belief is that evil people are more common than good ones, but that high levels of evil are so self-destructive that the survivors one meets tend to be good. If your experience differs, I can only call you fortunate.
I’ll tell you how it happened, because my great uncle, who was a Nazi, told me how it happened.
The Versailles treaty broke the Germans. The reparations it required destroyed their economy and broke their spirit. Then a man offers them to reclaim their pride and dignity, and (in the early years of the Party at least, regardless of what happpened in the latter years) turned the economy around and gave them a reason to believe in themselves, in the Fatherland. We tend to see the Nazi party as fundamentally depraved from beginning to end, but that is not the case; as with good intentions coupled with absolute power, things went very wrong and by time enough people decided things had gone too far it was too late.
If Hitler had died in 1938 he would have been lionized to this day. That was how he was looked at before he and they turned very dark and bloody and horrible to their own and others and helped to start a world war, along with Russia.
Sadly, I find that the best way to limit the human tendency to use ‘easy violence’ is to provide the threat of violence in return…and the greatest encouragement to use violence is the LACK of a credible counter threat.
…also, why did the Lt’s goggles break in half (and shatter) if they were around his throat and he was shot in the head?
See above in re: the goggles: I drew the page last panel first and realized after the fact that if he were wearing the goggles, Lieutenant Doolittle here would have been unrecognizable. So I put them around his neck, but didn’t realize I’d left them in elsewhere.
As regards deterrence, you have a point. Although I hold that violence in whatever form is immoral, it can be licit, or at least justifiable, as an act of defense against immediate physical aggression. But it’s a very genuinely slippery slope in modern society, given the way in which we continuously redefine our language to justify what we feel like doing. It’s the matrix of our morals, rather than our morals being the matrix of our language.
“Walk softly and carry a big stick”
Wait, is that a 51-star US flag I see on Mike’s shoulder there?
I guess Puerto Rico got its statehood, after all.
You win the cookie on this one! There ARE 51 states, and Puerto Rico is one of them. And the round star flag is the Battle Flag of the U.S. Continental Army, which is why it’s on Mike’s shoulder patch. Easter egg – good spot!
Sorry but that last panel made me laugh.
À chacun son goût. 😉
“The goggles, they do nothing!”
I personally believe each nation should upkeep a large military but I also believe it should be mianly defensive in nature though I hate war ( I’m also an Air Force cadet Not the ones at the officers academy this ones more geared towards NCOs) and believe a modern military should be meant to keep the peace and keep nations that want to expand via conquest contained. Don’t worry it is improving 100 years ago no one would have blinked an eye at whats going on. Now I can only hope that it will be solved peacefully and saner minds will win
It would perhaps be more accurate to phrase my beliefs as “militant pacifism,” or, more complexly, as “a commitment to non-aggression as a principal ethical foundation of personal interaction.” Deterrence is not the same thing as an active threat, though, it’s well to bear in mind.
I think the point here about violence is that violence itself is corrupt and harmful however, the correct application of force and for the right reasons is both acceptable and quite often necessary.
As to the comic strip itself I am guessing that was the lieutenants first combat mission too? As I doubt if he had been in combat before he would have made such a foolish mistake.
That’s essentially what I’m getting at, I suppose. It doesn’t make violence qua violence any less immoral if you’re compelled to use it in self defense, but it does make you less culpable in a real legal or ethical sense. And I’d draw a strong distinction between a passive deterrence and active threat. That is, between “Leave me alone, because I can defend myself” as opposed to “Do what I say or you’re gonna get it.”
In regards of the points touched on the disclaimer just as in the comments, I don’t think I have anything to add but to nod and, well, mourn for our endless stupidity, guess Einstein was right.
And so just as a vague thought, to me is a little tragical-humorous to see how people think that the fact we have advanced electronics and mehcanics makes us “civilized”… hehe?
Civilized is as civilized does. I always think of Churchill’s warning that the next Dark Age will be made longer by “the light of perverted science.”
That was a bit cliche at the end with the LT’s death
If you like. But it suited the plot and the moment, so I went with it. Hope it didn’t spoil the story for you – I’ll try to do better next time.
can I ask why Mike has a weird USA flag despite being in Canadian gear?
I seem to be of a completely diametric opinion than most people here. I believe violence is universal, down to the atom. It is a fundament of nature. Molecules thrash and rend each other, bacteria infect and destroy, fungi rot, the trees tear at the soil, the beetles tear at the trees, animals tear at plants and plants tear at animals, the Sun is constantly destroying our outer atmosphere little by little… All of creation is a grand cacophony of destruction and violence, and is utterly depraved.
It is from this that we come, and we are aggressive, like all other animals on Earth. Since we are of the same substance of existence, we too are violent and aggressive.
But since violence is just a background condition of existence, I don’t believe it is fundamentally bad, nor do I believe pacifism is fundamentally good. These are arbitrary social constructs. All problems that have ever arisen have been because of groups or individuals at cross purposes, neither side being good or evil, and all solutions have been the eradication those cross purposes; whether it be an old African tribe peacefully eradicating cross purposes through the grand nonviolent battle of consensus democracy, or two ethnicities trying to erase one another, it is too universal to discount it as some evil that haunts us that we can ever be rid of.
However, we all have a universal drive to continue existing, and mirror neurons that allow us to feel the pain of others – the Golden rule set in biology. So, since conflict just is, it is not evil, and like other neutral things that get in the way of purposes, must be managed, and often with force, be it the force of persuasion or the force of violence. There is no way to amend cross purposes besides force.
And it has done good! We are the least violent generation that has ever existed – the media, in its quest for constant ratings, continues to parade a grand exaggeration. Violent crime is down, deaths at the hands of militaries are down, deaths by disease are down, and even though the Lockian idea that rights and freedom come from property didn’t pan out and left a few generations overconsumed and depressed, even that’s going down. Despite living in a universe of total violence and depravity, we are, every day, reducing the amount of suffering that comes with force, and there is a groundswell of interests that, at the moment are disconnected, but believe that now that communications technology is a near-ubiquitous layer on top of reality, that less violent means of force will be the means by which cross purposes are resolved ever more.
So take heart, that even in this universe, even as we are, in a handful of centuries we have gone from the Crusades to violent solutions becoming ever more culturally repugnant. The eddies and swirls in the long arc of time may show violence and dominion, but tended to, the arc bends toward justice.
Also, those last two panels – classic.
Though I have different beliefs, I would say that I agree with large parts of of what you said, more and more towards the end, in particular that the world of today to a large extent is a lot more peaceful than ever before and than often portrayed in the media. (I recommend a look at the 2014 Gates Annular Letter for a much more positive perspective).
Violence has its place. However like everything else it can be abused. If we look at it from the stand point of a bully they would say it was normal for a larger more aggressive person to prey on a weaker just like in Nature. Only humans can go beyond Nature with our cerebral cortex. Unfortunately our brains are made of layers of previous developments so the more ancient parts can be affected and affect the later organs. For others violence can be used to aid people in need. Like those who are attacked by others. I am greatly simplifying things here.
Right now with Anthropogenic Global Warming we have something that will test our species for survival. If we fail we will plunge into chaos and billions will die before stabilization. Or it would end up much like in “Elysium” with the two tiers, the rich and everyone else with human and robot guards. One of many possible developments.
This will be one of many hurdles we will have to jump in order to reach the next tier of societal development.