/lit/ - Literature

>Hitler parlayed men’s fear of other men into an aggression that degraded and destroyed most of Europe, including, of course, Germany itself.
And yet she has already established the dehumanizing and parasitic propaganda that was erected. How is one to feel like fulfilled "man" with his masculinity affirmed if he's to be killing or victimizing an enemy that's seen as a rat or bug? You're talking about a volatile political climate that's undergone unwarranted subjection because of the treaty of Versailles. Within the political climate the degree to which supposedly masculine undertones played a part are negligible. Similarly, the proposition that women were relegated to more conventionally feminine positions to affirm masculinity completely ignores the very real utilitarian purpose of simplying BIRTH. To be able to sustain a massive industrial-war machine there needed to be children birthed constantly. This also works in conjunction with the racially charged ideology. Both utterly blot out the supposed significance of masculinity in this dimension outside of a surface appearance for the purpose of deceit.

>understood how deeply pleasurable
it is to have the power of life and death in your hands
Except that it isn't. Studies have routinely demonstrated that soldiers intentionally aim not to kill (at least in WW1-2). Unless they are SPECIFICALLY and RIGOROUSLY trained to kill, and unless they dehumanize the enemy, it is in no way ordinary for men to want or be used to killing.

>[liberals have not reckoned with the male loathing of peace and domesticity or with the anger of young males at the modern state s confiscation of their weapons.
And yet the majority of the world was fighting against Germany and Japan as part of a DEMOCRACY.

> Ignatieff is positing a biological male violence that is angry at both order and civilization; and the great achievement of peace in Europe
Again there's a whole-sale ignorance of the geo-political and racial influences involved as well as the profound misery and psychology of the wars.

Is this retard honestly arguing that the soldiers of WW2 enjoyed fighting? Or that their eventual dehumanization of violence/the enemy was anything other than a coping mechanism to reconcile the CONSTANT fear and violence they undergone (something that is easily evident in rates of alcoholism and PTSD).

>How much of the pleasure is in the power per se, especially in humiliating a designated enemy, creating terror, lording it over the less powerful? Is power the foreplay and killing the act?
Idiotic. Again, attributing WW2 to masculinity and at the same time seeming to work under the premise that violence is so rampant in society that it's normal or "pleasurable".

Go ask how many people you know have been in a fight or been assaulted. Now ask if they enjoyed it. Ask murderers. Ask soldiers. Look at the rate of these crimes. THEN go beyond that and transcend "masculinity" as synonymous with testosterone vs masculinity as concep