A thing that the present day cult of united states military worship actively obscures, but which at one time was common knowledge both inside the military and in civilian life is that if you join the military then the government literally owns you. If Uncle Sam tells you to stand down wind of a nuclear test because it wants to know how effectively an infrantry unit can fight in the middle of a tactical nuclear exchange, your choices are “yes sir” or the stockade. This is not a hypothetical scenario but an actual thing that happened in the 50s, repeatedly.
Due to incidents like that and a number of other examples of the military leadership treating service members as disposable assets who’s only intrinsic value was in how much money the government had invested in training them, the military-legislative complex finally decided that if it was going to make this whole all-volunteer force work (an existential necessity for the military following the disasterious war in Vietnam) then it had to at least give some pretense to the idea of treating soldiers like actual humans.
So over the next couple decades, the military and the army in particular, begin to really try to put a humane face on the service. A lot of the casual abuse that was part and parcel of army life gets prohibited. Drill instructors can’t physically beat recruits anymore. The mantra of “no one left behind” gets popularized, which was a direct effort to counter the lingering belief that there were still American POWs held in Vietnam. Then 9/11 happens and full blown military worship goes mainstream, to the point questioning the military as an institution becomes a social taboo to an extent it never was before.
But all the chain store military discounts and thank yous for your services can’t obscure the fact that the purpose of the military is to carry out missions for the national interest and no matter what it claims, the mission is always first and the health safety of any individual GI is a nearly insignificant second. A solider is an asset, and although they may be an extremely expensive and valuable asset, they are ultimately expendable.
And of course part of being in the military means being trained to accept this. No military could function without soldiers willing to be treated in this way. It’s why so many professional armies have abandoned conscription. It turns out it’s a lot easier to brainwash willing volunteers into having so little regard for their own life than it is to get a bunch of draftees. This is of course also why militaries around the world, all volunteer or no, favor recruits who are just barely adults. It’s much easier to condition people who haven’t yet developed the sense of self preservation that characterizes mature adulthood to be disregard their own well being on command.
Most discourse about military training emphasizes training to take life, and the dehumanization this entails, but this ignores that a) outside of combat specialty training (e.g. infrantry, armor, etc) this is not as focused upon as much as disregard for personal safety, because this is the most vital attribute of a solider, whether in a combat or non combat role. Once you have someone willing to stand stoically down wind from a nuclear blast on que, training them to kill other people is easy. The dehumanization of self is the pretext for the dehumanization of others. A moral Injury by design.
Tl;Dr stay away from the military (every military) and especially the army (every army)
title???? a TITLE????? is it not enough that i wrote the damn thing IS THAT NOT ENOUGH WORDS WRUNG FROM MY VERY FLESH AND BLOOD
the song lyrics have abandoned me, no number of parantheses and lower cased words can save me from this hell
“I wring out my flesh for what is inside it, pouring out everything I have written, because what has been has has already been repeated: what has been said has been said.”
(Source: The Lamentations of a Middle Egyptian Scribe, c. 19th century BCE.)
really rude of you to just expose my past life like that
Okay! So while I was getting a little bean to fall asleep, @thatlittleegyptologist and I located the source text, since neither of us was familiar with the title “Lamentations of a Middle Egyptian Scribe”. The line above is actually a rather… liberal translation from recto 2-4 of “The Complaints of Khakheperreseneb” (British Museum EA 5645), a Middle Kingdom text, the original possibly dating to the reign of Senwosret II* (12th Dynasty), written in the genre of national distress texts.
This was a particular genre in Egyptian literature wherein calamitous events that could befall Egypt and its people were described. Some of them had political purpose, such as The Prophecy of Neferti, others seem to be more along the lines of exercise in hyperbole and form, such as The Admonitions of Ipuwer. The Complaints is written on a wooden writing board, extant examples of which we know from the New Kingdom, and this particular board (containing a copy of the earlier MK text) was dated to roughly the reign of Amenhotep II (18th Dynasty)**.
I’ve mentioned this to be a very liberal translation. For example: The use of “written” for Dd is incorrect: Dd here means “said”, instead. Translating X.t as “flesh” is also incorrect: X.t is “body”.
Lichtheim translates the lines as follows, and since that’s a good translation, I’m not going to append my own because it wouldn’t be much different if at all:
I wring out my body of what it holds, In releasing all my words; For what was said is repetition, When what was said is said. (Lichtheim, 1975:146)
The verse then ends with:
Ancestor’s words are nothing to boast of, They are found by those who come after. (Lichtheim, 1975:146)
In essence, what Khakheperreseneb describes here is the uselessness of writing, since it has all been written before.
— *Lichtheim, M., Ancient Egyptian Literature vol. I (1975), p. 145 **Parkinson, R. B., The Text of Khakheperreseneb: New Readings of EA5645, and an Unpublished Ostracon, in The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 83 (1997), p63
oh to be more accurately past-life scalped on my own post
[ID: Image 1: the AO3 title box when posting a fic, empty of text, with a red error message underneath saying “We need a title! (At least 1 character long, please.)”
Image 2: A line of hieroglyphics, with a shorter line of four glyphs under it that’s right-aligned.]
god i love reading about stupid drama in ancient greece. like there was an athlete named theagenes who was so good at every kind of athletic contest that when he died, one of his opponents would go to beat the shit out of a statue of him out of spite, but then one day the statue fell on the guy and killed him so the greeks took the statue to court for murder, convicted it, and threw it into the sea
actually i left out the best part of this story which is that a plague then struck and when people consulted the oracle at delphi she was like “well you’ve pissed of theagenes” so they had to go dig the statue back up out of the fucking water
I am so excited to announce the debut of my new series, Cryptid Club! Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved the mystery and lore surrounding these creatures and this was my chance to get to know them a bit better.
