Obedience or Revenge… !!

History tells us that generally, when a war is over a winner always imposes his rules and seeks to find immediately if there was a blind obedience in the enemy’s troops. In one term he is trying in the name of human rights to revenge!

On October First 1946, the international Military Tribunal of Nuremberg delivered its verdicts, after 216 court sessions of the original twenty-four defendants, twelve (Including Martin Bormann, tried in absentia) were sentenced to death by hanging.

Obedience represents a form of conformity due to a figure of authority. Social pressure is explicitly expressed in form of command, of injection .

Thus, under the commands of an authority, recognized like legitimate, the individual can be brought to make even acts of violence, as shown in the experiment of social psychologist Stanley Miligram .

But the difference between such laboratory experiments and real painful war is that in the first you are requested to obey but in the hectic hard life of war you are forced rudely to obey. Blaming soldiers shouldn’t be legal when we know that refusing the obedience of their superiors in the wartime, in the presence of the enemy or an armed band, is considered following all the military code of justice in the world as a specific infraction for which reclusion or prison sentences and even death sentence can be proclaimed.

What can a soldier do? Obeying his superior or disobeying him and risking to be shot as a dirty enemy spy!!

A simple soldier can’t be sentenced even if he were the one who executed hundreds and thousands of people. The clearest example is the situation of the soldier who threw the bomb on Hiroshima, Killing thousands and thousands of people as if they were bugs…! The question is, who has to be blamed? Of course not that soldiers, he was considered as the executors of a legal authority that ordered that. If he didn’t execute , he would be very harshly blamed and there would always be some one to do it.

The ironic question remains: What could happen if the State, which hold the trial of Nuremberg against Nazism or which ordered to bombard Hiroshima and Nagasaki, failed the war, will we see an opposite role, the winner is being shattered and the loser is celebrating his triumphal arch??

A famous psychiatrist named Jung has observed that the duty to obey is establishing in our unconsciousness. From the ten commandments of God to Moses in Sinai which reflect clearly the duty to obey to God, parents etc…, to many mythological themes of good and evil, to other voodoo magician…Our unconscious is paralyzed by these ancestral and heavy images.

We are bounded by the weight of these archetypal and Mythological images. What can we do? Better to work to be like a magician bird… free on the air, free of all burden of system, A bird who seeks to express itself in light !!

William MATAR
Copyright 2000

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