In July 2005, the National Geographic TV channel showed viewers a new project - a multi-part documentary about a person's ability to kill a person. Much of this project turned out to be a real discovery for society. The facts cited by the authors of the film are really shocking, and the results of scientific research on this issue make us look differently at the person himself and at the war.
This radically changes our ideas, which seemed to be established and unshakable. Why does a normal person, even drafted into the army and fighting for his homeland, still not want to kill? Science has found biological explanations for this.
Denial of murder
The texture of the film is shocking and hard to believe at first. In 1947, American General Marshall organized a survey of World War II veterans from combat infantry units in order to determine the behavior of a soldier and officer in real combat. The results were surprising.
Only less than 25% of the soldiers and officers of the US Army's combat infantry units fired towards the enemy during the battle. And only 2% deliberately aimed at the enemy. A similar picture was in the Air Force: more than 50% of enemy aircraft shot down by American pilots accounted for 1% of the pilots. It turned out that in those types of battles where the enemy is perceived as a person and a person (these are infantry battles, air duels of fighters, etc.), the army is ineffective, and almost all the damage inflicted on the enemy is created only by 2% of personnel, and 98% unable to kill.
A completely different picture is where the military does not see the enemy in the face. The effectiveness of tanks and artillery here is an order of magnitude higher, and the maximum efficiency is in bomber aviation. It was she who, during the Second World War, caused the maximum damage to the enemy's manpower (approximately 70% of all military and civilian losses of the enemy). As for the face-to-face infantry combat, their effectiveness is the lowest among other combat arms.
The reason is that soldiers cannot kill. Since this is the most serious issue of the effectiveness of the military, the Pentagon brought in a group of military psychologists to the research. Amazing things came to light. It turned out that 25% of soldiers and officers urinate or defecate from fear before each battle. In the US Army, this was generally the norm. National Geographic cites the memoirs of a WWII veteran as an example.
The veteran soldier says that before the first battle in Germany he wet himself, but his commander pointed to himself also wet, and said that this is normal before each battle: "As soon as I wet myself, the fear disappears and I can control myself." Polls showed that this is a massive phenomenon in the army, and even in the war with Iraq, about 25% of US soldiers and officers urinated or defecated from fear before each battle.
Emptying the intestines and bladder before fear of death is a normal animal instinct inherited by humans from animals: with a bowel and bladder emptied, it is easier to escape and escape. But psychologists could not immediately explain something else. Approximately 25% of soldiers and officers experienced temporary paralysis of either the hand or index finger. Moreover, if he is left-handed and must shoot with his left hand, then the paralysis touched the left hand.
That is, exactly the hand and the finger that are needed for shooting. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the archives of the Reich showed that the same attack pursued German soldiers. On the eastern front there was a constant epidemic of "frostbite" of a hand or finger that had to be fired. Also about 25% of the composition. As it turned out, the reasons lie deep in the psychology of a person who was forcibly sent to war.
In this search, the researchers first found that 95% of all violent crimes are committed by men, and only 5% by women. This once again confirmed the well-known truth that women are generally not suitable for sending them to the war by the state to kill other people. Research has also shown that humans are not aggressive at all. For example, chimpanzees show monstrous aggressiveness in their behavior towards their relatives, which is evolutionarily absent in humans, since, according to scientists, aggressive individuals of the human race inevitably died in the course of human history, and only those who were inclined to compromise survived.
Analysis of the behavior of dogs has shown that instinct prohibits dogs from killing their own kind. They have clear biological constraints on this behavior, which put a dog into a state of stupor if it begins to inflict life-threatening injuries on another dog. It turned out that a normal person in such situations becomes like dogs. Scientists at the Pentagon, examining the stress of a soldier during combat, found that the soldier completely "turns off the forebrain" responsible for conscious behavior, and the lobes of the brain that control the body and mind with the help of animal instincts are turned on.
This explains the paralysis of the hands and fingers of soldiers - an instinctive prohibition against killing one's own kind. That is, these are not at all mental or social factors, not pacifism or, on the contrary, the fascism of a person's ideas. When it comes to killing one's own kind, biological resistance mechanisms are turned on, which the human mind cannot control at all. As one of the examples "National Geographic" cites Himmler's trip to the newly captured Minsk, where the Nazis of Germany and Belarus massacred Jews.
When a Minsk Jew was shot in front of Himmler, the ideologist and organizer of the extermination of Jews, the head of the SS began to vomit and faint. It is one thing to write orders for the murder of "abstract" millions of people far away in the office, and another thing to see the death of a very specific person sentenced to death by this order. The largest American psychologists Sveng and Marchand, who were commissioned by the Pentagon, found out something amazing in general.
The results of their research were shocking: if a combat unit conducts continuous hostilities for 60 days, then 98% of the personnel go crazy. Who are the remaining 2%, who, in the course of combat clashes, are the main combat force of the unit, its heroes? Psychologists clearly and reasonably show that these 2% are psychopaths. These 2% had serious mental problems even before being drafted into the army.
The answer of scientists to the Pentagon was that the effectiveness of the actions of the armed forces of close combat contact is achieved only by the presence of psychopaths, and therefore the reconnaissance or shock breakthrough units must be formed only from psychopaths. However, in these 2% there is also a small part of people who cannot be attributed to psychopaths, but can be attributed to "leaders".
These are people who usually go to the police or similar bodies after military service. They do not show aggressiveness, but their difference from normal people is the same as that of psychopaths: they can easily kill a person - and not experience any worries from it.
Rampant murder
The essence of American research: biology itself, the very instincts prohibit a person from killing a person. And this was, in fact, known for a long time. For example, in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century, similar studies were carried out. A regiment of soldiers at the shooting range hit 500 targets during the test.
And then in battle, a few days later, all the shooting of this regiment hit only three enemy soldiers. This fact is also quoted by National Geographic. A person biologically cannot kill a person. And psychopaths, who make up 2% of the war, but are 100% of the entire strike force of the army in close battles, according to US psychologists, are also murderers in civilian life and, as a rule, are in prison.
A psychopath is a psychopath: whether in war, where he is a hero, or in civilian life, where he belongs in prison. Against this background, any war itself appears in a completely different light: where 2% of the psychopaths of the Fatherland fight with the same 2% of the enemy's psychopaths, while destroying a lot of people who do not want to kill a person. War is done by 2% of psychopaths, for whom it is absolutely not important for the sake of which to kill someone. The main thing for them is the signal of the political leadership for reprisals. It is here that the psychopath's soul finds its happiness, its finest hour. Research by American scientists concerned only the behavior of the US Army during the Second World War.
Our domestic military historians, I already foresee, are ready to argue that "the Americans are bad fighters, but our army has shown the heights of courage and heroism." For this reason, articles are published everywhere that we, they say, "did not give up, but died." This is a bluff. How many Americans surrendered to Hitler? Sheer trifle.
But the USSR showed a record that no one surpassed (and never, I am sure) in how to surrender to the aggressor. Hitler attacked the USSR with an army of only 3.5 million. And this army surrendered in 1941, 4 million soldiers and officers of the cadre of the Red Army.
Here, of course, it was not the desire not to kill anyone that worked, but another - an attempt to get rid of the hated USSR, when in 1941 Hitler was seen as a "liberator" from the "Jewish Bolshevism" of the accursed Stalin, who was in the people's livers.
Veterans of the United States of World War II and Vietnam, Iraq, and Russian veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya - all agree in one opinion: if at least one such psychopath turned out to be in a platoon or in a company, then the unit survived. If it was not there, the unit died.
Such a psychopath almost always solved the combat mission of the entire unit. For example, one of the veterans of the American landing in France said that one single soldier decided the entire success of the battle: while everyone was hiding in shelter on the coast, he climbed to the Nazi bunker, fired a submachine gun into its embrasure, and then threw grenades at him, killing there everyone.
Then he ran to the second pillbox, where, fearing death, he was alone! - all thirty German bunker soldiers surrendered. Then he took the third pillbox alone … The veteran recalls: "It looks like a normal person, and in communication he seems quite normal, but those who lived closely with him, including myself, know that this is a mentally ill person, a complete psycho ".
In search of psychopaths
The Pentagon made two main findings. Firstly, it is necessary to organize military operations in such a way that the soldier does not see the enemy, whom he is killing, in the face. To do this, it is necessary to develop remote war technologies as much as possible and focus on bombing and shelling. And secondly, those units that inevitably come into direct close combat contact with the enemy must be formed from psychopaths.
Within the framework of this program, "recommendations" appeared for the selection of contractors. Most of all, psychopaths have become desirable. Moreover, the search for people for contract service ceased to be passive (selecting from those who applied), but became active: the Pentagon began purposefully looking for psychopaths in the US society, in all its layers, including the lowest, offering them military service. It was the realization of a scientific approach: the army needs psychopaths.
Namely - in the units of close combat contact, which in the United States today are formed only from psychopaths. The USA is a large country, and its population is twice the population of the same Russia. And psychopaths there for military service can be found for 20 years of "scientific approach" is incredibly many. This is probably the origin of the victories of the US Army in the current wars. No army in the world today can withstand the US army, not only because of technology, but primarily because the United States was the first in the world to understand the science of killing and form shock units only from psychopaths.
Today, one professional US Army soldier is worth hundreds of other armies because he is found and selected as a psychopath. As a result, the armies of other countries still suffer from the same disease - in close combat, only about 2% are able to actually fight, and 98% cannot kill. And only the United States has significantly changed the effectiveness of contact combat of its troops, bringing it from 2% in World War II to 60-70% today.
In a normal society, we treat psychopaths. Isn't it time for us to recover from the war itself, if, according to the research of scientists, a person does not want to fight, cannot fight, is not intended by Nature or God to fight. A person should not fight. This is the norm. And everything else is psychopathy, illness.
