Това е книга, чийто автор с предговора си ме отказа да я чета.

Съжалявам, но когато напоително описваш за своя основна теза компютърните игри като факторът, който кара децата и младежите да са агресивни и да упражняват насилие, звучиш малко смешно.

Още по-смешно звучиш, когато обясняваш как именно поради агресията във видеоигрите и по телевизията, насилието в живота ни се увеличава всяка година, че непрекъснато расте броят на убийствата, изнасилванията и т.н. в съвременния свят - когато точно книгата, която приключих преди това доказва обратното - насилието намалява през цялата човешка история и в последните години е на невиждано ниско ниво ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11107244-the-better-angels-of-our-nature ).

Войните били причинени от това, че чрез телевизията и игрите ние приучаваме и тренираме децата си да убиват. Да наистина, сигурно Ченгис Хан и Василий Българоубиец са играли прекалено много видеоигри като малки...

Авторът е военен и доколкото погледнах вътре в книгата, разглежда различни моменти от военната история и организация, за да защити идеята, че насилието и убиването са заучаеми и подлежащи на тренировка, в което няма съмнение. Но уводът бе толкова нелеп, че не можах да издържа. ( )

'Full of arresting observations and insights...that make you alter the way you have thought about a certain subject...a powerfully argued explanation.'-New York Times

The good news is that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to kill in battle. Unfortunately, modern armies, using Pavlovian and operant conditioning, have developed sophisicated ways of covercoming this instinctive aversion. The psychological cost for soldiers, as wittnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. The psycholicial cost for the rest of us is even more so: contemporary civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army's conditioning techniques and, according to Grossman's contoversial thesis, is repsonsible for our rising rate of murder, expecially among the young.

On Killing is an important stydy of the techniques the military usese to overcome the powerful reluctance to kill, of how killing affects the soldier, and of the societal implications of escalating violence.

'Colonel Grossman's perceptive study ends with a profoundly troubling observation. The desensitizing techniques used to train soldiers are now found in mass media-films, television, and video arcades-and are conditioning our children. HIs figures on youthful homicides strongly suggest the breeding of teenage Rambos.'-William Manchester

'A fine piece of work.'-Dr. Richard Holmes, author of Acts of War

'This important book deserves a wide readership.'-Library Journal, starred review

A former army Ranger and paratrouper, Lt. Col. Dave Grosman taught psychology at West Point and is currently the Professor of Military Science at Arkansas state University

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction the the paperback edition
Intoduction
Section I Killing and the existence of resistance: A world of virgins studying sex
Chapter One Fight or flight, posture or submit
Chapter Two Nonfirers throughout history
Chapter Three Why can't Johnny kill?
Chapter Four The nature and source of the resistance
Section II Killing and combat trauma: The role of killing in psychiatric casualties
Chapter One The nature of psychiatric casualities: The psychological price of war
Chapter Two The reign of fear
Chapter Three The weight of exhaustion
Chapter Four The mud of guilt and horror
Chapter Five The wind of hate
Chapter Six The well of fortitude
Chapter Seven The burden of killing
Chapter Eight The blind men and the elephant
Section III Killing and physical distance: From a distance, you don't look anything like a friend
Chapter One Distance: A qualitative distinction in death
Chapter Two Killing at maximum and long range: Never a need for repentance or regret
Chapter Three Killing at mid- and hand-grenage range: 'You can never be sure it was you'
Chapter Four Killing at close range: 'I knew that it was up to me, personally, to kill him'
Chapter Five Killing at edged-weapons range: An 'intimate brutality'
Chapter Six Killing at hand-to-hand-combat range
Chapter Seven Killing at sexual range: 'The primal aggression, the release, and orgasmic discharge'
Section IV An anaomy of killing: All factors considered
Chapter One The demands of authority: Milgram and the military
Chapter Two Group absolution: 'The individual is not a killrr, but the group is'
Chapter Three Emotional distance: 'To me they were less than animals'
Chapter Four The nature of the victim: Relevance and payoff
Chapter Five Aggressive predisposition of the killer: Avengers, conditioning, and the 2 percent who like it
Chapter Six All factors coinsidered: The mathematics of death
Section V Killing and atrocities: 'No honor here, no virtue'
Chapter One The full spectrum of atrocitiy
Chapter Two The dark power of atrocitiyi
Chapter Three The entrapment of atrocity
Chapter Four a case study in atrocity
Chapter Five The greatest trap of all: To live with that which thou hath wrought
Section VI The killiing response stages: What does it feel like to kill?
Chapter One The killing response stages
Chapter Two Applications of the model: Murder-suicides, lost elections, and thoughts of insanitiy
Section VII Killing in Vietnam: What have we done to our soldiers?
Chapter One Desensitization and conditioning in Vietnam: Overcoming the resistance to killing
Chapter Two What have we done to our soldiers? The rationalization of killing and how it failed in Vietnam
Chapter Three Post-traumatic stress disorder and the cost of killing in Vietnam
Chapter Four The limits of human endurance and the lessons of Vietnam
Section VIII Killing in America: What are we doing to our children?
Chapter One A virus of violence
Chapter Two Desensitization and Pavlov's dog at the movies
Chapter Three B.F. Skinner's rats and operant conditioning at the video arcade
Chapter Four Social learning and role models in the media
Chapter Five The resensitization of America
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Compelling

This was a book on a great and important topic, with a productive line of research, which unfortunately succumbed to two major flaws.

The two big problems are quite serious. First, the data/research he relies on is a limited set, and primarily from now-highly-questioned sources. The SLA Marshall "non-firer" data from WW2, and the civil war musket studies, are specifically highly questioned. Second, he spends the last 10-20% of the book pushing "video games are turning children into killers" through a weak link with military conditioning techniques, and crime/murder statistics.

There are some parts of the book which don't "ring true" to me, but they were addressed and may have been due to the changes in how training was conducted after WW2. I'm not sure, though. I have never been a sniper and have never fired a scoped rifle at a human being, but from reading about them pretty extensively and talking with a few, the idea that it's somehow "less intimate" than regular infantry combat seems false. Most of the long-range snipers are observing their _targets for longer than most regular infantry ops, and a similar argument could be made for UAV operators (who might be monitoring a _target for days or weeks before firing). They have a clearer view of the _target than a few instants behind a red dot at 25m. As well, I don't know of anyone in Iraq/Afghanistan or modern counterterrorism/counterinsurgency who would hesitate at all to fire, and most who actually wouldn't be particularly "torn up" by dropping an adversary -- maybe this is due to the effective depersonalization which happened in spite of official policy, or maybe I've somehow just been around the 2%, but reflexive/automatic and without particular moral concern would be how I'd characterize it.

However, the core of the book was still solid. The most interesting to me was how fucked up our policies were in Vietnam (individual replacement vs. unit-level rotation, plus tolerance of anti-war activity directed against soldiers returning from Vietnam), as well as how bad pre-Vietnam military training was (bullseye ranges vs. current instruction on known distance ranges), and how we did some things right in Afghanistan/Iraq largely by accident. A topic of particular interest to me is how as a contractor I ended up experiencing some of the "high risk of PTSD" activities or lack of mitigation (constant low-grade risk, and going from war zone to a 5 star hotel or Michelin starred restaurant or hypermarket after a 2h flight on a weekly or more frequent basis; acting alone; zero other support; zero legitimacy by a larger organization), and yet aside from "fuck these people" as a general belief (for a large set of "people"), and a desire to shop for things in bulk and stockpile, no lasting consequences. My "peak risk" only happened a few times, and wasn't so much "active firefight" as "situation which almost turned into the Alamo but was defused at the last second", unlike infantry combat, but that's not particularly different from the 90% of non-combat-arms personnel involved in the wars.

It does seem like one could design a superior training, deployment, and re-integration program for participants in "20 year long wars" like Afghanistan, vs. what we've evolved from the military contractor communities, and this book provides some of the arguments. Still, a better solution is to go back to short, well-defined, winnable wars. ( )

Although some of the statistics and research cited in this book are a bit dated at this point, I enjoyed it. This book gave me some new perspectives and understanding that I hadn't had before now. ( )