Make War, Not Love

Form this fairly pragmatic approach rose the practice of nursing, with nuns professionalizing the matter to combat prostitutes soliciting. This development opened nursing as an alternative military employment for women, rather than implying direct historical roots.

It is not the roots of nursing, however, but the circumstances of its development that are currently in the spotlight; the sexual behavior of human beings, male and female, under wartime conditions. Modern society is fulled, funded and geared towards war. Since WWII, the arms trade has dominated every economy on earth. We are programmed, both by the imperatives of past eras and the propaganda of warmongers, to accept military conflict as a constant backdrop to our daily lives. There is more war on earth than ever before in history, and as always, the men doing the fighting are the poor. Today, poverty is reckoned on a worldwide scale; it is not the sons of the affluent West who die in their millions, but the soldiers born and raised in the third world. Where Western troops are involved, they are always drawn from the lowest ranks in society.

The addition of contraceptives and modern medicine to the equation is, on first glance, an excellent thing; less men die, less are maimed, and the release of sex is more freely available. Historically, the human race has been swept with a generational cull of warfare, disease, and infant mortality.

In short, the human race is overdue a historical event; we have missed a cull, and are now overpopulated. Nature has already intervened; obesity, heart disease, AIDS and cancer threaten to wipe out millions worldwide; our wholesale destruction of the environment has caused repercussions of cataclysmic proportions; our own race for supremacy has left the world in the shadow of nuclear war.

But the axe has yet to fall; the west is rich, decadent, and lazy. Wealth, luxury and affluence, and our society is crumbling. The family unit is in the minority; 40% of people live alone. In the UK, binge drinking is on the rise, bringing with it violence, criminal damage, public disorder and a rise in promiscuity, drug-assisted rape and venereal disease.

Having attained a stable, viable population, we have yet to shed our wartime conditioning; the sexual behavior of men and women at war has, since WWII, spread through society and affected us all. Monogamous or promiscuous, the true nature of human sexual behavior has been lost in emergency measures; the prevalence of love stories and the notion of ‘true’ love suggest that human beings naturally form long-term, monogamous relationships. Only at war have human beings embraced successive partners. War is so deeply entrenched in our society that even the term ‘peacetime’ no longer applies; children are swamped in cartoon war-imagery, the cinemas belch forth a constant torrent of action-heroes, the news feeds endless live footage of worldwide conflict into our homes, and this state of affairs is new!

Barely fifty years ago, we fought the Second World War, following the Great War, the War to End All War… we have had nothing but war since, and our modern societies have become poisoned with it; we are behaving, sexually, as if we were at war; relationships are made and broken, promiscuity is rife, the sex trade becoming accepted. Our youth are organizing into tribal, sometimes armed units – we call them gangs. Paramilitary action is currently the highest profile crime worldwide, all in the course of past precedent. The ‘problem’ is that the men are not being killed; female suffrage through contraception has brought about a weird male equality in return; we get to live.

The cause of our modern behavior must be a history and a mentality of war; the sex trade, like every other trade, is built upon the arms industry. If promiscuity is a symptom of war conditioning, selling sex is selling war. The free-love movement has been co-opted by the warmongers; even the slogan ‘make love, not war’ now sells bullets and pays for soldier’s caps.