Are They Not Dividing The Spoil

The State is born of war and its unique demands. Those social evolutionists who have tried to derive the political state as a development from kinship -- that is, as an emergent of household, kindred, or clan -- have simply not recognized the issues involved. The first political figure in history is not patriarch, but military leader. The history of every people of which we have record demonstrates that the first and greatest of all role-conflicts in history is that between head of household and clan on the one hand and, on the other, military chieftain. We see this in Genesis 14. The State is not related to big families, but to immoral families. As a Godly family grows in size, it does not shirk its responsibilities to the poor and become a welfare-state. Nor does it use the IRS to confiscate money from neighboring families to protect its family business from competitors or award itself a government contract to produce things no one would buy voluntarily. State, immorality does. And the most significant form of immorality which generates the State is war. The link between the State and war should not surprise us. The Bible tells us that the State is rooted in war; the war-monger State is strewn through the pages of history as the instrument of God's judgment upon the lawless (Romans 13). Beginning with Cain, the founder of the first fortress-city, continuing with Nimrod, the first post-flood military dictator, and proceeding through the Old Testament, the military State has dominated the lives of those who will not embrace the Law of God in the Bible. From the beginning the state was nothing more, basically, than an institutionalization of the war-making power. If war is, as Randolph Bourne put it, "the health of the state" -- and it is, at least as far as the functions and powers of the state are concerned -- this is demonstrably one of the most ancient of political facts. Sociologically, there is no reason why decentralized Family rule cannot continue, with the autonomous nuclear family (Genesis 2:24) retaining close and fruitful cultural community with the extended family (Deuteronomy 4:9), while building voluntary social and commercial networks. Are they not conquering? Are they not dividing the spoil? A cunt or two for every soldier! Sisera. She is pictured as waiting for her son's return. Why the delay? She is comforted by the thought that Sisera must have taken great spoil, and it will take him time to collect it all. It must have been a great war! Other Biblical descriptions of war should leave us unsurprised at her expectations (e.g., Isaiah 13:16-18, where the Babylonians will be judged by being raped and slaughtered by the Medes (cf. The term translated "damsel, maiden" in most Bibles actually means "womb." She refers to the girls using coarse soldier talk that views women only in terms of their genitals. We are jarred to reality by the coarse language of verse 30. To give it a modern translation we would have to find crude language that would give an equivalent effect -- language that is still regarded as "unprintable," at least in Bible commentaries, so I shall have to leave it to the reader's imagination to come up with something equivalent to what Deborah, under divine inspiration, rape puts in the mouth of the anti-mother of the anti-Christ. We have not left it to the imagination of the reader because we too often leave unspoken the violence encouraged by the State. We all know how soldiers talk and yet we all sort of laugh it off. Violent, sexual comedy is increasingly popular. We are all "party animals" now. We know how soldiers are de-civilized in training for the acts they will commit in war, and how that war will bring increased State power and control over our lives. We turn our heads; we silently approve it; we blithely condone it. Patriotism covers a multitude of sins. And let us come to grips with that point: this soldier-violence is encouraged by the State, is it not? Is not "basic training" an exercise in losing compassion, creative thinking, individuality, and respect for life (one's own and certainly the "enemy's") in exchange for animal barbarism and a centralist mindset of unquestioning obedience to the State? Do you know what a soldier's "pep talk" is like? Violence of mind is at least implicitly encouraged, if not explicitly. It used to be said that there was a good deal in common psychologically between the kind of soldier who could win a Congressional Medal of Honor or even a Silver Star and the kind of individual we label psychopath in civil life. In each there is a strong relish for violence. In the former, exercised by artillery, machine gun, rifle, or grenade, it is licensed violence. The State's imprimatur upon war legitimizes violence in its citizenry. So is there a fascination with war's violence in civil populations -- along with fear, to be sure. It is impossible to doubt the widespread thrill of violence experienced vicariously through the media, especially television. Tens of millions of Americans watched the war in Viet Nam every evening. And it has been correctly said that World War II is the longest running movie of all time. War movies and documentaries retain their appeal for all ages. And now there's Rambo. But as we see in the mother of Sisera, war is more than mere violence, and as we know from those who can't shake sailor mouth, sexual immorality and even sexual violence is part of the warmonger State. But there is a different kind of licensed immorality that comes with war, and that has still wider appeal inasmuch as it exists on the home front as well as in garrison and on the battle field. I refer to the whole area of sexual conduct. Mars and Venus have ever been close companions. It was under the steady impact of the Roman Republic's wars, first foreign, then civil as well as foreign, that the destruction of the Roman family system gradually began. It was not easy for young Romans, after a number of years in the field where every form of violation of the canons of continence was scarcely more than routine, to return to the iron morality of the traditional Roman family system, with its built-in coercions, constraints, and subjections to patriarch and matriarch. The great wave of immorality that hit Roman society in the first century B.C., so well attested to by contemporary essayists, and that the Emperor Augustus strove valiantly to terminate through laws and decrees, had its origins in war. I do not think it extreme to link the breakdown in moral standards in all spheres -- economic, educational, and political, as well as in family life -- to the effects of two major wars -- celebrated wars! What is in the first instance licensed, as it were, by war stays on to develop into forms which have their own momentum. And now there's Duke Nukem. Let's leave the "theatre" of war and look at violence in everyday life. War has historically been an act of aggrandizement of geography or wealth by the State. Citizens mimic their State, and we should not be surprised to find that theft characterizes the private sector of economics.