That’s one of the more underappreciated issues when it comes to gender roles. You’ll hear constant female whinging about “male violence” and the male proclivity towards solving issues with fists, but smack-all about the role women play in it all.

Men don’t generally do the verbal battling women do between themselves, and with other men. Women instigate, and women provoke, but that’s OK, ‘cos it’s “only words”.

If you actually go out and observe dispassionately and without taking sides, what you’ll often find is that those same “sweet little girls” that decry violence are in the background, pushing the males towards the fight. It’s true in barfights, and it’s true in wars–The women are always in the background, encouraging the participants and belittling the ones who are too smart to engage in the battles.

I have heard it thousands of times, where feminists claim that a “world run by women” would be peaceful and productive. History tells us that’s a lie, because when you go looking at the actual record, what you find is that female heads of state are just as violent and prone to trying to solve problems with violence as the men are.

Female friend of mine is one of the worst misogynists that I’ve ever encountered. If you put her in charge, most women would be locked up away from the rest of society and their own kids. She experienced what I can only describe as “impossible to believe” amounts of abuse from her own mother, went through the mill in an all-female boarding school, and then did time in the WAC before it was integrated with the rest of the Army. Her outlook on the female of the species is such that the phrase “Women hate other women because they know what they’re like from the inside…” springs to mind whenever she gets going on it all.

The thing to remember is that a.) we are a sexually dimorphic species, and that b.) the females are the physically smaller sex. Because of that, they’ve had to compensate by taking their competitiveness into other areas than merely physical, and in getting the males to serve as surrogates for their violent impulses. The unfortunate perception among a lot of them that they are powerless foils rather than self-actuating agents just encourages them to abuse their ability to coerce and inveigle the males around them into actuating their whims.

And, it’s not exactly unusual to observe that when you have a boat-load of single males and no females, as you do at a lot of overseas military bases and assignments, things are generally a lot more peaceful. The club systems in Korea were notorious for this when the camps were in “closed” mode vs. “open to the locals”, simply because that whenever you added females to the mix, they’d start instigating shit just to have some fun. The local Korean and Russian bargirls that they were letting on Camp Howze for the first few months I was there had to have been doing something inimical, because the minute they closed post and the clubs went to “all male”, peace broke out. I swear, the first few months I was there, there must have been a major ruckus at least once or twice every weekend. The last 9? Can’t remember ever having so much as a really heated argument break out. All the female staff were older women, and just did not have the desire to “get it on” through watching their toyboys fight it out.

Of course, I will have to grant that the majority of that peacefulness might just have been due to the fact that the majority of the drinking and carousing was going on out there where the girls were…

Chicks are not peaceful little angels. The reality is, they love them some conflict and violence–Just not on their persons. It’s all through proxies.

..and yet Harry, that is way of many cultures in many times.

Dyak headhunters launch headhunting raids when the women say to.

Spartan mothers are famous for it (though an obvious outlier), “With your shield or on it”, or the son who complained to his mother that his sword was too short, “take another step forward.”

In our own time and culture, who was it handing out the white feathers at the start of WWI? Women and mothers.

Food for thought.

Bonus: it makes everything you do look like a spontaneous local action. Great for astroturfing. Pretend there’s no organization.

We are not all the same, but never mind rank. The most competent leadership is a prestige hierarchy, which is hard to do secretly. A cult of personality can’t be done secretly either. An old boy network thrives on secrecy and deniability and yet has at least a small element of prestige (local reputation.)

I suggest you find and read Philip Wylie’s 1943 book, Generation of Vipers. Read the part on “momism,” or the adoration of mothers.

We’re getting that good and hard now, comrades. One need only look at the list of “non-essential” businesses, the closure of religous facilities, and the complete lack of concern over George Floyd funerals, French Laundry diners, or teacher’s union vp’s travel to Barbados for vaction. Oh, put your mask on and lookee, a new, new Covid. Don’t you dare mention age of death or the dehamanizing aspects of masks, whether for children or anyone else.

“No one here has any rank — you are all the same,”

Sounds just like the proposed re-education camps for Deplorables.

Or you could find it in yourself. I don’t buy the notion that such disciplines are not natural. Darwin wouldn’t allow that. Unless you mean “hold together” in the sense of group cohesiveness. It’s natural for group cohesiveness to be contingent on whether the problems you face are better addressed with the group you have at hand than by your own individual initiative.

I think these men were already demoralized before they were captured. It’s easier to capture the demoralized.

It’s said the first duty of a prisoner is to escape. Easier said than done. I would modify that to: resist, by any means at your disposal. It’s simply a matter of remembering who the enemy is. That shouldn’t be hard at all. The enemy are constantly reminding you. You’d have to be dense not to get the message.

There was once a pilot who got shot down and thrown into a nasty POW prison. He focused on keeping unity among the prisoners. He never escaped. But he got released eventually, and went into politics. When they found it convenient, people called him a war hero. On what grounds? Something about unity. But he never escaped. He never killed any guards. He never got a Steve McQueen movie made about him.

And he turned out to be a somewhat inept politician, in a very particular way. He never seemed to understand whom he was supposed to be fighting. But he was big on unity. He just didn’t grasp what unity is for in the first place. He seemed to think it was an end in itself.

If and when unity helps you win, I’m all for it. If and when it doesn’t, screw unity.