Asher.P4.T6: Edwardian Era Synthesis

Violence as retribution is always immoral. During times of war, many try to persuade themselves that acting out in aggression and brutality is a necessary requirement: that they need to do so to protect themselves from the identical aggression and brutality of the opposing side. In the spirit of war, all senses of cruelty and inhumanity are accepted, because the enemy is dehumanized, and simply defined as an entity you need to defeat by any means necessary. The majority of those directly involved in war decide to label the experience as amoral, because the opposing side is no longer human, and therefore doesn’t need to be treated with any humanity. An example of this is Ernst Ludwig Kirschner’s piece, Self Portrait as a Soldier. His oil painting depicts him in military uniform, with a cigarette in his mouth and a naked woman behind him. There also seem to be bloody and stained cloths around them. Kirschner paints himself expressionless, with no emotion, and his eyes black, dark, and with no light in them at all. The naked woman in the painting has her face turned to the side, to avoid any possible human connection to the soldier. Kirschner communicates the mechanical, senseless character that overcomes soldiers in times of war – persuading them to commit horrors of murder and rape to, in all senses, defeat their enemy. It seems as if the fictional rape of this woman in justified because through the lens of war, she is not even a human, simply an object and a casualty of war.