One day at a beach Kathleen Barry witnessed an accidental death. Seeing how empathy drew together the bystanders – strangers until that moment – in shared human consciousness, she asked: ’Why do we value human lives in everyday moments but accept the killing in war as inevitable?’
In Unmaking War, Remaking Men , Kathleen Barry explores soldiers’ experiences through a politics of empathy. By revealing how men’s lives are made expendable for combat, she shows how military training drives them to kill without thinking and without remorse, only to suffer both trauma and loss of their own souls. She turns to her politics of empathy to shed new light on the experiences of those who are invaded and occupied and shows how resistance rises among them.
And what of the state leaders and the generals who make war? In 2001, a fateful year for the world, George W. Bush became President of the US; Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel; and Osama bin Laden became the de facto world terrorist leader. Analyzing their leadership and failure of empathy, Unmaking War, Remaking Men reveals a common psychopathology of those driven to ongoing war, first making enemies, then labeling them as terrorists or infidels.
Kathleen Barry asks: ‘What would it take to unmake war?’ She scrutinizes the demilitarized state of Costa Rica and compares its claims of peace with its high rate of violence against women. She then turns to the urgent problem of how might men remake themselves by unmaking masculinity. She offers models for a new masculinity drawing on the experiences of men who have resisted war and have in turn transformed their lives into a new kind of humanity; into a place where the value of being human counts.
