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Unmaking War, Remaking Men: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves

Kathleen Barry

3.25 · Rating details · 20 ratings · 2 reviews

Kathleen Barry answers the perennial question: Is war inevitable? with an emphatic "no." She explores soldiers' experiences through a politics of empathy and reveals how men’s lives are made expendable for combat in which they suffer loss of their own souls. She then probes the psychopathy that marks world leaders from George W. Bush to Ariel Sharon to Osama bin Laden to s ...more

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ebook, 235 pages

Published October 1st 2010 by Phoenix Rising Press of Santa Rosa

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Sep 09, 2012 C. rated it really liked it

Shelves: feminism, own-or-access, war, history-politics-economics

Wow this was weirdly written in places, and had an unacceptably high number of typos and grammatical errors ("insure" does not mean the same thing as "ensure"). But apart from that, this book was really very good. I especially enjoyed the chapter which discussed the Israel-Palestine conflict; it was a highly empathetic and illuminating treatment of the topic.

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Dec 13, 2016 FXKatt rated it really liked it

Parts Don’t Jell Real Well

Highly recommended. In stretches, astounding. And thankfully, not academic. But “Unmaking War, Remaking Men” is not all of one piece. In fact, it seems an attempt to join radical feminism and new age-ism--add in a liberal portion of left political analysis.

Feminism is the forceful part. It‘s behind the push, the conscience, the original raw voice. When soldiers, women troops, refugees, wives, war victims are lucidly grasped without props and screens, this b Parts Don’t Jell Real Well

Highly recommended. In stretches, astounding. And thankfully, not academic. But “Unmaking War, Remaking Men” is not all of one piece. In fact, it seems an attempt to join radical feminism and new age-ism--add in a liberal portion of left political analysis.

Feminism is the forceful part. It‘s behind the push, the conscience, the original raw voice. When soldiers, women troops, refugees, wives, war victims are lucidly grasped without props and screens, this book rocks, unsettles, converts. The reader stops--either permanently (thus the 30% one star grades here) or in profound thought. For he or she is in a zone of unspeakables, and in the grip--at least for a time, of unsurpassable anti-war writing. The male protection racket of war, patriotism, the sexualization/victimization of women soldiers are in turn smashed/exposed by Barry’s currents of defiance. (In my recollection most of this compelling writing occurrs between pp. 50-105 of this 200p book.)

The weak link is the psychological--yes New Age, terms that are used to underpin much of Barry’s content. Concepts like “core masculinity,” “the politics of empathy,” “psychopathic leadership“ and “life force“ are more aligned with the human potential movement than with radical politics. Despite Barry’s valiant attempts to politicize these terms, they must, in the end, be misleading. That they detract through their circularity soon becomes evident in the way the writing waffs into more detached coverage that, for the most part, is a duplication of Left critiquing of the wars in Iraq, Israel, and Afghanistan.

The reader gets clued into this psychological bent early via the transcendent lesson on human empathy provided by the tragic death at Bodega Bay. One’s immediate counter thought is: for every such victim there must be many Kitty Genoveses, and a mile long string of rubber necking events. And then there is the hypothetical conversation between a male marine vet and Barry, which invokes her learned capacity to empathize. Okay, beautiful, but does he want to delve into her reality? And by extension, given her reach out... is the left capable of such attention? or would a New Ager even begin to listen to what Barry has to say?

As to the legal “expendability” of soldiers’ lives, I do think this is a remarkable and a more material focus, but should it be separated out, especially on introduction, as a unique form of human waste? Are we to believe that the lower half of the world’s population is not expendable. Or that most soldiers (U.S. military is central here) actually serve as front line troops (only 7% do)? Or that Empire soldiers don’t cause way more deaths and suffering than they receive in kind? I think these distinctions need to marked out in the text.

But the real slippage seems most apparent in the last chapters--the mandatory Solution pages, which I was Not looking forward to. In fact the words “Buddhism“ and “Soul“ popped out at me as I skimmed forth. I doubt that Buddhism can speak to “remaking men,” and has even less to say about “unmaking war” than does the Catholic Church. But this is precisely what terms like “core masculinity” and “politics of empathy” lead to: the spiritual, the inward, the psychological, the transcendent ... Their outcomes are tied to their meanings, which in political terms, means a loss of intelligence and intelligibility and, in this case, partial abandonment and subordination of a riveting critique of the reality of male power.

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