While the current U.S. president launches military strikes against Iran and promises more to come, we should remember that he is not the only president in history to enjoy conflict, destruction, and the allure of power. In fact, every recent U.S. president has initiated attacks on other nations. It seems we, as a nation, love war. Any student of history will see that this love is not limited to the United States. We’ve been engaged in warfare for 10,000 years of human civilization.
Sigh!
In the opening pages of A Terrible Love of War, the late Jungian analyst James Hillman recalls General George Patton surveying a battlefield scattered with churned earth, burned tanks, and dead soldiers. Patton lifts a dying officer, kisses him, then surveys the carnage and confesses: “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life.”
This scene from the 1970 film illustrates what Hillman devoted his last significant work to understanding: the profound pull of war within the human soul. Despite our moral condemnations and humanitarian ideals, we remain attracted to this destructive activity.
Twenty years after Hillman published his meditation, the world provides ample evidence for his thesis. The Russia-Ukraine war has now entered its fifth year, with over a million casualties and no clear end in sight. In January, U.S. forces attacked Venezuela and captured President Nicolás Maduro. Just a week ago, a major military operation began against Iran, marking the most aggressive escalation in the region in decades. These are not isolated incidents. They are signs of an archetypal pattern that Hillman would call, at its deepest level, an influence on human existence.
Hillman structures his book around four provocations: War is Normal, War is Inhuman, War is Sublime, and Religion is War. The first assertion hits hardest because it affronts our progressive sensibilities. We prefer to think of war as an anomaly, a failure of diplomacy, a breakdown in rational discourse. Hillman refuses us this comfort.
Look at the historical record, he urges. Since the beginning of recorded history, hardly any generation has avoided organized armed conflict. We define peace as the absence of war, not the other way around. This linguistic fact reveals our deeper assumption: war is the default condition, and peace is just the gap between conflicts.
The current global situation confirms this. Ukraine’s war is a “war of attrition,” with shifting borders causing a slow, inch-by-inch struggle. Russia controls about twenty percent of Ukrainian territory, and diplomacy remains stuck despite summits. The hope for a peaceful solution clashes with the martial spirit Hillman links to Ares, the Roman god of war.
Hillman’s most unsettling argument concerns the connection between war and belief. Whatever the object of belief be it the flag, the nation, the president, or a god, an energy drives it. Decisions become quick. Dissent becomes difficult, and doubt, which hampers action and questions certitude, becomes traitorous. This mindset is clear today. President Trump’s impulsive and ambiguous decision-making makes sense from this perspective. War increasingly follows its own logic, defying rational rules of international relations. War results from irrational emotional energy. In this way, Hillman seems to suggest that war is our most ancient religion, a god we worship.
His most controversial claim is that we actually love war. Not consciously, not rationally, but at some depth of the soul that our daylight consciousness refuses to acknowledge. After World War II, a French woman confessed to the philosopher J. Glenn Gray: “You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have not felt before or since.”
Soldiers share similar experiences, citing intense combat, deep bonds formed under fire, and a strong sense of purpose rarely found in civilian life. Hillman quotes one veteran: “I felt like a god. I was untouchable.”
This terrible love explains why antiwar movements, despite their moral clarity, often fail to prevent the next conflict. We can understand intellectually that war is inhuman, destroying lives, communities, and ecosystems, yet we still find ourselves attracted to its spectacle. How else can we explain our endless consumption of war films and war games? Hillman compares our viewing of war, whether real or cinematic, to watching pornography. We are all voyeurs.
Hillman does not call for pacifism, seeing it as naive. Instead, he stresses understanding the war god as key to controlling excessive violence. In Roman mythology, Mars represented not only bloodshed but also discipline, restraint, and the virtues that distinguished soldiers from murderers. Hillman warns that when the martial spirit is driven by narrow beliefs, it results in domination, intolerance, and repression. A proper understanding of Mars could reveal wisdom on when to fight and when to stop.
This distinction feels urgent as American forces engage in what some analysts describe as an open-ended regime change operation in Iran, and the Ukraine conflict shows no signs of ending. The question isn’t if nations will continue fighting. We know they will. Instead, we must stay aware of war’s seductive pull.
Hillman died in 2011, before the current conflicts began. He argued that Western civilization, despite its claims of peace and human rights, has actually fostered the most enduring war machine of any culture worldwide. The reasons for this, he believed, are rooted not in politics or economics but in the religious and psychological depths of our collective soul.
If Hillman is correct, our traditional methods for preventing war are not enough. Diplomacy, economic sanctions, and international organizations all have roles, but none address the core issue. That core issue is rooted in the archetypal truth that war is a fundamental part of our souls and maybe the universe.
In the trenches of World War I, Hillman observes, French, German, Russian, Italian, English, Scottish, Irish, Austrian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Canadian, and American soldiers, to name just a few, engaged in killing each other while invoking the same God. Each believed God was on their side. Each was certain of the justice of their cause.
Bob Dylan sang about this phenomenon in his 1964 song, With God on Our Side.
Or maybe the Joan Baez version is easier on the ears, for some.
—
Previously Published on The Notebooks of James Hazelwood
iStock featured image
Well I like you. I was wondering who else was thinking about James Hillman today.
Mary Emerson – Smith