We are taught by Holy Scripture to love one another, and significantly, to love our enemies, as well as to forgive one another. Yet, for whatever reason, when it comes to those times of war, we don’t find that this sort of Biblical sentiment of love and of forgiveness, is held in high favor by governments, whatsoever. Rather, what we so see when war is in the air, is a relentless drumbeat thus drummed into our minds, that seems to stipulate that our country is specifically blessed by God, and that this other country is for a certainty, God forsaken, and thus populated by peoples that can only be considered to be subhuman and are essentially, then, dehumanized.
While it is true that war can indeed bring out the best in some people – it has to be said that war, to a very large extent, brings out some of the worse behavior, as well. What is especially disturbing is that governments make it their point, to see that their compliant citizens, are recognized as being especially patriotic the more that they buy into their enemy as being undeserving of respect, civility, or consideration of any kind – for the enemy are meant to be debased so as to thereby be seen as simply subhuman, and those then that are thus fully deserving of their rather dire fate. So then, that which is typically frown upon, from any conventional society, of unrelenting hatred of the other, is in times of war, seen as the epitome of what it means to be a good citizen of their own country, by thus displaying that hatred through the necessary violent means that destroys and thus kills that which has no right to life.
The reason that dehumanizing the other is so vital for nations that have decided to war against one another, is that in the natural order of things, premediated murder, is not too infrequently considered to be a societal capital crime. Yet, what would normally be seen as premediated murder is not typically considered to be a crime when so executed as part of warfare; in fact, those that are especially adept at killing the enemy, are eligible to received state sanctioned awards and medals. Indeed, in times of warfare, the perceived need to defeat the enemy is everything; so that, even those acts of rape, torture, civilian abuse of all kinds and degrees, as well as pillaging, when enacted, are typically, never subject to military reprimand or punishment of any kind.
So, when warring against another nation, of which that nation has been successfully dehumanized, means then that for the most part, the general population doesn’t have any real issues with what has to be done in order to defeat that enemy. Again, when the belief is that one country is made up of humans and therefore deserving of all the unalienable rights that goes with that humanity – but the other side, somehow, has been debased to being perceived as subhuman, we do so find, that a significant portion of the civilian population that believe in that construct, are going to be just fine with it. In other words, patriotic hate is deliberately structured for the expressed purpose for the people, to circumvent their highest calling in life, which is to love one another, and this thus allows those same people to override their moral obligation to do right by one another, by believing that in warfare this moral law is somehow not applicable.