Long tradition but I would not call it proud, that’s a very slim piece of pie.
Most people are appalled by killing, that’s majority human nature to my thinking. Only a few really groove on it, and we try to keep them in prisons or armies.
Update: Only a few groove on it, but those few may be charismatic and gather followers.
Update 2: They will be extremely few in the US military. I don’t mean to slur the military here. But it does happen, and it is a historical force to be reckoned with.
Update 3: A passage from John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider comes to mind:
“They [government infiltrated by organized crime] took to leaving tribes alone when they went on the warpath, and the result was that the most ambitious kids, the ones with both rage and intelligence, wound up dead or crippled. That came naturally. Since time immemorial they’d been carefully isolating gang wars from involvement with the general public.”
