I am humbled that men from Europe and other lost places I will never find read and find value in this space.

Below an email to which I will hopefully well engage.

Brudermord

Crack Man

Thu, Jan 21, 8:37 AM (2 days ago)

Hello Mr Lafond,

There is one ancient theme, as old as human society. The affection and hate between brothers. I can recall on many accounts personally, biological brothers keeping a healthy relationship until Adulthood, some that never had a good relation to begin with and others who had a very good relationship until something petty or serious turned it around.

A common story in fiction, religion and mythology is the story of loving brothers who turn against each other, often one brother kills the other in a fight or in mindless rage, sometimes regretting the outcome afterwards.

Kain kills Abel, Romulus kills Remulus, even among some of the oldest gods, the egyptian gods, Seth kills Osiris.

Some of these stories just tell about eager competition and jealousy between brothers. Some tell of loving brothers, but their fate leads them against each other, each as a champion of their people/cause, like the biblical myth of the Egyptian Pharaoh and Moses starting as brothers of one household but ending up as enemies.

There’s also many instances where warriors bonded as a "band of brothers“ proclaiming their bonds to be as or even more sacred as the ones of blood between biological brothers.

I am curious of your opinion, what did you observe in your life about the hate-love between brothers?

Quite ironic that blacks do use the word brother inflationary, while they also kill themselves in high numbers.

In the German language there are many words describing affection with brotherly terms - "brotherly love“ and such, but there is also an old word exclusively for the murder between brothers "Brudermord“.

Read you,

Bro

As a little boy, my little brother was frightening in his anger and I used to run and hide from him. When I became bigger I would sometimes hit him or throw him in these situations. Then, at age 16, us being 11 months apart we had a stand up fight that ended in a draw when he sent me through a new wall my father had built and we became wedded to the cause of learning drywall before he got home. We swore never to fight again and have not, outside of a few boxing matches in which he suffered hand injuries pasting my eyelids into my brain and declared me too hard-headed to beat on anymore. Tony and I love each other but are separated by the world tides and are lucky to meet once a year. I miss him.

As a youth, I noted that when brothers fought each other it was always a good savage fight.

My brother and I, horrified that one of our friends would not avenge his older sister beaten by her husband, declared a pact, that if this happened to our sister, that the one of us with the least familial responsibility, would kill the offender and the other would support his children. We did this at 16. Five years ago my sister had me over for dinner to meet her fiancé and then asked me to recount how I had butchered one of my friends who was in the process of beating Tony. Her fiancé was horrified and asked, "Why am I listening to this?"

My sister said, "Just in case you ever thought of hitting me, I wanted you to know who my brother was."

We all laughed, and that man, is now my brother, a good man, a better man than I by far.

When Tony was introduced to him a year later, he turned to me and said, "Bro, have you had the talk with him?"

That was another occasion for laughter.

My brother has the men he served with in the army as a band of brothers and they meet and support each other.

I have the men I have met in the boxing and stick-fighting and writing journey for my brothers.

So we have each other by a tether and have our own circle of brothers made along the way.

In regarding wider forms of brotherhood I am reminded of a line from an old Germanic poem: "Curse struck us brother."

In this poem it seems that honorable men of the same race slew each other along tribal lines. In many ways the story of Europe and it's taking of the world as its wife over a couple hundred years is that men in that place fought each other for thousands of years—like against like—and then took those skills and conquered a world.

Then, in 1914, they came home to slaughter each other in their millions, largely as a result of tensions built up in competition over resource acquisitions in Africa. In the 2020s and 2030s Africa's inability to defend itself may again cause a great war between Chinese, Russians and Americans.

It seems that honor cultures in general suffer from an inability to fathom the duplicitous manipulators that come among them as friends and even servants and teachers, who set brother against brother. The American Civil war was such a thing. Crazy Horse and sitting Bull of the Lakota were slain by fellow tribesmen working for the enemy conqueror. Geronimo, and two boys and some 60 women were hunted by many fellow Apache warriors on behalf of the alien conquerors.

This extends to modern prize-fighting, as businessmen, promoters who are not fighters, manipulate fighters and set them against one another. I have been to fight venues where this has been overcome, and after a fight, opponents, realizing their commonality, become friends and training partners, where no such relationship develops with the promoter.

The honor culture makes a brotherhood, a state that is as subject to tragedy as the brotherhood formed by the condition of our birth and the sharing of parents.

Interestingly, the use of the inflationary term "brother" among African Americans seems to have been inherited by their ancestors from fellow slaves from England and Scotland who belonged to covenant religious sects. Having spent much time amongst these men in Baltimore, I can attest to an honor culture much stronger than among my own folk and have also witnessed that they largely slay one another in service to manipulative forces who hold towards them no good will, but only ill. It is no accident, that after The Longest Day, a WWII movie, which depicted an honorable enemy, that the tenor of war movies and news has been increasingly one that denies the decency of the enemy, that makes war, even war amongst kindred men, into a bug hunt, a video game.

Brother war is our snare, our, pit, the rocks of circumstance awaiting our shared ruin.