The victimizer’s justification as strategy for war veteran’s identity

Abstract

This paper, which is framed in the philosophical and psychological discussion about the narrative-self, analyzes the relation between the construction of the identity and the war veteran narratives about warfare. The hypothesis that I am assuming is that some war veterans use one sort of special kind of narrative, which is called the strategy of the uchronia, in order to avoid the Experience of harm. Looking closely at these narratives, it is possible to deduce from them that the veteran is applying some cognitive tool to justify the harm they inflicted (or they suffered) during wartime, named the executioner’s justification. This cognitive tool is used to make believe them that the actions they have done during the warfare were useful for building a better actual world, and in this way, put away the reality of war from the expectations of the human world. Perceiving this kind of narrative on soldiers' testimony is relevant to democratic societies because moral wounds that veterans are carrying from warfare keep off them from living properly as a civil