All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms "atrocity-producing situations." In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing - the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm - to murder - the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.
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War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it "the lust of the eye" and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects - objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
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It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers.
From A Culture of Atrocity by Chris Hedges
So we have ridiculous rationalizations for the killing of children. We have disappearing freedoms justified by war. We have war heroes being treated like crap.
2 comments:
Speaking from the experience of one who has been there, Chris Hedges, (whom I respect greatly) only has it partially right.
The conflicts in which I have been a direct participant were relatively short, violent and "managed". Leadership was superior and was never given that "long draw" during which it deteriorates.
However, one war, despite the fact it only lasted for 74 days, put us into almost constant exposure to combat. Within hours of that first engagement the glory has long disappeared. The length of exposure was worrisome to commanders. Anything over 30 cumulative days can turn a combatant into a bag of jelly. Or, it could kick him/her right over the edge.
We were lucky. The rules of armed conflict were actually in place on both sides. That made things somewhat more precise, however, when one unit took casualties after responding to a white flag from the enemy, no white flag was ever accepted as a sign of capitulation again. Unless the enemy stood, unarmed and sent a messenger into the fire zone, we overran them and didn't stop until we commanded the objective. That meant kids who should have been taken prisoner became casualties.
The situation in an insurgency is somewhat different. Soldiers and marines find themselves unwilling to take the same risks they would in face-to-face combat. The result is to lay fire into a general area. They view the civilians in that same direction as aiding and abetting the enemy so if they suffer casualties no one cares.
The US is facing another problem. Over-exposure in the field. So are Canadian troops.
When a unit is hit with a roadside bomb and takes casualties, they need to be removed from action and decompressed properly. Failure to do so will create the situation Chris Hedges describes. Of course, if there are not enough people to take the place of those suffering from combat shock, the troops go back to the same threat and same role as the previous day. It's bad management and poor leadership.
There should be no heroic notion left in war. Only those who have never actually experienced it would be able to suggest it. (Read the entire Bush administration and our own Stephen Harper).
Interestingly, when I went to Gulf War 1, I was a combat veteran. My skepticism ran very high, but my instincts were to survive and kill with judicious caution.
The real problem lays with the politicians and pundits who have allowed both Iraq and Afghanistan to go on for so long. For the second time in 35 years they have failed to recognize that war is a downward spiral with diminishing returns. If constant progress is not being made, it rapidly deteriorates to a stalemate and the troops will do what they have to do to get out of it alive.
War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects-objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.
I would disagree with that in a general sense. That is, in fact, the penis swinging behaviour of the Mark Steyns and Jonah Goldbergs of this world. The average soldier doesn't often get there, My Lai notwithstanding.
What is more correct is that such behaviour is couched in a survival instinct. Something along the line of, "I'm not getting killed through the observation of polite rules. If I can break those rules, survive and not get caught, I'll do it."
That doesn't mean that soldiers don't engage in wholesale slaughter, rape and outright murder, sometimes as whole units, from the psychology described by Chris, but it is not the normal pattern, nor is it a typical motivation.
The length of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have gotten the troops to the condition they are now in. Not the actual combat. They have been over-exposed. I would reckon that US troops in particular, owing to the number of rotations they are enduring, are now suffering from combat stress at levels never seen before.
Wait until that manifests itself 10 years from now.
Good post and a valuable piece of information.
Hey Dave, thanks for coming by and offering another, more nuanced perspective. I think simply the fact that war requires an "enemy" is itself a huge problem (although I understand it is necessary to get the "job" done). The stanford prison experiment shows how regular good people, as soldiers generally are, can start to become violent or domineering, in the absence of counteracting forces. In the stanford prison experiment they found that simply leaving the "guards" unsupervised overnight caused the worst abuses, but having some outside presence prevented them. I think abu ghraib is a good example of this principle in action. However, when proper preventative measures are taken, such as many that you mentioned, it protects soldiers from taking on these characteristics. I have no experience in the military, so my assessment of all of this is like armchair statesmanship, but for what its worth, I think it's horrible not only what these wars are doing to the Iraqi and Afghan populations, but also what they are doing to our soldiers.
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