A video has emerged of the battle of Fallujah, initiated just after the US elections in 2004, showing the destruction that was wreaked there. This documentary, which lasts about 30 minutes, is in English and was produced by a major Italian broadcasting network called RAI. It interviews former US soldiers who had been involved in the battle, journalists, people in and from Fallujah, and a British parliamentarian who quit in disgust at the British government’s complicity in the Iraq war.
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In July 1983, during the week of mob rule in Sri Lanka triggered by the killing of 13 government soldiers by Tamil separatist guerillas, a large number of Tamil prisoners in one of the government jails were brutally murdered by their fellow inmates in ways that are too gruesome and harrowing to describe here. Since the Tamil prisoners were suspected of being separatist rebels, they had been held in a separate section of the prison from the Sinhala prisoners who had murdered them, so the question naturally arose as to how these this atrocity could have been committed.

The ‘official’ story put out by the government was that the Sinhala prisoners had overcome their guards, taken their keys, released themselves, obtained various weapons, gained access to the Tamil prisoners, murdered them, and then returned to their own cells voluntarily.

This story was so preposterous that no thinking person would give it any credence. It was obvious that there had to be collusion between the prison authorities and the Sinhala prisoners to kill the Tamil prisoners as an act of revenge for the killing of the Sinhala soldiers by Tamil separatist guerillas.
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In April 1971, there was an attempt to violently overthrow the elected government of Sri Lanka. The attempt was planned in secret by disaffected group of young people called the JVP who organized a militia and launched a surprise attack. The government was initially taken off balance but recovered and managed to crush the uprising using considerable force and brutality. This resulted in the rebel movement going underground, and for the next two decades the JVP carried out further surprise isolated attacks that resulted in the deaths of large numbers of people, including many prominent politicians.

The government responded to this steady stream of violence by giving its security forces considerable freedom to deal with suspected rebels. A college friend of mine told me of his experience when he went to a remote area to visit a high school friend of his who had enrolled in the police force after he left high school. While chatting with his friend in the police station, a person was brought in who was suspected of being with the insurgency. To my friend’s horror, his former classmate casually broke off their friendly conversation and started assaulting the prisoner, both to try and get information from him and to deter him from any future action that he might be contemplating. The question of establishing guilt in a court of law did not come up. After the assault was over, my friend’s classmate came back and resumed the conversation, almost as if nothing had happened. My friend was shocked at the abrupt switches in behavior.

I mention this story to illustrate a point that I think many of us miss, that wars degrade all of us. At some level of our consciousness we know that in the process of creating an army, we are essentially training people to become cold-blooded killers who can and will unquestioningly shoot and bomb people who may be just like them, but just happen to be citizens of another country or fighting on the other side. The only way that you can get people to overcome their natural abhorrence at taking some one else’s life is to both dehumanize them and to get them to view the enemy as less than human. The first half of Stanley Kubrick’s film Full Metal Jacket, which deals entirely with the training that new Marine recruits get, shows how the military carries out this process of taking ordinary young people and making them into people who can be ordered to kill another human being. I am told that the recently released Jarhead tells a similar story.

But this process of dehumanization does not stop with just the soldiers or just with the battlefield. Once people are taught to tolerate this way of thinking, it inevitably spreads. It is almost impossible to contain the ruthless mentality that is desired for the battlefield to just that venue. The abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib (warning: disturbing images) and Guantanamo and Afghanistan are the inevitable consequence of creating this mindset.

There are reports that some soldiers abused prisoners as ‘sport.’ Other reports say that soldiers used photographs they took of dead and abused and mutilated Iraqis in exchange for free membership in porn sites.

The killing and torture of people in war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan are just the latest examples of something that happens with all occupying soldiers in all wars at all times.

Ordinary people are, of course, shocked by these revelations, as they should be. It is never pleasant to think that people just like us can be guilty of such unspeakable acts. My friend had that same reaction when he witnessed his classmate’s treatment of the prisoner. How could someone who had the same background as him, who just a few minutes before had been chatting about mutual friends, suddenly become transformed and treat another human being so badly, and be so seemingly oblivious to the fact that he had just violated all norms of justice or even just plain civilized behavior?

We try to deal with this disconnect by viewing such acts as aberrations, to blame it on a few ‘bad apples,’ and console ourselves that most people do not behave this way. And in a purely numerical sense, we are probably right. The actual number of people who actually carry out acts of such brutality as have been revealed so far may not be large. If it were, we would have the equivalent of mass murder.

But we must not forget that such acts can only occur because the ethos in which these people act tolerates, if not condones or even encourages, such behavior. When you train people to kill without thinking, put them in a hostile environment where they feel under threat, give them powerful weaponry, give them unquestioned power over those under their control, and breed in them a sense that they have immunity for their actions, then it is only a matter of time before some do the kinds of things we find abhorrent. I am not sure that any of us would act much differently if we had undergone the same training and been placed under the same circumstances, so we should not be quick to judge the soldiers who do these things as somehow innately evil people, different from us. What we have to do is prevent the circumstances that encourage the baser elements of our natures to surface and allow such acts to be even contemplated. (In response to yesterday’s posting, commenter Joshua links to several experiments that study what regular people can be induced to do to other people under particular conditions. Two of the more famous cases, the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment are particularly disturbing.)

This brutalizing effect of war does not end even when the war ends. The mentality bred by such training cannot be simply turned on and off like a switch. Upon their return, it infects soldiers’ personal relationships as well.

By most measurements, there is a higher incidence of domestic violence in the military than in the civilian world. The most recent figures, from surveys conducted by the Department of Defense, suggest that domestic violence occurs twice as frequently in the military as among civilians. But activists and social workers believe that the rate is much higher. “Those numbers are soft,” says Hansen. “Essentially, that figure comes from a reanalysis of a reanalysis of a comparative analysis from a study which goes back to the early ’90s.”
Hansen believes the true figure is closer to five times that of the general population. Those who dispute her estimate say that the statistics should be adjusted to account for the disproportionate percentage of soldiers whose demographic profile — mostly young men, often with relatively low educational attainment, from unstable, low-income families – pegs them as most likely to have a problem with domestic violence in the civilian population (or at least most likely to be reported for it). They argue that domestic violence is no more prevalent in the military than it is in a civilian population of comparable demographics.

Many soldiers will resist the temptation to personally indulge in such kinds of abuse but that effort often exhausts their own energies and they have little stomach left to actively oppose the few who take advantage of their power to abuse others. But we, collectively, also bear responsibility for creating the kinds of conditions that enable these things to occur.

It may be possible that if there are strong countervailing pressures from the top that enforce tight discipline and control and accountability, that some of the worst excesses can be avoided, But what the events at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan show is that the top echelons of the administration, rather than maintaining such strict policies, deliberately cultivated a sense of ambivalence as to whether the Geneva conventions even applied to the prisoners or whether torture was permissible. Seeming to condone torture under these conditions was like lighting a fuse. The only question that remained was when the explosion would occur not if. And the government’s desperate battle to keep further information of abuse from being released is an indication that their casual attitude towards the treatment of prisoners has resulted in much more widespread abuse than has been suspected, making it harder for them to sustain the self-excusing ‘few bad apples’ attitude.

Currently the President and Vice President are lobbying furiously to block the full adoption of anti-torture legislation contemplated by Congress, further sending the message that they are not unequivocally opposed to prisoner abuse. Larry Johnson, formerly of the CIA and the Department of State’s Office of Counter Terrorism argues why this is a really bad idea.

In the next posting, we will look at the brutalizing effects of war on the general public.

POST SCRIPT: Blair rebuffed on terror suspect detentions

British Prime Minister Tony Blair suffered a defeat in his attempt to pass legislation to hold terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. Parliament gave him an upper limit of 28 days. Meanwhile, in the US, the administration can simply, without judicial oversight, designate anyone (even you or me) as an ‘enemy combatant’ and that person can be held indefinitely at an unknown location and with no access to anyone to ensure that they are treated humanely.

In the recently released film Good Night, and Good Luck there is one scene where a pair of worried news reporters are discussing the fact that they have been asked to sign a loyalty oath. This was something that was instituted during the anti-Communist witch hunts of the 1950s led by Senator Joe McCarthy. The reporters said that if they did not sign, they would lose their jobs. Even Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly, two people who challenged McCarthy, had signed the pledges.

That scene brought back bitter memories of the time that I had to sign a loyalty oath or lose my job. It was one of the things in my life that I most regret having had to do.

The year was 1983. Sri Lanka had had a long history of ethnic tension between the majority Sinhala community and the minority Tamil community to which I belonged. In July of that year, a small group of Tamil guerillas, determined to seek a separate state, attacked a military convoy and killed thirteen troops. In the days that followed, Sinhala mobs went on a rampage, killing Tamil people and setting fire to their homes. The government and the security forces stood by for days, either doing nothing or providing tacit support to the mobs, leading to speculation that the government itself had organized and initiated the mob rampages as part of a political strategy, to serve as a warning to the Tamil separatist movement that their actions would have negative consequences for other Tamils. It seemed as if the government was essentially trying to blackmail the guerillas into ceasing military action, using the Tamil population as hostages.

My wife and I and our three month old daughter, and my mother and sisters and their families, had to go into hiding for about some days in the homes of courageous Sinhala friends of ours, who knew full well that they risked having the mobs attack them too if they were discovered to be harboring Tamils. We returned to our homes after nearly a week of chaos, when the government finally gave the order for the police and army to take back control of the streets from the mobs. Fortunately, our homes had escaped the mobs’ attention, making us luckier than most.

I was furious that the government had not carried out its most basic duty, which was to protect the lives of its citizens. But that was not the end of it. To make matters worse, the government then declared that the way to counter the Tamil separatist movement was for everyone to sign an oath that they would not advocate the creation of a separate state.

This is typical of the way that governments everywhere tend to handle unrest and dissent. Instead of looking at the causes of the unrest, they declare that it is the very act of dissent that is causing the problem. This is much easier to do than to examine and rectify the root causes. This is why governments constantly seek to stifle speech and intimidate opponents and why advocates of civil liberties have to be constantly on guard against curbs on speech. This kind of government strategy rarely works but that does not stop them from trying. The Sri Lankan government’s action in 1983, far from stopping the separatist movement, seemed to only serve to increase its vigor with the result that the strength of the guerilla group increased over two decades until it effectively fought the government army to a draw. There is currently a tenuous ceasefire, with the separatists controlling a significant part of the territory that they consider to be their own homeland.

But back in 1983 I was furious that I was being asked to sign this pledge, essentially a loyalty oath to a unitary state. My opposition was not because I had any separatist sympathies. I had opposed a separate state then and still prefer to avoid it now if at all possible. But the very fact that I was being forced to swear what was effectively an oath of allegiance to government policies made me angry. If anything, being coerced into signing made me more sympathetic to the separatist movement, not less.

But I had no choice. All universities in Sri Lanka are run by the government. If I did not sign, I would be fired and would not be able to get other jobs. We were not independently wealthy people. We had only our jobs to support us, and a newborn baby to take care of. So I signed. I have never forgotten that feeling of anger and resentment when I signed that worthless document.

Some might argue (and do) that if you agree with the substance of an oath, then what is the harm in signing? In this view, only those who object to the ideas being sworn to have reason to protest. Hence they view such oaths are a way of flushing out dissenters or forcing them to shut up, and this type of thinking was common during the McCarthy era as well. But this is wrong. The principle that is being upheld by those who object to such oaths is that they change things in an important way. The presumption then becomes that if you don’t sign, you have something to hide.

The fifth amendment to the US constitution says that no one “shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” I think it is an excellent sentiment but I would like to generalize and expand it even more to everyday life with a “none of your business” or a “right to be left alone” attitude which says that no private citizen should be forced by anyone else to express an opinion on any issue.

My view is that private people have the right to believe whatever they like and have the right to not voice their views on any topic, without any inferences being drawn from their silence. To require such people to say oaths is something that has to be reserved for very special situations, like in court trial, where lying can have serious consequences for the rights of others. There also may be situations like joining a society or club, where one is required to make some kind of symbolic affirmation of the goals of the organization. But these are different from government inspired loyalty oaths.

I oppose all symbolic acts of loyalty when they are coerced, either explicitly or implicitly, like standing for the national anthem, saluting the flag, saying the pledge of allegiance, and so forth. These things should be done only by those who genuinely want to, and no aspersions should be cast on those who decide not to. Forced acts of loyalty are as worthless and demeaning to all concerned as forced acts of religious piety.