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 A Culture of AtrocityPosted on Jun 18, 2007
By Chris Hedges 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. The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war—the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis—is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue. The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation. Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee. Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December. Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country. Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire. Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces. “It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack. 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. Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence. It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not. Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless. The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them. War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war. We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.
Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits—there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.
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By Sean O'Keefe, June 18, 2007 at 5:28 pm # I have not read such trash in a long time!! Having been over there and going back again, the Iraqis only hate toward us is the fact that we did it half assed and did not put enough troops into beign with!! The things that you descibe are not typical, they happen, yes, but are rare and most of the civilian deaths are caused by the insurgents and Al Queda, well over a simple majority!! I have never seen such terrible un-truths!!
By MARIAM RUSSELL, June 18, 2007 at 4:53 pm # Tom Doff, please tell me you are not comparing a bunch of desparate people coming North looking for work so they and their families can survive in the dog´s world we have built with our own hands, with a trained to kill, overwhelmingly armed, army, and airforce whose aim is to deal death and destruction.
By joshua welch, June 18, 2007 at 3:19 pm # This “Culture of Atrocity” has nothing to do w/ religion. I know that’s what you learned in your divinity program. If these people lived their lives based on evidence they would of course still be blowing each other to smithereens.
By Anonymous Coward, June 18, 2007 at 3:01 pm # One less little boy to grow up and stone a young girl to death.
By MARIAM RUSSELL, June 18, 2007 at 2:44 pm # Thanks for the Schell, Max. Have read the others. Now, for anyone who thinks we have recently developed this penchant for the slaughter of civilians, and believe the myth of the moral US spreading good, you will be sad to learn we did not shrink from doing it to our own, so if marshall law is ever declared, find a hidey hole....... The state funding and control of higher education that have produced the totalitarian regime of political correctness has all but guaranteed that there will be few (if any) publications that illuminate, rather than obfuscate, some of the more devious deeds of the American state throughout its history. But historian Walter Brian Cisco, who is not an academic and is not on any state payroll, has recently written a book – War Crimes Against Southern Civilians – that blows the lid off the conspiracy of silence about the violent, mass-murdering origins of the American Leviathan state (or “The New Birth of Freedom,” as both left-wing and right-wing statists put it). In the name of “restoring the union” the U.S. Army, under the micromanagement of Abraham Lincoln, waged war on its own people, shelling and burning entire cities populated only by civilians and engaging in acts of plunder, forced evacuation, and mass murder. It is all documented in gory detail by Mr. Cisco, who quotes conservative icon Richard M. Weaver in his introductory chapter as having remarked that “from the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan there lies but an easy step to total war of the Nazis, the greatest affront to Western civilization since its founding.” Lincoln cultists are fond of dismissing all of this by reciting Sherman’s “war is hell” slogan. But as Cisco points out, murders, rapes, and robberies are also inevitable in human society, and are likely to happen much more often if we cease to regard them as reprehensible. Those who idolize General Sherman in this way are not “hearing the totalitarian echo in their words.” Lincoln was always aware of what was going on; waging war on civilians – his own citizens – was his own policy from the very beginning, as Cisco proves. In May of 1861, for example, Captain Nathaniel Lyon recruited some seven thousand new German immigrants (mostly without uniforms) to eliminate suspected secessionists in St. Louis. They rounded up some six hundred men and paraded them through the streets playing the Star Spangled Banner (which must have been completely foreign to the mostly non-English speaking Germans). When the citizens of St. Louis protested, the recruits fired on them, killing twenty-eight civilians and wounding seventy-five. Lyon was promoted to brigadier general a week later, while some ten thousand civilians fled St. Louis. By 1863 Missouri, under U.S. Army occupation, was a place were “arson, theft, and murder became so common that vast sections of the state were uninhabited.” Cisco quotes Union General James H. Lane as saying, “We believe in a war of extermination. I want to see every foot of ground in Jackson, Cass and Bates counties burned over – everything laid waste.” Another practice of the Union Army that is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century was forced relocation of suspected dissenters. Cisco gives chapter and verse of how this occurred in Missouri, Tennessee, and elsewhere, as thousands of civilians were forced to leave their homes. This even included Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham. Plunder and pillage was also the Official Policy of the Lincoln regime from the start of the war, as Cisco shows. Before being defeated in the Battle of Fredericksburg the Union Army occupied the town for a short while. Cisco quotes a Union Army officer as saying that “the men had emptied every house and store of its contents, and the streets, as a matter of course, were filled with chairs and sofas, pianos, books, and everything imaginable. . . .”
By Tom Doff, June 18, 2007 at 2:21 pm # Bullsh*t, Hedges, your theory is full of cr*p. Look at all the millions of young men and women Mexicans invading the US, you don’t see a lot of stories of them killing and raping US kids. Or is the US MSM just hiding that truth from us too?
By namvet67, June 18, 2007 at 2:18 pm # I know first hand of the environment that creates these “atrocity-producing situations.” I come from a culture of atrocity. Da Nang and most of 1 Corps was a free-fire most of the time during the Vietnam War. I was 17 when I joined the Marines. I was a true believer. My government as well as my religion sanctioned it, so all I had to do was fight. Kind of what I always had wanted to do. I had outgrown playing war and thought I was ready for the real thing. But, by a month after my 19th birthday I didn’t know what I believed in. I just knew that I didn’t want to be a Marine anymore. As badly as I had wanted in the Marines I now wanted out with even more desire. I was in a military hospital recovering from gunshot wounds to my back, but I was more confused mentally than I was wounded physically. My body would take care of the damage the bullets caused but the damage to my mind was ignored. I had just spent almost a year in a place where the war was there when you woke up in the morning and it was there when you fell asleep that night. To survive in that environment you have to discard anything that makes you vulnerable. Eventually this will include your god, your country and maybe even your family. Things like justice and emotions have no place. At first you could justify atrocities that happened in a strictly military situation involving only military members. But seeing civilians, especially children and women involved in atrocities wasn’t part of my definition of war. All my war games growing up only involved heroic military men. My twelve years Catholic schooling hadn’t prepared me to deal with seeing children and babies as part of the game. Soon your baggage consists only of you. Everything you brought to the war you have given up. The goal now is just to survive and you tell yourself that you will do anything to survive. When you miraculously make it home you’re immediately shocked to discover that most Americans don’t even care about what you were doing or what you went through. So don’t blame, or only cry for the grunt or the insurgent or the collateral damage. But also try and learn from the survivors.
By Chaseme, June 18, 2007 at 12:59 pm # Remember this one? http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1586/looting_in_iraq/
By moni, June 18, 2007 at 12:30 pm # Chris Hedges . . . what a succinct summation and how can it get more excrutiatingly obvious. War is NOT the Answer.
By Greetings, June 18, 2007 at 12:24 pm # Why can this President use our dearest national treasure, young lives, and destroy all the good our great county has done to fulfill some warped neo-con view? I do what I can do to change this wrong as many of us do but still the war and the arrogant neo-cons and dysfunctional religious attitudes persist. No one will win this war. We all are losers. I along with the majority of the American people will continue to do what I can to stop this war.
By MARIAM RUSSELL, June 18, 2007 at 12:09 pm # And Then we make excuses..... It was a ¨MISTAKE¨ I, PERSONALLY, DO NOT BUY IT. I THINK BEING TURNED LOOSE TO KILL AT WILL IS THE ULTIMATE HIGH FOR SOME OF THESE GUYS.
By MARIAM RUSSELL, June 18, 2007 at 11:49 am # This needs saying, over and over and over. If we create the situation, yes, we can allow our own children to be turned into murdering monsters. Do high school teachers even have the latitude to use a book like WAR IS A FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING?
By Matt, June 18, 2007 at 11:49 am # Lefty: “That’ll teach ‘um not to try to steal Dick Cheney’s oil!” No, Lefty. For the fanatically pro-Israel neoconservatives (including gentiles like Cheney and Woolsey) who planned this war and lied us into it, this is all about Israel and about hating Arabs and Muslims. The racist book “The Arab Mind”, by Zionist supremacist Raphael Patai, was their bible on how to “deal with” these inferiors. The murderous Zionist hatred of Arabs and Muslims is written all over the whole enterprise. Your lovely “progressive” Israel-firsters are the prime culprits.
By carlito paquito, June 18, 2007 at 9:42 am # BRAVO BRETT KAN !!! Could not agree with you more. Who here among us, children or not, cannot reason enough to realize the above photo says more than just collateral damage. Veteran for Truth MARSHALL, to answer your query last week on evidence of offshoring, outsourcing, etc., Answer: Blackwater, everything MADE IN CHINA, and every tech who answers my calls on tech issues with everything I own in my home. Thanks for the challenge though at least we’re communicating.
By Fed-Up, June 18, 2007 at 9:35 am # This is the kind of photo I should carry around with me, and whip out every time I hear some asshole defend the war and the “surge” and try to justify it using the simplistic talking points handed down from on high from “Dick” and “Shrub”. Take a good look-this is what the rest of the world is seeing, but our media hides these images from us. We are more concerned about whether Paris Hilton got a body cavity search when she was put in the slammer. Makes us look like a bunch of morally banckrupt cowards.
By James Yell, June 18, 2007 at 7:21 am # I have mentioned this situation before. We find ourselves in a country that did nothing to us, killing people who are in their own country, their own houses and frequently minding their own business. They and or their children, wifes, parents neighbors are supposed to be faceless collateral damage, but if this device works at all it is only when we are actually in a defensive situation in our own country, not when we have acted like a bully, have left only the motive of Oil as a reason for these innocent deaths. People need to keep pointing out, “how would all these right wing and knee jerk patriots feel if the foriegn army was in our country and our people were considered necessary collateral damage and not what the actually are people killed needlessly?
By brettkan, June 18, 2007 at 6:32 am # “killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—(to) murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you” Based on this definition, the whole war can be seen as murder. Add Your Comment |
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