9 May 04

Looking Within

When I posted my piece last week about Ron the Deranged and the American military, I didn’t yet know that some of the photographs of torture in prisons in Iraq that have now been spread around the world featured women. Women doing shocking things—things that are shocking for any human to do but especially shocking because they’re women.

DocRoc at WriteOutLoud has wondered about this in an open letter to Tim O’Brian. Of the many people I’ve spoken with and written to this week, nobody has been able to come up with any kind of explanation at all. We’re all dumbstruck.

Not one normally to find myself without an opinion, I am going to dare to do something challenged by Burningbird (thanks Alembic): I’m going to express UNCERTAINTY.

Here’s the most frightening thing I think I’ve ever said.

I’m not sure-I’m not sure that, given the same circumstances, the same boredom, the same bitterness, the same mix of factors-I would categorically not have been that woman with that leash in her hand.

Which is, I’ve decided, the most compelling reason we shouldn’t go to war. People don’t want to go to war because they don’t want to get killed; others don’t want to kill. But what I think we should be most afraid of is becoming Lynndie England.

As Chris Hedges, author of War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, puts it: “the line that divides us, who would like to see ourselves as civilized and compassionate, from such communal barbarity is razor-thin.”

Posted by at 05:03 PM in Politics | Link |
  1. I firmly believe that very few people are like Gandhi or Christ or Martin Luther King… able to resist social pressure to the extent of their lives. All people carry demons inside and given the right circumstances those demons are likely to come out. That’s what happened in Germany. Germans are not inherantly an “evil” people; if you look at their literature and philosophy you will actually conclude that they are a very ethical and sensitive people. But nonetheless the Nazi’s did emerge. There were people like my German grandfather, a socialist pacifist, who joined the Germany army (not the same as the Nazi army) but refused to carry a gun. He was captured by the Americans and in the last days of his life he related to me (and I recorded it on video) the awful treatment he recieved at the hands of the American and French prison guards (the French were the worst). So much of what you hear about the “good heartedness” of the victors just simply isn’t true. It’s all propaganda. We are all capabale of awful acts.

    One thing that bothers me a lot about the west is this PC assumption that women are somehow immune to the temptations and cruelties that men are always accused of. Most women just simply do not encounter the environments that Lynndie England was immersed in and therefore probably don’t develop the “freedom” to let out their demons. I think anyone who is subjected to the awfulness of human cruelty and sadism has the potential to exercise the same demons. Women are human, not saints. If a person can feel hate, then the demons are there, man or woman. Myself included. The trick is if you can overcome the demons. Perhaps women are in general better at this than men, perhaps because society nearly always requires them to be better at it, whereas men are nearly always encouraged to carry at least a vestige of brutishness. If women were drafted into armies in the same proportion as men, I wonder what would happen then?

    — butuki    9. May 2004, 17:32    Link
  2. Pica, Thanks so much for saying this – and Butuki as well. Chris Hedges has said almost everything that needs to be said on the subject (though i may disagree a bit with his complete dismissal of comraderie). I wrote a little on the appalachian aspect of this – England’s National Guard unit is based in Cumerland, MD, not too many miles south of where I live. Few soldiers are as wholesome as Jessica Lynch – like England, a WV native. Of course this kind of behavior is widespread. soldiers are trained to kill, dehumanize, humiliate. They’re not terrible people, they’re “just doing their job.”

    — Dave    10. May 2004, 03:56    Link
  3. “One thing that bothers me a lot about the west is this PC assumption that women are somehow immune to the temptations and cruelties that men are always accused of.”

    Sorry to Trouble…

    Uh…

    How to say?.. Males and Females are relatively equal in their ABILITY and USE of causing cruelties.

    Cruelties like torture.. Women, over the eons, have become especially adept at emotional and psychological torture. Going back to the point of the original post, that is not intended to (nor does it) imply that MOST women are vicious, cunning manipulators with NO other concern other than themselves, their own self-protection, the protection of their kids and their Women “friends”.

    Nup. Nor, as I “said” at JOHO (although that post could get axed), are the people claiming to be like Ghandi anything close to actually BEING like Ghandi, no matter how civil the words they use to spout their own particular forms of hatred.





    — JamesJayTrouble    10. May 2004, 07:18    Link
  4. I’m pleased these photos, horrific though they are, have been published because they have made everyone stop and think. Yes, I believe there is an innate tendency for humans to harm one another and it doesn’t just happen in wartime. Also in the news here has been a story of two psychiatric nurses who were abusing patients in a dementia unit – scratch the surface of our respective societies, take a look at what is going on behind closed doors and this sort of behaviour is evident. I am grateful to journalists and others “inside” the institutions (detention centres, prisons, psych hospitals, homes for people with intellectual disabilities) who are prepared to expose the horrors that are occurring under our noses. By being aware of what is going on we can at least initiate change.

    — Jenny    10. May 2004, 14:19    Link
  5. I’m glad the photos have been published, too, and I want to commentdboth Pica and Butuki for their courage in admitting that none of us know how we’d really act if put in the same situations. Nevertheless, this is one reason for spending some time in one’s life developing a moral/ethical framework for oneself and knowing what it’s based on and why. Religion can be as just as hollow as political ideology if the person hasn’t taken the core truths to heart and really thought about them. I don’t know what I’d do – but I know I’d have a lot of reasons for not going over that awful edge into the abyss of cruelty and sadism.

    — beth    12. May 2004, 04:48    Link

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