An interesting read on soldiers in Iraq and abuse.

I find this an interesting read.


From the makers of A Peaceable Kingdom:


"Dear friends,

As Jenny and I work in our studio editing the new Peaceable Kingdom, it
has been powerful and instructive to follow the discussion of the recently posted internet video depicting soldiers abusing a dog in Iraq. I recently
watched this video and wanted to share some thoughts.

As I read Harold's post, I saw something of myself. Though not a farmer, like him, I was socialized as a traditional male in a rural community. I shot birds with my bb gun, and I caught and killed fish. I watched, cried, and tried to intervene as my brother and his friends caught and killed the frogs that lived in the stream behind my house. I myself caught and thoughtlessly gassed beautiful butterflies for my insect collection. I wept when my dog was struck and killed by a passing bus. An egg farm at the end of a dead end street in my town imprisoned thousands of chickens, and the only time I gave them a thought was when the shed doors were thrown open at night and the noxious odor of their confinement offended my nostrils. I was laughed at for being poor, and laughed at those who were poorer than me. And throughout my childhood years, what was the favorite game of me and my friends? It was a game called "war." We would practice developing our strategies, hiding and stalking, and spent endless afternoons making wooden guns. We threw stones or socks filled with sand at each other as make believe hand grenades. We bound the hands of our "prisoners" with baling twine and marched them around at the points of our toy rifles, all of it done with childish enthusiasm, and absolutely no understanding of what this game was all about.

Are all these things connected? I think they are.

This video from Iraq depicts a kind of violence common to traditional male
culture in the US. Probably one person instigated it, and others followed
along, either afraid to be seen as sensitive or weak, or similarly caught up in the ritualized domination through which men are taught to work out their pain, fear and insecurity. I can say for sure that I, and most men who grew
up in rural environments, have either witnessed or participated in similar
situations involving vulnerable humans or nonhumans. And I suspect those
from suburban and urban backgrounds have their own tales to tell.

I remember, for example, watching as a boyhood friend took a fish he had
caught and burned him alive with a road flare. My friend was angry he said,
because the fish was the wrong kind, not good for eating. I was maybe
12, and did nothing to stop him, though I well knew what was happening was
wrong and was repelled by it. I also remember watching members of a high
school athletic team repeatedly catch and throw a terrified mouse against a
wall, laughing uproariously as she squeaked and ran for her life. Once again,
I did nothing to intervene. Why? I was afraid, and rightly so. Were I to
be perceived as emotionally vulnerable, I could easily become the focus of
that same destructive energy. How did I know this? Because I had seen it
happen many times to others. What is not obvious from the outside is that most situations of this nature offer three roles: victim, victimizer, and
bystander. It takes extraordinary courage, and self-possession, to make
another choice, to successfully intervene.

Having met many people in my life, I must admit that I have encountered
a handful that seemed utterly consumed by violent, dishonest, or
exploitative tendencies. One of them was a serial rapist at the county jail where where I worked as a counselor. Others have been "successful" people involved in corporate life, and a few have even been people celebrated for their charitable endeavors. My encounters with such individuals have been
chilling, and sobering. One academic researcher on this subject at
Harvard, for example, determined that up to one in twenty-five Americans has
sociopathic tendencies, operating day to day without the emotional/ethical
connection to others that we call "conscience." Such individuals regularly and without any sense of inner conflict commit acts that nearly everyone
would consider destructive and socially deviant, often in clever ways
that conceal their true intent. The presence of such individuals in all walks
of life raises troubling questions for psychologists, educators,
philosophers theologians, and really, anyone who has been unlucky enough to be the focus of their attention.

Perhaps one or more of the young men in the video were true sociopaths.
But they just as easily might not have been. A few years after college, I had close friendships with two men who had been to war on behalf of this country. One had fought in World War II, at one point helping liberate a concentration camp. The other fought in the jungles of Vietnam. These men were two of the kindest, most ethical people I have known. Both had experienced the savage horror of combat. Both had come face to face with "the enemy," and both had taken human life. And both, decades
after the fact, were daily haunted by what they had seen and done. I
remember one telling me about having to crawl down a street strewn with
severed human heads while being shot at by a sniper in a tower, and
another, of ripping the company insignia off his shoulder and pinning it with a
sharp stick to the body of a man he had killed, the man who was had been
trying to kill him.

Both have struggled their whole adult lives to find peace through public
service, anti-war activism, and therapy. Through them, I got to know several
other combat veterans, and as different as their stories were, the nature of
the burden they carried was strikingly similar. They had been called by
their country to serve in a time of crisis. They had been conditioned to
take orders. They had been trained to kill. They had been sent to a foreign
land and submerged in a level of mayhem, misery and torture that
completely overwhelmed any moral or ethical training they may have received during their upbringing. They witnessed and participated in the most desperate, horrific, and chaotic dimensions of the human experience--mass violence. Then they came home to a society that did not want to hear about or accept what they had seen and done, and what had been done to them. They were left alone to try and make sense of their experience.

So what have they taught me? First, that even the best of people, if put
in the worst of circumstances, might find themselves tormenting, maiming,
and killing others. And that when faced with the mayhem of war, something
inside of human beings breaks apart. We tend to become fearful, enraged,
disconnected, and disoriented, literally losing ourselves in a form of collective madness.

Are each of us 100% responsible for every act we commit? I personally
believe we are. But is it realistic to expect 18 to 20 year old youths
immersed in the insanity of war to maintain ethical clarity and psychological health? Can even fully mature adults remain completely sane in such an environment? If historical accounts are to be believed, the answer is no.

Responsibility for the taking of an animal's life at a slaughterhouse
weighs not just on the person wielding the knife, but also on the manager of
the slaughterhouse, the president of the meat corporation, the stockholders,
the ad agencies, the land grant universities, the people who buy and eat the
meat, and ultimately, every single one of us who pays the taxes that subsidize the meat industry, buys food at the grocery stores that sell meat,
and takes part in myriad other ways in the system that supports the
exploitation of others. So, I believe, it goes with war. Those who do
the killing and dying are at the end of a long chain of cause and effect. If
you follow the connections back far enough, every one of us has done, or not
done, something that has contributed to the situation playing out day
after day in Iraq. And just the same, every one of us is being damaged and
diminished by the violence of the war, violence done in the name of the
society to which we belong.

So my heart aches for that poor defenseless dog, wounded, cruelly
tormented and mocked in his misery. And my heart aches just the same for those young soldiers, who, like my veteran friends, have been placed by our society in an impossible situation that will likely cast a shadow over them, and
their families, for life. And it aches for the people and especially the
children of Iraq, whose formative experiences will have been an endless sequence of heinous misfortunes. And it aches for all of us not directly caught up in the day to day insanity of this and every war, those who look on with horror, but haven't yet found the wisdom or the strength to make it
stop.

Jenny and I started Tribe of Heart because we wanted to explore the path
of nonviolence, because we wanted to see if we could shift the balance of
our lives toward doing less harm and offering greater service to others. We
are now coming close to ten years into this path.

During this period of my life, many of the people who have taught me the
most, and who, in my eyes, give most freely to the betterment of the
world, at some earlier point of their lives brought suffering, and even death,
into the lives of others on a scale beyond that which I have personally known. In coming to understand a little about their lives, I cannot say that I
have found any evidence that I myself would not have done as they did had I grown up the same way and found myself in the same circumstances.

*cont*

Anger is a natural response to injustice, but it is in learning to
transform our feelings of anger and helplessness into deeper understanding,
greater patience, and creative, nonviolent action that we gain the possibility
of turning things around. To do so we need to help each other every day,
because the state of the world, and the momentum of our own mental
habits, is overwhelming. Choosing to refrain from judging those caught up in
violence is not incompatible with taking strong action to intervene on
behalf of those being harmed and/or preventing future violence. In fact,
many would say that transforming the cycle of violence actually requires
this of us. Otherwise, our intervention is likely to be ineffective, or
lamentably, even make things worse.

For those who have been deeply affected by this tragic incident involving
the young soldiers and the dog, I encourage you, if you are not already
doing so, to learn about and join in supporting peace and anti-war
organizations devoted to ending present wars as well as preventing
future wars. I also recommend the viewing of two powerful films, The Deer
Hunter, and The Ground Truth, one a fiction film about the Vietnam war, and one a documentary about our soldiers in Iraq. Together, they show the process through which young people lose, and then struggle to regain their
wholeness and humanity in the aftermath of war.

With gratitude and respect,

James

Recommended viewing:

The Ground Truth, directed by Patricia Foulkrod 2006 Documentary (Note:
preview gives excellent sense of the movie)

http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?moviei...9530&strkid
=1135100840_0_0

The Deer Hunter, directed by Michael Chimino 1978 Dramatic film (Note: dated
preview doesn't do the movie justice)

http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?moviei...837>6993_0_0

/end quote

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Feb 10 2007, 04:28 PM) [snapback]388198[/snapback]</div>

Thank you Daniel. I know it is a long essay but like you stated, it is well worth the time spent reading it.

This reminds me of how we cripple people in so many ways throughout our society, cripple them with poor stories (worldviews):

"Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent. - "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence" By Rev. Martin Luther King April 4th 1967

Have we learned nothing?

 

The post doesn't really focus on descriptions of the abuse in question. It is based on our society norms push us to act in such ways. It is not bashing the soldiers because they are soldiers, it is an internal analysis of what we are all capable of given the wrong upbringing.