"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely"
- --Sir Francis Bacon
Some liberal thinks make the claim that all war is cruel. The mere killing of another human being is by its nature cruel. Such beliefs are tied closely with notions such as animal rights, social welfare, and anti death penalty positions. Such thought is certainly in line with Hogarth's message. Yet is it true?
Killing certainly can be cruel. At the same time, death is not in and of itself cruel. Visited on the suffering it is release. This is not an endorsement of euthanasia, just a statement of fact. The Hippocratic oath, itself alludes to this when it directs doctors to relieve pain and do no harm - not cure illness or prevent death. Death is not preventable in any of our cases.
Killing is a difficult thing to face. Being a killer is certainly not something people want to think about very much. Yet that is what soldiers are asked to do. Their training is wholly directed towards preparing the warrior to cross the threshold into the place of fear. Once over the threshold, men die.
Standing in a line of men, firing a musket at another group of men 100 yards away, is a military success. The former civilian is now a soldier. He is a veteran of one battle. His ability to recross the boundary into battle will be easier (but not easy) the next time he is called. Is he by this act cruel? Well consider the following...
- 1. Cruelty is defined as a person in power harming a person who is powerless (or less powerful).
2. Soldiers firing on lines of soldiers firing back are not in a superior position.
3. Therefore, soldiers fighting soldiers is not by its nature cruel.
Once the fighting is over, and men see what destruction they have wrought, they might well question the about logic. During the Somme, frustrated German soldiers fire again and again into the bodies of men they know are already dead. Wounded are shot as they try to flee from the field. 20,000 men are killed in 30 minutes as they march across an open field into machinegun fire. Is this not the height of cruelty?
I am not certain.
Once over the threshold of battle, fear is a constant companion. Love, hope, faith, and loyalty come and go, but fear is a constant. Scared people are remarkably unaware of their own power. They feel tike they are the perpetual under-dogs. The German soldiers of 7-1-1916 almost certainly think they are about to be overrun by the hordes of Tommies coming at them in unending lines. They shoot like desperate men.
When the enemy go to earth, the desperation does not stop. They fire at anything moving. Shadows become potential enemy snipers, and wounded men look like everyone else in the dark at 100 yards. The seven days of artillery preparation does not help them think clearly either. Thousands of Germans die as well. By days end they may not feel so much cruel as relieved to be alive!
Soldiers have argued for centuries that civilians who have not been in battle have no right to judge their actions as being wrong. This may be true in battles between "noble opponents." But it is what happens after the battle that makes grey the moral certainty of "honorable combat."
RAPE, PILLAGE AND REVENGE
"Sargon, king of Kish, thirty-four campaigns won, the walls he destroyed as far as the shore of the sea ...To Sargon, the king, the hand of Enlil a rival did not permit. Fifty-four thousand men daily in his presence eat food."
- --Royal inscription of Akkad
Sargon lead his 54,000 men out of Kish on a campaign every year. Why? Were Sargon's enemies really that much of a threat? (One doubts it since he won every one of his campaigns!) Maybe the answer lays in the last line of the inscription. The king had to feed 54,000 men! His yearly campaigns can justifiably be viewed as little more than gigantic foraging raids.
William McNeil, in "The Pursuit of power", suggests that Summerian war is best view as just another natural disaster. The army might march through once every generation. In its path, death and destruction. The peasants would take a generation in coming back. While they recouped, they were temporarily "immune" to further aggression, since there was no food for an army. Once recouped though, the scourge might return, just as epidemic disease hit early civilizations. Is this cruel? More than likely yes.
Soldiers go to war for many reasons, honor, loyalty, political idealism, etc. But perhaps the single greatest motivation to combat is money. The US fought the Gulf War with the prime aim of protecting the vital Gulf oil fields for the West's use. In the middle ages they were more direct about the matter.
"Master Jean Remond, provost of the cathedral of Rheims, for ...300 pounds tournois...paid by the inhabitants of the said town Rheims to said Guillaume de Flavy [Captain of a company of soldiers] so as to be spared the pillaging and robbery which his men from Nesles might have carried out upon this city and the surrounding countryside during the months of July, August and September, 1437."
- --From "Guillaume de Flavy, Captaine de Compiegne"
City accounts show bribes paid to roving bands of men at arms throughout the hundred years war. Nor is the practice restricted to this time period. Danegeld is a Dark Ages example. And the practice is even present during the American Civil War! Still the medieval thinkers thought it was wrong. Christine de Pisan wrote in "The Book of Fayttes of Armes and of Chyualrye"...
"I aske of the [thee] yf whan men of werre [war] are taken in to wages, and that of theyre payment be noo faulte [default] made, Whethere it behoueth them wyth theyre wages truly payed to take vytailles [provisions] vpon the countrey, and take dyurse other thynges as they comonly do thys day in the realme of Fraunce...l ansuere the [thee] certeynly that nay, and that suche a thynge is noo poynt of the ryght of werre."
Still, right or wrong looting and pillaging are a part of war. McNeil puts forward the idea that the civilized practice of taxation is in fact the way ancient kings solved the problem of rampaging soldiery in peace time. The peasants are better off to pay the "bribe" to their own army, than be vulnerable to their neighbors army. He may be right. Such ideas of real politics are certainly a part of what is called military law.
Consider the notion of right of conquest. Because of victory in battle, the winner has certain rights which can be used to take things from the loser. Money, in the form of ransoms, slaves, cattle, art, treasure, and most importantly land are all up for grabs. Since possession is 9/10ths of the law in the US, such notions are powerful to us. For example, who owns the US? The Native Americans or the Europeans? I live in the State of Indiana [which has Potowatomi, Miama, Cherokee, and Blackfeet in it]. Clearly the Aborigines occupied the land 200 years ago. Now Europeans do [English, Irish, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Greeks, Italians, and even Arabs]. If only two counties were purchased. The rest were taken by right of conquest as a result of the battles of Fallen Timbers, and Tippicanoe. The controversy still lives though. Whites generally think their Aboriginal neighbors [if they realize they are there] are trying to take the land back.
I am certain that Gaul had similar problems well into the Dark Ages.
If pillage is then considered wrong. Then what is one to think of the whole statement "Rape, Pillage and Burn!"?
RAPE, ARSON AND TORTURE
History is replete with examples of the most inhumane acts men inflict on one another in war. Most recent are stories of systematic rapes conducted in Bosnia. The Nazi Holocaust springs to mind as well as the British concentration camps of the Boer war. It is a truth that no country or group of people is clean. One may be the victim today but last year or tomorrow the tables will be turned.
Everyone, even military justice, considers these actions wrong. At the same time they are not stopped. In fact they appear to be actively pursued, as a policy to defeat the enemy. As a policy it may work. Much like the terror of strategic bombing, atrocities do cow people into submission.
Atrocities also leave long lasting scares.
Consider some examples of wrongs committed during the Great Mutiny of 1857.
1 . On May 10th, 1857 "Mrs Chambers, the pregnant wife of the Adjutant of the 11th Native Infantry, was murdered and mutilated by a Muslim butcher from the bazaar."
"Mrs Dawson, wife of a veterinary surgeon, was in bed with smallpox when a mob surrounded her bungalow. Her husband came on to the balcony to protect her; but, after he was shot, flaming torches were thrown at her until her clothes caught fire and she was burned to death."
"Another woman, never certainly identified, was seen being dragged along in a palkaghari while a sowar, riding besides the carriage, stabbed her repeatedly, though she was already dead."
The sepoys appear to be veritable monsters for their actions. Keep in mind though, that this came after 100 years of colonial government. Now consider what the British troops did in retaliation.
2. "Captain William Wallace...considered it his duty to take up by the cartload those whom he suspected of being rebels, "to tie them up to a convenient tree and leave them hanging"... Wallace said he "never felt any remorse. They were such brutes."
John Fairweather recalled, "I fancied a man behind me was pressing rather rudely against me. I dug him with my elbows but he seemed to return my dig. I then turned round rather angrily towards the man and found it was the body of a rebel that had been hanged on a tree ...lt gave me a bit of a shock, but such scenes were so common that a swinging corpse forming part of a crowd at an auction seemed to affect no one."
"Only those with the strongest stomachs ...could remain unaffected as prisoners were blown away from the mouths of cannon ...When the gun was fired the man's body was dismembered. Usually the head, scarcely disfigured, would fly off through the smoke, then fall to the earth, slightly blackened, followed by the armes and legs. The trunk would be shattered, giving off "a beastly smell", and pieces of intestines and gouts of blood would be splashed not only over the gunners but also over any spectators who stood too close."
Keep in mind that no one is clean when it comes to atrocities. In a way they are much like acts of blood revenge taken out on a much feared foe. "They killed my sister. I'm going to have to kill one of them!"
This can go on for a long time.
What is interesting to note is how quickly one becomes desensitized to such visions of violence.
Lieutenant Fairchild noted how used the British soldiers became to the sight of swinging corpses. Gerald Linderman noted that, "shocks do not stop wars, for although a sight might stagger the soldier, it's repetition ordinarily made shallower penetrations until, as Thomas Galwey realized as he looked on the skulls of soldiers killed on the Manassas battlefield, "Horrid sights are, to an old soldier, horrid no longer."
American Civil War soldiers called this process, "hardening". They thought it was a good thing, since it made them better able to endure the terror of going into combat. At the same time it made them more able to commit such acts on their enemies.
Soldiers of all wars appear to undergo the process of hardening to the terrors of war. In so doing, they generally find that they see the war in a different light from the civilians they are fighting for.
Civil War soldiers thought that the folks back home were weak and cowardly, or at best could not understand the horrors they had undergone. World War One soldiers experienced similar difficulties. How could they explain trench warfare to their mothers? Gulf War veterans are likely experiencing the same problem in describing living in the desert for a year.
In all cases, soldiers never seem to brag about how many men they killed (until 20 years after the war is over). They tell stories, filled with lies and half truths. They remember the comrardery but they never tell of the atrocities they committed. Consequently each new generation gets to learn just how terrible war can be for themselves. Because, as I said before, "no one is clean."
So, why does all this happen? To understand that one must look at why people become desensitized to horrors.
BOREDOM, DEPRESSION AND SIMPLE STIMULATION
"If you can convince yourself intellectually that Jews have no souls. You can do all kinds of nasty things to them."
- --Professor Rheinhart Goldman Indiana University 1979
Imagine a teenager sitting at home somewhere in the US. "I'm bored" he says. He flips through the TV channels looking for something to "take the boredom away." He finds a rerun of the Three Stooges. He watches it for a few minutes then says "I'm bored" again. Pretty normal.
Bored people usually want the world to provide them with something interesting to look at. Amusing stimuli as the psychologist put it. If they don't get their circuses they complain that they are bored. They condemn old entertainments as boring, and the people who provide them as bores. What is interesting is that such people never say that they are boring people themselves!
Boring people make nothing for themselves. They want it given to them. They accept everything they are given without a complaint until it is either not new anymore, or requires them to think. Psychologist Erich Fromm and others suggest that such chronically bored people make up the bulk of our population. In other words a retailer's paradise.
Most of us are not aware of our boredom. It is covered up by static of our lives. One can constantly push it away by seeking out new stimulation. The Western world is full of it.
The trouble with thrill seeking is that it doesn't work in the long run. TV, films, alcohol, street drugs, sports, all fail to hold interest forever.
When the body is faced with new stimulus, it responds by perking up. The brain goes through a flurry of activity. One becomes engrossed in the new experience. With repeated contact with the same stimulus the response become less and less until it produces no response at all. This is called desensitization and is used as a psychotherapy for some mental illnesses.
Films, TV shows, sports, etc. are all simple stimuli. As such they conform to the above rule. They have a threshold, beyond which they fail to inspire interest anymore. Violence is another simple stimulus. That is why the soldier becomes "hardened" to the traumas of war. What then occurs if a person is not able to find new stimuli? Boredom, the soldiers friend.
Everyone knows what the feeling of boredom is. A gnawing empty feeling one gets when there is nothing to do. 1t comes out during silences. That is why they are so uncomfortable. One becomes painfully aware of the emptiness of one's self. If the self is empty then this is an even more uncomfortable feeling. One can even get desperate to escape from it. Mental illnesses such as panic attacks, substance abuse and depression are one way to escape. More common is fleeing the feeling by finding something else to think about, a new stimulus. None of these approaches is very effective. They eventually all backfire.
Mental illnesses have clear drawbacks to life functioning. But so too does looking for new thrills. As with addictions, tolerance develops. One must seek ever increasing thrills. So one may start out watching one football game a week and gradually work up to five. This could begin to affect one's marriage. Fighting might not be a problem though, since that is a new stimulus. In fact some couples stay together just so they can fight (even if divorced they fight).
If the cycle escalates too far, life circumstances can force a person to stop the madness and begin facing the root cause, boredom.
How does one face boredom. It makes one so aware of the emptiness of life. Maybe that is the key. Many people's lives are empty. They are filled only with simple stimuli. What would happen if one were full of complicated stimuli?
The emptiness would not seem or feel so horrible.
Complicated stimuli do not have thresholds. They excite one's imagination each time one reads it. Shakespeare, Jesus, Rummi, and Lao Tsu all standout as inspirations. Their writings are new each time they are read. Strangely enough, in this century, the various books written by Alcoholics Anonymous are also very rich in complexity. Encountering such works can be exhilarating but it is also tiring. It is said of the Koran that each passage can be understood in seven different ways, so reading it is far from easy.
Helping others, creating art, writing poetry, singing, acting, engaging in the here and now, all can be complicated stimuli. They lead one to a greater understanding of one's self. Attending funerals, visiting sick friends, working on physical therapy to walk again, make one aware of painful parts of the self. In other words, facing the world as it is. Simple stimuli on the other hand allow one to avoid the world and one's self. They allow one to not feel the pain the world holds and to not be fully alive.
Is this a problem? Well it allows soldiers to ignore the killing going on around them. That may be useful from a training perspective. But in the long run it cripples people. One may need to shut down feelings during a war. But once the shooting is over one needs to go on. And it is hard to do so if one has been a monster.
A CLINICAL EXAMPLE: CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE
Mr R looks like everyone else on the surface. But appearances are deceiving. Mr R is a twice convicted child molester, one of several I am professionally acquainted with. He looks normal, so what is it that makes him different from the rest of us?
On one level R differs from the greater population in him behavior. Sexual abuse is a prohibited behavior. By indulging in that behavior R put himself apart from the rest society. But is that really a difference? It is possible for any of us to do the same acts. Placed in the right (or rather wrong) set of circumstances anyone might do the same. Now R acknowledges the wrongness of his actions and takes steps to prevent a reoccurrence of it. He appears to be doing well. He looks to his past to understand something about why he did what he did. The following is an over view of R's development.
R was born in the midwest of the US in the early 40's. His mother was mentally ill but relatively stable during R's childhood. The family had a history of alcoholism but no one was an active drinker in his immediate family. R's grand father was a tinker, a profession that had a bad reputation for drinking and womanizing. R had several siblings but was not close to any of them.
When R was about five years old he was sexually abused by an iceman. He reports that he remembers the experience as pleasurable. He was abused by other people outside of the family as well between the ages of seven to eleven. In each case, his adult interpretation of the event was as a pleasurable event. He never told his parents, and no one was ever prosecuted for these crimes.
When R was a teenager he engaged in homosexual relations with several same age boys. Again defined as a pleasurable experience. His orientation could have been thought to be homosexual but for the fact that he also began having sex with his sister. All these relationships were kept secret since he was aware that they were "wrong" in societies' eyes.
R married in the early 60's. His ambition was to have a normal family life as defined by societal norms. In other words he did not set out to be a child molester from word go. As it turned out his wife was mentally ill much like his mother (schizophrenia). They had three children, none of whom are mentally ill. R worked steadily in a good job and supported his family as the world expected him to do.
By the early 70's his marriage had deteriorated. His wife's illness was no help in this but even without it R was having trouble sustaining adult relationships. He thought about having an extramarital affair but instead he turned to his children.
R's oldest two kids became his first victims. After fighting with his wife he wanted comfort. He remembered his own childhood abuse and the sexual pleasure it brought. He convinced himself that any actions he did to his children would be pleasurable to them. The abuse soon followed. It was done in secret for the space of several years. Throughout the time he assiduously avoided the idea that what he was doing was wrong. He blocked that thought out by plowing into his work harder.
R was arrested on molest charges in the lat 70's. He was placed on probation and had to move out of the home for a few months. He came into counseling for a few months but didn't do much work. He was back at home without any jail time and essentially without altering his way of thinking.
The abuse stopped for a couple of years. The older kids were never again abused. In the early 80's R began abusing his youngest son. Again the abuse followed a period of fighting with his wife. R was again finding escape from the world through sex. By this time it was clear that R's true sexual orientation was as a pedophile. He was arrested a second time by the mid 80's.
This time R received a much stiffer penalty. He spent two years in jail and prison. He was placed on ten years probation and he was required to stay in counselling for the space of years. While in prison he attended a sex abuse perpetrators group. In group, he saw how other perpetrators convinced themselves the abuse was okay. For the first time he realized the hurt he had inflicted through his actions.
R's counseling continues today. He now concentrates his time on complex stimuli, and generally avoids contact with children. He is divorced and lives alone. He is excommunicated from his church but seeks reinstatement. He is also active in several local clubs and non profit agencies. He now looks just like the rest of us.
R is pretty typical of child molesters. He has the stand history of life experiences which lead one to become an abuser. Step by step life moves him away from people and gives him "bad" thoughts about the way the world works.
R was raised in a family with problems. His mom's illness made her an unsafe person. They had no boundaries on what was right or wrong. R was not protected from being sexually abused nor was his sister protected from his sexually abusing her. The family had a history of sexual looseness which probably lead to the permissive attitude present.
R enjoyed the abuse he suffered. This is very common for abuse victims. It is safer to remember a scary experience as pleasurable then it is to realize how vulnerable one is. As an adult this thought came back and served as an excuse for molesting.
R started off his marriage with good intentions, but he lacked the skills required to maintain a close adult relationship. R's family taught him how to not talk and how to ignore scary events, not to see them and talk them out. As his marriage fell apart R began looking for simple stimuli to distract him. Sex was his stimuli of choice. The abuse he perpetrated gradually progressed from masturbating to oral sex to intercourse. Eventually it failed to solve his marital problems and landed him in prison for child molest.
Is R a dangerous person? Yes. Will he abuse again? No one can know. But for right now I would doubt it. Is the potential still there? Oh Yes! Once a boundary is crossed it is easier to cross it again. In R's case his sexual boundaries have been crossed for nearly 50 years! If he had been a wife beater one would have to consider him at risk for future assaults. As it is he never did that, so the risk is low. The same is true for drinking alcohol. Addiction is in his family, but drinking was never his thing so the risk factor is low.
Consider now a soldier just come back from the war. He has killed. He may well have looted, or even raped. In the case of Vietnam veterans, the prostitutes he likely visited were generally in their early teens. Drinking and street drug use is common. Is this person dangerous? A hard question. I think the answer has to be yes. But is this person necessarily dangerous? No. It all depends on what the person does with their life after coming home.
AFTERWARD
War is an exceptionally bloody thing. Men by the very nature of the event must kill and be killed. War is also an exceptionally cruel activity. Pillage and looting are normal behaviors after battles. It is easy to convince oneself of this by saying "I beat him. So it is okay for me to take his food/watch/pistol/money/etc." If the victim is a civilian, it is easy to think about how much support he gave to the enemy. If the victim is a woman, how great a step is it to go from taking a person's cloths to rape?
To survive the cruelties of war soldiers have to make themselves blind to most of its horrors. Human psychology helps in this since viewing the death caused in battle naturally makes one enured to sights of destruction. Seeking other simple stimuli such as alcohol, sex and gambling work only for a while since the same increase of tolerance effect is experience for them as for viewing combat. The soldier becomes numbed to the pain of the world. Consequently when it comes his time to inflict pain he can become very extreme before realizing he is going too far.
On returning home numbed soldiers must remake their lives. Unfortunately they will always carry that memory that they can "go too far" and have done so.
Can this problem be avoided by changing the way soldiers are trained? Yes, to a certain extent. Fighting only "just" wars minimizes the hatred soldiers start with. Training soldiers to respect non-combatants and that pillage will not be tolerated will also help. Rape must absolutely not be tolerated. Policing battle troops will help with enforcement. But most importantly the leaders of units must set clearly enforced limits of discipline.
Strangely having gays openly in the military would probably bring to the surface sexual issues that are not now talked about. It rape was talked about it would probably be less likely to happen.
But war will still be violent. No matter how much sensitivity training is done. Perhaps only switching to a non-violent Gandhi like approach would really reduce cruelty. t don't think any country in the world is ready for this.
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© Copyright 1993 by Chris Engle
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