Forwarded for your consideration. I know (Brigadier) Jim Wallace through his also being Patron of the Military Christian Fellowship of Australia.
Best wishes, Peter +++++ Mistreatment of Prisoners: society forgets its rules. Some ideas about what conditions cause apparently normal people to become torturers of prisoners Canberra Times 10 May 04 Torture - Whose Fault Really? Jim Wallace asks whether societies lack of absolutes is eroding the highest principles of the warrior code. In the past week we have seen US public figures and their generals all genuinely askance at how US soldiers could act so demonstrably against the values of the country and the US military by torturing prisoners. But are the values they are seen to have violated still there, or are they lost in what has become a mire of relativism common throughout the Western world? War has of course always contained atrocities. The killing of prisoners of war, or surrendering enemy, has been a relatively frequent feature of war. As our old WWII soldiers get older, it is amazing how frequently the telling of such incidents passes without comment. Although never morally acceptable in the west, these have almost always been incidents in the heat of battle or the shadow of similar atrocities by the enemy. What sets the latest revelations apart to a worrying degree, is that they have occurred out of the battle and have been perpetrated by at least two people and sometimes a group, acting together to a set of values that they obviously commonly held. Where did they get them? The immediate place to look is the institution - the US Army, and we need to look past doctrinal statements here, to the actual ethos of armies. Certainly any soldier knows there is no acceptance of this type of behaviour in the armies of the US or its allies. From the moment his foot alights from the coach at the recruit training battalion, every new soldier realises that this is an organisation with absolutes. Whether it's adherence to the standards of dress and turnout or the rules of war, the message is the same. Occasionally instances of bullying are reported in recruit training or line battalions, but they are inevitably strongly dealt with, and the careers of the perpetrators and even those negligent for lack of supervision of them, ended or truncated. However armies do not provide the main influence on their soldiers. The army may have the soldier for as little as a year or eighteen months before he is on operations. Society will have had him for at least 16 to 19 years longer. While we have always said that it is important that the values of society be carried into armies, is it now eroding the highest principles of the warrior code? The ANZAC came to the army with the bushman's very practical experience of life and death. But today's recruit comes with a conditioning to violence itself. Computer games trivialise not only the act of killing, but also the infliction of pain. They compete in the search for more graphic and unusual means of creating havoc and suffering, and as sure as McDonalds ads help create fat kids, help create potential sadists and torturers in uniform. Lt Col David Grossman, a Green Beret and US army psychologist, testified to an inquiry into one of America's too frequent high school massacres, that desensitising, conditioning and role modeling were what the Army used to overcome soldiers' natural inhibition to killing. In the same way computer games breakdown the individuals sensitivity to using the gratuitous violence that interrogators have justified in these cases. As a UK academic reported, they cause the players to have "distorted perceptions about violent behaviour, poor empathy for others and low moral development". These are all central factors in the torture of these prisoners and are surely amplified in their influence on youth, for the equally violent themes of today's TV, film and music. But what makes this conditioning or desensitizing all the more dangerous is that it occurs in a society that has lost its absolutes. In an effort to accommodate all manner of minority interests and "rights", we have denied the absolutes of our Christian heritage and instead replaced it with relativism. Activist judges have most recently taken this to the absurd extreme of deciding that whether you are male or female is no longer a matter of chromosomes, but what you think you are. Unfortunately for the soldier or potential soldier, this relativism in the society in which he is nurtured, makes his application of situational ethics on operations all to easy a step. It is a disastrous step if he makes it, as the surreal nature of an operational theatre allows him to easily justify the unjustifiable. For this reason the time-honoured test of the appropriateness of an action for the soldier has always been not "What should I do in this situation?" but "Who am I and what do I believe?" Unfortunately our society is fast removing the absolutes on which the correct answer to this question depends. And if that be the case, we can hardly blame the soldier or the army. Brigadier Jim Wallace is a former commander of the SAS, the Special Forces and the Army's 1st Brigade and is currently the Executive Chairman of the Australian Christian Lobby. http://www.acl.org.au ------------------------------------------------------ - You are subscribed to the mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put in the message body 'unsubscribe insights-l' (ell, not one (1)) See: http://nsw.uca.org.au/insights-l-information.htm ------------------------------------------------------
