Published on Monday, June 18, 2007 by TruthDig.com A Culture of Atrocity 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 Universitys
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.
Its 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 nations 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.
Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.
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