I’ve just been reading about the charges laid against a young American soldier in connection with the rape and killing of a young Iraqi woman. In the preamble to the charges it’s noted that the 21-year-old American suffers from a “personality disorder”. Because of that he had received an honourable discharge and that’s why he is being tried in a U.S. civilian court. It may be that the Americans have lowered their standards for military service so low that a number of men and women with various illnesses are being admitted.
2 months ago the U.S. army signed up an 18-year-old autistic man and his father had to go to court to have him released from a contract he did not understand.
We don’t know how many other marginal cases there are in the American military but quite possibly there are many many others.
The responsible figures in this tragedy are the men and women who led their country into this mess.
This is precisely why the U.S. government refused to sign onto the idea of an International Criminal Court. They fear that prosecutions for war crimes could reach up quite high into their government. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, for example, approved the illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War…in fact there’s a case to be made that the whole Vietnam invasion was entirely illegal.
Remember that the German officials at Nuremberg were not charged with the crime of genocide…they were accused quite simply of “Planning and Waging an Aggressive War” full stop. Several high officials were found guilty on that charge and were hung.
George W. Bush and Tony Blair have a great deal to answer for…and no doubt, they will be tried in absentia by some court somewhere. Certainly these people will not escape the judgement of history.
It’s true that part of any soldier’s training involves a brief course in desensitization, with respect to both the “collateral damage” of civilian deaths and the possibility of “friendly fire” deaths. So there’s a tendency to view death as a normal part of military activity. These rapists and killers knew what they did was wrong, but most of them were able to live with it.
There is also, of course, the inherent prejudice of North Americans and Western Europeans against those we consider inherently inferior. Canadians need to ask themselves how it is that these rather ordinary, undistinguished and not very intelligent men like George Bush, Tony Blair and Stephen harper are empowered to – as Randolph Bourne put it- “open the sluices and flood us with the sewage of the War Spirit”. We as citizens must bear some responsibility for what is done in our name.
These rapists and killers knew what they did was wrong, but most of them were able to live with it.
I worked many years at a Provincial Psychiatric Hospital. While the days of the asylum are behind us, abuses of a shocking variety were to take place during my 15 year tenure. The perpetrators of these crimes certainly new right from wrong and as you say, would somehow come to grips with their actions and live with them. Power and control in the wrong hands is a most dangerous thing indeed.
“Power and control in the wrong hands is a most dangerous thing indeed”.
How right you are.
What IS military action, really?
Having recently read about the American Civil war (90,000 dead at the Battle of Antietam in one day, a million overall, including about 300,000 civilians) and the prelude to Hiroshima (9000 civilians killed per day, prior to exterminating 200,000 with the atomic bomb).
Entirely at the hands, rather bombs and bullets of USA, but these figures are the tip of the iceberg.
Who would ever want to estimate the deaths and torturing of ordinary people around the world at the hand of US-backed terrorists and death-squads?
Reeks of genocidal holocaust and ethnic cleansing, by the nation that touts itself as the beacon of hope for humanity.
But it’s all necessary, and somehow noble, once you gussy it up as “military action”.
lord anthony
Anthony…here’s my immediate response to your question-
Military action is the end result of the ideas put forward by the men who own and control the weapons emporium. These men do this, simply in order to increase their personal wealth.
Their methods are insidious but their strategy is strikingly simple. It’s all based on a finely-tuned understanding of the art of propaganda; their model, of course, is the German Joseph Goebbels, closely followed by that other artful wordsmith and war lover, Winston Churchill.
David Frum, the self-exiled Canadian propagandist learned from both those men and is best known for his positioning of George W. Bush as the “leader of the civilised world”, with his now famous remark, which defined the “axis of evil”; Frum was picking up on Ronald Reagan’s Florida speech in which he characterized the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”. Using the word “evil” to describe the enemy justifies the subsequent military action.
This war propaganda community marches in lockstep with the weapons industry, in order to instill fear in the hearts of the general public. It’s this fear…irrational though it may be…that encourages and permits such insane adventures as the illegal war in Iraq and the misguided and misbegotten war in Afghanistan.
It’ fear that defines what you refer to as “military action” and that fear is what the weapons community requires, to gain access to government funds (your money and mine). This is precisely what the Harper government is doing now- and what the Liberals would have done had they stayed in power.
The sad part of it all is that there is an ample supply of wilfully blind citizens who don’t question this kind of propaganda until it’s too late.
One last thing- Let’s never forget that the U.S. government did not question the German persecution of the Jews. It never called for any reform there, because there was a close economic relationship between the Nazis and the Americans.
In fact, American investment in Germany between 1929 and 1941 in creased by 49 percent. During the same period, American investment in the rest of Europe declined. The U.S. had no qualms about profiting from the German war machine…and only entered World War Two because Japan attacked Pearl Harbour.
The only reason that Iran and North Korea are being spared their dose of “military action”, is that with demand in the Middle East so high…the defense industry has run out of capacity.