So I was planning a happy-skippy blog entry about how I’ve been really busy knocking off dozens of items from my post-Palestine to-do list (no exagerration – the list came to 40 items and I’m down to the teens). And talking about Kill Bill, because I saw part 2 and feel I have Things To Say about it. And making wry comment on the coverage that sheep and that budgie have been getting all around the world.
But I’ve just seen the coverage of the Iraqi prisoner abuse.
First thing – it’s on TV way before the net. Discussion boards have the story but the mainstream newssites and big blogs aren’t covering it yet. Weird – TV ahead of the internet – I can’t think the last time it happened to me.
Second thing – oh my lord. Of course, it’s one incident and it’s being dealt with and it’s not a general situation – but there have been so many reports of this kind of thing in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Gitmo. It is a sign of a general culture. This kind of activity is the outgrowth of the rhetoric surrounding the US military effort and ‘clash of civilisations’ and war on terror etc. It’s *inevitable*. It was predicted. It has been reported before. But photos tell a different story.
Third thing – it’s been a rough two weeks for the Arab world (which does exist as a collective entity on some level, if only because the rest of the world keeps lumping them together) – Bush supporting Sharon, Fallujah being bombed, and now this. If you’re already feeling victimised, this run of events certainly looks like the West is prepping for a fight to the finish with the Arab Middle East.
Fourth thing – the grinning thumbs-up may be familiar to anyone who’s been paying attention to the war-blogs for the last few weeks – the ‘Boudreaux controversy’ has been argued all over and made it into Salon.com a few days ago. Basically, its a photo of a grinning GI next to an Iraqi kid holding a sign – but there are two versions of what the sign says, one sickening and one heartwarming. Obviously one, or both, was photoshopped for political reasons. I think psychological logic supports the idea its the negative one, but it’s impossible to prove. This prison activity will lend more weight to this logic, because its premised on the fact that some soldiers in Iraq are happy to humiliate the Iraqis. And now we see that this is indeed the case.
Christ. Things are going to get worse before they get better.
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I did like Kill Bill 2, for what its worth.
6 thoughts on “Feeling Horrified”
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RE: prison abuse in Iraq. I’m not going to stick up for the US soldiers, but it’s not exactly the first time power has been abused in wartime. Canadian and Belgian troops were caught performing similar inhumanities during the UN’s Somalia campaign in 1997, for instance (http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9704/17/belgium.somalia/). Yes, it’s grotesque and unnecessary and no good will come of it, but I think the only thing (“culture” or otherwise) it’s representative of is what happens when people find themselves in power, with an “enemy” who they can further dehumanise; and then some sort of feedback loop occurs and escalates out of control. Or something like that.
RE: Lcpl Boudreaux. If giggling like a 12 year old at this [ http://www.ryano.net/iraq/index.php ] is wrong, then who wants to be right?
While an explanation of this that relies only on Stanford-Prison-DasExperiment psychology is technically sufficient, I rebel against it. Maybe I’m naive, but to explain this kind of gleeful abuse, I think you need to appeal to a wider culture within the fighting forces in the Middle East. That feedback psychology just doesn’t seem enough.
And it isn’t as though you need to look hard to find the culture that supports this – Americans who think Arabs are, effectively, primitives. One whole strand of the war on terror rhetoric relies on exactly this – that the enemy *hate freedom*. More egregious examples are only a floated-google away.
I believe that there is a wider culture, in which these soldiers were steeped, that dehumanises Arabs; and that these abuses are what comes of combining that culture with power and its feedback loops.
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Yeah, the Boudreaux thing has given chuckles – has Fark done a contest on it yet? – and the negative image would have been no more than a prompt for a “dumbass soldier” comment. My main beef with the controversy was how the emergence of a positive image was instantly accompanied by massive hate on the anti-war left and their pathetic hate-America chicanery yadda yadda yadda. On top of that, the way so many people said things like “I *knew* it was a fake as soon as I saw it, no soldier would ever do such a thing!” These are the little fictions which serve to hide atrocities and injustice, and they do matter.
AFAICT, the negative image seems to have the most supporters as being the true original, regardless of political orientation.
Have you ever sat in the stand behind the goal line of a footy match? I did it once and I don’t intend to do it again. I know that the people I were with said that it was ‘all in good fun’. But I still can’t reconcile the behaviour from what are otherwise great people with what I witnessed that day.
Given that that kind of behaviour came from someone who would in any ordinary situation abhore such behaviour, I am not surprised by the sort of debase crap going on in Iraq.
Sorry to have brought Iraq ‘down’ to such a level….
Well, there’s Stanford Prison plus the Milgram experiment – mixing authority and obediance is simply toxic. Add in a hefty does of “justice”, a belief that what is being done is right and proper and morally justified (or at least in the aid of a greater moral cause), and you are staring into the abyss.
There’s an excellent post in Whiskey Bar’s comments about the mindset behind this and what it reveals as well – look here</A. and skim down about 250 posts to April 30th, 1 AM or thereabouts. Scary, scary stuff.
Oh yeah, Morgue, Billmon is required reading, if you aren’t already.
That should be here.
Damn typos.