OMNI NEWSLETTER ON KILLING #2, December 28, 2011. For a Culture of Peace, Compiled by Dick Bennett
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See related newsletters: Vietnam War , Iraq War , Afghanistan /Pakistan
Those who do not make human beings the center of their concern soon lose the capacity to make any ethical choices, for they willingly sacrifice others in the name of the politically expedient and practical. Dwight Macdonald wrote in “The Root Is Man,”
Contents of #1
Trained to Kill
Dick on New Book Against Killing
Misc. Books on Killing in War
Killing Animals
Myths Justifying US Wars : Wood, Buccheit, Swanson
Contents of #2 Killing in Wars
Dick Bennett: Reporting Deaths of Civilians
NATO Planes Strike Civilians
David Smith, Ethnocentricism and Dehumanization
John Tirman, Mass Murder by US Empire and Public Indifference
Hedges and al Arian, Killing Civilians in Iraq
Rubenstein, Choosing and Ending War USA
Ending Killing, Show It: Friedrich’s Photographs WWI
Greg Harton, Graphic Images Stop Smoking
REPORTING DEATHS OF CIVILIANS KILLED IN US WARS
Dear Editor:
We can thank the Northwest Arkansas Times and its sister newspapers for printing the names of our soldiers killed in our present wars. Many have been killed, inevitably: the Afghan and Iraq
But their number is small compared to the number of civilians killed. During the twentieth century, wars killed more and more civilians, from the one-to-nine ratio of civilian-to-soldier mortality in WWI to nine-to-one in many of the conflicts occurring after the Cold War. For its toll on civilians in war, it’s called the gruesome century, or the century of slaughter.
This reality makes me reflect on the immense disproportion of our newspapers’ reporting of combatant and civilian deaths: every US
Do the editors believe their readers so undiscerning they cannot perceive the disparity, or so unfeeling they do not care? Do they think we have abandoned to xenophobia our lifetime commitment to protecting women, children, the elderly, or that we think only our vulnerable deserve sympathy? Do they think we have no concern for the blood spilled by the populations in our wars, or we are indifferent to the human costs of wars?
If they do, they blunder, for many of us can imagine the deaths of other nations’ innocents, and each attempt to erase them only diminishes for us the credibility and authority of the newspapers.
New York Times: Errant NATO Airstrikes in Libya
A multimedia presentation of the New York Times' investigation into civilian casualties in Libya
ETHNOCENTRISM, HIERARCHIES, DEHUMANIZATION
Book by David L. Smith, Less Than Human
“A Philosophy of Genocide’s Roots”
Review By DAVID BERREBY, The New York Times, : March 4, 2011
o
Consider, as Americans are so wont to do these days, the zombie. Once, he was a person, just like you or me, but then he changed. Now, despite his outward resemblance to a human being, he is a different thing altogether. He cannot disguise himself. He cannot change back. Another minus: He yearns to sink his zombie-plague-spreading teeth into your brain.
Illustration by Jennifer Daniel
LESS THAN HUMAN
Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others
By David Livingstone Smith 326 pp. St. Martin ’s Press. $24.99.
Excerpt: ‘Less Than Human’ (macmillan.com)But no cloud lacks a silver lining: He is a convenient image for people you despise — as in the Tucson
And it is, Smith writes in this stalwart attempt to tame the mystery with philosophy, a moral and cognitive problem as old as history. He quotes Amenemhet, a pharaoh who ruled nearly 4,000 years ago, describing his conquests: “I subdued lions, I captured crocodiles. . . . I made the Asiatics do the dog walk.” Slaveholders from ancient Greece to 19th-century America Rwanda ’s genocide were referred to as cockroaches and rats, and the janjaweed of Sudan
From that record, Smith reasonably argues that dehumanization is rooted in human nature, not culture. He offers a rigorous philosophical theory to explain it, informed by his discipline’s precision, and by certain well-founded suppositions about the mind. That makes for an interesting and unusually lucid book about an under-studied subject. It also makes for a theory that doesn’t work.
Dehumanization is possible, Smith argues, because of “our cognitive architecture — the evolved design of the human psyche.” Our innate predispositions incline us to divide living things into species, he argues, and, with the same mental equipment, to divide humans into ethnic groups. And just as we do not believe that superficial resemblance means bats and birds belong together, neither do we trust that surface appearances determine who belongs where on the ethnic map. [ETHNOCENTRISM--D]
In other words, in Smith’s account of the research, we are — for better or more often for worse — predisposed to believe that racial or ethnic identity is immutable. That’s because our instincts tell us it is based on an unchanging “essence” at each person’s core, rather than on changeable appearances. Philosophical experiments have shown, for example, that while most people feel sure that a 98-pound weakling can become a strongman, they also intuit that a black person can’t become white, no matter what physical characteristics he changes.
Smith clearly explains why many cognitive scientists believe this tendency is innate and then links it to another predisposition that seems “built in” to the human mind: our inclination to see living things in hierarchies, as in the “great chain of being” of medieval European Christians, with God at its perfect top, human beings above “higher” animals, and so on down to worms and plants. Because we feel that living things are defined by their essence, and because we feel that each creature has its rank in the world, Smith argues, dehumanization comes easily to the human mind: we accept that someone can look human but have a subhuman essence, and we accept that what is not human must be inferior. “When we dehumanize people,” he writes, “we think of them as counterfeit human beings.”
Bringing philosophy to bear on this issue has its benefits, even if philosophy’s methods — the strict definitions of concepts, the search for inconsistencies, the application of logic to language — don’t seem an easy fit with kulak parasites and Tutsi cockroaches. “Although searching for the necessary and sufficient conditions that define everyday concepts is ultimately quixotic,” Smith argues, “it’s still a worthwhile ideal, because the closer we can come to them the more precise and nuanced our understanding will become.”
This is true, but this approach also has a flaw: it assumes people’s thoughts and behaviors are consistent and coherent enough for rigorous analysis. Smith’s ethnic “essences” are those of a philosopher — they’re based on logical definitions (this is human, that is not) and, being eternal essences, they’re forever. “Subhumanity,” he writes, “is typically thought to be a permanent condition. Subhumans can’t become humans any more than frogs can become princes.”
These requirements leave much of the reality of dehumanization outside Smith’s tent. For example, he writes of the immense guilt of soldiers who have dehumanized their enemy in combat, but then, back in peacetime, recognize their victims as actual people, just like the folks at home. Shrewdly, he notes how military training and rituals aim to undermine this feeling that the enemy is human. But he seems not to recognize that this sort of soldier — who sees his enemy as human, then subhuman, then human again — cannot exist if dehumanization depends on a stable belief in permanent essences.
Similarly, in Smith’s account of slavery, the ancient Romans viewed their slaves as nonhuman frogs that could never turn into human princes. But for centuries, Romans were accustomed to former slaves re-entering society and rising to responsible and even powerful positions.
Then too, because essences must be consistent and well defined, Smith is forced to claim that all dehumanization makes its targets seem, as his title says, “less than human.” But many forms of dehumanization work by making their targets out to be more than human — to be ageless vampires, for instance, or world-spanning conspirators who control the United Nations and the Federal Reserve.
All these troubles arise because Smith’s insistence on immutable essences is only half right: people do categorize themselves and others using essences, but there’s nothing immutable about them. If, like trained philosophers, we could settle for good who is essentially human and who is a zombie vampire squid, we wouldn’t have, or need, this drama of dehumanization, rehumanization, then more dehumanization, and so on. Instead, the who-is-and-isn’t-human question is never truly settled. In fact, it is the dynamic, even mercurial nature of “real human” status that makes this mystery of our psychology so fascinating. What Amenemhet wants us to remember isn’t that he thought Asiatics were dogs, but that he made them act like dogs.
“We don’t humiliate vermin,” Adam Gopnik has observed, “or put them through show trials, or make them watch their fellow-vermin die first.” Right: we do that to people. Because we readily see others as human, we need reminding that our enemies are supposedly different. Which often works, because we also readily see others as not human. Smith has explored the nature of those conceptual boxes “human” and “not human.” But what really needs explaining is the constant, restless travel that the mind makes between them.
David Berreby is the author of “Us and Them: The Scince of Identity.” He writes the Mind Matters blog for Big Think.
Also see review by Peter Grosvenor in The Humanist (Jan.-Feb. 2012)
[Every page of Tirman’s history of US demeaning, enslaving, and exterminating others in its wars illustrates Smith’s Less Than Human. D]
The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America
Jun 2011, In Stock
Americans are greatly concerned about the number of our troops killed in battle--100,000 dead in World War I; 300,000 in World War II; 33,000 in the Korean War; 58,000 in Vietnam; 4,500 in Iraq; over 1,000 in Afghanistan--and rightly so. But why are we so indifferent, often oblivious, to the far greater number of casualties suffered by those we fight and those we fight for?
This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died inKorea , Vietnam , and Iraq Vietnam America
Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight.
This is the compelling, largely unasked question John Tirman answers in The Deaths of Others. Between six and seven million people died in
Trenchant and passionate, The Deaths of Others forces readers to consider the tragic consequences of American military action not just for Americans, but especially for those we fight.
"This sad and gripping record of crimes we dare not face, and the probing analysis of the roots of indifference and denial, tell us all too much about ourselves. It should be read, and pondered." -Noam Chomsky
"John Tirman has not only written a profoundly important, revelatory work about something that most people in this country ignore; he has looked deep into our history and the American mind to see why we ignore it. I wish I could give this highly readable book to everyone, from general to private to the civilian bureaucrats who send them off to kill, who shares the illusion that war mainly involves soldiers." -Adam Hochschild, author of To End All Wars
"The Deaths of Others is an incredibly important venture. I know of no other book that
so comprehensively catalogues the victims ofU.S. U.S.
so comprehensively catalogues the victims of
"Stunning . . . Tirman lays out his strenuously argued case with considerable cogency . . . Tirman renders us great service by providing a fuller picture of the consequences of war and challenging us not to reject data simply because it is not congruent with our favored worldview . . . If Americans today marshal the resolve to enact workable normas ensuring that our use of drones will always discriminate between civilians and legimate enemy targets, then we will at last be facing up to the crucial moral questions raised in this book."
--America
--
416 pages; none; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-538121-4ISBN10: 0-19-538121-1
John Tirman is Principal Research Scientist and Executive Director of the Center for International Studies, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include Terror, Insurgency, and the State: Ending Protracted Conflicts and 100 Ways America
John Tirman, The Deaths of Others
Published by Oxford University Press. Got a very nice review in The Progressive, in their July issue. The legendary Christopher Lydon interviewed me on his radio show. Listen. A long piece in AlterNet on the media's reaction to civilian casualties. An article in the Boston Globe (August 5). World Streams Radio did a long interview on August 17. More from MIT, including a video interview. A videotaped interview on "The Autograph" hosted by Susan Modaress on Sky Cable is here. Dan Rodricks, who interviewed me on NPR, writes a column for the Baltimore Sun and had an interesting piece on 9/11. Read.
Wrapping up theIraq
Wrapping up the
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
THE END OF THE AFFAIR. The complete withdrawal of U.S. troops in Iraq Fort Bragg U.S.
Give Obama some credit for having the chutzpah to depart; he'll take some heat from overheated Republicans, but this was the right thing to do and politically he won't suffer for it. But that's a sideshow. The lack of concern or even acknowledgement about the destruction ofIraq
Give Obama some credit for having the chutzpah to depart; he'll take some heat from overheated Republicans, but this was the right thing to do and politically he won't suffer for it. But that's a sideshow. The lack of concern or even acknowledgement about the destruction of
--Hedges, Chris and Laila Al-Arian. Collateral Damage: America
Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian on "Collateral Damage: America
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Senior Fellow at the Nation Institute. He was the former Middle East Bureau Chief of the New York Times. He is the author of several books, including War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
Laila Al-Arian, Freelance journalist who has written for several publications including USA Today, The Nation magazine, HuffingtonPost.com, and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. She is the co-author of Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians.
Rush Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN:
Thousands of Iraqis have taken to the streets of
STAFF SGT. TIMOTHY JOHN WESTPHAL: I basically just kicked the clump of people there to wake them up, turned on my flashlight, and all my guys did the same thing. And my light happened to shine right on the face of an old man in his mid-sixties. I found out later he was the patriarch of that family. And as we scanned the cluster of people laying there, we saw two younger military age men, probably in their early twenties. Everybody else — I’d say there were about eight to ten other individuals — were women and children. We come to find out this was just a family. They were sleeping outside.
The terror that I saw on the patriarch’s face, like I said, that really was the turning point for me. I imagined in my mind what he must have been thinking, understanding that he had lived under Saddam’s brutal regime for many years, worried about — you know, hearing stories about Iraqis being carried away in the middle of the night by the Iraqi secret service and so forth, to see all those lights, all those soldiers with guns, all the uniform things that we wear, as far as the helmet, the night vision goggles, very intimidating, very terrifying for the man. He screamed a very guttural cry that I can still hear it every day. You know, it was just the most awful, horrible sound I’ve ever heard in my life. He was so terrified and so afraid for his family. And I thought of my family at that time, and I thought to myself, boy, if I was the patriarch of a family, if soldiers came from another country, came in and did this to my family, I would be an insurgent, too.
AMY GOODMAN:
Sergeant Bruhns also served in
SGT. JOHN BRUHNS: If you’re on a patrol in a market and somebody opens fire on you and the US military, I mean, if we respond — if we return fire in that direction with overwhelming firepower and, let’s say, a thirteen-year-old girl gets killed, you’re just going to have to assume right then and there that her father and her brother and her uncles — they’re not going to say, you know, Saddam was a bad guy and thank the United States for coming in here and liberating us. They’re going to say, “If the United States
AMY GOODMAN:
I’m joined right now by the two journalists who first spoke to Westphal, Bruhns and forty-eight other Iraq War vets. Their stories are documented in the new book Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians. Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, senior fellow at the Nation Institute, author of a number of books, including War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists, he joins us here in New York. Co-author Laila Al-Arian is a freelance journalist who has written for USA Today, as well as The Nation magazine, huffingtonpost.com and the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, joining us from
LAILA AL-ARIAN: Well, Amy, the numbers are that less than one percent of the Iraqis actually support a US presence in Iraq Basra
AMY GOODMAN:
Chris Hedges, you divide the book Collateral Damage into convoys, checkpoints, raids, detentions, then hearts and minds. Explain.
CHRIS HEDGES:
These are the pillars of the occupation, and we wanted to give readers a kind of lens or view into the gritty details of how these mechanisms works, such as convoys. I mean, these are just freight trains of death. You have to remain moving once you leave what they call the wire, once you leave the safe perimeter of a base. And so, these heavily armored convoys will drive at breakneck speeds, fifty, sixty miles an hour down the middle of roads, smashing into Iraqi cars, shoving Iraqi vehicles to the side, running over Iraqi civilians, and then, of course, any time an IED goes off, unleashing withering what they call suppressing fire with belt-fed weapons — these are light machine guns like SAWs, .50-caliber machine guns — into a densely populated areas. And so, I think that rather than sort of do a Studs Terkel kind of memoir, we wanted to focus specifically on sort of key mechanisms that make the occupation work, how these mechanisms function, and the effect that these mechanisms have on Iraqi civilians.
AMY GOODMAN:
For example, Haditha. That was —
CHRIS HEDGES:
Exactly.
AMY GOODMAN:
— this tank going through.
CHRIS HEDGES:
Right.
AMY GOODMAN:
Gets hit.
CHRIS HEDGES:
That’s exactly right.
AMY GOODMAN:
Checkpoints?
CHRIS HEDGES:
Well, checkpoints are deadly for Iraqi civilians, in part because checkpoints are often put up very quickly, so that you can turn a corner in
Reasons to Kill
Why Americans Choose War By Richard E. Rubenstein
What makes Americans fight? Why do the professed first citizen of the free world so often accept armed conflict as a political measure, and how do we justify those choices to ourselves? When is war the right decision?
From the American Revolution to the end of World War II, the United States U.S.
Americans profess to be a peace-loving people and one wary of "foreign entanglements." Yet we have been drawn into wars in distant lands from Vietnam to Afghanistan Mogadishu
New blog post from Rich.
Advance Praise for Reasons to Kill:
“Many of us long for an intelligent and informed conversation about America
excerpt in Alternet – 5 Ways We Should Radically Reconsider War
5Ways We Should Radically Reconsider War
Loving your country does not mean following its leaders’ orders no matter what they are. August 27, 2010 |
Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Richard Rubenstein's new book, Reasons To Kill: Why Americans Choose War, with the permission of Bloomsbury Press. The book will be available September 2010.
#1 Refuse to Accept the Normality of War
At the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States America
Embraced by many liberals and centrists as well, this “law and order” rationale aims to legitimize the continuous military intervention represented by the War on Terrorism. Accepting it reduces publicity about specific conflicts, accustoms people to tolerate undeclared wars, and redefines “normal” military activity. At the same time, however, the expansion of what Dexter Filkins calls the “forever war” to new theaters generates objections both practical and moral, driving a majority of Americans to demand the early withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and Afghanistan , and to oppose new military adventures of this sort in places like Yemen and Somalia
In all this, one senses a growing understanding that the costs of empire far outweigh the benefits. To position the United States
· What about conflict resolution? Those who resort to violence generally do so because of unsolved problems and unfulfilled human needs, not just out of sheer fanaticism, malice, or power-lust. By giving up the struggle to maintain our superpower status -- an addiction all the more powerful for being largely unconscious -- we free ourselves to assist people to identify their problems and work them out in their own way.
· What about international or regional law enforcement? If conflict resolution doesn’t work, what the world requires is a legitimate source of coercion -- a lawful authority people can accept regardless of their socioeconomic status, political views, religion, or culture. This means new institutions, especially on the regional level, that can be designed and brought into existence relatively quickly, if only we permit people to organize and act free of our control.
# 2 Think Calmly And Strategically About Self-Defense
Almost a decade after the 9/11 attacks, American thinking on self-defense remains fixated on that great trauma. The consciousness that we were subjected to a totally unexpected, bloody assault, and that members of the same organization that attacked us are still at large, has given us the same mindset that afflicts people who have been in a disastrous and unexpected auto accident. For a while, at least, the driver that ran that stop sign and broadsided us becomes the “typical driver,” and ALL other drivers become sources of fear and loathing. MORE
Watch a Video with Richard.
TO END THE KILLING: SHOW THE REALITY
GRAPHIC TRUTH
Friedrich, Ernst. War Against War! 1924. Seattle International Anti-War Museum in Berlin in 1924, but the Weimar Government harassed him for his anarchist and pacifist views, and the Nazis closed it, after which he fled Germany
Greg, Harton. “Can Graphic Images Change the World? Researchers Advance Idea That Gruesome Photos Can Change Behaviors.” NAT (Nov. 15, 2010). Marketing researchers at UofA demonstrated that “highly graphic images of the negative consequences of smoking have the greatest impact on smokers’ intention to quit.” We need a similar book on the Vietnam War, and another on the Iraq
END NEWSLETTER #2 ON KILLING
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