Militaries make bad apples

People enlist in the military for all kinds of reasons, because they think it will make them 'proper men' or 'proper women,' (whatever those may be) because they're 'patriotic' (aka nationalist), because they don't know what else to do with their lives, because they want to go to college and can't afford it any other way, because they want to travel, because they want to feel part of something bigger than they are. Lots of different reasons, not least of which is a failure to think about the consequences of their actions.

Militaries (and I don't care whether you're talking about the N.Z. military, the U.S. military or the Indian military because they have all committed war crimes) take those recruits and persuade them that because they have put on a uniform, deeds that were murder last week are virtuous and noble this week, so long as someone else says so.

I'm with Shelley:

"Man has no right to kill his brother. It is no excuse that he does so in uniform: he only adds the infamy of servitude to the crime of murder."

War is a fiction -- by that I don't mean that it is unreal, but that it depends on a kind of shared pretence, a shared delusion. We have to pretend that soldiers primarily fight other soldiers, when in fact , most casualties of twentieth and twenty-first century wars are civilian.

We believe that there's such a thing as a 'battlefield' where actually, there are cities, towns and farmland.

We believe that 'our' soldiers, unlike 'theirs' are good and noble and don't rape and murder civilians, yet we know that domestic abuse (which often involves sexual abuse and sometimes culminates in murder) occurs at a considerably higher rate in military families than in non-military families. (The most frequent figure I see quoted is that the rate is 5x higher)

War is a fiction. Most recruits have to be persuaded to believe in it. And as it happens, militaries (including the U.S. military) have been getting progressively better and better at persuading recruits that when they put on a uniform, killing becomes legitimate. Recruiting younger kids may help with this: I remember reading that the average age of soldiers in WWII was considerably higher and firing rates considerably lower. But training practices also have a lot to do with it. As CPT Pete Kilner, Instructor, U.S. Military Academy wrote in 2000

"American military leaders have been very successful in their task to create combat-effective units. In response to the War Department's World War II research that revealed that less than 25% of riflemen fired their weapons in combat, the military instituted training techniques--such as fire commands, battle drills, and realistic marksmanship ranges--that resulted in much improved combat firing rates. In the Korean War, 55% of the riflemen fired their weapons at the enemy, and by the Vietnam War that rate had increased to 90%."

He goes on to argue that observe that training tactics that drill recruits into acting reflexively instead of reflectively enables them to 'overcome' their reluctance to kill.

(Caveat: the article's main thrust concerns the fact that the success of this training regimen (and the higher firing rates in combat that result) causes increased levels of PTSD and that this can be countered by giving soldiers arguments that allow them to better justify to themselves what they have done. Sometimes words fail.)

But even as they undergo this brainwashing, there are many points at which they could refuse: others have done so, both in this war and in others. So I'm not willing to let soldiers off the hook, especially soldiers in an all-volunteer army.

I may feel sympathy for people who do young and stupid things, but I will not shed tears for soldiers. I will not 'remember their sacrifice', or buy poppies for ANZAC day, or mourn their deaths or attend their victory parades, or get a lump in my throat when I hear people say that 'They will not grow old as we that are left grow old.' I will not buy into the idea that they are defending me or protecting civilians, or defending freedom or any of that. I sure as hell don't thank them.

And the reason I won't do these things is that I'm no longer interested in sustaining the fictions and pretences of war. If a person killed someone on the street where I live, they would be called a murderer, whether or not they were dressed up in a pretty uniform or said 'but I was told to do it.' I don't see that the name should change, just because the killing didn't happen on the street where I live.

Afterword

Another old diary from dKos slightly edited. Being both rigid of mind and replete with arrogant moral certitude, my opinions on this haven't shfited much in the interim.

And going completely off on a tangent, I think 500 hits is coming up, which is kind of nice.

Playing Happy Families

Motherland. Fatherland. Homeland. Patriotism. The national family.

So much of the language that's used to incite patriotism/nationalism is rooted in ideals of home, in ideals of domesticity, in familial ideals. Hearth and homestead, familiarity, good food, comfort, cosiness. Citizens are encouraged to think of the nation as akin their mother or father and of other citizens as their siblings. Sometimes the metaphor is even more defined. The nation is the nourishing mother, the alma mater, the government is the providing father and preserver of her sexual virtue, the pater familias. The citizens are the children, who must be obedient, respectful and above all else, loyal to the family.

Comforting, no? Cosy? Egalitarian and all that, to think of your fellow citizens as your brothers and sisters?

No. It isn't. Not comforting, not cosy and sure as hell not egalitarian. I don't think so, anyway.

It strikes me that when the nation is imagined as a family, it's always a particular kind of family that's imagined. A `happy' family. No divorce or domestic violence here, folks. No custody fights or acrimonious property disputes. No deadbeat Dads skiving off on the child support payments. No sexual abuse to mar the cosiness, no lives of quiet desperation, no skeletons in the closet (or LGBT folk either for that matter), no `Mother's little helper' in the bathroom cupboard. A family where, although people might have their differences, their similarities are more pronounced. A homogeneous family - certainly not a trans-national family - because that would play merry hell with the metaphor. And it's a defensive family, which, though it might have its internal squabbles, will quickly unite to attack any interloper who dares participate in them.

Ah, yes, foreigners. I bet you wondered when I was going to get to them. Because it's not just about who is included when we play happy national families. It's also about who is excluded.

Where does the foreigner fit in this picture of the nation as family?

When they are within national borders, they are the short-term family guest, who will remain tactfully and discreetly silent, keeping their fucking piehole shut for the blessedly brief duration of their visit. They will observe the formalities, tell the nice polite lies, bite their tongue and ignore the desperate weeping from the upstairs bedroom. Good house guests. At best. More often they are the interloper, the unwanted guest, the cuckoo in the nest, the changling in the cradle, the thief in the night. Sometimes they are the `yellow peril,' the `thieving gypsies,' the `flood of immigrants,' the `undesirable element,' the `influx,' the `deluge,' the `horde,' the `false asylum seekers,' seeking to rip `us' off and steal `our' jobs.

Beyond the national borders, they are `them.' Those strangers who are outside the family, who must be defended against, who are exotic, unfathomable, and `not like us.' The barbarians at the gate, the uncivilised Malthusian masses, the threat to `our' society and `our' values. Whose bodies can be bombed, burned and buried with impunity, whose thousand lives are worth but one of `ours,' who are indistinguishable, nameless, faceless, moths at a candle flame.

The nation as family metaphor invites people to divide the world into `us' and `them.' From where I stand, that right there is a huge stroke against it.

But this rabbit hole goes deeper.

The family is a site of intimacy - not necessarily pleasant, happy, loving intimacy, but intimacy none-the-less. Family members usually know each other through long acquaintance. They may not like or love each other, but odds are they know each other's habits, their preferences, their dislikes, their small pleasures, their antipathies. They have learned to live in shared spaces. In most - though not all - cases, the family is a site of particular and private personal knowledge. At their best, families are sources of love, friendship and joy because they are based on mutual respect and private personal knowledge.

Nations are not sites of intimacy. Let me say this again because I think this is really important. Nations are not sites of intimacy. Even the little minnow-nations like Aotearoa/New Zealand are not sites of intimacy. N.Z. has a little under five million citizens and there are about four million people living there. Pretty small, no? But not a site of intimacy. Hell, even my first home-town was not a site of intimacy - I could and did walk around town all day many times without running into a single acquaintance or friend.

This matters because the `nation as family' metaphor is often invoked precisely because it conjures up familial bonds of affection, loyalty and justifiable partiality. Because the family is a site of intimacy, people are supposed to value the lives of family members above those of strangers. When you're offered the terrible choice between saving a family member and saving a stranger, you're supposed to save the family member and let the stranger die.

Within the logic of the nation as family metaphor, you are similarly supposed to save the person who has the same passport as you over the person of a different nationality.

But despite the metaphor, the nation is not your family.

You are not bound to a stranger by ties of affection, shared personal knowledge and personal history simply because you happen to have the same citizenship due to the merest accident of birth. But you could well be bound by real ties of affection, shared ideals, and shared personal knowledge to people who don't share your citizenship.

Afterword

Another one that I've reposted (in slightly edited form) from dKos, since I am a) a bit preoccupied with some other writing at the moment; b) riding high on my anti-patriotic horse and; c) thinking in a fit of mad egotism that it might not be such a bad idea to have some of the less topical stuff I did there on In Flight.

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Apologia
Nanette has gently chastised me for having neglected In Flight for well -- over a month now, actually, she says looking a bit shamefaced. I have been doing some writing on a story which is possibly getting somewhere (my protagonists are now at the railway station even though they're not actually going to end up getting on the train because I have other plans in store for them), but otherwise I've been in a place of false starts and doubt.

So at the risk of being terribly divaesque, I thought I'd take Nanette's advice and repost a diary that I wrote earlier, albeit not the one she suggested (at least not right now). I wrote this about a year-and-a-half ago. It was my first diary on dKos, which I joined just after the 2004 election, and left during the Pie Wars. I've edited a little to clean up some particularly clumsy phrases, but haven't really touched the style or content. The former seems quite strange to me now, though if anything, I have become more convinced that patriotism is evil in the intervening time.
Anyway, enough already.

The Last Refuge of Scoundrels

Sun Nov 14, 2004 at 05:24:20 AM PDT
I am not a patriot. Soon after the towers fell -- I read Robert Jensen's essay, Saying Goodbye to Patriotism. It resonated like a church bell struck at close range. If you've not read it, you should.
I think the reason that the majority of U.S. voters decided to elect as their president a disingenuous, duplicitous, mass-murderer is because they are patriots. As patriots, they believe that the U.S. is the best nation on earth. There is nowhere else they would rather live. They wake up in the morning believing that to wake up American "is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on Earth" ( Kerry, concession speech, 3/11/04 )

They believe that democracy is an essentially U.S invention and that the U.S.'s system of government, with its 'checks and balances' is by far and away the best of the world. Not only that, but they believe the American people are the best -- the kindest, the bravest, the most morally upright, the most freedom-loving people on the earth. Because of these things the U.S. should lead the world. Who better to provide good strong leadership? As a democratic acquaintance of mine wrote "Hey, If there's going to be an empire, I can't think of anywhere I'd rather have in charge than the U.S." They are patriots and proud of it.

I am not a patriot. Partly I'm spared that fate because I don't know where I'd be a patriot for. Live long enough as a foreigner and your home becomes everywhere and nowhere. I lived as a foreigner in the States, now I am a foreigner in the U.K. When I visit the country where I grew up my accent marks me as a foreigner there too. Friendly people in the supermarket say 'Oh! Is this your first trip to New Zealand? How are you liking it so far?"

But the Americans that voted for Bush are patriots. And I think many of the Americans who voted for Kerry would also call themselves patriots. They'd subscribe to the idea that the U.S. flag is an emblem of freedom, that the U.S. is -- despite its problems -- the best country in the world.

I think the root problem with the U.S. is that liberals and the left have seldom challenged the idea that patriotism is a virtue. They've seldom stood up and said 'patriotism is evil to its core, and must be torn out, root and branch.' More often, they've tried to gather the mantle of patriotism around themselves. "Dissent is patriotic," they have said. "Asking questions is patriotic." "Protesting is patriotic."

Sometimes, I'm sure, they've done so to reach out across political divides -- "Look," they say, "we're not so scary. We're patriots too." But more often, I think the claims to patriotism are sincere. They want to think of themselves as patriots, they want to apply the term to their works. As patriots, they are genuinely angered by Republican attempts to monopolise the term.

One of the first 'grown-up' books I ever read as a child was Watership Down, which despite its reputation for fluffiness (it's got rabbits!) is an essentially political book. I made several false starts before I could read the whole way through. I'd make it to the end of the first chapter -- the one that begins with Cassandra observing that the house reeks of death and ends with Fiver paralysed in nameless fear before a vision of blood-covered fields. But for me -- when I finally screwed up my courage and made it past the first chapter -- the most frightening part of that book remains the part where Hazel's little band of refugee rabbits discover that a warren that has offered them shelter has an evil secret: it is snared and their hosts have betrayed them. As they plan to avenge themselves by driving out the other rabbits and seizing their warren, Fiver rages at them, gibbering and raving: "We shall help ourselves to a roof of bones, hung with shining wires! Help ourselves to misery and death!"

That's what I think about patriotism -- it's evil to the poisonous core of its rotten heart. Its roof is made of bones, it reeks of burning flesh. Why should those of us on the left help ourselves to that?

So what's so terrible about patriotism? Here is its lingua franca: "I love my country. It's the best in the world. Its people are the best in the world. Its democracy and values are the best in the world. Our brave men and women in uniform are the best in the world and they deserve my support."

Deeply embedded in this is a kind of calculus that says 'American lives matter more.' If bravery, kindness and the love of freedom are American values, then they are not simply human values -- they're American because Americans are kinder and braver and more freedom-loving than anyone else. And if Americans are the most freedom-loving, then their freedom is the most important, because after all, us foreigners don't love freedom as much. And since Americans are better, so too will be their democracy, their government and its decisions. Other countries should just fall into line and do what they say because they are not as good as America. After all, how did Kerry put it again? To wake up American "is the greatest privilege and the most remarkable good fortune that can come to us on Earth."

I know -- this is boring and repetitive. But I want to capture the tail-chasing nature of patriotism. Once you hold up that rose-tinted mirror of patriotism, you see only yourself, your nation, enlarged to take up the whole sky, reflected in its warm self-congratulatory glory. This mirror has a wondrous effect: every thing and everyone else is made invisible, marginal, not as important, a fly to be swatted, an annoyance to be eradicated. Patriotism takes you to the place where Americans will vote for a mass-murderer because his most recent mass murder wasn't primarily of Americans. Over 100 000 Iraqi civilians are dead, murdered on Bush's orders. If Bush had ordered 100 000 American citizens to be burned, buried alive, blown up and tortured, would he have been elected? But Iraqi lives aren't as important as American lives. They don't count.

And that's what patriotism does. It draws a line between people and says 'On this side of the line, people's lives, works, and ideas matter. On this other side, they do not.'

I am not a patriot. But I have heard its siren song. 'Sleep!' it cries, 'sink comfortably into torpor. Turn off your mind, your cold ruthless conscience, find surcease from despair, rest from rage, let your hard heart melt and heal. Let your head nod in agreement, look into our mirror and you won't have to see evil any more. Follow, and you won't be lonely, you will sing in sweet harmony instead of in your own out-of-tune discordant voice. Obey and you will no longer stand at bay, wondering where you will find strength to endure. We'll make you cosy and safe." I've heard that siren song, promoting 'unity,' 'coming together' and the 'healing of wounds.''Do the easy thing' it says 'Give in. Collude. Immerse yourself in our folksy, gosh shucksiness, find yourself in the homeland, remake yourself in our image'

But I am not a patriot. I will not set up house in that hall of bones.

[I wrote this on the evening of November 3rd. I've tidied up and edited/altered a little since then, but if you think my tone is angry here, it's because I'm angry.]