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.