The Question of Who II

Trey Smith

Take the military. The Pentagon achieves its ends through war. Troops must be obedient and willing to kill. This doesn't come naturally, so the military branches have to reprogram civilian recruits raised to believe killing is wrong so that they can be part of a murderous enterprise. After breaking down an enlistee's individuality, trainers then teach them to despise “the other,” whomever it may be -- kraut, gook, rag-head depending on the generation and the particular war. Only after sufficiently dehumanizing both the recruit and the future enemy can they mold a soldier who will do the dirty work demanded by an imperial nation. Then they build these soldiers into super-fit, adrenaline-charged fighters, surround them with propaganda that demonizes the enemy of the moment, and set them loose to “get the job done.”

The troops who are sent to Afghanistan find themselves in a conflict with no clear objective, let alone an achievable one. They face an able and motivated foe with a very simple objective: to drive the occupier out of their country. As U.S. losses mount, frustrations grow and pressure increases. It is an unfortunate commonplace that armed troops vent their anger with lethal force upon local civilian populations. Their ability to do that is part and parcel of their training that worked so hard to dehumanize these same people.

It is a sick hypocrisy for Obama, Clinton, Panetta, or Allen to claim that these actions are not a direct result of U.S. military and foreign policy. If Dick Cheney and John Yoo were torturing language and logic to advocate the torture of humans, why wouldn't guards at Abu Ghraib fall into the same debased state of mind? (For example, years after he claimed it was "not who we are," documents proved that, ahead of the My Lai massacre, Westmoreland himself had issued rules-of-engagement orders that any civilians found in Communist-held territory like My Lai, a "free-fire" zone, were to be considered enemy combatants, and treated the same as Viet Cong.)

Those in power attempt to frame the issue within the “one bad apple in the barrel” rubric. As long as they can pretend that war crimes and atrocities aren’t a logical outcome of official policy, they can shift blame to those without power and keep the odious policies in place. The cabinet secretary sanctimoniously intones platitudes about morality at the same time as one of his underlings is screaming “KILL!” into a fresh recruit's trembling face.
~ from So then Who in the Hell Are We? by Dan DeWalt ~

Want to know why I have been a dove my whole life? The segment of DeWalt's essay shown above sums it up rather well. The military, as an institution, is about systematically dehumanizing almost everyone and everything it comes in contact with.

The common soldier (i.e., cannon fodder) is brainwashed into dehumanizing the targeted "enemy." The military brass dehumanizes both their own soldiers and the other side's citizenry. If you stand up to decry this process of dehumanization, you are treated as little more than the dehumanized faceless enemy yourself!

Once a nation adopts this mentality -- this is not simply a US problem -- it is hard, if not impossible, to break the cycle. Once you have spent years stripping away the human elements of your target, it becomes hard to return the features back to the faces.

The US finds itself on a downward trajectory simply because our leaders have become addicted to the process of dehumanization. Everywhere they look -- both abroad and domestically -- there are people awaiting to be dehumanized. As soon as they check one group off the list, it's time to work their diabolical magic on the next group.