Liz Lawley links to a biting commentary by Washington Post staff writer Philip Kennicott on the American political response to the Abu Ghraib abuses. What strikes me most is that his article could just as well have been about Nazi Germany. Our nation has committed atrocities.
Reputation, image, perception. The problem, it seems, isn't so much the abuse of the prisoners, because we will get to the bottom of that and, of course, we're not really like that. The problem is our reputation. Our soldiers' reputations. Our national self-image. These photos, we insist, are not us.
But these photos are us. Yes, they are the acts of individuals (though the scandal widens, as scandals almost inevitably do, and the military's own internal report calls the abuse
systemic). But armies are made of individuals. Nations are made up of individuals. Great national crimes begin with the acts of misguided individuals; and no matter how many people are held directly accountable for these crimes, we are, collectively, responsible for what these individuals have done. We live in a democracy. Every errant smart bomb, every dead civilian, every sodomized prisoner, is ours.
We are Germany. Iraq is Poland. We are responsible because this is our government. I am responsible. It is my duty to speak out, for instance through MoveOn.org's web petition for a non-partisan investigation. It's little enough, but I don't know what else to do. I don't think anyone else does either.
The most enlightening article I've read on the subject was about the nature of the prison environment and the effect it has on human behavior:
What happened in that prison is just what we should have expected; not because the guards were evil or sadistic, but because they are human. They were in circumstances that nurture the kind of behavior those photographs document. It's what happens in prisons if steps aren't taken to prevent it.
He (and a mob of other journalists) talked to Philip Zimbardo, who directed the disastrous Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. (If you're not familiar with the experiment, or even if you are, check out Das Experiment (IMDB entry), a German movie based on the Stanford experiment.) Based on his experience and the study of that experiment, Zimbardo had some sage advice:
Zimbardo told our group that society puts too much emphasis on the nature of a person who commits evil and not enough on the situations that breed evil acts. He talked about the ways in which good people are seduced into evil, something he has spent a career studying:
Start with beliefs that justify your actions. Have permission to engage in usually taboo acts. Escalate gradually. Displace responsibility and undercut dissent. Suppress individuality by having people wear uniforms, for instance.
That sounds to me like the definition of a military prison in Iraq. Those in the upper ranks, even if they didn't know about the specific abuses, are responsible for not having taken action to prevent them in the first place.
Lynndie R. England, a female soldier featured prominently in many of the abuse photos, claims that her superior officers ordered her to pose. That is probably true, and her superiors were probably also affected by the situation. Certainly England's lack of visible remorse speaks to the fact that she had been desensitized to the horror of her actions. However, neither orders from her superiors nor a brain-washing situation is an excuse for the abuses that she and her comrades committed.
mademoiselle a. says:
I went through the article; I think it's a well written one, thank you for the link. However, I like that the writer does not come up with the ever-old comparison to Nazi Germany, but rather makes a point to colonial behaviour. This hits the point for various reasons.
What shocks me personally is to find that the instinct of gaining power over another human is still attempted to achieve via trophies. Be it the pictures of Abu Ghraib, be it the cut-off ear souvenirs from Vietnam, skalps, a chopped-off hand...this goes far back in history, through all centuries and continents, and it's still there; here, right among us in our oh so civilised world. We [read: humans]haven't really changed, and this is the depressing insight that should be drawn of this occupation.
No offence, just my thoughts...
Laurabelle says:
You're right that Nazi Germany is used too much in comparisons, and colonialism is more apt. I just think first of Nazi Germany because I've studied too much 20th century German history and because the Holocaust is held up so much as the atrocity that must never happen again. Abu Ghraib is nowhere near the horror that the Holocaust was, but it's a step on a very slippery slope.
No offense taken, of course. This is simply one of the reasons why I'm a librarian and not a writer for the Washington Post. ;-)
Stephen says:
If the soldiers were under orders, I think perhaps the Milgram Experiment-- obedience of authority rather than morality-- may be more applicable.
Jim says:
The premise of the article reminds me of an incident that occurred when I was working with "retarded" adults. (That label was often a cause of their difficulties, rather than a result, but it's not what I want to discuss right now.)
Two individuals -- I'll call them Anne and George, which may or may not be their names -- were in fairly continual conflict, though it mostly took the form of arguing and rarely came to blows. One day Anne came to me and said, "George hit me!"
Suspecting that she might have done something to provoke him, I asked, "Anne, what did you do just before George hit you?" She replied, "George hit me!" I repeated, "Yes, but what were you doing just before he hit you?" "He hit me!"
This went on for several minutes, with me rephrasing the question several ways and her responses seeming to indicate not so much that she didn't understand the question, but that she didn't even hear it. Then I had a bright idea: "Anne, what was Anne doing just before George hit you?" And she told me. And it was indeed provocative.
What do I think I learned from this? Anne knew that what she had done was wrong, but was unable to identify herself with doing something wrong. Her mind's answer to the contradiction was not to experience conflict, but to be unable to perceive it. The content of my questions had not been disturbing to her; it didn't even exist. But when I put the question in the third person, she could somehow divorce "Anne" from "I", and had no difficulty describing inappropriate behavior by "someone else" (though I'm sure she didn't think of it in those explicit terms).
One more thing I learned from working with these folks: Though officially "retarded" (IQ below 60), their social and emotional behavior was not different from that of "normal" people I've worked with; the only real difference was that they weren't as clever at hiding their attempts at manipulation. And that's why I think this incident is relevant to the Philip Kennicott article. Our IQ's may be higher, but I wonder if we aren't a nation of Annes.