SCAPEGOATS AND OTHER MATTERS

[Stanley]

SCAPEGOATS AND OTHER MATTERS

15 June 2004

I listened to General Janis Karpinski being interviewed by John Humphries this morning on Radio 4 in the series ‘On the Ropes’. Whilst I am certain that a woman who has managed to reach the rank of brigadier general in possibly the most macho section of the US Army, the Military Police, is no patsy or shrinking violet, I was impressed by the way she told her side of the story and more importantly, that she has spoken out whilst being suspended from duties. This is a very high risk strategy and I think she is relying on the fact that the truth will out in the imminent courts martial of the ‘perpetrators’ of inhumane treatment of prisoners in Iraqi gaols. Time will tell whether this touchingly simple faith in the US justice system will be proved to be correct.
I am well aware that it is very seductive to read or listen to testimony that reinforces ones own opinions (or prejudices) but even allowing for this, there is the ring of truth about what she says. Nobody who knows me will be surprised to hear that this triggered off a train of thought which addressed the concerns I have had for a long while about the present day military ethos.
Like many Old Farts my experience of the military derives from service 50 years ago. Whilst I will not pretend that I enjoyed it at the time I am now quite sure that being exposed to the particular brand of military discipline that was current then was, on the whole, very good for me. The basic principle was that they took a young lad in, liquidised him, and then poured him into their preferred shape of mould. I think the critical thing about this process was that our trainers were either veterans who had served in the war or their immediate protégés. Therefore the precepts that they were instilling in us were the ones that they knew worked best from combat experience. In the context of the time, it was a thoroughly practical training.
During the whole of this training process and my subsequent two years National Service I never came across a single instance of institutionalised bullying or inhumane behaviour. What was noticeable was that any suggestion of what is now known as macho behaviour was most likely to come from the insecure men who were trying to compensate. The really hard men, and by definition the ones I would most willingly share a foxhole with, were the most reasonable and gentle, they had nothing to prove.
Not long ago I heard a senior British Army officer commenting that if the same training regime that was used in the 1950s was applied today, half the recruits would be over the wall and doing a runner in the first two weeks. His thesis was that civilian life was so soft that it had influenced the quality of the raw material, the young men they took in as recruits, many of them addicted to violent computer games.
Switch to Northfield. Minnesota two years ago. I was staying there as usual with my friends at Carleton College and one day on Public Radio (the equivalent of our Radio 4 I suppose) I heard a news item about a football coach in the Twin Cities who had been so successful in instilling aggressive instincts in the team he was training that whilst psyching them up for the first game of the season they went berserk and hospitalised him for three weeks!
Switch again to the strange goings on at Deepcut Barracks in the UK where there is little doubt that something has gone very badly wrong and the Army and Government seem to be unable to reach any explanation which satisfies the parents of the soldiers (both men and women) who have died there from ‘suicide’. Like the parents I find it hard to understand how anyone can commit suicide by shooting themselves twice in the head. There are many other inconsistencies but let’s not get sidetracked into these. The bottom line is that there seems to have been an undercurrent of bullying and violent behaviour inside the camp.
Then we have the problem that has emerged of unacceptable behaviour towards prisoners in both US and British gaols connected with the aggression in Iraq. I deliberately leave the actual locations vague because I am convinced that the gaols which General Karpinski was responsible for were not the only places where such tactics are being employed to extract information.
We can be reasonably sure that 'RtoI' (Resistance to Interrogation) techniques are well understood and have been taught to certain sections of the security and military forces in both the US and the UK for many years. It also seems reasonable to believe that the reports that have half surfaced about these military orders (for that is what they are) suggest that they have been revised and possibly made more harsh under the general umbrella of ‘The War Against Terrorism’. God knows we in the UK not innocent in these matters, there were some very murky things done in Northern Ireland which will never see the light of day, shades of the Black and Tans, this is nothing new. The question in my mind is that when we look at the reports of inhumanity in Iraq where does the blame lie?
Switch again to another flashback, the Nuremberg Trials after WW2. The defence of ‘I was only obeying orders’ was not accepted then and neither should it be now. The difference in 1946 was that the people who formulated the policies and gave the orders stood trial.
My reading of these current matters is that there were deliberately inhumane policies, that they came from the very top of both administrations and that they could be accepted on the ground because of the training regime that recruits, and therefore the guards in the prisons, had been exposed to. It is an ethos that one can see and identify clearly in all aspects of modern life from popular fiction and films, through computer games, and even in the language used in sports commentaries. Masculinity and prowess is seen as the ability to channel aggression, the problem is that like any other destructive force, once unleashed it can become uncontrollable. We saw this in WW2 and subsequent conflicts where the darkest sides of human nature were utilised as tools for conquest and repression. I see no difference in these terms between the football coach in Minneapolis being beaten up by his team and these inhumanities, it is only a matter of degree and codification. Once Pandora’s Box is opened we lose control and the moral high ground, in the end civilisation is the loser.
I don’t think there is any quick answer to this problem beyond a slow painful struggle back up the hill to a higher standard of ethics. As to how this regaining of morality in our institutions can be obtained, I think it is a matter of constant pressure from liberal opinion. Not very exciting and certainly very slow, but that was how we achieved civilisation in the first place. Perhaps one of the places it starts is by Old Farts like me wasting my time writing naïve occasional papers at the kitchen table.
To return to the present problem. If our masters in government think that the revelations of inhumane treatment in the name of the ‘war’ against ‘terrorism’ will go away with a few sacrificial goats, they are mistaken. Whatever the ‘war’ is that we are fighting, it can only be ‘won’ by light and humanity. Failure to realise this will ensure even more troubles in the future. It may be that the ‘war’ is with ourselves, or rather with our deepest and darkest animal instincts.

15 June 2004