When my friend Lynn was in college, a history professor assigned her to research the Holocaust by reading microfilms of American newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Although many people claimed to have been shocked to discover in the spring of 1945 that Nazi Germany had sent the bulk of Europe’s Jews into a system of slave labor and death camps, Lynn found a good deal of the story had been reported in the American press – a piece here and a piece there over the course of years. Perhaps it was the fault of newspaper editors, that none of them gave a reporter time to put all the pieces together in a comprehensive whole, perhaps the problem was human nature, no one wanted to look beyond a limited, occasional report to learn the whole, horrible truth.
An anthropologist might argue that it is human nature to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths, that there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. In 1991, journalists Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman traveled to East Timor to report on the oppression of the Timorese by Indonesia. They were looking for trouble and they found it, getting caught in the middle of a massacre of Timorese civilians by Indonesian troops. Mr. Nairn reports that as this awful event unfolded around him, his mind refused to accept the evidence of his senses. At first he thought the soldiers were just trying to intimidate the crowd when they raised their rifles. Even as they started firing, Mr. Nairn’s mind told him they must be shooting blanks – surely no one would shoot unarmed civilians. The people falling to the ground must be frightened or hysterical, he thought. Only when he saw blood pouring from bodies would Mr. Nairn’s mind finally accept the fact that people were being murdered before his eyes.
If it’s that hard for a journalist predisposed to suspect soldiers to accept an atrocity playing out before his eyes, what chance does the average citizen have, sitting home behind multiple McLuhanesque filters, subjected to repeated cycles of political spin and the “Friends” finale there for distraction?
If it is human nature to disbelieve those things we find disagreeable, then what are we to make of the current state of affairs in Iraq? We have been presented with photographic evidence of torture of Iraqi prisoners in the jail at Abu Ghraib. The photos are shocking not only for the humiliating and degrading treatment to which the prisoners were subjected, but also for the asinine grins of approval plastered on the faces of the American soldiers who were supposed to be “in charge.” The shock registering across the Arab world in response to these images is formidable. These are not prisoners of war, but civilians and from an extraordinarily modest society. Imagine an occupying army from half a world away coming to your town and seizing a group of middle-aged church deacons, stripping them naked and forcing them to simulate sex acts for cameras while the foreign soldiers leered like idiots. Imagine what you would want to do to those occupying soldiers in your town. Officials from the White House say the guilty soldiers from Abu Ghraib will pay for their misdeeds, but they won’t. Their fellow soldiers will pay for those misdeeds, because those pictures will recruit thousands of young men, eager to make war on America.
Do not be fooled. This is not an isolated, unrepresentative incident, caused by a few renegade military police. The soldiers accused of perpetrating the abuses say they were ordered to “prepare the prisoners for interrogation” by military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. (Again the Bush administration’s civilian contractors.) Whether or not the abuse was ordered by the command structure, it is true that illegal practices are rampant and condoned, even ordered, in American military prisons. The U.S. military is holding civilians in prison for months, with no charges brought against them. It’s not photogenic, but it is a direct violation of the fourth Geneva Convention. The operation of these prisons is also in violation of U.S. Army regulations, which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has tossed aside. The Iraqi and Afghanistan prisons and the illegal prison the Pentagon has been running for over two years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba mean Mr. Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush are war criminals. It may be unpopular, unpalatable and the majority of Americans may find it hard to believe, but it’s true just the same.
Hard to Believe
When my friend Lynn was in college, a history professor assigned her to research the Holocaust by reading microfilms of American newspapers from the 1930s and 40s. Although many people claimed to have been shocked to discover in the spring of 1945 that Nazi Germany had sent the bulk of Europe’s Jews into a system of slave labor and death camps, Lynn found a good deal of the story had been reported in the American press – a piece here and a piece there over the course of years. Perhaps it was the fault of newspaper editors, that none of them gave a reporter time to put all the pieces together in a comprehensive whole, perhaps the problem was human nature, no one wanted to look beyond a limited, occasional report to learn the whole, horrible truth.
An anthropologist might argue that it is human nature to shield ourselves from uncomfortable truths, that there is an evolutionary advantage to doing so. In 1991, journalists Allan Nairn and Amy Goodman traveled to East Timor to report on the oppression of the Timorese by Indonesia. They were looking for trouble and they found it, getting caught in the middle of a massacre of Timorese civilians by Indonesian troops. Mr. Nairn reports that as this awful event unfolded around him, his mind refused to accept the evidence of his senses. At first he thought the soldiers were just trying to intimidate the crowd when they raised their rifles. Even as they started firing, Mr. Nairn’s mind told him they must be shooting blanks – surely no one would shoot unarmed civilians. The people falling to the ground must be frightened or hysterical, he thought. Only when he saw blood pouring from bodies would Mr. Nairn’s mind finally accept the fact that people were being murdered before his eyes.
If it’s that hard for a journalist predisposed to suspect soldiers to accept an atrocity playing out before his eyes, what chance does the average citizen have, sitting home behind multiple McLuhanesque filters, subjected to repeated cycles of political spin and the “Friends” finale there for distraction?
If it is human nature to disbelieve those things we find disagreeable, then what are we to make of the current state of affairs in Iraq? We have been presented with photographic evidence of torture of Iraqi prisoners in the jail at Abu Ghraib. The photos are shocking not only for the humiliating and degrading treatment to which the prisoners were subjected, but also for the asinine grins of approval plastered on the faces of the American soldiers who were supposed to be “in charge.” The shock registering across the Arab world in response to these images is formidable. These are not prisoners of war, but civilians and from an extraordinarily modest society. Imagine an occupying army from half a world away coming to your town and seizing a group of middle-aged church deacons, stripping them naked and forcing them to simulate sex acts for cameras while the foreign soldiers leered like idiots. Imagine what you would want to do to those occupying soldiers in your town. Officials from the White House say the guilty soldiers from Abu Ghraib will pay for their misdeeds, but they won’t. Their fellow soldiers will pay for those misdeeds, because those pictures will recruit thousands of young men, eager to make war on America.
Do not be fooled. This is not an isolated, unrepresentative incident, caused by a few renegade military police. The soldiers accused of perpetrating the abuses say they were ordered to “prepare the prisoners for interrogation” by military intelligence officers and civilian contractors. (Again the Bush administration’s civilian contractors.) Whether or not the abuse was ordered by the command structure, it is true that illegal practices are rampant and condoned, even ordered, in American military prisons. The U.S. military is holding civilians in prison for months, with no charges brought against them. It’s not photogenic, but it is a direct violation of the fourth Geneva Convention. The operation of these prisons is also in violation of U.S. Army regulations, which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has tossed aside. The Iraqi and Afghanistan prisons and the illegal prison the Pentagon has been running for over two years at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba mean Mr. Rumsfeld and President George W. Bush are war criminals. It may be unpopular, unpalatable and the majority of Americans may find it hard to believe, but it’s true just the same.
(c) Mark Floegel, 2004