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The New Transparency of War and Lethality of Hatred
Hugh Pickens writes "Robert Wright says that if you had asked him a few days ago — before news broke that American soldiers had urinated on Taliban corpses — if such a thing were possible, he would have said 'probably.' After all if you send 'young people into combat, people whose job is to kill the enemy and who watch as their friends are killed and maimed by the enemy, ... the chances are that signs of disrespect for the enemy will surface — and that every once in a while those signs will assume grotesque form.' War, presumably, has always been like this, but something has changed that amounts to a powerful new argument against starting wars in the first place. First, there's the new transparency of war as battlefield details get recorded, and everyone has the tools to broadcast these details, so 'it's just a matter of time before some outrageous image goes viral — pictures from Abu Ghraib, video from Afghanistan,' that will make you and your soldiers more hated by the enemy than ever. The second big change is that hatred is now a more dangerous thing. 'New information technologies make it easier for people who share a hatred to organize around it,' writes Wright. 'And once hateful groups are organized, they stand a better chance than a few decades ago of getting their hands on massively lethal technologies.' It used to be that national security consisted of making sure all foreign governments either liked you or feared you; now it requires that as few people as possible hate you. 'I think we should reflect on that before we start another war.'"
Please be sarcasm...
No, the problem is our enemies do not fear us.
So we're supposed to terrorize our enemies... Who are we? Al Qaeda?
Fear and hatred are not mutually exclusive. I'm sure that the Taliban rank and file have jolts of pure fear when they see an American patrol (and vice versa). They can well hate us for various reasons, including instilling the fear in the first place.
War is a horrible mix of the best and worst in human kind. Be nice if we could figure out how to get around it, but I rather doubt that's going to happen short of some uber powerful alien race coming down and telling us to grow up.
But the big flap over urinating over the Taliban corpses is just that - a flap. I think it just reflects on the total inanity of the general media these days. You don't want to talk about big, complex issues so you make little stupid things go nuclear.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
US Marines routinely sent home Japanese skulls (they were photographed in LIFE). Someone sent Roosevelt a cigarette holder made from a Japanese femur. The Russians did crazy, unspeakable things to civilians on a large scale in Prussia and the Nazis were more than happy (desperate) to tell the world through even representatives of the Allied press.
And, oh yeah, the Nazis... no real need to go there.
And why stop with WWII? Vlad Dracul (yeah, that guy) made damn sure everyone knew why he was called "Vlad the Impaler" and he didn't even have a Facebook account.
So, in short, no, nothing new here.
People today seem to think that this is something new. The only "new" in all of this is the instantaneous aspect of transmitting information. These types of acts have been perpetrated in other wars since man picked up his first sticks and stones. To be amazed that this actual happened is nothing more than the true disconnect that people; in general, have with reality as a whole.
Dehumanization of the enemy explains a lot of the behavior. Normally it would have just happened and few people would know about it. They would know it happens, but not the details of every case. Technology changed that of course.
When one side fights with morals and the other doesn't, that's the problem. Urinating on someone who is dead and won't care is a big outrage, but only due to respect for the dead, even if it's your enemy. Beheading and dragging corpses through the street behind cars seems to be the way things work on the other side.
Technology allows us to share both sides with equality. Having a higher standard puts that side at a big disadvantage. If the US said it would drag corpses thrugh the street in victory and do all kinds of legal but humiliating things to you if you are caught or killed, the enemy would individually fear, not collectively. And individual fear is a lot harder to overcome. I don't want my body desecrated, I'm not joining your war unless I have to, and even then I'll do a half-hearted job.
Either play nice, or play dirty, but don't expect your enemy to do the same. And when you make a promise like 'no torture', either stick by it or throw it out the window. The worst propaganda you can have is a country that says one thing and does another (collectively). At least the jihadis are consistent. They have completely dehumanized the enemy, and do not seem concerned with the same things.
Unfortunately it does work. Pick up Unbroken, a story about a downed WWII flyer who, amongst other fairly horrid episodes, got interred in a Japanese POW camp. He remained there till the end of the war and describes leaving the camp. The area had been carpet bombed previously (and hit with the atomic bomb). The civilian population - which previously had been ready to sacrifice themselves when the Allies invaded were basically shocked into submission.
Don't make the mistake of conflating how we persecute 'war' these days with all out and out military aggression which has not been seen on a large scale since WWII. We would have won in Vietnam, would win in Iraq and Afghanistan if we did that (and likely be set up for war crimes). War is really ugly business. We're just playing at low level conflicts for now. (Not that it makes it morally or politically correct). Hopefully we won't get there again, but with humans being the ugly little monsters we are, I wouldn't bet on it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's so much worse than living in an area where explosive amputations aren't a strange occurrence, or where having the front of your head blown through the back of your head is a potential outcome of both supporting the local warlord and not supporting him.
Come the fuck on people. Its war. This is just like that Abu Ghraib bullshit. People die horribly all the time in these areas, and yet for some reason the thing that always outrages the moral cowards at home is when someone is humiliated. Its like the civilized mind cannot comprehend the atrocities of war, so they focus in on the level of wrong that they can identify with.
R Kelly never used a orphan as a human bomb, blew the legs off of another rapper, then had to watch him drag his intestines behind him while he bled out. But that fucker did pee on someone. Peeing on someone we can be outraged about. Peeing on someone we can understand.
You know what those guys who got peed on would really be upset about? Getting killed.
Al Qaeda attacked us because we stood in the way of resurrecting the caliphate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caliphate#Views_of_al-Qaeda
The error is with people who see something like Al Qaeda and only see a reflection of what the West does. This is an incredibly blind and egocentric way to think about the world and what motivates people outside the West. Hate does not need a valid premise to exist. Hate is its own creation, and not anyone else's fault except the person filled with hate.
If all of the USA and Europe disappeared into the ocean tomorrow, Al Qaeda would not celebrate and become pastoral goat herders, content their work was done. Because their work has just started. They would go right on with their murderous rampage, killing innocents, as they already have. Until they get their caliphate back.
Incidentally, the greatest number of victims of Al Qaeda are Muslims, not Westerners, by orders if magnitude. We in the West only see glimmers of a much greater struggle going on in the Middle East. And yet, in the blind egocentrism of so many in the West, such as you see in some comments here, and in the story summary, you think the struggle is all about the West! Why this colossal egocentric blindness?
This obnoxious ignorant egocentrism that can only understand and think about Al Qaeda in terms of motivations and interests that only center upon what the West does is a failure of analysis. As if Al Qaeda were born of Western actions and only exists as a reflection of Western actions. If you believe that, if you cannot think about Al Qaeda as its own entity, devoid of anything having to do with the West, you lack the cognitive abilities to comment intelligently on the subject.
You cannot stop the creation and continued existence of something like Al Qaeda by modifying your own actions or correcting past mistakes. Because its not about you. Because something like Al Qaeda will always exist, hate requires any premise, real or imagined, to justify what it does in transgression of simple human decency. And so you must fight something like Al Qaeda, not placate it. That is a fool's errand that does understand how hate works psychologically.
Al Qaeda is its own creation, inspired by its own beliefs, that would still exist no matter what the USA or the West ever did. If you don't understand that, stop talking about Al Qaeda, you don't understand it.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The family of my best friend as a teenager came from Germany in the immediate post-war years. I remember one time, quite out of the blue, his grandfather (who had been a young man during the war) came up to and told us "If you ever hear a German tell you that we did not know what the Nazis were doing, he is lying." (these were his exact words). He went on to tell us how families would disappear, many Jewish but also others as well, and that while no one could be quite sure where they were taken, everyone knew that it was to their dooms.
It still stands as one of the most profoundly disturbing experiences of my life, to have this old man so brutally and honestly reveal a truth to me in such a fashion, to brush away all the standard excuses that German's of the wartime generation invoked to get out of any sense of responsibility for what had happened. To this day I actually have no idea why the old man came up to my friend and I, but he permanently altered my view of humanity, and how easy it is to rationalize any action, and even in many cases inaction. Europeans from Paris to Danzig stood by and let their countrymen be marched off to their deaths, and while there were heroes here and there (just as there were collaborators), all in all they just stood there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In the first century BC, Mithradates and his allies killed every single Roman citizen in Anatolia within a month's time. Historical estimates offer that somewhere between 80,000 and 150,000 Romans were killed across the Aegaen islands and Anatolia. This happened in a world without the Internet, without mass media, without high tech weapons, without gunpowder.
Mithradates and his lieutenants were able to spread hatred of Rome entirely through word of mouth. They were able to coordinate their slaughter without the Internet. They were able to kills tens, if not hundreds of thousands, in practically the blink of an eye.
It doesn't seem to me that much has changed with regards human capacity to spread hatred.
Oh Enlightened One:
Do you really feel that creating a utopian society that consists of "Social Security and Medicare for all" is what will stop angry teenagers from pulling Columbine on a biological warfare scale? I don't think that 17 year olds give a flip about entitlement programs, per se, and care much more about bullying and social issues that face teenagers, so this is just static.
For those who are geopolitically motivated, this theory of "if everyone had the same basic stuff nobody would be pissed off anymore" is a failed experiment called Communism. You can look to Europe where everyone has free healthcare and basic rights and see how well that's working out. It's a wonderful thought, that probably won't create the desired utopia and probably has very little to do with why people might be inclined to violence around the world.
As for the notion that simmers below the surface of many liberal elitist postings that if somehow the USA just stopped meddling in world affairs the rest of the world would stop menacing and grow more peaceful and harmonious... That is so naive it's hard to even want to debate the point. I firmly believe that most people are generally well intentioned and good natured. It's the ones that are evil that we need to worry about, and there are plenty of them all around the world. They will and they do rise to positions of power where they can and will spread tyrrany, bloodshed, and misery with our without our intervention. We can debate the merits of individual conflicts or our nature as Superpower where we feel we need to confront these ills directly, but it does not change the fact that there are a large number of very bad folks running governments that left unchecked will grow far more powerful and do far worse things worldwide.
The notion that we can contain those problems to a region by leaving the Middle East for example is just naive. Iran has tentacles into South America, and those forces can freely flow right up into the States through the nonexistant southern border we are so afraid to police. I think very well intentioned people like yourself(I do believe you mean well) have ideas which have very bad consequences. I love this part of your thinking:
"The Foresight Institute also has some good thinking on this in the past, in terms of empowering everyone to deal with emerging threats. It's like the playing fields has totally changed, but the USA still is still preparing to win at Major League baseball when everyone else is now playing pickup games of soccer everywhere."
Right - empowering everyone. Like who, exactly? China and Russia? They directly oppose any effort to reel in other dictators or bad actors on the world stage, especially if they think the USA might have to go it alone at our expense. China and Russia have never met another dictator they didn't like. Europe? Europe comes through here and there with half-hearted sanctions and nasty letters, but doesn't really ever back a verbal threat with the credible threat of action. The bad guys of the world today really feel little risk in terms of repercussions for acting out, and this is why so many are acting out. Empowering everyone is more or less what the UN tried to do, and that organization doesn't fix anything they get their corrupt hands into. Maybe I'm missing your point and there is something of a different approach here, but I think when much of the world would rather let us take the damage for them, we're on our own whether we like it or not.
It definitely seems from reading a lot of comments from otherwise clearly bright people that the naivety is running strong. I prefer to see the world as it is and work with that than dream of the world that isn't and pretend it will be that way if we all hold hands and sing.
and Muslims are supposed to be better than dragging burned mutilated corpses through streets. Just pointing out that your point B is irrelevant since America is as much represented by these soldiers as the Muslim population is represented by that mob in Fallujah.
Are you seriously suggesting that the US Marine Corps doesn't represent the US? Maybe you think they just happen to be over there on vacation, but I'm pretty sure they were sent, armed, paid by the the US government. They are acting on the authority of the United States of America, and as such everything they do, good or bad, reflects on the integrity and honor of the United States, and the Corps as well. If this was some group of jackoff civilians in Detroit you might have some kind of point, but when it comes to soldiers, you don't.
It's war. We tell our soldiers they are fighting for the survival of our country, or way of life. Go put a bullet through your enemies, head, the stomach, their back. Empty your clip. If they engage at close range, put a knife through their eye. Disembowel them. Waterboard the if you need information. Throw a grenade between them and blow them to bits. Push their bodies into a ravine so they won't be see along the trail. Piss on them, wait, no, definitely don't do that. This is morally wrong!! Once you kill them, leave them there to rot. This is the right thing to do.
BULLSHIT.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
The US is the biggest terrorist in the world you don't kill hundred of thousands of Japanese even after they tried to surrender and call your self the army of rightness.
When did that happen? As I recall, after ther first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the emperor of Japan brought together his cabinet to decide whether to continue fighting or surrender. The result was a 3 to 3 split. And this was AFTER the first atomic bomb. Once the emperor of Japan decided to surrender, several members of his cabinet seriously considered a coup so that they could continue fighting. At least if you're going to attack the US, get your facts straight. It's awfully hard not to be the bad guy when you are operating on fictional versions of history.