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March 5 - March 8, 2022
Social distance is generally fading as a form of killing enabling in Western war. But even as it disappears in this more egalitarian age, it is being replaced by a new, technologically based form of psychological distance.
Night-vision devices provide a superb form of psychological distance by converting the target into an inhuman green blob.
Now, in many cases, the battlefield appears to every soldier as it did to Gad, an Israeli tank gunner who told Holmes that “you see it all as if it were happening on a TV screen…. It occurred to me at the time; I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don’t see people, that’s one good thing about it.”
Given an opportunity to kill and time to think about it, a soldier in combat becomes very much like a killer in a classical murder mystery, assessing his “means, motive, and opportunity.”
it, “You want to make damn sure you don’t get your own ass shot off while you are hosing the enemy.”
We have seen before that when the enemy is fleeing or has his back turned, he is far more likely to be killed. One reason for this is that in doing so he has provided both means and opportunity for his opponent to kill without endangering himself.
It is not very profound to observe that in choosing from a group of enemy targets to kill, a soldier is more likely to kill the one that represents the greatest gain to him and the greatest loss to the enemy.
One consistent tendency is to elect to shoot leaders and officers.
Throughout military history the leaders and the flag bearers were selected as targets for enemy weapons, since these would represent the highest payoff
Oftentimes the criteria for deciding whom to kill are dictated by deciding who is manning the most dangerous weapon.
During the French Dahomey expedition in 1892, hardened French foreign legionnaires faced a bizarre army of female warriors, and Holmes notes that many of these tough veterans “experienced a few seconds’ hesitation about shooting or bayoneting a half-naked Amazon [and] their delay had fatal results.”
When Barbary apes wish to approach a senior male, they borrow a young animal which they carry, in order to inhibit the senior’s aggression.
A British infantryman watched Germans emerging from a dugout to surrender in WWI: “they were holding up photographs of their families and offering watches and other valuables in an attempt to gain mercy.”
Modern training uses what are essentially B. F. Skinner’s operant conditioning techniques to develop a firing behavior in the soldier.[4]
Several independent studies indicate that this powerful conditioning process has dramatically increased the firing rate of American soldiers since World War II.
The British, who had been trained by modern methods, had not seen any such thing in their soldiers, but they had definitely observed it in the Argentineans, who had received World War II-style training and whose only effective fire had come from machine guns and snipers.[5]
The effectiveness of modern conditioning techniques that enable killing in combat is irrefutable, and their impact on the modern battlefield is enormous.
The recent loss of friends and beloved leaders in combat can also enable violence on the battlefield.
And it is these ordinary men, who do not like combat at all, that armies must persuade to kill. Until only a generation ago, they did not even realize how bad a job they were doing. —Gwynne Dyer War
Swank and Marchand’s World War II study noted the existence of 2 percent of combat soldiers who are predisposed to be “aggressive psychopaths” and apparently do not experience the normal resistance to killing and the resultant psychiatric casualties associated with extended periods of combat.
The presence of aggression, combined with the absence of empathy, results in sociopathy.
“I learned early on in life that there are people out there who will hurt you if given the chance, and I have devoted my life to being prepared to face them.”
These men are quite often armed and always vigilant. They would not misuse or misdirect their aggression any more than a sheepdog would turn on his flock, but in their hearts many of them yearn for a righteous battle, a wolf upon whom to legitimately and lawfully turn their skills.
We aspire to be defeated in battles by powers so much greater than our-self, that the defeat itself will have made us larger than when we arrived.
Whether called sociopaths, sheepdogs, warriors, or heroes, they are there, they are a distinct minority, and in times of danger a nation needs them desperately.
Without the creation of abstract images of the enemy, and without the depersonalization of the enemy during training, battle would become impossible to sustain.
You put those same kids in the jungle for a while, get them real scared, deprive them of sleep, and let a few incidents change some of their fears to hate. Give them a sergeant who has seen too many of his men killed by booby traps and by lack of distrust, and who feels that Vietnamese are dumb, dirty, and weak, because they are not like him. Add a little mob pressure, and those nice kids who accompany us today would rape like champions. Kill, rape and steal is the name of the game.[10]
life. Indeed, the obedience-demanding religious leader may represent the only form of authority (outside of the family) that has ever existed in the killer’s life. This religious leader may not be immediately proximate during the actual killing, but in the spiritual realm that the killer believes to await him after the crime, the religious aspect is all-important.
In summary, most of the factors that enable killing on the battlefield can be seen in the diffusion of responsibility that exists in an execution by firing squad.
The leader gives the command and provides the demands of authority, but he does not have to actually kill. The firing squad provides conformity and absolution processes. Blindfolding the victim provides psychological distance. And the knowledge of the victim’s guilt provides relevance and rationalization.
The research outlined in this book has permitted us to understand that, although the mechanism of the firing squad ensures killing, the psychological toll on the members of a firing squad can be tremendous. In the same way, society must now begin to understand the enormity of the price and process of killing in combat. Once they do, killing may never be the same again.
The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder. —Glenn Gray The Warriors
And thus the soldier is able to further rationalize his kill by honoring his fallen foes, thereby gaining stature and peace by virtue of the nobility of those he has slain.
Once again, we see killing in modern warfare, in an age of guerrillas and terrorists, as increasingly moving from black and white to shades of gray. And as we continue down the atrocity spectrum, we will see a steady fade to black.
A man cannot change his feelings again during the last rush with a veil of blood before his eyes. He does not want to take prisoners but to kill.”
…No soldier who fights until his enemy is at close small-arms range, in any war, has more than perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of being granted quarter. If he stands up to surrender he risks being shot with the time-honoured comment, ‘Too late, chum.’ If he lies low, he will fall victim to the grenades of the mopping-up party, in no mood to take chances.
“The last thing you ought to know is that if I ever catch any of you heroes killing a POW, I’ll shoot you right on the spot. Because it’s illegal, because it’s wrong, because it’s dumb, and it’s one of the worst things you could do to help us win a war.”
On the next battlefield our soldiers may commit war crimes and thereby cause us to lose one of the basic combat multipliers that we have available to us: the tendency of an oppressed people to become disloyal to their nation.
One interviewer of World War II POWs told me that German soldiers repeatedly told him that relatives with World War I combat experience had advised, “Be brave, join the infantry, and surrender to the first American you see.” The American reputation for fair play and respect for human life had survived over generations,
War…has no power to transform, it merely exaggerates the good and evil that are in us. —Lord Moran Anatomy of Courage
Nations celebrate their costliest battles, even losing ones—the Alamo, Pickett’s Charge, Dunkerque, Wake Island, and Leningrad are examples—due to the bravery and nobility of the sacrifices involved.
There are many benefits reaped by those who tap the dark power of atrocity. Those who engage in a policy of atrocity usually strike a bargain that exchanges their future for a brief gain in the present. Though brief, that gain is nonetheless real and powerful. In order to understand the attraction of atrocity, we must understand and clearly acknowledge those benefits that cause individuals, groups, and nations to turn to it.
One of the most obvious and blatant benefits of atrocity is that it quite simply scares the hell out of people.
Any study of the atrocity list of recent years…shows immediately that the victims, by their appalling ineptitude and timidity, virtually assisted in their own murders….
North Vietnam and its Vietcong proxies represent one force that blatantly used atrocity as a policy and was triumphant because of it.
But while the United States was fruitlessly bombing the North, the North was efficiently murdering the infrastructure of the South, one by one in their beds and homes.
The Mongols were able to make entire nations submit without a fight just on the basis of their reputation for exterminating whole cities and nations that had resisted them in the past.
Nicolae Ceauşescu’s state police in Romania and Hitler’s SS units are two examples of units bonded to their leaders by atrocity.
By ensuring that their men participate in atrocities, totalitarian leaders can also ensure that for these minions there is no possibility of reconciliation with the enemy.
In the absence of a legitimate threat, leaders (be they national leaders or gang leaders) may designate a scapegoat whose defilement and innocent blood empowers the killers and bonds them to their leaders. Traditionally, high-visibility weak groups and minorities—such as Jews and blacks—have filled this role.
