From: Mark Steven Heyman (markheyman@infoproconsulting.com)
Date: Thu Jun 03 2004 - 17:09:53 BST
On 3 Jun 2004 at 11:50, David Robjant wrote:
MSH:
> This was not an argument against war; just a statement of
> fact about war. What I was hoping to convey is that there is no
> reason to believe that combatants on any side are excluded from
> engaging in psychopathic behavior. When people from one country
> believe that THEIR soldiers are above this, it is a result of being
> TOLD so their entire lives, not from any historical analysis.
There seems to be something right about what you are saying here.
You are right about the dangers of blinding patriotism, I'm sure.
But aren't you overstating it a bit? Isn't there atleast *some*
historical analysis to support the idea that certain armies behave
more psychopathically, as a rule, than others? I guess the
Republican Guard wouldn't get good marks for behaviour, judging from
those mass graves.
msh says:
I'm pretty sure you don't want to reduce barbarism to body counts.
If so, the end of WWII (some say the first shots of the Cold War)
produces some interesting ideas.
As for the Republican guard, they were murderous, you're right.
What's interesting is that you know all about them, but not,
apparently, about some other activity of the misnamed Gulf War,
(misnamed if your concept of war involves two more or less equally
powerful enemies in combat).
Since "Deterring Democracy" is on the table, here's a quote from the
Afterward of the fifth printing, 1993:
"The second component of the attack was the slaughter of Iraqi
soldiers in the desert, largely unwilling Shi'ite and Kurdish
conscripts it appears, hiding in holes in the sand or fleeing for
their lives -- a picture remote from the disinformation relayed by
the press about colossal fortifications, artillery powerful beyond
our imagining, vast stocks of chemical and biological weapons at the
ready, and so on. Pentagon and other sources give estimates in the
range of 100,000 defenseless victims killed. "This is not war; it is
simply massacre and murderous butchery," to use the words of a
British observer of the US conquest of the Philippines at the turn of
the century, The desert slaughter was a "turkey shoot," as some US
forces described it, borrowing the term used by their forebears
butchering Filipinos4 -- one of those deeply-rooted themes of the
culture that surface at appropriate moments, as if by reflex.
"Months later, US Army officials revealed what the Pentagon expected:
not war, but slaughter. The ground attack began with plows mounted on
tanks and earthmovers to bulldoze live Iraqi soldiers into trenches
in the desert, an "unprecedented tactic" that was "hidden from public
view," Patrick Sloyan reported. The commander of one of the three
Brigades involved said that thousands of Iraqis might have been
killed; the other commanders refused estimates. "Not a single
American was killed during the attack that made an Iraqi body count
impossible," Sloyan continues. The report elicited little interest or
comment. Nor did the "murderous butchery" generally.5 "
msh says:
You might want to take a look. It's pretty convincing
Thanks,
Mark Steven Heyman (msh)
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