What The Gruesome
Images Say
By John Chuckman
04 October, 2005
Countercurrents.org
There
is an Internet
site that displays extraordinarily gruesome photographs taken
by American soldiers in Iraq. Apparently, the owner of the site exchanges
access to pornography for soldiers sending him their war pictures.
Digital cameras
and the Internet are now providing a real glimpse of war to an American
public that still daydreams about fresh-faced boys and girls marching
off to do brave deeds on behalf of democracy.
The Pentagon has
become concerned about the site, and rightly so. It is a public relations
disaster, especially in the Arab world where such pictures must burn
deeply. Karen Hughes peddling American Sunday School stories in the
Middle East can hardly compete with the visceral impact of this stuff.
It is not just the images themselves which evoke disgust, but the implicit
idea that Americans take such pictures and regard them as legitimate
currency for pornography.
One Pentagon official
was quoted saying something about the people engaged in the trade breaking
all kinds of military regulations. I'm impressed with ethics like that:
it is fine to disembowel people or burn them to crisps, but it is a
serious breach to publish photos of your handiwork.
When I was a little
boy growing up in the south side of Chicago, I saw many unpleasant things.
Somehow, I understood at a young age that there are people who enjoy
destruction and horror and inflicting pain. Likely all the legends of
ghouls, vampires, and other staples of horror literature derive over
centuries from genuine human experience.
They seem to constitute
a minority of human beings, otherwise humanity's penchant for destruction
would outweigh its impulse for creation, and a form of human entropy
would reduce society to chaos. But they are a sizeable minority, and
there is nothing special about America which prevents its producing
a full share. If we believe that nurture, as well as nature, plays some
role in producing these dark creatures, American society may well produce
more than its share. They are after all, at least the milder, non-lethal
cases, the very people who take pleasure in injuring complete strangers
through business fraud, computer viruses, and vicious politics - all
prominent features on the American landscape.
There is a persistent
tendency for Americans to believe this can't be so. The influence of
Christianity is important here. Since the idea of America is often emotionally
blurred with the idea of a secular Church, complete with its own Apostles'
Creed and Holy Scripture (Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence,
etc.), it is not surprising that there is widespread belief in the intrinsic
goodness of America's soldiers. But that belief is as scientifically
baseless as the one about "curing" homosexuals or the one
about "creationism" being a legitimate school subject - both,
please note, held by tens of millions of Americans. We might add also
the American Catholic Church's dreamy ideas and stubborn refusal to
take responsibility for conditions of a priesthood that encourage countless
cases of child molestation.
Those who enjoy
violence and destruction always have been part of human society, likely
representing a genetic thread, and in ancient days they were just the
kind of people you might want on the ramparts defending your city. The
trouble is America doesn't keep them at home. It insists on sending
them abroad to practice their ghastly arts on others.
I have to suppress
a bitter laugh when I read things in the liberal press calling on soldiers
to hold on to their humanity. Would those be the sons of the soldiers
who cut the throats of tens of thousands of civilians in night raids
during Vietnam? The sons of the ones who collected human ears? Relatives
of CIA officers running an international torture network? The words
serve no purpose for those actually possessing humanity. Equally, they
are a waste of breath for those with the bad genes. You can't tell someone
with a serious, violence-inclining mental disorder to kindly behave
him- or herself.
We have a choice
in society. The people who have such uncivilized tendencies may be kept
in check by rational laws and policies. America with its high rate of
incarceration, its continued use of the death penalty, and its endless
fascination with redemption clearly recognizes in some distorted way
the importance of doing this at home. What civilized people all over
the world want to see is America exercising restraint abroad.
How utterly reckless
to just casually start wars without realizing that releasing the human
monsters from their cages always is part of what you are doing. If Americans
ever come to understand that simple fact, the world will be a better
place.