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Out of a Culture of Violence
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The
consequences of manipulating the emotions and the minds of US
citizens and US soldiers surely are grave
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Reports
frequent the media as to the mental health of many of the US soldiers on duty in
Iraq. Yet, what has to be borne in mind is that, if anything, they are products
of a culture of violence.
The
construct of the human body is one that knows its boundaries and knows what
belongs to it. When something foreign to it is introduced, the human body
automatically goes on the defense, rejecting even the transplant of an organ
unless a physician can introduce a drug that prevents the rejection. The only
foreign elements that the human body allows are the nutrients from what we
ingest, and only through channels that are designated for that purpose. Like
most systems, our biological system fails only when we subject it to man-made
values regardless of what we choose to understand. Yet, with all that has been
learned, surely it should be understood that man pushed beyond reason becomes
unreasonable.
This
perception of Iraqi lives is not new. The abuse of Iraqi soldiers is but a
glimpse on a mentality that could unleash such terror in the name of democracy.
It not only questions the meaning of democracy, but clearly outlines the
approach to Iraq and its people from the beginning. And so it has been.
Concerning the Gulf War, Ramsey Clarke, US attorney general under Lyndon
Johnson, and others wrote this under a photo:
An
incinerated body of an Iraqi soldier on the “Highway of Death,” a name the
press has given to the road from Mutlaa, Kuwait, to Basra, Iraq. U.S. planes
immobilized the convoy by disabling vehicles at its front and rear, then bombing
and strafing the resulting traffic jam for hours. More than 2,000 vehicles and
tens of thousands of charred and dismembered bodies littered the sixty miles of
highway. The clear rapid incineration of the human being ...suggests the use of
napalm, phosphorus, or other incendiary bombs. These are anti-personnel weapons
outlawed under the 1977 Geneva Protocols. This massive attack occurred after
Saddam Hussein announced a complete troop withdrawal from Kuwait in compliance
with UN Resolution 660. Such a massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates
the Geneva Convention of 1949, common article 3, which outlaws the killing of
soldiers who “are out of combat.” There are, in addition, strong indications
that many of those killed were Palestinian and Kuwaiti civilians trying to
escape the impending siege of Kuwait City and the return of Kuwaiti armed
forces. No attempt was made by U.S. military command to distinguish between
military personnel and civilians on the “highway of death.” The whole intent
of international law with regard to war is to prevent just this sort of
indiscriminate and excessive use of force.
Clark
further writes:
It
has never happened in history that a nation that has won a war has been held
accountable for atrocities committed in preparing for and waging that war. We
intend to make this one different. What took place was the use of technological
material to destroy a defenseless country. From 125,000 to 300,000 people were
killed... We recognize our role in history is to bring the transgressors to
justice.
However,
it always seems that the United States is on one side of justice and a growing
number of people and countries are on the other side. Power corrupts and
ultimate power corrupts ultimately, as the fall of the Roman Empire bore witness
to.
Terror
Unleashing Terror: The Soldiers
The
US preparation for war included a process known as “physic numbing,” which
Fran Shor reported
…according
to the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, builds on well-known defense mechanisms,
such as repression, denial, and projection, to create an exclusion of feeling
and disconnectedness. Aided by the surfeit of stimuli from televisual culture
and media-manipulated images, people may tune out those realities and
possibilities that threaten their own sense of connection to the world. In the
case of 9/11, the Bush Administration quickly exploited the anger of the
American people without allowing a grieving process to mature. Drowning out the
voices of survivors and their families who opposed retaliation, war on
Afghanistan was initiated. Begun as a campaign to seek and destroy Osama bin
Laden and his al Qaeda network, a network created by the CIA in the 1980’s,
the intervention in Afghanistan quickly became an exercise in imperial politics
and the lethal arrogance of power. (Shor,
pp. 1–2)
Citizens
were programmed like computers, but even computers break down after a while. All
energy in the universe is never lost. It is what we do with it that is
important. The consequences of manipulating the emotions and the minds of US
citizens and US soldiers surely are grave. According to sociology professor Alan
McEvoy, an expert on violence and victimization, a majority of rapes are
pre-planned. The rapists “feel a need to control and have power over another
person, because they feel a lack of personal power and self-esteem” (McEvoy
pp.1–2).
Forewarned
Last
September, soldiers were evacuated for mental health reasons. Last October an
unverifiable 10 percent of noncombatant soldiers were recorded as committing
suicide. The same 12-member Mental Health Advisory Team that was dispatched to
the Gulf War was dispatched to assess the situation and only released its
findings this March (Dunham, p. 1). Surveys were carried out, but what purpose
can “managing” the situation serve but to serve the interest of the Bush
Administration (U.S. Army, p.1). The Mental Health Advisory Team report found:
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Seventeen percent of soldiers were assessed to be suffering traumatic stress,
depression, or anxiety and were deemed to be “functionally impaired.” Of
that group, about three-quarters said they had received no help at any time in
Iraq from a mental health professional, a doctor, or a chaplain.
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Twenty-three percent described themselves as feeling moderate to severe
stress.
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Only one-third of soldiers who wanted help actually got it (Associated Press pp.
1–2).
The
solution is apparent, but this administration’s intent on its final goal is
considering the draft for women rather than ending the war. One wonders how much
a ruse it is when last month the Department of Defense announced that some of
the soldiers dispatched last year had pre-existing mental health illnesses. Was
it a case of the end justifies the means or denial? This was the first time that
a Mental Health Advisory Team was dispatched in theater, but it spent only from
August to October last year in Iraq and Kuwait.
Without
a true and valid assessment, who is to say that the mental ill-health of these
soldiers existed before the war (Benjamin p. 1–3)? A report from 2000 may,
indeed, confirm this and much more:
However,
there is clear evidence that many military personnel enter the armed forces with
histories of potentially traumatic experiences and that some are further
traumatized during active duty by combat exposure or other stressful experiences
that may also be common to civilians. In a national retrospective telephone
survey, 27% of adult women and 15% of adult men described a history of childhood
sexual abuse, whereas a survey of US Army soldiers in combat support and
combat service support units found that 49% of the female soldiers and 15%
of the male soldiers reported a history of childhood sexual abuse using the same
screening questions as those used in the national study. Rosen and Martin
also found that 48% of the female soldiers and 50% of the male soldiers were
physically abused before the age of 18 years, and that both childhood sexual and
physical abuse were related to current psychological distresses. (Martin
et al)
The
torture of Iraqi prisoners: Is it a case of a pressure cooker exploding or was
it planned, as the many photographs and videotapes seem to imply? When man
becomes a god unto himself, then everything else is inevitable.
In
the past year, 24 soldiers, 2 marines and 2 sailors committed suicide, and 2
soldiers took their lives as patients at the Walter Reed Army Hospital. After a
year in Iraq, one soldier, a noncombatant of the 555th Combat Engineer Group,
returned to the United States and killed his wife. Insufficient screening of
soldiers and more congressional hearings—the only congressional hearing that
needs to take place by those far away from the burning, physical, sexual and
emotional abuse of Iraqi lives is instant and complete withdrawal. Any soldier
with an ounce of conscientiousness would not be able to stomach much more.
Thousands of GIs have been admitted to Landsthul Regional Medical Center in
Germany (far away from the US vote) for psychiatric care, according to
neurosurgeon Dr. Gene Bolles, who followed the situation for two years after the
September 11 attack (Berkowitz pp. 1–3).
Terror
Unleashing Terror: The Victims
Gender
issues in Iraq are not as liberal as in the West. The sanctity of the body as
guided by Islam protects the body politic. Yet the devastation in one’s life
when the body is invaded is all apparent in the more liberal societies. The rape
of Muslim women has become the unspoken weapon of dominance with the aim to
devastate. Bosnia forgotten by some cannot be forgotten in the words of Jasminka
Dizdarevic in the midst of this dishonorable occupation of Iraq:
The
aggressors did not choose the age, authority, origin; the aggressors destroyed
everything they came across, from an innocent child – seven years old to an
old woman of 87. The terror over the Bosniak woman has been conducted through a
well thought-out plan, since they were aware that if they break her, the Bosniak
woman, if they kill her soul and her body, the whole nation would be killed –
and this is what was the only goal of theirs. The Bosniak woman withstood all
tortures invented by the aggressor, She – proud, with her head raised she
continued to live the life she has lived earlier. The only aim for her was to
give birth again, to bring up her future children so as to remember well what
their mother, sister, grand-mother did experience – not for the revenge, but
not to forget the evil done by the aggressor with the aim to exterminate them.
Raped
of history, raped of community, raped of country, one can be left with what one
was born with, but when that, too, is raped, where can one go to find sanity?
Depending on their inner resources, women who have been raped can lose
themselves in the healing process of conception and nurturing the future in the
form of a child. Yet, the growing trend of female criminals in the United States
indicates their criminality to be caused by physical or sexual abuse in the home
or in their youth. In the United Sates the raping of male prisoners by fellow
male prisoners can lead the victim to have a complete sense of emasculation.
There are symptoms of guilt, anxiety, depression, interpersonal isolation,
shame, low self-esteem, self-destructive behavior, post-traumatic stress, poor
body imagery, sleep disturbance, nightmares, anorexia or bulimia, compulsive
behaviors such as alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling, overeating,
overspending, sexual compulsion (malesurvivor).
This
is what one calls a peace-time situation. What then can one expect in the
theater of war? Who can one turn to when male victims in the West fear the label
of homosexuality as well as suffer the symptoms above? A deep sense of
self-blame, an inability and lack of opportunity to unburden the nightmare in
the midst of a nightmare with surviving family members who also feel raped by
the invading coalition forces who have only been able to establish lawlessness,
death, and destruction (NCVC pp.1–2). The only thing left is pity for the
lowliness of the perpetrator and the inner strength of knowing that might of
Allah is greater than the might of man—now and in the Hereafter.
sources:
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