The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #69284 Message #1175731
Posted By: GUEST
01-May-04 - 08:56 AM
Thread Name: BS: American Soldiers Torturing Iraqis
Subject: RE: BS: American Soldiers Torturing Iraqis
The issue, as I see it, isn't one of military policy, but of military culture, as many good posts to this thread have noted.
There is a double standard: one is the policy of the military, which theoretically at least pays lip service to high, moral values and standards for the military. The second is the culture of the military, which is quite sadistic, controlling, manipulative, and abusive.
You can dress up the worst of human behavior in clean, neatly pressed military uniforms with shiny buttons. But there is no denying what their ultimate raison d'etre is: to kill people their politicians label as "our enemies".
That is the nature of the game, pure and simple. That is why being in combat destroys and eats the soul of the combatants as the perpetrators of atrocities against humanity, and the civilians who constitute, by a huge margin, the victims of combat.
The greatest irony of all to me is that we call the perpetrators of the most dishonorable practice known to human kind--the murder of our own fellow humans, honorable and respectable.
We certainly give them more respect and honor than we give to our teachers of future generations, nurses who tend the sick and wounded, social workers who spend their working lives trying to patch up broken humans and help them avoid breaking other humans due to their own tremendous psychic pain...
No, I just can't agree that the warrior is a person who should be honored and respected for what they do, which is always utterly destructive.