Robert Jay Lifton On Creating The Conditions For Atrocities

[DrFunkenstein]

Excerpts...

Both Abu Ghraib and My Lai are examples of what I call an "atrocity-producing situation"-one so structured, psychologically and militarily, that ordinary people, men or women no better or worse than you or I, can regularly commit atrocities. In Vietnam that structure included "free-fire zones" (areas in which soldiers were encouraged to fire at virtually anyone); "body counts" (with a breakdown in the distinction between combatants and civilians, and competition among commanders for the best statistics); and the emotional state of US soldiers as they struggled with angry grief over buddies killed by invisible adversaries and with a desperate need to identify some "enemy."

The Iraq military environment is quite different from that of Vietnam, but there are some striking parallels. Iraq is also a counterinsurgency war in which US soldiers, despite their extraordinary firepower, feel extremely vulnerable in a hostile environment, and in which higher-ranking officers and war planners feel frustrated by the great difficulty of tracking down or even recognizing the enemy. The exaggerated focus on interrogation, including the humiliation of detainees as a "softening-up" process, reflects that frustration.

Recognizing that atrocity is a group activity, one must ask how individual soldiers can so readily join in. I believe they undergo a type of dissociation I call "doubling"-the formation of a second self. Nazi doctors could continue to be ordinary husbands and fathers when on leave from their murderous work in Auschwitz. Similarly, Tony Soprano is a likable fellow who cares about his children but is in the business of maiming and killing. The individual psyche can adapt to an atrocity-producing environment by means of a subself that behaves as if autonomous and thereby joins in activities that would otherwise seem repugnant. Ironically and sadly, this is an expression of the same genius for adaptation that has so well served Homo sapiens in the evolutionary process.

To attribute the scandal at Abu Ghraib to "a few bad apples" or to "individual failures" is poor psychology and self-serving pseudomorality. To be sure, individual soldiers and civilians who participated in it are accountable for their behavior, even under such pressured conditions. But the greater responsibility lies with those who planned and executed the war on Iraq and the "war on terrorism" of which it is a part, and who created, in policy and attitude, the accompanying denial of rights of captives and suspects.

Psychologically and ethically, responsibility for the crimes at Abu Ghraib extends to the Defense Secretary, the Attorney General and the White House. Those crimes are a direct expression of the kind of war we are waging in Iraq.

Read on...

[struggle4progress]

1. Sounds good. Link please.

[berry]

2. I think this is the link.

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0513-15.htm

To be published in the forthcoming May 31, 2004 issue of The Nation

Conditions of Atrocity

by Robert Jay Lifton

[struggle4progress]

3. Thanks! Really have to agree with this:

To attribute the scandal at Abu Ghraib to "a few bad apples" or to "individual failures" is poor psychology and self-serving pseudomorality ... But the greater responsibility lies with those who planned and executed the war on Iraq and the "war on terrorism" of which it is a part, and who created, in policy and attitude, the accompanying denial of rights of captives and suspects.