"Good guy" -- the description of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales by neighbors that is headlining in the American media -- is pretty much the way ordinary Germans saw other Germans who brutalized people in extermination camps in WW2 (See Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust). "Good guy" is how most family, friends and neighbors in the USA described John Demjanjuk, the Ukranian-born Nazi extermination camp guard who was deported to Germany for war crimes and who died Saturday, convicted of his crimes but living free in a German nursing home. And "good guy" is how family, friends and neighbors described Ander Behring Breivik, judged by his countrymen to be "mentally unfit" when he massacred dozens of young people in Norway because his government tolerated Muslim immigrants.
Imagine an Afghan who came to the USA and murdered 16 people, mostly women and children, and burned their bodies. Then the Afghan government whisked the guy away and said, "Trust us, we'll take care of the matter," and the Afghan press was full of reports saying that neighbors in Afghanistan liked the guy. An American president who allowed this to happen would likely be impeached. And would Americans really care if some foreign terrorist who had just shot or blown up a bunch of kids sitting at a family diner had done it because he had snapped, or was drinking, or was under stress, or for any of a dozen possible motives our press has proffered for Bales' actions?
I'm not against factoring in such motivations in passing final judgment, but only if consistently applied. The problem is that Americans, just like most other nations and cultural groups, believe that most of what they do is motivated by a morality based on Golden Rule principles of fairness and do no harm (unless first done to you), and that heinous acts committed by one's own kind occur because the actor has a screw loose or was suffering unbearable social or economic pressure. In fact, recent work in evolutionary psychology indicates the Golden Rule principles operate fairly in all cultures, most of the time, but not between cultures. People in other cultures are generally thought to commit terrible acts for calculated reasons, underscored by some perverse morality that can be readily discounted, so that only the consequences of their actions should be judged, whereas for one's own group motivation is, and what ought to, mostly count.
What goes for individuals, goes for whole nations: When our country kills and shreds the flesh of others, whether flatly described in technospeak as "collateral damage" involving a few dead individual bystanders or "strategic bombing" that annihilates tens of thousands of civilians, it's almost always for fine moral reasons and because we want to save lives in the end; but if others do similar things with similar consequences, it's almost always because they are calculating evildoers. This asymmetric mindset has been with us since our species emerged from the caves, and is a continuing cause of much misunderstanding and distrust between groups in the organized anarchy of our ever-violent world. In this regard, America is unexceptional in its reaction to a massacre perpetuated by any of its own against others.
Now, factor this mindset into to the mundane workings of the extraordinary technocratic bureaucracy behind today's war-making industries, which has more destructive potential than all of the world's previous wars combined. Its managers are often the "best and the brightest," with a lot of nice guys whose team spirit differs little from that found in an advertising firm, cabin crew or Internet company. The flat language of technology and bureaucracy, and the ordinary career trappings of promotions and perks and Christmas parties, only mask (and so make possible the psychologically impossible brutality) of this awesome killing machine.
Steve Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, documents how everyday violence between people has declined markedly since the Stone Age. But this underplays another well-documented trend (known as a "power law distribution") that big wars (as well as large terrorist attacks) over the last couple of centuries, though increasingly infrequent, are very many times more murderous and catastrophic than those preceding. Each bigger event generates more world-shaking consequences than the last: politically, economically and socially. Lacking the will and means to consistently impose a universal moral code across all peoples (and the human evolution and history of intergroup rivalry says "Don't hold your breath" on this score), perhaps the only way to ultimately outwit the bad beast of our nature from doing all in all of us in the Space Age is to ignore how nice or not are the guys who prepare the killing, or how good or not may be the guys who do it, and focus mainly on treating the consequences of killing.
Support our soldiers, and support this war. The reality of war is gruesome, but don't allow these terrorists with a stone-age mentality to get you to feel sorry for doing what is necessary.
"We did not ask for this mission, but we will fulfill it" - President George W. Bush
Once free then mankind can hit the play button on evolution and head to the stars.
What started this? We burned some books. For the record, the appropriate way to dispose of a Quran that's too old? Burn it. But leaving that one alone, even if what we did was inappropriate, I think the response is to take a stack of Bibles and a blow torch and put on a show. Not murder a bunch of people, then behave all outraged when you've successfully pissed a soldier off enough that he retaliates in kind.
I don't condone Sergeant Bales' actions, but I certainly understand them. When the hawks come to Congress demanding war, THIS is what they're signing up for. Not glory, victory and conquest, but madness, hatred and death.
"Eye for an eye"--unnecessary war, drone strikes, death penalty etc.--strengthens "the bad beast of our nature"...violence is a force that feeds on itself. Violence causes societal regression, like partying in the streets when the enemy is assassinated, torturing detainees and spitting on the dead. The answer is diplomacy, humane policy, rendering enemy leaders powerless without full-scale attack on the country, peacefully when possible, and locking them up (in decent conditions) so they can't hurt anyone.
Industrial Revolution gave people an opportunity to move from the lower social group to a higher one.
Elites didn't like it, therefore Marxism appeared (also, in mid 18th Century) to put the masses under another type of control: social elite to replace old royal blood based one.
Back in USA today: young people, who grew up anywhere between San Francisco and Manhattan (or geographically between Berkley and Harvard), sign for Service to make money, learn the trade, get through the college and move up from their social group to a higher one. And elites don't like it. This is a main reason for all the contempt for people in a uniform. The soft belly liberals are scared of anyone with a firearm and just hate our soldiers (otherwise, how could anyone compare an American Soldier with Nazi war criminal)
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-madness-is-not-the-reason-for-this-massacre-7575737.html
Here’s a summary of the Western media discussion of what motivates Muslims to kill Americans: they are primitive, fanatically religious, hateful Terrorists. Even when Muslims who engage in such acts toward Americans clearly and repeatedly explain that they did it in response to American acts of domination, aggression, violence and civilian-killing in their countries, and even when the violence is confined to soldiers who are part of a foreign army that has invaded and occupied their country, the only cognizable motive is one of primitive, hateful evil. It is an act of Evil Terrorism, and that is all there is to say about it."
And then they let their rulers do it again....
Europe almost self-destructed. Any wonder they look at our clueless war-mongering with astonishment.
Sorry but all recent evidence points unanimously to the contrary.
I recommend Barbara Tuchman's book "The March of Folly" if anyone is interested in gaining some historical perspective, not just on Afghanistan but on governmental and political foolishness in general.
I guess those Germans had every right to do what they did then.
All signs point to the Chinese having some weight of their own to throw around soon.
What I find ironic about all this is that all through history, this happens...yet mankind never seems to learn from it.
The parallels between our time now and our time before WW2 are almost scary..yet this time we may actually be on the other side of the fence, morality-wise. Sigh
Hey! That's exactly the comment I made yesterday! I'd like to apply for a job with HuffPost now.