Picture credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c7/Svejk_01.png
Later however, this fascination gave way to a horrified realization of what barbarous atrocities humanity is capable of doing in war.
I vividly remember a story from a documentary book, where a lucky Russian survivor recalled his “fake” execution by Nazi soldiers. The details of his captivity escape me but not the conclusion of his ordeal. After proper torturing, he was taken for execution with a head shot. He was dully blindfolded and was forced to kneel in front of the self-dug grave while a handgun was pushed against his nape. He heard the shot and moments later the blindfold was removed. He saw several German soldiers surrounding him with belly-shaking shrilling cackle and telling him in broken Russian: you see, even heaven is full with German soldiers! He never figured out why they spared his life.
In my readings I also encountered stories about decimation of Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serb, and Greek villagers, and brutal hangings of real or presumed partisans. One haunting picture that would deserve to be in the top 10 most horrific war images ever, was of a teenage girl, a bona fide partisan, hanging in a state of decay in a village square. One of her breasts was cut off after her death and her body was left hanging there naked to rot, to serve as a deterrent for the villagers.
Around that time of my life, the concept of barbarism became synonymous in my mind with Nazi German soldiers and the SS.
How wrong I was. What followed in the next six decades since WWII ended made the Nazi German soldiers look like barbarians in training: napalm spitting boats, Agent Orange spraying planes, showering bombs from clouds of giant B-52s dwarfed the Nazi Germany’s flamethrowers, sarin and other nerve gases, or the V-1/V-2 flying bombs.
And now it seems that the mental savagery of the Nazi soldiers is also surpassed by a great margin.
No, not in terms of sheer numbers. The few hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans killed in the two largest scale wars of the past decade is no match for the millions exterminated by the Nazis during WWII.
But in terms of the cruelty of the spirit.
The brutality and senselessness of individuals and even small or medium sized groups definitely outshines - or perhaps I should use a neologistic term here: “outdarkens”- the worst Nazi atrocities. Here I want to emphasis the word group.
It first became evident in Abu Ghraib, the most publicized Iraq prison abuse scandal that was the direct doing of not a single deranged individual but a group, possibly groups, of deviant maniacs. Furthermore, it’s hard to believe that a much larger than officially admitted number of individuals, including high ranking officials, were unaware of the despicable actions committed in US military uniforms. Although this latter group had not directly abused Iraqis, but they were at best enablers, at worst, incendiaries in the shameful actions.
Recently, just days apart came news of two deeply disturbing actions yet again of the US military.
In Afghanistan four US soldiers urinated on corpses of Afghan men – presumably Taliban fighters - .
In an Iraq city, Haditha, 24 unarmed civilians were killed by a US unit in 2005. This is bad enough by itself (how dare I say it in such a matter of fact way, when the world had ended for 24 people in a violent, horrific bloodshed?): similar to the Nazi decimation of villagers, the murders were committed as apparent retaliation for the death of a fallen comrade. However, this time there is a twist: one of the unit members urinated on one of their victims. Here is an excerpt from CBS News coverage:
Dela Cruz also testified that he regrets urinating on the skull of one of the dead Iraqis, saying he was overtaken by grief for his dead comrade.
"The emotion took over, sir. We had just had one Marine (who) died," said Dela Cruz.
- Not joking, this is not from Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical masterpiece: The Good Soldier Švejk! -
I’ve been clearly emotionally overwhelmed by the latest war atrocities. By now, I know that cruelty has been perpetrated throughout the millennia of human history. I know that by singling out Nazi Germany as the embodiment of barbarism reflected a certain naiveté on my side, since many wars and many cultures before them displayed similar and even worse violence.
But the Americans? The champions of freedom and justice for all, the most wholly committed humble followers of Jesus Christ, the bearers of moral consciousness of the world? How can such things be done by Americans? Done not by individual deviant characters but groups of 4, 10, sometimes hundreds of people without even one of them ringing the alarm, without warning the deviants that they do something horribly wrong--how can this happen?
I came to believe that cruelty is wired into human nature, just as into almost any wild animal. This cruelty can be suppressed, can be tempered, but can’t be radically removed from us. Therefore, in my opinion one of society’s greatest obligations should be to educate about the futility and moral malevolence of cruelty. Social pressure is a tremendous power and eventually most members of society will bow to it. In that case, at least one in four will know that it’s not alright to urinate on fallen adversaries and it’s not alright to humiliate the weak or defenseless.
Unfortunately, today’s social climate in the world, and in the US in particular, is not favorable for the sheepish aspirations of a cruelty-free world. Before this question can even be addressed, we should eradicate hatred from ourselves first, and there doesn’t seem to be much interest for that.
Posts
