Wednesday, September 09, 2015
The US Military and the Myth that
Humanity is Predisposed to Violence
A U.S. war veteran pulls his medals off his uniform before
throwing them towards the site of the NATO Summit during an anti-war protest in
Chicago in 2012. (Photo: AP)
We have this tragic misperception that humanity is predisposed
to violence.
The truth is that humanity is predisposed to peace. The default
position for humanity is that of conscientious objector to war and violence.
In our work at the Center on
Conscience & War, this is proven to us daily, through our
individual conscientious objectors. Science
has proven it, too. This tendency for cooperation over competition is evident
in daily life: on an average day, most people will witness countless acts
of cooperation, kindness, and humanity towards one another, and not one act of
violence or competition. And most of it is so commonplace, we barely even
notice it. We take our nonviolence for granted.
And so does the news. What makes the news is violence, not
cooperation. Particularly, on our local news programs, the top stories
are the ones that depict street crimes and “home invasions.” Seeing this
interpersonal violence, I am convinced, leads us to believe that people are
predisposed to acting violently toward one another. We all make
decisions based on patterns we observe, and if the patterns we
observe are highlighting violence, we are going to decide that humanity is
violent.
How does this relate to war? If we believe that violence among
humans is natural, we will believe that war is inevitable.
But violence is not natural. Our conscience tells us killing
another human being is wrong. And it is the military that knows this better
than anyone.
The military has taken notice that, over time, and through the
history of war, the vast majority of individuals refuse to shoot to kill. That
means, instead of firing directly at an “enemy,” soldiers (used here to cover
all members of the Armed Forces: soldiers, Marines, airmen and women, and sailors)
would fire their weapons away from their “targets,” or pretend to shoot. One
investigation found -- and these studies
have been replicated
-- that in World War I only about 5% of people shot to kill; in World War
II, about 15% of people shot to kill. By the US war in Vietnam,
the rate at which soldiers were shooting to kill was found to be 90%. Today,
that number could be even higher.
What happened? Training evolved to meet the military's goals.
There is a science of teaching soldiers to kill and it is called
killology.
It is the science of circumventing the conscience.
In order to get an otherwise psychologically healthy individual
to kill, US military training has been developed to bypass the conscience and
have the act of killing – the act of firing one’s weapon with the intent to
kill -- become reflexive.
Our conscience knows that taking another human life is wrong. We
don't want to do it; we know that it is the worst possible thing we could do.
So the training has been developed to teach a soldier to kill without thinking,
without filtering through the conscience.
When we take the time to think – to filter through the
conscience -- we make better decisions. And in the case of war and killing, the
vast majority of us already have decided.
In fact, 99% of us have decided by default that we will not
chose to kill. The military comprises less than 1% of the total US population.
When you add veterans to that number, it still only creeps up to 7%, and some
of them, of course, had been drafted; they didn’t volunteer to join the
military. And did volunteers join the military with a desire to kill, or
for some other purpose?
In my experience, talking as I do to members of the military
everyday, people that volunteer hold a sincere desire to serve and protect and
to do something bigger than themselves. We call it "the service,"
after all. The people who join the military are some of the most beautiful,
selfless, and loving people you could know. Sure, there are some cynical and
self-serving reasons we could suggest for why people join the military, and
there are real accounts of skinheads and other racists who were enlisting
during the US invasion of Iraq, but that’s not the rule. By and large, today’s
1% joined the military out of a deep love and affection for humanity, not
because they want to be killers.
And they suffer consequences for the same reasons. It is the
same love for humanity and desire to serve, I believe, that causes them to
experience deep trauma once their conscience processes the results of what
they've done, the deaths and the pain they’ve been a part of. Military training
dulls the conscience, but not forever. Very likely, the conscience is
going to come back. We all can relate to that just through our normal
experiences of life. If we have an argument with someone we love and don’t
handle ourselves well, it nags at us. Our conscience tells us we’ve done
something wrong.
Now, put that on the scale a million times greater: killing
someone or failing to prevent an egregious act in war. Even being trained to
kill can and does cause trauma because it is so foreign from what our instincts
tell us is right. This trauma, these wounds to the soul – moral injuries – are
caused by transgressions against the conscience.
Hundreds of thousands of veterans are struggling with this
trauma, which is different than the trauma that is experienced by a rape
survivor or a hijack survivor. It's not characterized by the hyper-vigilance or
fear for one’s life that we see in those cases. Moral injury is an inner
conflict. The Marines did a study
in 2011 that revealed that much of the trauma the service members were
experiencing was about guilt and betrayal of conscience.
So, is humanity predisposed to violence? I don't think so. We’ve
allowed ourselves to be deceived by not only the military industrial complex,
which profits from war, of course, but also by all the major pillars of our
society: our government, our schools, our media, and even our churches.
They all tell us that violence is human nature. Even the peace movement
falls victim to this myth. We think, “people who join the military are
different from me. They can kill. I can't kill.” Well, what I’ve learned, and
what the evidence shows is that they can't kill either – not without
consequences.
Remember, veterans make up just 7% of the population, yet they
represent 20% of the
suicides in this country. That’s a very telling and shameful
number.
So what’s a soldier of conscience to do? Too often, soldiers in
crisis believe they have only two choices: violate their conscience or violate
their orders. Of the two, violating their orders is a piece of cake. Maybe
they'll get court martialed, go to jail, get busted down in rank, lose some
pay. Maybe they'll get kicked out with a bad discharge. That’s finite, that's
measurable, it’s manageable by most people.
But the violation of the conscience? We are just beginning to
understand its consequences, and they can be immeasurable.
It’s important that people know there is a third option:
conscientious objection -- a legal pathway through which one can apply for
discharge by affirming our natural predisposition for peace, by affirming the
power of conscience.
Beverly Bell, Natalie Miller, and Emily Simmons helped with this
article.
Copyleft Other Worlds. You may reprint this article in whole or
in part. Please credit any text or original research you use to Other Worlds.
Maria Santelli is Executive Director of the Center on Conscience & War,
a 75-year old organization founded to provide technical and community support
to conscientious objectors.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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