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The Dignity of Corpses
Civilization hasn’t successfully drawn a moral border at the sanctity of human life itself, but because it needs to put some limit on human behavior, it has, apparently, taken a last stand at the dignity of corpses.
It’s OK to kill your enemy, but not to urinate on him, at least not after he’s dead.
The latest scandal of the war on terror — the release of the video of four Marines urinating on the corpses of two dead Afghanis (“Have a good day, buddy”) — has turned the game of geopolitics downright surreal. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, exercising code-red damage control, said the men may be guilty of a war crime. Official condemnation of the act has been far swifter and more severe than the routine statements issued by Pentagon spokespersons after the mere bombing of a village and the deaths of disputed numbers of women and children. There were no press releases dismissing the incident because the desecrated Afghanis were insurgents.
It was almost as though, in the game of war, where nothing is sacred except the supremacy of power — winning — this is where power stops and humanity begins: You must respect your enemy’s dead body. It says so right there in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
However, upon reflection, it seems to me that, in all likelihood, in an era where positive spin is crucial to a successful war effort, the official stand in defense of the dignity of corpses may not be in deference to morality so much as public relations. If skewering the head of one’s enemy on a pike furthered a political end, official “thou shalt not” morality would manage to find a loophole for such behavior (it’s for the greater good), and the nation’s ultimate moral stand would retreat even further into obscurity and irrelevance.
My point is this: Morality is no match for the need to win, for the culture of domination. And the moral bedrock of civilization is nothing but sandstone.
This is not a plea for sterner morality but for a shift away from domination mentality, whether at the personal, the corporate or the geopolitical level — or at least for public awareness of the price we pay when we build a nation around the endless defeat of enemies, real and imagined.
“When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.”
The quote is from a breezy Associated Press story about the urination incident, putting corpse desecration into context. The speaker is a Marine lieutenant “who teaches the law of war to Marines before they are sent off to Afghanistan.” His point is that we shouldn’t judge these men too harshly.
The point is made with more vehemence further down in the story, when the reporters quote a Vietnam vet who sneers at the public’s “naïveté” about war: “I did a hell of a lot worse in Vietnam than urinate on some dead bodies,” he said. “We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors, and we knew how to get revenge.”
It’s just part of the time-honored tradition of war, from Achilles and Hector onward through the bloodstained millennia. The AP story reads like the shadow version of the speech President Obama gave at Fort Bragg last month, announcing the shutdown of the Iraq operation: “You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries . . .”
When war is merely upcoming — with Iran, for instance — we talk about it with matter-of-fact abstraction and, of course, urgency. Gotta do it now or . . . or . . . Iran will become a member of the nuclear club, and then there will be hell to pay. And then we go to war and there is, indeed, hell to pay, but we pay it with a shrug and the unspoken words: What did you expect? “When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.”
Such quotes, however, did not accompany the recent stories about another former Marine, 23-year-old Itzcoatl Ocampo, who served in Iraq in 2008 and was arrested last week for the murders of four homeless men in Anaheim and Yorba Linda, Calif.
Ocampo, by all accounts, suffered not only serious and untreated PTSD related to his military service, but had this condition compounded by poverty. “After he left active duty in 2010, Ocampo returned to Orange County to find his father living under a bridge,” according to a KTLA-TV report. His father was homeless! He loved his father. He started stalking and murdering homeless men — desecrating their corpses with 40 or more stab wounds — and even showed a picture of one of his victims to his father, warning him of the dangers of the street.
The psychology here is over the edge, but “when you ask young men to go kill people for a living . . .”
Let us stop shrugging off the madness of war — and I mean that term literally. We try to contain this madness with crisp rhetoric, discipline and honor codes, but human psychology will have none of that.
As Matthis Chiroux, an Afghan vet and war resister, pointed out recently in an excellent essay, the phenomenon of “war porn” — the photographic record of desecrated corpses — is widespread within the ranks and aggravated by our long, slow defeat in the war on terror: our inability to impose our will on a living enemy. “Historically, defeated or nearly defeated armies have been guilty of some of the most serious atrocities,” Matthis writes.
When the glory of victory eludes us, we can only impose our will on corpses.
27 Comments so far
Show AllHillary Clinton says the men "may be guilty of a war crime".
I'm a big fan of irony, but there are limits...
Damn! That is funny. Dick Cheney said Clinton would make an excellent president, it`s becoming impossible to tell the news from parody.
That's excellent, TA.
War is odorless, painless and sanitary. It is just another television show. It has no more impact on our daily lives than a television sitcom. A football game has more impact on our lives than war. We are numb to war. "War" is just another word, like "breakfast" or "road" or "building". We never feel it. We never see it. It is just another non-concern as we go about our daily lives.
"We are numb to war. "
The main purpose of the violence we are subjected to by the mainstream media is to make the horrors of warfare acceptable to us.
To consider warfare acceptable is to have a high opinion of idiocy.
I am not convinced that the case . Warfare and violence was very accpetable to people and MASSES of people well before the onset of the mass media. (The illiterate were as likely if not more likely to Volunteer so what conditioned them?)
Showing up to watch a "witch" or a "blapshemer" burned at the stake was seen as public entertainment during the inquisition and violence was even more widespread then.(Homicide rates in Europewere 100 times higher in 1600 then today)
This suggests that the embrace of that violence is rooted in the structure and belief systems of our respective societies. I still believe it a learned behaviour but there was not a whole lot of television and vidoe games around in 1939 when the entire world marched to war and those wars had Governments fully supported by their populations.
So just as example in WW1.
98 percent of the military age males in one town in British Colombia VOLUNTEERED to go to war. Now you might state and the MSM exploits whatever it is in our respective belief systems to advance their agendas but chances are the people have already been "conditioned" by their respective culture and society.
There is something far deeper at work here then the MSM or religion and patriotism which I see as things that just help that something that something along. If the MSM religion and patriotism all to disappear tomorrow that something would still be there and another vehicle would be found to help nurture it.
I recently read a book on the War of 1812. In that war a lot of atrocities were committed by either side. On the US side the greatest number of volunteers (more then all other States combined) came from its most Illiterate State, that being Kentucky which did not even border Canada. That state overwhelmingly supported the war. In New England few volunteered and indeed continue to trade and do business with Canada. So why the difference ?
GW North: I think you know the answer (although it's often useful for a teacher to pose matters as a question to prompt others to think on their own). It's the warrior ethos attached to Christianity, the power that lent the sickening idea of Holy War to combat itself. (And anyone paying attention, recognizes which enduring archetype is most keenly tied to war and the warrior ethos.)
In contrast, here on the American continent, before European settlers arrived, if braves intended to go to war (potentially over a senseless trifle), the Councils of the Grandmothers were convened. Why? Because those who had NURTURED life the longest, understood its price. They would be least likely to grant a nod unless war was absolutely necessary. And there is an ecological analogy to those who honor nature's communities with the understanding that countless millennia went into the intricate development linking one specie's survival with that of another. Today, in place of that Sacred wisdom, we see rows of monoculture... like scar tissue on the breast of the earth, in many places gone is the grand biological symphony of the forest.
Top-down, male dominating societies treat brute force as a highly prized gift. The power to destroy is granted celebrity status, while life everywhere (starting with the female womb) is made cheap.
And here we are.
So many males in this forum shy away from this issue or seek to slay its messenger, as if avoiding the fundamental flaw in the societal blueprint (commencing in a lack of balance) can somehow make up for its deficiencies. Not so.
As the current paradigm collapses (already in evident stages), what comes next will be a return to more egalitarian patterns of engagement... these will cross all lines, deleting the former "ism divisions" from the collective consciousness. And AMEN to that!
>>Top-down, male dominating societies treat brute force as a highly prized gift. The power to destroy is granted celebrity status, while life everywhere (starting with the female womb) is made cheap.
Quite right. One needs to look for what it is that is common in all these "vehicles" that drive this violence against others and the male dominated top down hierarchy is clearly one of those things that is "In Common".
Others suggest this violence just part of human nature. The potential to commit violence certainly is but that does not mean it "Human nature". We still as individuals have to CHOOSE to commit violence. The choice we exercise and how we justify it is a learned behaviour.
My own single largest proof of this is seen in the bible where the Hebrews claim that their God gave them the promised land and ordered them to kill all that inhabited it and to take the women as their sex slaves.
The ONLY reason they saw the need to create this fiction was because they knew that what they were doing was innately wrong. They knew it and had to create a myth so as to justify it.
We do not create these myths when we do acts we know are good ones because there no need to.
A Fireman is never challenged about going into a house and rescuing people. He is never asked to defend to justify or defend his actions. A Policeman will be challenged if he guns someone down and will seek to defend his actions.
If these were equally part of Human nature we would not have that need to JUSTIFY that violence on another. We would just do it and not give it a second thought. (there are certainly people like this but as individuals the greater society sees them as being mentally ill)
Violence against others is a learned behaviour and is encouraged by the male Dominated society we have evolved. The very FACT that males dominate most societies shows that one group of people think they superior to or more worthy then another. This is the same meme that drove and drives wars of religion, and racism and wars against the various ISMS.
When a group of people OPENLY proclaim themselves as special or exceptional 9 times out of ten that group of people will make war on those they see as their lessors.
The USA does this on a daily basis.
I agree. Do you remember the story about the dominant baboons eating tainted food outside a Congo tourist spot and dying off? "The result being the less dominant surviving male baboons formed more EQUITABLE relationships with the females?
I know that men humiliate other men for not taking part in gross, often cruel (if not violent) rituals. What becomes the "norm" is consistent with my explanation for Mars rules.
The famous novel, "Lord of the Flies" took the behavior of British boys raised in what had been the belly of empire (in that era), and then extrapolated from the ghastly hierarchy they created (on the basis of who's the toughest, most evident bully) a theoretical model for human nature. As if...
Certainly some persons have the moral strength to oppose their own conditioning and do the right thing regardless of reward or punishment. However, I am more interested in the societal constructs that make doing the decent thing all the more difficult. The U.S has allowed those under the cloak and cover of law to grant their imprimatur to TORTURE!
When a society scratches the bottom of that barrel, something is DEADLY wrong. As pundits like Rush Limbaugh make light of torture, tolerance for depravity and depraved indifference to life become more widespread. In other words, the conditioning mechanisms of any society can turn the grotesque into a norm... as most prefer to conform, rather than know the pain of becoming an outcast.
You are one of the only males in this forum who speaks honestly and with consideration about this issue. Some men prefer to use history as their example to reinforce the LIE that war is inevitable and a facet of human nature. Their ready capacity to place aside the undeniable FACT that women were not part of legal bodies, religious orthodoxies, educational institutions, or government for CENTURIES, as if this has made no difference, is revolting.
Here's an anecdote for how that narrow vision operates. Years ago medical studies on the human heart were ONLY conducted on men with the results (as it turned out falsely) generalized for women and their health.
I'm surprised they don't study menstruation exclusively on men!
"If the MSM religion and patriotism all to disappear tomorrow that something would still be there and another vehicle would be found to help nurture it."
I think you're right, GW. It's propaganda (good or bad) that drives culture, and today the leader in that field is the MSM. Previously it was religion and patriotism, which are losing steam. Bad propaganda is then magnified by peer pressure to drag many more voluntarily into the fray. Also a high level of poverty drives the poor into the military. The high level of poverty and unemployment are reasons why they have been able to dispense with the draft.
"That something [that] would still be there" is probably a primal, visceral drive to violence that is lessened by proper education and increased by media violence.
A progressive medium more powerful and appealing than the MSM is what is needed to capture the nation's attention.
"On the US side the greatest number of volunteers (more then all other States combined) came from its most Illiterate State, that being Kentucky which did not even border Canada. That state overwhelmingly supported the war. In New England few volunteered and indeed continue to trade and do business with Canada. So why the difference ?"
Which tends to prove that the higher the level of illiteracy, the more willing people are to accept warfare, probably because they are more susceptible to bullshit. Could this be the reason for the dumbing down of USans?
>>The main purpose of the violence we are subjected to by the mainstream media is to make the horrors of warfare acceptable to us.<<
Precisely. Oh? Another war? Ho-hum. When does NASCAR begin its 2012 race schedule?
DKshaw: If you're going to make a blanket statement and use the word WE, then you should also mention that many of us do NOT just go along with war, nor are we numb to its sickening impacts.
It would also help if you added to your indictment by considering the countless channels and mechanisms used to indoctrinate a people into the banality of evil that war constitutes.
It would also be useful if you spoke about the root origin of the pro-war dominator societal model that came about largely by turning women, the bearers of life, into politically invisible, powerless, undervalued players; their imput rendered meaningless.
You could talk about all the MIC personnel now seen regularly on the Occupied air waves sanitizing war by showing no photos of dead babies. Nope. That keeps the Evangelicals placated in just protecting American wombs from abortion here at home. Nor would you hear of such a thing as "enemy" body counts.
Speak neither of the video "games" that turn 6 year olds into robotic, efficient killers, a useful skill given that so much of militarism is now taking to the sky and the distancing use of drone warfare.
Etc. Ad nauseum.
Just as I related in response to Hedges' title, "War Is The Force That Gives Our Lives Meaning," speak for yourself, pal. You do NOT speak for me, or 90% of the men and women that I know.
good point raised - its ok to kill them - whoever they were - but its not ok to piss on them
i'm sure that if we asked the dead guys - they would have preferred to endure the piss if they got to live through it
it is so pedantic to make this fuss over the urine situation without considering that we killed these guys dead a as door nail, as they say
then clinton cries the crocodile tears about war crimes
hey hilbill - remember when you said - we came we saw he died
that ms asswipe was a war crime and i think clinton (either one really but best both) should be tried as war criminals before these obviously misguided marines
as bill maher would say: new rule - you can kill them but don't piss on ''em
As always, Chris Hedges has a truthful and pertinent window into this that I think people need to hear. This is from his Democracy Now! interview on Tuesday, January 17, 2012.
This dehumanizing situation of war that impacts both warrior and the warred upon is one of the most compelling reasons why all alternatives should be exhausted before war is utilized.
Here's the quote:
CHRIS HEDGES: Well, you know, when people are killed on a battlefield, and those who are deemed the enemy are, at best, treated like human refuse. But usually they’re treated like trophies. They’re often dismembered. I mean, one of the first things you do after you kill an enemy combatant is go through their pockets. And in war after war that I covered, the desecration and mutilation of corpses was extremely common. So, I think that what we saw was a window into the reality of war, one that has essentially been censored from public view.
***
If you do not like to see your SONS turned into callow, dehumanizing machines do not allow them to be sent to war easily.
Then it's still okay to send your DAUGHTERS to war?
No daughters, son, husbands, wives, cats, dogs or rats. I'm for a war free world.
The u.s. government is accomplished at lying. Sometimes, however, there is truth in the dialog. The spin is in the reasoning behind the proclamation.
Case in point: "The u.s. is a war zone."
It is. We are under siege. The misdirection concerns from whom. Many within the u.s. citizenry believe it is from Arabs, ie, the elusive terrorists. Others, who have somehow managed to break through the boundaries of conventional thought influenced by a perverted school system and electronic media, myself included, believe it is from the powers behind the government itself.
Defend yourself.
Fight the powers.
"When the glory of victory eludes us, we can only impose our will on corpses."
In this author's point of view this is nothing but the frustrations of young men denied the "glory of victory". Why is it our young men are seeking the "glory of victory"? I thought they were engaged in spreading democracy and preventing attacks on this country. I wasn't aware there was to be any victor or vanquished involved in that enterprise. I thought their service was supposed to be some form of noble self sacrifice in the interest of this nation and all the world's down trodden. I wasn't aware they were just looking for self glorification and "hero" worship. Joining the military is not like winning a "football" scholarship or a place on a pro team.
Part of military training, or training for combat, involves using racial slurs to divest the so-called enemy of its humanity. This tactic is as old as warfare, itself. Nor does it help that an imbecile like Bush dropped The Crusades cue, followed up by the imbecile Boykin who stated that "his god was bigger, and badder than their god." Add this to the ACTUAL Evangelical infiltration of the U.S. Air Force, down to the moral disaster of having ministers coach pilots in the "righteousness" of dropping those bombs! (This has all been documented with articles published on this site and Truthout exposing these practices.)
Religion has been twisted BIG TIME into this otherwise farcical charade called modern war. And there's nothing like the (false) promise, that GOD wants you to kill a particular "enemy" to make a conscience disappear... that is, until it surfaces like a body tossed into the sea.
Conditioning is required to get people (unless they ARE sociopaths) to kill other people; and when war is promoted on the basis of fixed fabrication, enemies become complete fictions. But you can't tell that to those who have become brainwashed, or indoctrinated by all manner of propaganda. That's why they can desecrate the dead. And it's why I teach the law of karma; for while no human eyes may be observing the twisted deeds of the vicious warriors, the Akashic Record maintains it all. And EVERY act will be balanced in time... that is Universal Law, a/k/a karma.
The best treatment of the subject was written by Simone Weil in 1939, in her book (booklet?) The Iliad, or the poem of force.
"'When you ask young men to go kill people for a living, it takes a whole lot of effort to rein that in.' The quote is from a breezy Associated Press story about the urination incident, putting the desecration of corpses into context."
Killing people for a living..... such a bizarre turn of phrase.
"'We cut left ears off and wore them around our necks to show we were warriors and we knew how to get revenge.' It's just part of the time-honored tradition of war, from Achilles and Hector onward through the blood stained millenia." -Robert Koehler
The Trojan warrior Hector killed Petroclus in battle, stripped the armor from the slain Greek warrior's body, and took it back into the city of Troy to display as a trophy. Achilles, upon learning of his dear friend Petroclus' death, fell into a grief stricken rage. Achilles armed himself, and went on a revenge rampage, killing many Trojan soldiers in his mad pursuit of Hector.
When Achilles finally caught up with Hector, he killed him to avenge Petroclus' death. Achilles then tied Hector's corpse behind his chariot, and dragged it around the walls of the city while the Trojan citizens inside watched in horror and wailed. Eventually, a deal was brokered for the return of the desecrated body of Hector, in order that a proper burial ceremony could be performed.
The enemy evil doers' atrocities supposedly justify our atrocities in reprisal. That macabre dynamic once made scalping almost as American as apple pie. It even gets characterized as a time-honored, virtually inevitable feature of war, somehow proving that our side is made up of great warriors who know how to get revenge. And so the cycle repeats.
It does take a whole lot of effort to rein it in.
Time to take the toys away from the boys, and stuff the genie back into the bottle.
Bill from Saginaw
Thank you for continuing to post evocatively on profoundly important issues.
We cannot AFFORD to act as if morality is irrelevant in our lives and/or in politics.
Reverence for LIFE, intrinsically includes reverence for DEATH, and similarly for REBIRTH -- as that is what life is really all about (all three).
Expedient situational ethics is warmongering institutionalized -- whilst personal integrity, choices, honor, dignity, service, and our authentic truths -- are renown as the cornerstones of a mutually beneficial and sustainable society.
Just like funerals, the action is not for the dead, it's for the living... both the perpetrators and their target. Who and what do you choose to be?
There is a very good book titled Achilles and Vietnam that points out how Achilles is characterized in the Iliad as suffering from a war-caused breakdown when he desecrates Hector's body, a breakdown very similar to what we today call PTSD. Atrocities in war show us how war destroys our sense of a well-ordered universe and our understanding of right and wrong. The Greeks knew this over thousand years ago. Why can't we remember?
Pee All You Can Pee.
Reenlist. Marines.
Ocampo didn't kill homeless men because he loved his homeless father. He killed them simply because they were easy targets, and he get's off on killing. Did this happen because of his military service? Probably not. Will it be excused because of it? Probably.
Are these soldiers peeing on bodies because they are disappointed they don't have glory and acclaim? I don't remember that being part of their enlistment contract. Did they enlist to prove they had big "dicks"?
"WANTED A FEW GOOD MEN" ... to piss on dead human beings...."Semper Fi"