Content area
Full text
INTRODUCTION
In late 2019, I had an email exchange with a Vietnam veteran named Marc about dehumanization in war. I had been paging through a book on military ethics and came across this passage written by two philosophy professors.
Our troops cannot and should not avoid dehumanizing their enemies to some degree. Just as it is their responsibility to only kill certain people in certain ways at certain times, it is the responsibility of leadership to help them accomplish this by training them to only dehumanize certain people in certain ways at certain times. (French & Jack 2015:194)
I knew the moral agility described here would sound absurd to Marc. He went through basic Army training in 1970 and was a willing killer within a month of his arrival in the jungles of Vietnam, in a messy war with thin lines between enemy aggressors and civilians. ‘I read [these] lines and laughed’, Marc responded. ‘Was this written as a joke? The thinking is so out of touch with reality it's frightening’. In principle, humans can compartmentalize their affect within a category; in many societies, for instance, some people may be considered worthy of empathy and care while others may be considered dispensable. But historically, American military control over this process has been sloppy at best. Finely tuned togglings of dehumanization are hard to control among heavily armed young adults who are terrified or exhausted, possibly vengeful, and conditioned since their basic training to withhold empathy from certain types of people. And those ‘types’ are often labeled, even by military authorities themselves, with a dehumanizing epithet that can be used with such broad extension (in the sense of: the set of all things to which a term refers) that it can encompass civilians.
War may sometimes look like an orgy of senseless violence, but as Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois (2004:3) remind us, ‘Sadly, most violence is not senseless at all’; it is always mediated by meaning. National discourses leading up to war often encourage the projection of negative qualities onto the enemy ‘other’. Conditioning during military training and service does still more to disinhibit the act of killing. In the United States military, in fact, this disinhibition has a famous history. General S. L. A. Marshall claimed...