Australian Nationalism, Conflicted Identities, Militarism and Exclusion
Abstract
In this
presentation I argue that Australian nationalism is very much alive but is also
conflicted, complex and problematic; and this could be an indicator of the
future direction of nationalism elsewhere. I have used Australia as a case
study, although similar arguments about the phenomenon of nationalism could be
used in relation to many countries with heterogeneous populations.
Australia
has a culture of ‘nationalism’ that is insecure, sensitive to criticism, with
anxieties about the dispossession of indigenous people and invasion of the
territory by outsiders. Australia’s nationalism is both ‘situationalist’ in
building a rational civic culture and ‘constructivist’ in spinning an
exclusivist national mythology (Brown: 2004).
‘Nationhood’ needs to be reinforced by governments that promote
galvanising activities called ‘Nation-Building’. This is done by instilling
pride in the institutions of the state and belief in the shared mythology. But
‘identity’ is a conflicted matter for many people who do not fully share in the
nation’s ‘mythology’, which is often fictitious, in-group specific,
exclusivist, masculine, militaristic and constantly being manipulated by
political operators. Andrew Jakubowicz refers to the ‘uniqueness’ of what he
calls “the Australian Empire Project”. (Jakubowicz: 2005).
Recent events concerning disrespectful treatment of Muslim
clerics in Australia and the gratuitous raising of the issue of Muslim women’s’
headscarves have underlined the perceived threats to Australian identity and
revealed some disturbing and quite irrational features of our national psyche.
Introduction
The purpose of
this essay is to describe the phenomenon and suggest that more work needs to be
done.
In my 2005 presentation, entitled Australian Nationalism, Conflicted
Identities, Militarism and Exclusion, at the previous conference in
this series, I argued that Australian nationalism is very much alive but is
also conflicted, complex and problematic; and argued that this could be
an indicator of the future direction of nationalism elsewhere (Bach 2005).
I have in mind other societies focussed on the military aspects of their
history that Samuel Huntington would describe as ‘Praetorian’, that is,
strongly influenced by a deep embeddedness of the military in the civil
institutions of the nation state (Huntington 1970).
Since the Cronulla riots, which
coincided with the 2005 conference, the term ‘face paint patriotism’ has been
coined. This phenomenon, described by Gideon Haigh, depicts the emergence of a
disturbingly xenophobic and aggressive strand of nationalism, capable of vicious
and divisive violence in Australian society. It included ‘enforced flag
kissing’ followed by assaults that occasioned significant physical injuries.
These ‘patriots’ targeted Australians with the appearance of being other than
‘Anglo (Haigh Sep 19, 2007)’.
This tendency has been noted again in
response to, or coincident to, statements by former federal Minister for
Immigration and Citizenship, Kevin Andrews. Resettlement organisations and
Sudanese people, who described the Minister’s statements as hurtful and
detrimental to the successful resettlement of African and Sudanese refugees,
have documented these statements and outcomes that resulted from the ‘dog
whistle’ response. The former Minister expressed no regret, nor did he give his
condolence to the Melbourne Sudanese family whose son had been violently
killed.
I drew attention in 2005 to the role
the military has in the forging of national identity and creation of the
narrative of national mythology by Australian political elites. I mention here
the celebration of ANZAC Day as “the one day of the year”, the resurgence of
militaristic depictions of Australia
I intend to draw out the synergistic
relationships of racism, military training and indoctrination and the
experience of combat against peoples described by Social Psychologist, Matthew
Hornsey, as being of outgroup ‘other’ ethnicities (Hornsey 2004)
(Hornsey M September/October 2004).
It is worthy of mention here that many of the wars and warlike actions that
have involved Australian military personnel have been against Africans, Arabs,
Koreans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Afghans or Iraqis. These engagements, I
argue, significantly amplify and ingrain authoritarian, patriarchal behaviours
and attitudes and the practise of simplistic racial stereotyping in Australian
society.
The military culture
The military is a part of society with
a special role as servants of the government in power. That role is what Rod
Lyon refers to as “the management of violence”. The military is an instrument
of violence that needs to be very carefully managed by civil authorities in a
democratic society (Lyon July 2004).
Its personnel are the sons and daughters of this society. It is a mirror of
society, yet it is a mirror that exaggerates the need for obedience, hierarchy,
patriarchy, and the simplification of problems to the point where all problems
are seen as threats, whose solution is ‘the default position’: the application
of violence. “The man with a hammer sees everything as a nail”. (Rex Brown, Texas
In my experience as a young soldier in
the British Army, I was frequently told that I was not paid to think. If I made
a mistake I would acknowledge this and was told, “not to be a hero”. The
military is a ‘brotherhood’ (and a ‘sisterhood’) that protects its own. The
organisation does not like to admit mistakes; or it minimises their
significance. The military does not mention ‘courage’ when obliged to admit
that it makes mistakes. It can require members to tell lies under oath, as in
the cases of Col Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter in the 1987 inquiry
into the Iran-Contra scandal.
This can also be seen in the various
ADF responses to (a) accusations of sexual harassment, mainly but not only from
female personnel, (b) accusations of ‘bastardisation’ and (c) occasional
suicides by military personnel whom bullying and intimidation may have unduly
stressed. The ADF continues to fail in correcting its wrongs. Covering up and
protecting its own take priority over any willingness to reform or administer
just outcomes for individuals. Admitting mistakes requires courage.
The family of Pvt Jake Kovco have
their own experience of this, as they continue to seek the truth about Jake’s
shooting in his Baghdad
Indoctrination of the military
The word indoctrination is employed
here to embrace all aspects of military culture, including the siting of most
military concentrations away from civilian populations, if through necessity,
and the emphasis on separateness from and difference to the civilian society.
Military personnel are generally subjected to the same education, societal
conditioning influences and media exposure as most other citizens. But,
additionally, they are acculturated into the military interpretation of history
and a ‘national identity’ that focuses on conflicts, ‘victories’ and the
claimed qualities of ‘bravery’ and ‘heroism’. The Australian mythology about
‘the diggers’ is a useful construct in this scenario.
In this ‘parallel universe’ there is
no room for nuanced explanations why the military were deployed into particular
theatres of operation. To tell soldiers simplistically “the bad guys were
there” fails to analyse or engage with critical thinking. Qualities of that
nature are singularly threatening and unwelcome to military obedience and
cohesion. The civilian population are silenced, as in current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan
Brian Martin examines this
differentiating aspect of military culture and indoctrination in his 1984 book,
Uprooting War (Martin 1984).
Brian Martin develops his arguments regarding the military in Chapter
9, where he says:
“Even in societies where
military forces are overtly subordinate to civilian elites, military
perspectives and interests can penetrate deeply into a society's fabric. This
process of militarisation has been especially noticeable in industrialised
countries since World War Two. Since then, 'peacetime' military spending has
provided a rationale for continuing state intervention into economies and for the
turning of industrial and professional efforts toward military priorities”. 65
Brian
Martin is referring here to the viral effect of military attitudes that are
adopted by their families and children. These attitudes find a life of their
own as they spread through schools, workplaces, social institutions, government
and the media.
Furthermore,
as Brian Martin details the specialised functionality of the military
community:
“Internally, military
forces are bureaucratic in form, with a strict hierarchy and division of
labour, rigid rules and duties. The function of military forces is to be able
to use organised violence against opponents, usually seen as similarly
organised. Because killing of other humans is not readily undertaken by many
people in modern societies, military recruits undergo extensive training,
indoctrination and isolation in a military environment. The key to military
performance is unquestioning obedience to orders, which again has much in
common with non-military bureaucracies.
Military forces use
violence as the ultimate defence of state interests, and not surprisingly the
ultimate sanction against internal resistance in armed forces is also violent:
imprisonment or even execution. Military forces even more than other
bureaucracies are similar to authoritarian states in their denial of the right
or opportunity to dissent, in their demand for obedience and in their use of
reprisals against recalcitrant subjects”. 151
The military act with various degrees
of secrecy that are incompatible with accountability and democratic
governance. This is especially relevant
when the military is accused of committing serious wrongs. Many military
operations are covert in nature, consisting of violent acts against undeclared
enemies, sabotage of civilian utilities, and assassination of individuals, in
locations that have not been declared as war zones, and often with the
intention of transferring the blame for these essentially terrorist acts onto
other actors. Black Ops and Psy Ops, as they are known, do not acknowledge the
agency of regular military forces, are exceptionally hazardous and are likely
to lead to denial of these activities. This has happened in relation to Indochina and other theatres of warlike activity and will
be one of the problematic outcomes from what is termed the ‘war on terror’.
Covert warriors travel light. They
move fast and take no prisoners. For anyone squeamish about this, they kill all
prisoners (who may or may not be in uniform – and may or may not be
combatants). The traumatic act of killing at very close quarters is generally
by strangling or stabbing. Guns are too noisy. It is interesting indeed to
learn from former US Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, that the Geneva
Conventions that also protect the soldiers of democracies are now considered to
be “quaint” (Gutman R (Editor) November 5, 2007).
Unacknowledged civilian casualties are
another result of this style of war fighting, as the deaths and injuries go
unrecorded and the media opinion-makers try to focus public attention on “our
brave boys”, bearers of the ‘national mythology’, who, in this case, were not
there anyway. Callous public attitudes that are necessary to the prosecution of
war, assume that the entire population of the opposing nation state are the
‘enemy’, their places of habitation are ‘battlefields’ or ‘battle space’, which
makes them ‘free-fire zones’, and that their lives are worthless and not a
significant concern to us.
War crimes and punishment
If military personnel are taught to
kill, they also need to be taught only to use lethal force when ordered to do
so. There are several levels of response to perceived threats that military
personnel learn, as they interpret and respond to situations that they face.
This is known as the graduated response. There are penalties for unlawful
killing. An undisciplined force or a vengeful, permissive and unprofessional
leadership can readily lead to excesses in lethal response behaviour. At the
time of public discovery, there were attempts to explain away the My Lai massacre, which may have indicated a breakdown in
the normal restraints of good discipline as well as a state of denial. The
‘one-off incident’ explanation assumed that this was what had happened at My Lai .
The overall prevailing strategy of the
civil and military leadership elite can also include the
indiscriminate killing of as many civilians as possible. Negative attitudes to
the ethnic ‘other’ and the preconditioning messages received in military
training are critically important enablers. So too are the precise language and
‘messages’ embedded in their orders. When Serb paramilitary troops executed
Bosnian Muslim prisoners in Srebrenitza the effects of this ‘conditioning’ were
exhibited. (video) Military orders require a directive ‘task oriented’
approach that eliminates any moral values that might hinder the act of killing.
Additionally, we need to consider the
soldiers’ desensitisation to killing other human beings – or ‘sub-human
beings’. In most societies that make claims of decency and civility, people do
not like to think that they have sanctioned barbaric behaviour and breaches of
the Geneva Conventions. This is one of the reasons why returning veterans are
disillusioned and bewildered by society, families and friends, who turn away or
refuse to hear about their awful experiences.
The most serious incidents of war
crimes and crimes against humanity evoke a protective, secretive response from
military leaderships. This is not surprising as the Nuremberg Principle places
the blame on senior officers to a greater degree, and for good reason. More
recent experience shows that accountability being increasingly shirked in
favour of placing greater blame at the lower end of the chain of command.
Exceptions to this rule would be Rwandan genocidaire, Colonel Théoneste
Bagosora and former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević, who have both been
tried by United Nations tribunals, though the latter took his own life before
the completion of the trial.
The My Lai massacre, which took place
on 16 March 1968, during the Vietnam War, demonstrated that the US government
and military were unable and unwilling to satisfactorily investigate the
incident, and ultimately blamed it on a junior officer, the Platoon Commander,
Lt James Calley, making him the token ‘bad apple’ in a blameless professional
leadership. Claude Cookman, a former US Special Forces soldier, explains how
this happened in his paper, An American Atrocity: The My Lai Massacre
Concretized in a Victim's Face, he also states that other massacres
took place on the same day (Cookman June 2007).
It is important to note that the US military ‘cordoned-off’ My Lai from other massacres. As Claude Cookman explains,
“on that same day another company massacred at least ninety women and children
a mile away [from the acknowledged massacre], in My Khe—an atrocity few have
heard of”. In fact there were deliberate, random, both authorised and
unauthorised killings taking place in many regions of Indochina ,
Vietnam , Cambodia and Laos
There are many examples that
demonstrate a culture of impunity in the US
military that has continued till the present war in Iraq
More recently, in 2003, the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq produced just
a handful of low ranking defendants, MPs Spc. Charles Graner, Ivan Frederick,
Pfc. Lynndie England
General Janis Karpinsky accused Donald
Rumsfeld of authorising torture, as she claimed to be sidelined by a parallel
chain of command, the CIA and by ‘private contractors’ over whom she had no
authority. So, Pvt Lynndie England
This paper does not propose to accuse
the Australian Defence Forces (ADF) with direct participation in such war
crimes. Nevertheless, a large body of evidence emphatically proves that United States forces, allies of Australia
Dehumanisation of opponents
The euphemistic language used by
military and civilian elites is well documented, as are the effects of these
particular words and phrases in military operations. They are known as
‘weasel-words’ and ‘unspeak’. The latter term is taken from British journalist
Steven Poole’s 2006 book, Unspeak: How Words Become Weapons, How Weapons
Become a Message, and How The Message Becomes Reality. These words were
described by George Orwell, in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English
Language, and in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, published
in 1949. There are probably too many jokes about ‘collateral damage’, however,
this term summarises a range of callous and indiscriminate acts that needlessly
cause civilian casualties. These casualties can result from the use of
‘overwhelming force’ otherwise referred to in Humanitarian Law as
‘disproportionate force’ (Gutman R (Editor) November 5, 2007).
The term ‘collateral damage’ has the
effect of erasing the significance and value of the human lives that are
extinguished by lethal conflicts. Terms like ‘ethnic cleansing’ now have a
sinister ring as the Serbian leadership used this, but genocide would have been
just as appropriate. Terms like ‘cordon and search’ and ‘eliminate’ and ‘take
out’ have much the same outcome of trivialising the killing of human beings.
More banal, perhaps, would be the use of the term ‘battlefield’ to describe a
suburb of Baghdad, but the effect of ‘clearing the battlefield’ is to create a
‘free fire zone’ with the same terrifying consequences for civilians.
Similarly, the term ‘civilian targets’ depicts people as objects to shoot at.
This act should always be referred to as the ‘targeting of civilians’, which is
indisputably a major war crime (Gutman R (Editor) November 5, 2007).
English is not the only language that
facilitates what are otherwise unconscionable acts. When questioned about the
killing of East Timorese women and children in 1975, an Indonesian officer
informed John Pilger, “When you clean the fields don’t you kill all the snakes
large and small?” Richard Woolcott, Australia ’s
Ambassador to Jakarta explained to John Pilger,
“Although we know it’s not true, the formal position of the Indonesian
government is that there is no Indonesian military intervention in East Timor . We should act in a way designed to
minimise the impact in Australia
Whether the military are deployed to
carry out legitimate tasks on behalf of their domicile state or to commit war
crimes, there are some aspects of their training and conditioning that remain
constant. In all cases dehumanisation of opponents, ‘the enemy’, must be
employed to enable soldiers to kill, at close range if necessary. The
opponent is always labelled as something less than human, given a nickname like
‘Charlie’, ‘gook’, ‘slope’, or ‘rag-head’ that conveniently excuses random acts
of killing, disrespect for the corpse, maltreatment and even murder of
prisoners and massacres of civilians.
US Lt Col David Grossman (rtd), in his
book, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and
Society, explains how young men (as they were, prior to more recent
conflicts) were conditioned to accept that their job was to kill, that killing
is a normal, routinised activity, and that they must learn to cope with
feelings of remorse or revulsion and blot out any empathy they may have for
fellow human beings (Grossman November 1, 1996)
(Grossman August 10, 1998).
In some military forces, there is heavy alcohol consumption and sometimes other
drugs are used. Some rebel militias in Africa
administer drugs, by scratching the temples of their child soldiers and rubbing
in amphetamines or heroin. This practise was well documented with child
soldiers in Sierra Leone Poland
As David Grossman develops his argument,
the act of killing, the participation in combat, the soldier’s experience of
being adrenalised, hyper-vigilant and frightened for extended periods can
inevitably lead to a high incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD),
psychotic episodes and psychiatric disease. The percentage of combat-hardened
veterans that David Grossman claims to suffer from these disorders can be as
high as 97%. These veterans are suffering mental illness as a result of their
military service. There is an extremely high rate of suicides among these
veterans, which can sometimes be identified in a specific act, or which may
manifest in persistent risk-taking behaviours. This may be born out by returned
American veterans of the Iraq
Killing distance and callous attitudes
For some combatants, especially from
technologically advanced nations, there is also the opportunity, as Susan
Sontag explains, to “kill beyond the range of retaliation” (Sontag and Jump 06/03/07).
This phenomenon gives rise to callous explanations by air force pilots and
naval personnel that “I was just doing my job”. The job can be a matter of
identifying dots on a video screen and pressing a button.
There was little public questioning during World War II of the Allied
incendiary bombing of the German cities, Hamburg and Dresden, except for some
later disquiet in Britain. There was mainly a triumphant satisfaction in Allied
nations following the fire bombing of civilian homes in sixty seven (check) Japanese cities, including Tokyo, and the symbolically demonstrative
atomic bombing experiments in Hiroshima and Nagasaki :
“The
first indiscriminative bombing onto residential area was examined in March 10,
1945. The Great Tokyo Nagoya , Osaka ,
Kobe
Since
June of 1945, relatively small cities like NAGAOKA had also become targets of
indiscriminative incendiary bombings”.
US Air Force General Curtis Emerson LeMay and British RAF Air Chief
Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, known also as ‘Bomber Harris’ and sometimes as
‘Butcher Harris’, were architects of these several significant events including
the incendiary bombing of Hamburg and Dresden and LeMay in the Japanese
incendiary bombing raids, followed by the atomic bombings.
I mention this as I reflect on what I saw in the German city of Essen Korea ,
China and Mongolia
Western, particularly American attitudes to the frequency and conduct of
warfare, have been influenced by the absence of any trials of Allied officers
at the end of World War II. The Puritanical beliefs that the USA is an
embodiment of the ‘light on the hill’, and America’s role in the world,
characterised by what is termed ‘American Exceptionalism’, confers virtual
immunity from prosecution for US military and intelligence personnel. I contend
that hegemony alone has created this unhealthy paradigm, which confers
extraordinary powers and impunity on the USA
This point is significant to the arguments in this article, as US General Curtis Emerson LeMay threatened in
May 1964, “You want to know my solution to Vietnam US against
the three nations of Indochina . This statement
indicated an intention to inflict unprecedented civilian casualties, coincident
to General LeMay’s threat, and in clear breach of Geneva Conventions and Just
War Theory stipulations against the use of disproportionate force. References
to the Stone Age have echoed on through every twentieth and twenty first
century conflict since 1964. As President Johnson told American officers in Vietnam
Racial attitudes driven by fear of
numerical superiority
The “coonskin” reference suggests very strongly that the President
considered the Viet Cong and their allies as less than human. This translated
on the ground to a spree of indiscriminate killings. When we try to examine the
reasons for the use of this overwhelming force, indiscriminate air power and
egregious weapons in Indochina we find in the documentary evidence that these
military strategies stemmed from a deep-seated Western fear of being ‘swamped’
by endless waves of millions of Asians. The Pentagon Papers and documents in
the British National Archives are irrefutable on this point.
Further examples of how attitudes of racial superiority and contempt
informed the military campaign can be seen in the words of US General William Westmoreland,
as he explained his readiness to kill 3.5 million Indochinese people in these
terms:
“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient. As the philosophy of the Orient expresses it: life is … is not important”.
US General William Westmoreland
Film
documentary, Hearts and Minds, 2002
Noam Chomsky’s close reading of the
Pentagon Papers yields these revealing passages:
“America’s early
strategy, as
[Townsend] Hoopes describes it, was
to kill as many VC as possible with artillery and air strikes:
As late as the fall of 1966... a certain aura of optimism surrounded this strategy. Some were ready to believe that, in its unprecedented mobility and massive firepower, American forces had discovered the military answer to endless Asian manpower and Oriental indifference to death. For a few weeks there hung in the expectant Washington air the exhilarating possibility that the most modern, mobile, professional American field force in the nation’s history was going to lay to rest the time-honoured superstition, the gnawing unease of military planners, that a major land war against Asian hordes is by definition a disastrous plunge into quicksand for any Western army.
But this glorious hope was dashed. The endless manpower ofVietnam North
Vietnam US
As late as the fall of 1966... a certain aura of optimism surrounded this strategy. Some were ready to believe that, in its unprecedented mobility and massive firepower, American forces had discovered the military answer to endless Asian manpower and Oriental indifference to death. For a few weeks there hung in the expectant Washington air the exhilarating possibility that the most modern, mobile, professional American field force in the nation’s history was going to lay to rest the time-honoured superstition, the gnawing unease of military planners, that a major land war against Asian hordes is by definition a disastrous plunge into quicksand for any Western army.
But this glorious hope was dashed. The endless manpower of
The casualness with which these people spoke their
minds when discussing the killing of millions of people, most of whom were
civilians, demonstrates that they believed their worldview to be normal and
widely held. Lt George Coker, USN explained to a group of American children:
“If it wasn’t for the people it [Vietnam
Film documentary, Hearts and Minds, 2002
Film documentary, Hearts and Minds, 2002
Lt Coker might not have been aware of the ancient
cultures of the places that he was engaged in destroying nor the 5,000-year
history of the Vietnamese. His sense of superiority was reinforced by his war
experience.
During bayonet practice soldiers are
ordered to make “blood-curdling yells” as part of psyching them into jabbing a
bayonet into a sack of straw. I too had to do this. It helps to yell, as
adrenalin is a necessary ingredient. The exercise seems more real that way.
David Grossman describes group absolution, vicarious role models and intimate
brutality as explanations of the aims and outcomes of military training. He
further explains why these learned responses could not be turned off when
combat veterans return to their home environment.
Grossman describes the military
turning people into killers. This was seen in the films, Tigerland and
Full Metal Jacket, in which the drill instructor repeatedly tells
the young US Marines that they are “killers” (and this was something to be
proud of). In the film Gardens of Stone the main character,
another US Marine ‘true believer’, is heard to say, “death is our business –
business is good” when describing the relentless slaughter in Indochina.
So, inevitably, we hear lines like,
“Waste the Gook”, from the characters in films like Casualties of War
and Full Metal Jacket – it was an expression commonly used. A
helicopter gunship door gunner, in the film Full Metal Jacket
explains to colleagues
“If they run they are VC, if they stand still
they are disciplined VC.”
Whilst
US forces were destroying a
substantial part of Vietnam
This was called “a C4 burial” – much easier than digging a grave and giving that person a dignified burial. Memories of these events led very often to PTSD.
Daniel
Ellsberg, in 1971, relates this snippet
of discussion:
“Exhausted men concentrated on immediate means rather than eventual ends. A poignant example of this thinking was recalled by TIME Correspondent Jess Cook. In the spring of 1967, after a long and fruitless retrospective interview, he asked McNamara: "Isn't there anything you regret at all about how the war was conducted?"
There was a long pause.
"Yes," replied the weary Secretary. "There is one thing. We should have been able to come up with a better technique for population control.””
Further
examples can be seen in Robert McNamara’s explanations of war crimes in the
film, The Fog of War, which relates to the ordinariness of the
routinised tasks of managing wars. Hannah Arrendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, bears a chilling
similarity to the career of Robert McNamara, who speaks about war crimes in the
film, even using that terminology in referring to LeMay .
Psychological
theories – Case Study: the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF)
One
of the most revealing racist statements that has emerged from the conflict in Israel and the Palestinian Territories
“After lunch,
the Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee spoke with great intemperance
about the Arabs. When he drew a breath, I was constrained to say, 'Dr Hacohen,
I am profoundly shocked that you should preach of other human beings in terms
similar to those in which (Nazi) Julius Streicher spoke of the Jews. Have you
learned nothing?' I shall remember his reply to my dying day. He smote the
table with both hands and said, 'But
they are not human beings, they are not people, they are Arabs.'
When combat veterans return
to society and their families they bring these values, including the racist
stereotyping of the 'other', with them, thereby reinforcing the legitimacy of
these values in society.”
In her essay, Jewish
Trauma and the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict, Avigail Abarbanal
describes how every family in Israel has at least one young adult son or
daughter serving in the IDF and the parents’ generation also participated in
the exclusion of Palestinians and the occupation of their lands (Abarbanal 10 June 2003).
She describes how the whole society is imbued with the same authoritarian
militarist racist values. As she describes this in her question, “What does
it mean to base a whole identity on the experience of trauma?” –
“Throughout my upbringing in Israel Israel
Indoctrination is also an important function of the
military, and since every Israeli is required to do military service the
control is comprehensive.
The phrase “a good Arab is a dead Arab” was
commonplace and as children we used to sing songs that called for the
destruction of all the Arab countries and their leaders.
It means to view the world as mostly a negative and
dangerous place. It means to have an “us and them” mentality. The world is
divided between our group and all the others and the others are not to be
trusted. It means to not be particularly respectful of others. It means to be
aggressive, defensive and emotionally reactive. It also means to personalise
everything and think that everything that happens is about us.
When people suffer from trauma it is extremely
difficult for them to see someone else’s point of view or to empathise with
others. Being traumatised does not exclude success, intelligence or creativity.
In fact there are many traumatised people who occupy important positions and
who do extremely well in some areas of their life. But trauma causes people to
be chronically anxious, see enemies everywhere and always anticipate negative
outcomes. They live in a permanent state of urgency and emergency and it is
hard for them to be patient. Traumatised people live in a private hell. The
philosophy of life of the traumatised can be quite fanatic and narrow minded.
The world they live in is so scary that they desperately try to hold on to
their way of seeing things, to the point where they can be quite rigid and
uncompromising. Views different to their own present a real threat to their
world.”
Avigail Abarbanel 337
Carmen Lawrence explains this phenomenon of dehumanisation in her 2006 book Fear and politics (Lawrence 2006). She writes:
“There’s
considerable evidence that when fear is engendered in any community, people
become more punitive and less concerned with the welfare of those they’ve been
asked to define as the others, the outsiders. High levels of threat and fear
reduce our capacity for rational thought. They increase our reliance on group
stereotypes, and increase the likelihood that we’ll behave towards others with
heightened distrust, suspicion and prejudice. And there’s a mountain of evidence
in social psychology and sociology to that effect”. 81
Carmen Lawrence further deconstructs the politics of fear with references to the Holocaust:
“What
I want to talk to you about this morning is the role that fear of the other,
fear of the stranger, xenophobia, sometimes called, plays in generating
violence and in eroding human rights. And in speaking to you, I’m speaking from
a concern that developed along, in me, a long time ago. My personal journey of
exploration into this subject really began when I was introduced at a
university like this, as a psychology student, to the work of Erich Fromm and
Wilhelm Reich, and through them to a much fuller awareness of the horror of the
Holocaust. And in researching their attempts to understand the genesis of
fascism and authoritarianism, I embarked, like many before and since, on what
was really a gruesome quest, to try to understand how human beings arrive at
the point where they can torture and kill one another without apparent regret.
That
so many ordinary Germans, and for that matter, people in Eastern Europe, could
stand by as their Jewish neighbours were first branded and then excluded from
normal life, then herded into ghettos and cattle trucks, and say they didn’t
know what was happening….”
“These weren’t the actions
of a disordered few. Oppressive regimes and terrorist organisations can’t
operate at all without these willing executioners, without a bureaucracy to
keep the wheels of the system turning, without finance to pay for the cattle
trucks, without factories to manufacture the gas, and without the majority of
people turning a blind eye, to the disappearances and the brutality taking
place around them.” Carmen Lawrence 260
Winnifred Louis has studied
the social psychological reasons for Australians agreeing to allow their
government to subject asylum seekers to extraordinary cruelty after the
Australian public had been repeatedly told that these vulnerable people
represented a threat to Australian security and identity (Louis 5 July 2007).
Jessica Stern wrote Terror
in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, which was published
in 2004, in which she studied fundamentalist terrorists by interviewing them.
Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu and Buddhists were all subjects in her study (Stern August 17, 2004)
(Stern August 17, 2004).
She found that their preparedness to kill large numbers of non-combatant
civilians rose in direct proportion to their religious zeal.
Conclusions: propaganda to the wider community
I have
postulated that war begets prejudice, concluding that this area requires
further examination in future studies. Propaganda depicting racial stereotypes
is only one manifestation of the dehumanisation, which relates to the training
of military personnel. This indoctrination has a clear purpose, and probably
detrimental post-facto societal effects. Making war brings unintended
consequences. I have examined existing knowledge and drawn together threads
that I regard to be logically related, but which may not have been connected in
previous work.
War has many hidden costs in advanced
democracies that engage in power projection through military means. One of
these is the traumatisation of the veterans, their wives, and families,
especially the children. The whole society pays an intergenerational price for
the presence in their midst of one or more physically or psychologically
damaged cohort.
Society also pays for a form of often
latent, sometimes expressed and sometimes acted-out, xenophobia and racism.
This racism has been born out of military indoctrination and combat that
veterans of a nation like Australia
In researching the roots of racism it
is possible to find crosscurrents of guilt and illusions of superiority
stemming from conflict, thus sowing ethno-religious disharmony into the future.
Part of the mental process of
indoctrination appears to feature the essential ingredient of fear in most
examples that I have examined. Bertrand Russell famously said that “fear is the
parent of cruelty”. It appears that fear
is indeed a potent driver that enables people to kill other human beings, as
long as this person has been dehumanised as ‘other’, not like us, and labelled
as an ‘enemy’.
The more ignorant we are of the
‘other’ human being the more likely we are to use excessive, lethal force, and
the more cruel will be the killing. Community approval or at least apathy and
disinterest enable military personnel to carry out the task allotted to them.
This only helps them to get through the task but is no help when they return
traumatised to reintegrate into the society. It is even harder when they do not
feel able to articulate what they have experienced and when the society has
lost interest in the issues.
Myth making begins where the national
elite finds political expediency that suits the purpose of nation building. The
link between religious zeal, nationalism, deep-seated fear of the ‘other’ and
xenophobia is strong. The links to military actions and the national mythology
are also there, but require further study.
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http://www.klimt02.net/forum/index.php?item_id=927.
This essay was presented at the International conference on Racism inthe New World Order: Realities of Colour, Culture and Identity,
8-9 December 2005, and published here:
http://www.usc.edu.au/NR/rdonlyres/FF483353-FE64-49C9-84EF-627B696170CB/0/RacismsConf1revised.pdf#page=44
Bartley, Roseanne, 2002, Culturing the Body 2002 (image at heading)
http://www.klimt02.net/forum/index.php?item_id=927.
This essay was presented at the International conference on Racism inthe New World Order: Realities of Colour, Culture and Identity,
8-9 December 2005, and published here:
http://www.usc.edu.au/NR/rdonlyres/FF483353-FE64-49C9-84EF-627B696170CB/0/RacismsConf1revised.pdf#page=44
