We are in a period of brutalization that continues to intensify. The latest uptick in violent language and brutal policy may be evidence of the Bushites and the Rabid Right fighting for their political lives in the face of majority opposition, but it sets a new standard of brutality that affects the whole public dialogue, and all of us as individuals.
“Brutality” means humans acting like beasts (or at least how humans interpret animal behavior.) It carries with it the expectation that human beings in a civilized society should progress beyond this automatic behavior when it is clearly inappropriate and counterproductive, especially in the long term. It also implies an attitude about the value and sacredness of life. Progress used to include moving farther away from brutality to the rule of consciousness and more “human” means of solving conflicts.
Brutalization is shifting individual and societal standards to accepting higher levels of brutality as normal and acceptable. In civilized humanty, it is retrogression. So how in the world, early in the twenty-first century, did we get here?
Our sense of the word “brutalization” comes from historian George Mosse, in his analysis of French culture during World War I. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement (June 16, 2006–online but behind a pay wall), Jay Winter characterized the “war culture” of the period, as described by two other historians, concluding:
“Thus the war became a kind of crusade, a morality play in which good and evil were evidently divided that those who cried `enough’ were deemed either deluded or dangerous.”
World War I remains such a profound event in European culture that a colloquium was held recently “on the explosion of extreme violence in 1914-15, marking a kind of degeneration of war into slaughter on a scale the world had never seen before.” France and England lost 2 million men, four times the number killed in World War II.
The slaughter on one battlefield in 1917 was so extreme and so needless that a half million French soldiers refused to fight. This forced a change in tactics, and changed the nature of the war. After the war, a vast veterans movement of some four million arose in France. They formed
“overwhelmingly pacifist associations, determined to make war unthinkable…They hated politicians, those self-serving evildoers who sent men to war, but never paid the price for their policies. Their voices were angry. They had a cause and defended it as fiercely after the war as they had defended their part of the front during it.”
This war and this movement, Winter writes, had a lasting effect on French culture and policy. He does not explicitly say it affected the skepticism and refusal of the French government to get involved in the US invasion of Iraq, but the implication is there.
We recognize the us/them buttons that politicians push, and their manipulation of our natural impulse to defend ourselves when threatened. When Shakespeare wrote the phrase, “let loose the dogs of war,” he knew that war releases instincts that can become uncontrollable, and that feed on themselves. A pack of violent dogs is a self-reinforcing mechanism.
Humans can rationalize and compartmentalize, and so appear to themselves rational even when they aren’t. Humans also can escalate violence beyond anything a pack of vicious dogs can accomplish, and justify it with the logic of attack and counterattack, with defense soon becoming pay-back and vengeance. War fever is not even assuaged by victory, for there are always new groups to be defined as enemies, and to conquer.
But war itself does not necessarily start the brutalization process that can result in war, or determines how that war is conducted. During the brutality of the Vietnam war, an immense dialogue took place on the meaning of war as well as that particular war.
It found in history a long list of voices crying out against the futility of war, the needless brutality and its ineffectiveness in solving problems. It demanded that war be evaluated not just with numbers and geopolitical theories, but by suffering, especially of the innocent, and the brutalizing effect on those who inflicted this suffering as well as its victims. As the soldiers in World War I learned, they are often the same people.
This dialogue was central but also other dialogues were part of it. The Civil Rights movement sensitized us to the racial and ethnic component of the us/them equation, to the fear of difference, of the alien. Prejudices of the past were recalled, and the images of those Other racial groups that by then were obviously false. The examination of socially supported gender roles and their implication in violence and oppression began even before the feminist movement, and men reevaluated what it meant to be a man. Many started on a journey then to revive and refine techniques for solving problems without violence, and to develop new ones.
Today there are thousands of Americans involved in developing, learning and using what I call the Skills of Peace. I divide these interrelated skills into outer (learning about cultures and histories), inner (learning about ourselves, our responses and motivations, as well as cultivating attitudes and learning skills to clarify our relationship to the world) and interface (methods of communication, negotiation; skills of mediation and conflict management and resolution.)
The skills of peace are applicable in our families, schools and neighborhoods, in our political and on-line associations, as well as in international war and peace. They give the lie to the cliché that although “we all want peace” it is unattainable, or we don’t have any idea of how to achieve it.
Our society and our culture spends billions on the skills of war and conflict. We pay little official attention to the skills of peace. We even send soldiers into “peace-keeping” situations with little or no training in how to keep the peace, other than waving weapons, storming homes and conducting interrogations. We do essentially nothing to counter the brutalizing effects on society, or the psychological traumas suffered by the children we turn into killers, and the resulting impact on their families and society. But then, we’ve been notoriously lax in even tending to their physical injuries.
We spend a disproportionate amount of money and time on the skills of war, and that disproportion is one of the causes of brutalization. The self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing, and naturally escalating violence unleashed by war is another. But brutalization can also begin in political choices.
The Brutal Road to Iraq and Torture
How has America in the early twenty-first century come to the point of justifying the capture, imprisoning and torture of people almost at random, with no regard for rights under the Geneva Conventions and more importantly, for generally accepted minimal rights in the civilized world? How has this prosperous and advanced society turned back the clock on the painful progress towards a more civilized and less dangerous world, for which thousands if not millions have sacrificed their lives?
I believe much of the current attitude can be traced back to the 1980s, when the neocons in the Reagan administration pumped up the rhetoric to absurd heights to justify a proxy war in Central America, while they exploited a highly publicized and inflated rise in urban crime, which led to the reversal of trends in criminal justice. In the 60s and 70s, there was an emphasis on the rights of the accused, to redress the balance of individual rights and society’s interest in preventing crime. Perhaps most importantly as well as symbolically, capital punishment was no longer considered a just sentence or effective deterrent.
The subtext of that trend was this: A civilized society does not enact revenge for its own sake, nor does it feed a spiraling culture of revenge. A modern civilized society finds more effective ways to deter crime and deal with criminals, just as many previous societies had done: without capital punishment. Capital punishment brutalized society.
Though this is now accepted in much of the rest of the world, it is likely to be news to anyone who came of age in the US in the 1980s or after. The culture has turned completely around, and justice is equated with vengeance. You need look no further than the ever-popular crime dramas on television. In the 60s, popular series like “The Defenders” and “The Law & Mr. Jones” portrayed defense attorneys as heroes, protecting individuals against abuses by prosecutors and police, against juries being swayed by emotional appeals to exact revenge, and against aspects of the law that treated the “innocent until proven guilty” unjustly.
In today’s crime shows, the heroes are prosecutors and police who use any means necessary to convict suspects. In surfing TV channels the other night, I caught a minute of a willowy blond prosecutor objecting to an accused killer not getting the death penalty because he had a biologically caused mental illness. “We’ve convicted psychotics and schizophrenics before,” she complained. This is typical. You can see the difference even over the life of one series: “Law & Order.”
We all know of the cases of mentally deficient prisoners who were executed. We know of other cases in which prisoners who committed crimes in their youth were executed many years later, when they were demonstrably no longer that person. We also know that the US has the highest proportion of its population in prison than any other “civilized” democracy. We know that there are innocent executed because they could not afford a decent defense, and that African Americans and other minorities are disproportionately jailed because of race as well as economics.
But crime and support for the death penalty were so politically hyped that even though the President has nothing to do with capital punishment, it became the central issue leading to George Bush the First defeating Michael Dukakis in 1988. This despite the fact that the vast majority of voters were untouched by violent crime, except through their television sets. Having hyped the threat, politicians exploited natural fears by promising to get tough, and enacting three strikes laws and bringing back capital punishment. There was no more “coddling” criminals, despite the fact that crime was being committed largely by men too young to have a history of being coddled. No more attention to the economic crises in the inner cities, or the collapse of manufacturing jobs, or the patterns of racial injustice.
Meanwhile, demographers showed that the jump in urban crime was largely predictable by the jump in the proportion of young men, and would abate as the trend reversed. Which is what happened.
By 2004, capital punishment had become such a non-issue that when John Kerry said he was opposed to it, hardly anyone noticed. But the brutalization had done its work.
The demagogic appeals of the 1980s had expanded into a rhetoric of the right wing which is historically startling in its violent oversimplifications, outrageous untruths and brutal assumptions. But there were also countertrends contending for the national soul. It took the match of 9/11 to set this house aflame again.
Terrorized by the War on Terror
By choosing to regard terrorist attacks as acts of war rather than criminal acts, the Bushites not only gave terrorists the identity they craved–the identity as warriors that would inspire new recruits–but they both hyped the threat and used the resulting fever to justify extreme acts, including official patterns of brutality.
The terror of terrorism is in surprise, and the power of terrorism to inspire fear is directly related to its novelty as well as the violent imagery associated with it. It is certainly not proportional to the threat.
Ben Friedman in the San Francisco Chronicle (February 19, 2006):
Conventional wisdom says that none of us is safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are.
Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina’s flooding of New Orleans shows how vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about. By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism.
In 2001, their banner year, terrorists killed one twelfth as many Americans as the flu and one fifteenth the number killed by car accidents.
Even if attacks killing thousands were certain, the risk to each of us would remain close to zero, far smaller than many larger risks that do not alarm us, or provoke government warnings, like driving to work every day. And if something far worse than Sept. 11 does occur, the country will recover. Every year, tens of thousands Americans die on the roads. Disease preys on us. Life goes on for the rest. The economy keeps chugging. A disaster of biblical proportions visited New Orleans. The Republic has not crumbled.
The terrorist risk to the United States is serious, but far from existential, as some would have it.
Yet the Bushite mantra that 9/11 had changed everything was so ubiquitous and powerful that to deny it was next to impossible for years, until it had become a self-fulfilling prophecy. America did learn it was vulnerable to the kind of attack it had not suffered before, and should have quickly protected itself against this vulnerability. Some of this was done, but not all that was needed. The Bush government took another course when it invaded Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks for political gain.
More than 3,000 people were killed by terrorist acts on 9/11/2001. This resulted in invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, where civil war killed more than 3,000 people in Iraq I just last month, and some 6,000 in the past two months. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq is likely to surpass 3,000 soon. This is often the logic of war–of any war, just or not. When a society must defend itself with whatever means are necessary to fend off destruction and hold back an invader, that logic is tragic but must be accepted. When a war is created for political and economic ends, and sold to a democracy with lies and manipulation, it is more than tragic.
The Bushite rhetoricians positioned this war without a nameable enemy as an archetypal fight to the death between good and evil. In such a battle, the good are always good, and can never do evil, just as the evil are always evil. Creating these archetypes is a normal function of war, which both sides do. It is also common to use racial and religious stereotypes, and to characterize the enemy as less than human, as beasts.
Bush also oversimplified and distorted the adversary’s position, as hating our freedom, by which he meant, our shopping malls. So Americans are fighting for their way of life, meaning our shopping malls (because Americans were never asked to curtail spending and pay for war) and not meaning our civil liberties (because Americans are forced to give up accepted rights of privacy, rights within the justice system, and access to accurate information on government activities.)
Such oversimplification and distortion not only leads to brutality, it is itself a form of brutalization. It is a brutal view of the world, and denies the humanity as well as the possibly legitimate grievances of the Other, the enemy. In denying that the Other is civilized, it justifies acting outside the norms of civilized society. It makes us uncivilized and brutal.
Through surrogates like Ann Coulter, their flunkies in the press, and in their own voices, neocons and Rabid Right Republicans are pumping up the rhetoric of violence. Brutalization also increases in times of violence, as is the case now in the Middle East. While half a million people are roaming Lebanon because their homes have been destroyed, a commentator on Fox brags of the US military capability to turn Syria “into a parking lot.” This is brutalization speaking loud and clear.
But brutalization is expressed not just in blood-thirsty rhetoric, but in indifference. Indifference to suffering, and to those causing suffering. The constant barrage of violent news is like getting hit on the head with a board. It desensitizes, which is an effect of brutalization.
Brutality is commonly an instrument of authoritarian rule, and brutal definitions lead to a logic of authoritarianism. They don’t call dictators “strong men” for nothing.
Brutalization is now so pervasive in this society that we barely recognize all its manifestations. When it becomes part of cultures–created for example by the Cheney rules–it becomes harder and harder to oppose it, and then even to recognize it. But it links the authoritarian White House to the torturers at Guantanamo and the rapists and murderers in Iraq. It is ever-present in the violent rhetoric of the right, that expands the definition of the Other, and brutalizes not only the Other in foreign lands, but in the political opposition at home. It leads to citizens of small towns harassing, vandalizing and threatening violence on the families of other small town citizens, over a zoning dispute, or a public official over a word in a speech, taken out of context or even misheard.
We need to identify brutalization: its manifestations and causes, and shine a light on it. We do not need to add to it with conscripting more cannon fodder for brutal dictators by any other name. We need to put political muscle and will behind accountability, and to promote a government and a society that values and uses and learns the skills of peace.
