‘Malevolent potency’ of man

In a culture of violence, instances of cruelty should come as no surprise. War creates its own overheated climate, by stirring the emotions of the warriors and thereby freeing the wolf in us to prey upon those we perceive as enemies.

Cruelty enters when doors of human combat are flung open.

But then the question arises: If we can kill on the battlefields in a thousand horrible ways, why not allow torture? There is no civility in war, no internal restraints in a state of kill or be killed.

Hatred comes easily to a soldier who knows that his own death may wait around the next corner or over the next hill, like a shadow in a forest that moves almost imperceptibly.

Charges that American soldiers tortured and killed their Iraqi prisoners have revealed the existence of the same wolves that prowled My Lai in the Vietnam War and were present at No Gun Ri in the Korean War.

And who knows at what other times the red-eyed beasts hunted on the bloody fields of history, breaking rules of war that were written without regard to the emotional highs of actual combat?

Hitler merged war and torture in a manner that has stained humanity with blood that will never be erased. But Americans are not without sins of their own.

Lt. William Calley led an assault on My Lai that killed 500 unarmed civilians who lay in a ditch pleading for their lives. One soldier would testify later, “I cut their throats, cut off their hands, cut out their tongues, scalped them. I did it. A lot of people were doing it and I just followed. I lost all sense of direction.”

In South Korea, soldiers in an American Army unit systematically gunned down 300 unarmed civilians as they cowered under a railroad bridge, because the soldiers feared they might be infiltrators.

I’m not attempting to excuse those accused of atrocities against prisoners in their care, but this is a war fueled by hatred, as all wars are, and one can argue that “they” have done worse to us and, anyhow, isn’t torture better than death?

Isn’t it?

We have seen the enemy shout in joy over the mangled bodies of Americans being dragged through the streets of a ravaged country. We have seen the remains of civilians murdered by Islam’s human bombs, babies blasted into eternity before they have taken their first steps in life. We have seen our bombs and missiles destroy buildings and houses and anyone in them in great bursts of fire and blood.

So why not torture? Why not humiliation?

A very wise e-mailer, a psychiatric worker who calls herself Doris, points to evidence of the wolf in many facets of our lives. She talks about the pleasure of teasing at the cost of the victim’s comfort, laughter at another’s misfortunes and the voyeuristic joy in violent sports.

Doris writes: “Lurking beneath the sweetie-pie/angelic facade of teenagers, old-agers, politicians, Martha Stewart nice ladies, U.S. soldiers, fraternity boys, stockbrokers and priests is maybe what Freud should have written more about: the malevolent potency of human beings.”

Those who discuss, observe and comment on the incidents at Abu Ghraib prison and possibly elsewhere tend to assure us that the conduct of a few does not represent the attitude of the many. I’m sure of that. In my war, I never saw a prisoner mistreated. But I know it occurred.

Because what I did see was hatred so intense that at any moment it could have dissolved the ethics of social conduct that restrain our baser instincts and freed the beast within. What happens under those conditions, though never excusable, is at least explainable. Hatred begets hatred, and torture roams with violence. The wolf has many victims.

There will be investigations of the mistreatment of prisoners by Americans in Iraq. There will be committee sessions, courts-martial, condemnations, thunder from a thousand pulpits and possibly imprisonment. There will be defenders as well as condemners, who explain with skewed rationale that we were only doing to them what they, in effect, were doing to us.

There is historical precedence for that kind of twisted logic. We killed idolaters who denied God, we tortured witches who cast spells, we beheaded rebels who challenged kings, and we gassed Jews for no reason at all.

So why not, acting with the emotional authority that war provides, abuse those who represent members of the force that is abusing us? Why not torture, sodomize, humiliate and possibly kill representatives of a people who shoot, dismember, burn and cheer over the bodies of our soldiers and civilians?

We’re in a war.

And beyond the political debates, beyond the national anthems, beyond the weeping women and the fist-clenched men, a reality arises on the bloody fields of human conflict. Horror is what war is all about.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at [email protected].