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September 24, 2005
War Porn
A site has been noted in couple of blogs, a site where soldiers post their own war porn, pictures of Iraqis they killed, in order to get access to conventional porn. Billmon has a long post explaining how this site has basically convinced him we must withdraw immediately -- notwithstanding all the qualms one may have about what will become of Iraq...
The site was first written up in the Nation. Don't click on it if you don't want to see what blown up heads and charred bodies really look like -- with smiling U.S. soldiers posing next to them and with comments like "where's the barbecue sauce?" It's basically a porn site that promised access for free to soldiers who posted pictures proving who they were. And so they posted these pictures, their war trophies, their porn. (It's really hard to look at. At least read the Nation article first and if you do look, I'd advise not being in a hurry. It's not easy to recover from, if recover is the right word. Let me rephrase: it takes some effort to breathe again.)
I just came back from the D.C. rally where the main slogan was "Support the Troops." There were more than a few references to the torture and the killing done us but the overwhelming majority of the posters were simply: "support the troops, bring them home." At this point in history, I'm for any reason, anything that stops what we are inflicting on that country.
But must we all be so blind to the nature of our actions in Iraq? Lots of people argue "we" have some obligation to Iraq, "we" must not withdraw so quickly, "we" must first set things right at least a bit.
(Let's for the moment ignoring the imperialist assumptions underlying those comments: "we" somehow have a duty to be somewhere where we are not wanted at all.)
Well, if the "we" in question was composed of the people who put forth these statements in earnest maybe there'd be something to talk about. But, at this point in history, all those arguments put forth by the bleeding-hearts-unite-for-Iraqis crowd are effectively blind to the imperial, murderous nature of what the real we, our troops, are doing over there. Whether they are blind out of naivete or out of imperialist ideological assumptions does not really matter, not at this point in history anyway.
And yes, support the troops in this sense: we must recognize what is happening to hundreds and thousands of men and women so that we may react to it appropriately rather than pat them on the back and thank them for "serving." Many have obviously become deeply dehumanized, and have carried a racist, callous culture to its outmost conclusion. They kill, they take pictures, they smile for the camera.
Is it their fault they were sent there, in this war based on lies and deception? Let's just say no to that, even though we must also honor the concscientious objectors who showed that one can say no. We can simply acknowledge that most of them didn't join thinking they'd get to blow up people -- although we must also acknowledge some did.
But there they are, murdering and torturing. There is no getting around that fact, because getting around that means not seeing the people of Iraq as people. Not seeing what they are doing means participating the the imperial supremacy --which is more complicated than racism simply based on skin color-- which allows men to kill, and sometimes smile.
And they are killing and torturing, often just for sport, and not because they are "undertrained" or because it's policy or because they are trying to extract some intelligence. Torture, simply put, seems to release tension for these soldiers. from the latest report from the Human Rights Watch, which is worth many posts on its own:
Soldiers in the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division vented their frustration by systematically torturing Iraqi detainees from 2003 into 2004, hitting them with baseball bats and dousing them with chemicals, a U.S. rights group alleges in a new report.The Human Rights Watch report, issued Friday, was compiled from interviews with a captain and two sergeants who served in a battalion of the 82nd Airborne that was stationed at a military base called Mercury near Fallujah, the insurgent stronghold retaken by U.S. forces last year.
The soldiers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the abuse took place almost daily and often came under orders. Anything short of causing an inmate's death was allowed, they said.
The residents of Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad, nicknamed soldiers at the nearby base ''the Murderous Maniacs,'' New York-based Human Rights Watch said. ''The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor.''
It said soldiers in the elite 82nd Airborne deprived detainees of sleep, food and water, subjected them to extreme heat and cold, stacked prisoners in human pyramids, kicked them in the face, and put chemicals on exposed skin and eyes.
One of the sergeants allegedly told the group that military intelligence personnel, eager for information, often instructed soldiers to ''smoke'' detainees -- called Persons Under Control or PUCs -- during questioning, the report said. ''Smoking'' prisoners meant physically abusing them until they lost consciousness.
But the motive was not always to gain intelligence, one sergeant was quoted as saying.
''Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration you show up at the PUC tent. In a way it was sport,'' he reportedly said.
''One day (another sergeant) shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini-Louisville Slugger, a metal bat.''
The soldier said anything short of death was acceptable.
So, yes, we must support the troops in the sense we must help them come to terms with what they are doing, what they have become. We must examine why and how our culture produces the racist, imperial ideological base which "blooms" into something so horrible. We must realize something is broken in their humanity, and something is broken in ours. We must do lots of things.
But first we must stop them. We must stop them from killing and torturing more people. The only way to do that is to bring them back here, now.
I also hope someone archives that site. I bet they will pull it. I don't have the know-how to archive a discussion forum. As hard as it is to look at, it is the harshest, most truthful mirror of what this war really looks like.
Posted by zeynep at September 24, 2005 09:05 PM
Comments
Billmon's change of mind about US withdrawal after looking at those photos makes me really lament the lack of graphic images of civilian suffering in the mass media here. As a child, I saw the pictures of suffering Vietnamese that were widely disseminated in the late 60s and I and much of the rest of the country knew that that was the main reason the US had to get out of Vietnam. Without frequent reminders of the suffering the US is causing in Iraq, people don't have that visceral moral revulsion that propelled the anti-Vietnam War movement. That site really does need to be archived and pictures put on protest banners the way pictures of mutilated Vietamese were during the Vietnam War.
Posted by: deang at September 24, 2005 10:58 PM
Well done. I tried to write something about those pictures and what they portend, but I couldn't get much beyond "this is sick". This stuff has to be said.
Posted by: Disillusioned kid at September 25, 2005 02:25 PM
I just came back from the D.C. rally where the main slogan was "Support the Troops."
Zeynep, what rally were you at, the pro-war rally on Sunday? Because the slogan you'll find on the UfPJ site is "End the War on Iraq" and on the ANSWER site its "Fund People's Needs, Not the War Machine - End Colonial Occupation, Iraq, Palestine, Haiti..." The lead banner (I think) that I saw on many TV coverages of the DC rally said "We all want peace" (dumb slogan, IMHO, Bush "wants peace"). Nary a "Support the Troops" among them. Not that "Support the troops, bring them home" isn't a popular slogan, of course.
Posted by: Eli Stephens at September 26, 2005 10:43 PM
"Torture, simply put, seems to release tension for these soldiers."
Posted by: mark at September 28, 2005 03:09 PM
I can't help thinking that those "helpful people" who think we have to stay and "fix Iraq" are really determined to stay stupid.... maybe even an arrogant stupidity?
I agree the corporate media should show the pictures and videos of civilians suffering - but even without those pictures and videos, don't people realize the immense suffering that war causes? And if they don't, what is wrong with them?
Posted by: Susan - NC at September 30, 2005 01:22 PM