War & Society

Welcome to War & Society! This course will examine the relationship between war, conflict, citizenship, and violence. To study this, we’ll employ sociological concepts and perspectives that will position critical analysis of the social dynamics that shape these social currents. Social hierarchies that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of military, economic, and political elites have, over the course of last century, worked to foster the “militarization of everyday life”— even university life. We'll explore questions such as: Why do Americans appear to favor military solutions to complex social problems? How does social class correlate with military service (especially working-class identity)? Why are so many military recruits from the poor and working classes? Why do so many people “thank” and positively affiliate with military social identities, even though they would never themselves volunteer service?

Throughout the course, we’ll call upon classical and contemporary social theories to help us understand how the problem of war is rooted in the unequal distribution of power and resources, both within the United States and globally. Drawing from a series of close readings and films, we’ll explore diverse subject areas that include: the politics of fear and panic, how culture and media interact to produce social meaning about war, the interaction between social identity (race, class, gender) and war, the evolution of masculinity, and police militarization. This work will further position us to consider how war, as well as other forms of socio-political violence, work together with and interact with the forces of global capitalism.

War on the Streets

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The War at Home

From Occupy Wall Street to Ferguson Missouri and beyond, the work of photojournalists increasingly are revealing a stark truth: the United States is engaging in a wide-scale re-engineering of its domestic police forces. The creeping militarization, however, did not occur in a vacuum; it has a history that represents a martial miscegenation of sorts, where the ethic of “serve and protect” once associated with civilian police appears to have become merged with the “hunt, kill, destroy” ethos of military forces. But this didn’t happen overnight. There is a history that sets the stage for a process that has become accelerated in recent times.

Historically in the United States, private police forces were first employed by wealthy plantation and landowners. These “slave catchers” were hired and paid to hunt African-Americans. Critics argue that we never really escaped this past, even if the legacy connections are not always obvious. To trace these developments, we have to follow the money. Wealthy corporations and allied powerful interests have always employed the police to protect their assets. During slave times, of course, those assets did not simply include material goods they also included people, who were considered property.

Today, the same people continue to pay for private security and invest in public police forces to protect private property [local example: The Waterfront shopping plaza on the river in Homestead is protected by a full-time police police officer, whose expenses are reimbursed to Homestead borough (paid for) by the shopping complex].

There is a racial ideology (spoken and unspoken) that often drives these developments, including resource allocation. While there is presently a contentious debate raging in the U.S. with regard to police funding – some people say we need more funds and others say there is too much funding, there are no easy answers. The problem is socially entrenched. What you think about police funding is going to derive in many respects from your own personal experiences. Do you have police in your family? Were you the victim of a crime? Do you live in a deteriorated neighborhood? Do you live in a racially homogeneous social space?

The police funding equation is not as simple as “more cops (funds) = less crime.” As the research indicates, money is not always an effective predictor of public safety. The data, in fact, demonstrate in a fairly consistent way over time that fewer than half of serious crimes are reported to police. Few, if any arrests are made in those cases. Only about 11% of all serious crimes result in an arrest, and about 2% end in a conviction (Nissen, 2020). Simply put, there are many local complex social factors that impact the degree to which police can be effective in their jobs.

Police Militarization

Scholars have documented the trend in the outfitting of local domestic police with military-style gear (the exorbitant costs of which are paid by the U.S. taxpayer) as having started with the Reagan administration’s “war on drugs. This policy failure is, however, by no means consigned to the past, as it rages on, fueled by another policy disaster – the amorphous “war on terror,” which was launched to coincide with the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is worth noting that we cannot blame one political party while holding the other blameless. Police militarization is truly a bipartisan project; one that has occurred within a socio-political context, where up-armoring of police is but one manifestation of a comprehensive plan to address a wide range of security issues in the wake of 9-11. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have embraced a politics of fear in order to 1) motivate voters and 2) avoid being seen as soft on crime and terrorism. The results are staggering in scale to the extent that they encompass NSA surveillance, drone wars, and the increasing privatization and expansion of the prison/carceral state.

The New Military Urbanism

Author Stephen Graham (2011) discusses the multiple ways in which the “new military urbanism” might be seen in cities like New York City, Baltimore, and London. The development is typified by the increasing proliferation of large militaristic SUVs on city roads, an increase in the number of militarized borders and surveillance zones within and around urban areas, amplified collaboration between military, intelligence and police organizations, as well as patterns of linking neoliberal logics with security infrastructure (i.e. EZ Pass monitoring, photo enforcement of traffic laws). Perhaps most disturbing among these developments is the tendency to conflate internal urban ethnic minority groups with external enemies of the state (Graham, 2011).

Recent research on public attitudes toward police and policing suggests that the Mayberry R.F.D. notion of “officer friendly” has been profoundly ruptured and perhaps along with it the shared public sense of a social contract. Public trust, not surprisingly, goes out the window when policemen patrol neighborhoods as if they are in the middle of Iraq or Afghanistan.

SWAT

In a report entitled “War Comes Home,” the American Civil Liberties Union called attention to how, over the course of the last 25 years, the number of SWAT team raids in the United States dramatically escalated. Their report found that nearly 80% of all SWAT raids it reviewed between 2011 and 2012 were deployed to execute a search warrant. Bear in mind now, this type of “invasion” tactic is being routinely used against people who are only suspected of a crime. Police, in other words, are using a tactic proven to result in significant injury and property damage as a first option and not as an option of last resort.

Who are the targets of these raids? Statistics reveal, more often than not, it’s the doors of blacks and Latinos that are broken down. The same ACLU report found that when they could identify the race of the person/people whose homes were broken into, 68% of the SWAT raids against minorities were undertaken in order to execute search warrants for drugs. The figure dropped to 38% when it came to whites. This pattern was established in spite of the well-documented fact that blacks, whites, and Latinos all use drugs at roughly the same rates. SWAT teams, it would appear, are disproportionately applying their specialized skills to communities of color. What this essentially does is take racial profiling and “stop and frisk” to a terrifying new level.

Organizational Culture

Given these developments and that fact that cities can be dangerous places for everyone. There are questions that remain to be answered. What do we want our police departments to accomplish? Is their mission “Serve and Protect?” or is it “Search and Destroy?” The public seems unsure.

Many among the public prefer to live in nostalgia. Policing, in their view, resides in a mythical past, where the police are always helpful and friendly – like a neighbor to be trusted. Doubtless, there are individual police who are committed to upholding these ideals. Statistical patterns, however, indicate a different reality is emerging.

Strong opinions that exist on both sides of the “good cop”/”bad cop” divide. On the one hand, there are those who defend the “blue line” as they argue #bluelives matter and #notallcops. The problem with the #notallcops argument is that it reduces systemic institutional violence to an individual problem. That is, it suggests we might simply remove the few “bad apples” to fix the problem. Policy accountability efforts are often painted with the broad brush of being “anti-cop.” This type of thinking, unfortunately, gets in the way of prudent action to bring about meaningful institutional level reform through policy change.

On the other hand, many argue that police behavior has jumped the shark; that norms for professional conduct are deteriorating and people are being needlessly harmed and in many cases killed due to police violence, leadership failures, and the failure of police organizations to regulate themselves. From the never-ending stream of videos, showing unarmed black men and children being shot, including the strong-arming/bullying of a nurse, and in one instance, the killing of a woman, Sandra Bland (who refused to put out her cigarette), critics allege the cops are out of control and nothing is being done about it.

In addition to these developments, statistics document contemporary uses of SWAT occur at a rate that is 25 times more frequent than in the 1980s. Again, these happenings did not occur in a vacuum. Violence has a history and a memory. From the original slave patrols conducted in the wake of the U.S. Civil War, through the policing of Jim Crow laws in the old South, and now the involvement of U.S. soldiers in wars overseas (many of whom have become police offices upon return), policing forces are not surprisingly militarized as a result.

The policy apparatus that contributed the most to the funneling of millions of dollars into militarizing local law enforcement was the federal 1033 Program. The 1033 Program provided surplus military equipment to state and local policing agencies. According to a report published by The Guardian, the 1033 program has provided 12,000 bayonets, 5,200 Humvees and 617 mine-resistant ambush protection vehicles (MRAPs) to local police agencies across the United States.

Originally intended for use in counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism operations, military equipment is increasingly being used against political protesters and other local civilian populations. These weapons of war did not magically “appear” on our streets–they proliferated because the federal government paid for them and facilitated their use.

With that, local law enforcement reveals signs they are evolving into a domestic army. Things like bodily comportment, equipment, tactics, command structure, a willingness to lay hands on the public and disregard for basic constitutional protections all indicate that this is happening. Ironically, aggressive foreign policies exercised by the United States that were once universally applauded by Americans, who saw the activity as necessary to “keep us safe” and “spread democracy,” produced what philosopher Michel Foucault called a “boomerang effect.” Violence exercised abroad ran it’s course and finally came home to roost (Graham, 2011).

Here are a few statistics worth noting:

In 1980, there were approximately 3,000 SWAT raids in the United States. Now, there are more than 80,000 SWAT raids per year in this country.

79% of the time, SWAT teams are deployed to private homes.

60% of SWAT raids in one ACLU study were shown to target homes for drugs/drug use, not to save a hostage, respond to a barricade situation, or neutralize an active shooter.

65% of SWAT deployments feature the deployment of a battering ram, boot, or other explosive device to gain forced entry to a home.

62% of all SWAT raids involve a search for drugs.

50% of the victims of SWAT raids are either black or Latino.

36% of all SWAT raids indicate that no contraband is found by the police.

35% of the time, in cases where it is suspected that there is a weapon in the home, police do not find a weapon.

7% of all SWAT deployments are for hostage, barricade or active-shooter scenarios.

More than 100 American families have their homes raided by SWAT teams every single day.

Even small towns deploy SWAT teams now: 30 years ago, only 25.6 percent of communities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 people had a SWAT team. Now, that number has increased to 80 percent.

This is a Public Policy Failure

When the police are used as the “one size fits all” policy arm to address racial injustice, poverty, homelessness, opioid overdose, mental health problems, and inadequate access to healthcare, neither the public nor the police are served. The police are set up to fail and be hated by the public. In this environment, no one can ever feel “served and protected.” Everyone is at risk.

Essentially, we’re putting all our human resources and funding into one bucket (the police) and asking them to do everything (that they are not trained to handle) that more specialized institutions could address for far less money with higher rates of effectiveness. The police, in turn, ratchet up the violence and try to contain problems with the only tool they have – mass incarceration.

Put another way, we “defunded” education and healthcare and gave it all to the police without ever loudly proclaiming that we did this; we provisioned one institution with funds from the others and made our problems worse, not better. That the public largely continues to support this failed approach (obviously, there are pockets of resistance) says something important about the public. What drives them to support failed policy? Why do people time and again choose righteous indignation over support for interventions to change the system?

Sources

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, by Stephen Graham (2011)

War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing, published by the American Civil Liberties Union (2014)

For more on the history of SWAT, link to the New York Times report “SWAT: Mission Creep” w/video.

Discussion Questions

What do you think about these statistics? Do these developments alarm you?

What do these trends say about what it means to live in American society?, considering how rapidly we are transferring the weapons of war into the hands of police to be used on U.S. citizens?

Do you think it is a good idea for so many police to have access to/deploy weapons of war on our streets? (to be used on U.S. citizens)?

“F*^k You I Like Guns”

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I wanted to share this blog post for the following reasons: 1) TRUTH BOMB 2) it resonates a lot with my own lived experience.

Like the author, I’m an Army veteran. I spent 4 years on active duty (plus 2 more in the reserves), where I attained the rank of Captain. I didn’t join the military to fight for anyone’s freedom but my own – I needed money for college, and books, and well, to eat. Basic stuff. My dad was a steelworker who lost his job when I was in high school. I knew I was headed to college, but I didn’t have the slightest idea how I would pay for it. The Army fixed that.

When I was in the Army, we shot M-16s, the forerunner of what is the now standard issue M-4. Both of these rifles are AR-style (ArmaLite) rifles. Like a lot of women, I discovered I was good at shooting this rifle. I was awarded expert skill badges throughout my time in service. The skill seems rather useless now and far removed from the skills I require to be a professor. Today, outside of my research, I don’t have much to do with firearms or sport shooting.

Like a lot of people in the military, I enjoyed shooting my rifle. I even liked taking it apart and cleaning it. In hindsight, and based on preliminary findings in my research, guns and target shooting give people a sense of power and mastery (even if these are false notions). In other words, this activity offers some people an opportunity to “fake mastery,” especially mastery over their own lives (I feel powerful, despite not having any money or real power).

In some instances, it can be argued that guns may help some people firm up their gender performance when it is suspect (i.e. I don’t project masculinity through my embodied representation (not characteristically masculine enough); or, or I’m a woman who wants to claim “male” power and play the “big boys” game). Guns in this respect, offer both men and women (or boys and girls) a way to compensate for perceived personal deficits. They are a prop that helps them “fake it til they make it.”

All military people are introduced to basic weaponry skill training in Basic training, where they are given an opportunity to demonstrate (or not) gun mastery. This intensive period of training and socialization, which is designed to break down individuals and in the process remove all claims to dignity and personal autonomy [no one, by the way, escapes this], can leave a lot of people feeling shook and uncertain about how to get their power back.

Put another way, Basic training is the place where everyone is forced to confront their own existential weakness; this is where they find out pretty quick how or even “if” they can measure up. As the social deck is effectively “reshuffled,” the austere training environment socializes people to organize themselves into ranked hierarchies. Recruits, who have no actual rank, claim “social rank” by demonstrating weapons mastery, through technical training and marksmanship performance, as well as body mastery, through extreme body conditioning and physical domination of others. This process of socialization with respect to weapons training and physical training has no analog in the civilian world.

What Does the Gun Research Say?

Researchers have documented that men in particular, who have experienced economic setbacks or worry about their economic futures, are the group of gun owners who demonstrate the most attachment to their guns. In a study by Moyer, those men who indicate “high attachment” said that that having a gun made them a better and more respected member of their communities” (Moyer, 2017).

This research offers insight into one of the major reasons that guns appeal to many people – and not just military people. They are fearful and looking for a way to actively manage their anxiety. Or perhaps they simply want to climb on board the self-esteem train. The price of a gun is their cheap ticket to ride.

Although there is comparatively less work on college students, it stands to reason that this logic retains appeal with this group as it does men in general. So without further preamble, let’s check out the following blog post.

Me doing a middling job of hitting a target. I better not quit my day job.

“Fuck You I Like Guns”

(re-blogged from the blog “Engineering, Parenthood, and a Solid Attempt at Adult Status”)

America, can we talk? Let’s just cut the shit for once and actually talk about what’s going on without blustering and pretending we’re actually doing a good job at adulting as a country right now. We’re not. We’re really screwing this whole society thing up, and we have to do better. We don’t have a choice. People are dying. At this rate, it’s not if your kids, or mine, are involved in a school shooting, it’s when. One of these happens every 60 hours on average in the US. If you think it can’t affect you, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. So let’s talk.

I’ll start. I’m an Army veteran. I like M-4’s, which are, for all practical purposes, an AR-15, just with a few extra features that people almost never use anyway. I’d say at least 70% of my formal weapons training is on that exact rifle, with the other 30% being split between various and sundry machineguns and grenade launchers. My experience is pretty representative of soldiers of my era. Most of us are really good with an M-4, and most of us like it at least reasonably well because it is an objectively good rifle.

I was good with an M-4…really good. I earned the Expert badge every time I went to the range, starting in Basic Training. This isn’t uncommon. I can name dozens of other soldiers/veterans I know personally who can say the exact same thing. This rifle is surprisingly easy to use, completely idiot-proof really, has next to no recoil, comes apart and cleans up like a dream, and is light to carry around. I’m probably more accurate with it than I would be with pretty much any other weapon in existence. I like this rifle a lot. I like marksmanship as a sport. When I was in the military, I enjoyed combining these two things as often as they’d let me.

With all that said, enough is enough. My knee-jerk reaction is to consider weapons like the AR-15 no big deal because it is my default setting. It’s where my training lies. It is my normal, because I learned how to fire a rifle IN THE ARMY. You know, while I may only have shot plastic targets on the ranges of Texas, Georgia, and Missouri, that’s not what those weapons were designed for, and those targets weren’t shaped like deer. They were shaped like people. Sometimes we even put little hats on them. You learn to take a gut shot, “center mass”, because it’s a bigger target than the head, and also because if you maim the enemy soldier rather than killing him cleanly, more of his buddies will come out and get him, and you can shoot them, too. He’ll die of those injuries, but it’ll take him a while, giving you the chance to pick off as many of his compadres as you can. That’s how my Drill Sergeant explained it anyway. I’m sure there are many schools of thought on it.

The fact is, though, when I went through my marksmanship training in the US Army, I was not learning how to be a competition shooter in the Olympics or a good hunter. I was being taught how to kill people as efficiently as possible and that was never a secret.

As an avowed pacifist now, it turns my stomach to even type the above words, but can you refute them? I can’t. Every weapon that a US Army soldier uses has the express purpose of killing human beings. That is what they are made for. The choice rifle for years has been some variant of what civilians are sold as an AR-15. Whether it was an M-4 or an M-16 matters little. The function is the same, and so is the purpose. These are not deer rifles. They are not target rifles. They are people killing rifles. Let’s stop pretending they’re not.

With this in mind, is anybody surprised that nearly every mass shooter in recent US history has used an AR-15 to commit their crime? And why wouldn’t they? High capacity magazine, ease of loading and unloading, almost no recoil, really accurate even without a scope, but numerous scopes available for high precision, great from a distance or up close, easy to carry, and readily available. You can buy one at Wal-Mart, or just about any sports store, and since they’re long guns, I don’t believe you have to be any more than 18 years old with a valid ID. This rifle was made for the modern mass shooter, especially the young one. If he could custom design a weapon to suit his sinister purposes, he couldn’t do a better job than Armalite did with this one already.

This rifle is so deadly and so easy to use that no civilian should be able to get their hands on one. We simply don’t need these things in society at large. I always find it interesting that when I was in the Army, and part of my job was to be incredibly proficient with this exact weapon, I never carried one at any point in garrison other than at the range. Our rifles lived in the arms room, cleaned and oiled, ready for the next range day or deployment. We didn’t carry them around just because we liked them. We didn’t bluster on about barracks defense and our second amendment rights. We tucked our rifles away in the arms room until the next time we needed them, just as it had been done since the Army’s inception. The military police protected us from threats in garrison. They had 9 mm Berettas to carry. They were the only soldiers who carry weapons in garrison. We trusted them to protect us and they delivered. With notably rare exceptions, this system has worked well. There are fewer shootings on Army posts than in society in general, probably because soldiers are actively discouraged from walking around with rifles, despite being impeccably well trained with them. Perchance, we could have the largely untrained civilian population take a page from that book?

I understand that people want to be able to own guns. That’s ok. We just need to really think about how we’re managing this. Yes, we have to manage it, just as we manage car ownership. People have to get a license to operate a car, and if you operate a car without a license, you’re going to get in trouble for that. We manage all things in society that can pose a danger to other people by their misuse. In addition to cars, we manage drugs, alcohol, exotic animals (there are certain zip codes where you can’t own Serval cats, for example), and fireworks, among other things. We restrict what types of businesses can operate in which zones of the city or county. We have a whole system of permitting for just about any activity a person wants to conduct since those activities could affect others, and we realize, as a society, that we need to try to minimize the risk to other people that comes from the chosen activities of those around them in which they have no say. Gun ownership is the one thing our country collectively refuses to manage, and the result is a lot of dead people.

I can’t drive a Formula One car to work. It would be really cool to be able to do that, and I could probably cut my commute time by a lot. Hey, I’m a good driver, a responsible Formula One owner. You shouldn’t be scared to be on the freeway next to me as I zip around you at 140 MPH, leaving your Mazda in a cloud of dust! Why are you scared? Cars don’t kill people. People kill people. Doesn’t this sound like bullshit? It is bullshit, and everybody knows. Not one person I know would argue non-ironically that Formula One cars on the freeway are a good idea. Yet, these same people will say it’s totally ok to own the firearm equivalent because, in the words of comedian Jim Jeffries, “fuck you, I like guns.”

According to Jeffries, the “I need to protect my family” argument is simply ridiculous. He similarly objects to owning assault rifles. The reasoning, in his view, constitutes what are more or less “bullshit arguments.” Especially the “I need to protect myself; I need to protect my family” argument.

Yes, yes, I hear you now. We have a second amendment to the constitution, which must be held sacrosanct over all other amendments. Dude. No. The constitution was made to be a malleable document. It’s intentionally vague. We can enact gun control without infringing on the right to bear arms. You can have your deer rifle. You can have your shotgun that you love to shoot clay pigeons with. You can have your target pistol. Get a license. Get a training course. Recertify at a predetermined interval. You do not need a military grade rifle. You don’t. There’s no excuse.

“But we’re supposed to protect against tyranny! I need the same weapons the military would come at me with!” Dude. You know where I can get an Apache helicopter and a Paladin?! Hook a girl up! Seriously, though, do you really think you’d be able to hold off the government with an individual level weapon? Because you wouldn’t. One grenade and you’re toast. Don’t have these illusions of standing up to the government, and needing military-style rifles for that purpose. You’re not going to stand up to the government with this thing. They’d take you out in about half a second.

Let’s be honest. You just want a cool toy, and for the vast majority of people, that’s always an AR-15 is. It’s something fun to take to the range and put some really wicked holes in a piece of paper. Good for you. I know how enjoyable that is. I’m sure for a certain percentage of people, they might not kill anyone driving a Formula One car down the freeway, or owning a Cheetah as a pet, or setting off professional grade fireworks without a permit. Some people are good with this stuff, and some people are lucky, but those cases don’t negate the overall rule.

Military style rifles have been the choice du jour in the incidents that have made our country the mass shootings capitol of the world. Formula One cars aren’t good for commuting. Cheetahs are bitey. Professional grade fireworks will probably take your hand off. All but one of these are common sense to the average American. Let’s fix that.

Be honest, you don’t need that AR-15. Nobody does. Society needs them gone, no matter how good you may be with yours. Kids are dying, and it’s time to stop fucking around.

Lethal Logic – “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people!”

The slogan has become a broken record at this point – “guns don’t kill people; people kill people!” Everyone’s heard it; it often is played like a trump card. Some people even think it settles the whole gun control debate. Shut down the argument. This may be why it’s the NRA’s slogan (Johnson, 2013). But these two things are not mutually exclusive. The reality is that people with guns kill people. We can’t just simply separate the two.

Do we really need to argue semantics and philosophy here? The “guns don’t kill people” argument is deeply flawed. First, because it sidesteps the debate. The issue is not whether guns can spontaneously kill people on their own. The issue involves how incredibly easy a modern weapon makes killing (Shammas, 2017). And second, because it indulges a logical fallacy.

Let’s take a closer look at this argument. The first thing to notice is that the argument has no stated conclusion. What follows? What is it suggesting? That there should be no gun regulation at all? That there should not be more gun regulation than there is? That the increase in mass killings done with guns is irrelevant to whether or not there should be gun regulations? We are left to wonder what this really means. No conclusion about gun regulation logically follows from the two statements. And any argument, if it is to be deemed effective, is going to posit a conclusion….or it’s not really an argument at all. What’s happening here is that someone is indulging in what is called a logical fallacy – they have mistaken the relevance of proximate causation. (Johnson, 2013).

The argument under consideration makes clear that, when it comes to murders, people are the ultimate cause and guns are merely proximate causes—the end of a causal chain that started with a person deciding to shoot/kill. But nothing follows from this semantic juxtaposition that suggests whether or not guns should be regulated. Such facts, furthermore, are true for all criminal activity and even noncriminal activity that harms others. In other words, the ultimate cause of the shooting/killing lies in some decision that a person made; the gun itself/object that did the harming was only a proximate cause. But this tells us nothing about whether or not the proximate cause in question should be regulated or made illegal (Johnson, 2013).

Here’s another example (consider it in the aftermath of a bad car accident):

“Cars don’t kill people; people kill people.”

Obviously, cars should not be illegal. But notice that this has nothing to do with the fact that they are proximate causes. Of course, they should be regulated; no one should be allowed to go onto the highway in a car with no brakes. But all of that has to do what cars are for (they are not made for killing people), what role they play in society (it couldn’t function without them) and so on. It’s a complicated issue—pointing out that cars are merely proximate causes to some deaths contributes nothing to our understanding of the problem (Johnson, 2013).

Here’s a suggestion. The next time you hear someone quote the NRA slogan – “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” in an attempt to end a discussion about gun control, have some fun. Point out that they have “mistaken the relevance of proximate causation.” Pause briefly to enjoy the confused look on their face and then patiently explain the nature of the logical fallacy to them (Johnson, 2013).

Guns are tools that make killing more efficient. Limiting that efficiency is a legitimate goal. Purveyors of the “guns don’t kill people” argument should remember that, by their inane logic, F16s don’t kill people and nuclear missiles don’t kill people. Only the person “behind” the F16 or nuclear missile kills. Despite this, we still limit access to F16s and nuclear missiles. Why? Because these weapons have the potential to kill multiple people in seconds (Shammas, 2017).

Most people agree that guns should be regulated to some extent (at the least, most think that all gun sales should require a background check). But how strictly should they be regulated? Perhaps very strictly. After all, states with stricter gun regulations have fewer gun-related deaths. Then again, there may be philosophical issues related to the protection of liberty and individual rights that override more utilitarian concerns. It’s a complicated issue. There are lots of relevant factors involved, but the fact that guns are proximate causes isn’t one of them (Johnson, 2013).

Briefly put, this particular slogan makes an irrelevant point, which is not followed by any conclusion. Yes, people do kill people. So do nukes, machetes, grenades, knives and fists. The fact that, like guns, all of those tools require some sort of human action to function isn’t an argument against restrictions on their use. This is especially so for guns, which—unlike fists and knives—enable one person to slaughter others with a brutal efficiency that the Founding Fathers couldn’t even begin to comprehend in 1791 when the Bill of Rights was ratified; also a time when semi and fully-automatic firearms technology didn’t exist (Shammas, 2017).

People kill people, and guns make that killing easier. While knives often wound and sometimes kill, guns often kill. Efficiently. So enough with the inane word games. Until we do something—until we stop listening to pithy, bumper-sticker-worthy straw men like “guns don’t kill people; people kill people”—more Americans will die. Simply because of how obvious the solution is. And that’s a shame (Shammas, 2017).

No one is suggesting that we do away with the American constitutional right to own a gun. Everyone, in fact, seems to be in agreement that there are responsible, law-abiding folks who just so happen to own guns. No one is saying these people should be sacrificed and suffer the consequences for the evil acts of a minority. It is being suggested, however, that people stop treating guns like they are toys and that we move past circular and fallacious arguments in order to enact some positive social change.

Sources

“Fuck You I Like Guns” blog post, by Anna

“Do Money, Social Status Woes Fuel the U.S. Gun Culture?” by Melinda Wenner Moyer, 2017

Gun Violence Archive

Discussion

What are your general thoughts about guns?

Does the idea or the act of shooting a gun feel powerful?

Do you feel safe from guns at school?

What do you think should be done (or not done) to solve the current crisis?

When you were reading the blog post, did you assume the gender of the author was male? (hint: not!)

When War is a Crime – “The Kill Team”

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Thrill Kill

The “Kill Team” as they have come to be known are sadly not characters ripped from a Hollywood movie. They are real American soldiers who committed acts of torture and murder during the war in Afghanistan. Also known as the “Maywand District Murders,” located in Kandahar province, the extrajudicial killings were the handy work of young Infantrymen who claimed they were influenced by their charismatic squad leader, Staff Sergeant Calvin Gibbs.

Dan Krauss’ 2013 film relates the story of Specialist Adam Winfield, a 21-year-old soldier in southern Afghanistan who tried, with the help of his father, to alert the military to the war crimes that were being committed by his fellow soldiers. Winfield along with the other soldiers were members of the 3rd Platoon, Bravo Company, which was part of the 5th Stryker Brigade based out of Tacoma, Washington.

The film, which you can preview in the trailer below, won first place in the category of Best Documentary Feature at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival. More recently, filming has begun for a dramatic rendering of the story, starring Alexander Skarsgard in the role of Gibbs (release est. 2017).

What Happened?

In an article written by Mark Boal, we learn how a group of American soldiers, all trained Infantrymen, decided it was “finally time to kill a haji.” The squad had apparently deliberated at length about how to do it over the course of numerous conversations and “late-night bull sessions.” Bagging “savages” as they termed it, carried a low probability of getting caught. Some of the soldiers “agonized over the idea; others were gung-ho from the start.” Eventually, their talking gave way to action, as the soldiers took active steps to execute a plan to commit organized murder.

As part of an effort to root out the Taliban located in their sector of responsibility, the platoon made their way to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village framed by poppy fields. It was here that the soldiers seized upon an opportunity when their officers retreated to the interior of the compound to talk to a village elder. As Boal explains, when their leadership was effectively distracted, it was at this point that the soldiers began looking for someone to kill. One soldier confessed to investigators: “The general consensus was “if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it.” It was soon afterward that a young Afghan farmer was killed under dubious circumstances.

Boal described the victim in his article: “He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. Not much younger than they were (Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19). His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. The expression on his face was welcoming. “He was not a threat,” according to Morlock, who later confessed to the killing.

Not satisfied with simply taking an innocent life, the soldiers celebrated their kill and took photographs of themselves with the young teen they murdered. One soldier (Holmes) posed for the camera holding a cigarette as he hovered over Mudin’s bloody and half-naked corpse; he grabbed the boy by the hair in the same manner as one might hold a deer taken as a trophy. Morlock (shown below) did the same, after which he snipped off the finger of the boy to keep as a souvenir.

When it was all over and done, Sergeant Gibbs was found guilty by a military court of being the leader of a U.S. Army “thrill kill team” that murdered a total of three (there were likely more) Afghan civilians for sport. He was sentenced to life in prison, although he will be eligible for parole in nine years. Additionally, Gibbs was found guilty of 12 other related charges, which included the taking of body parts from corpses as trophies. In summary, three soldiers, who also pled guilty in the case, testified against Gibbs, whom the accused of masterminding a scheme to kill unarmed civilians, using planted weapons to make the deaths appear justified.

Gibbs testified in his own defense, where he denied murdering civilians, even though he did admit to taking trophies from Afghans that he maintained were killed legitimately. As part of his testimony, he compared his cutting off of fingers from his human kills to “keeping antlers” from deer he’d shot.

In taped testimony obtained by ABC News, Jeremy Morlock told investigators: “He just really doesn’t have any problems with f—ing killing these people.” “And so we identify a guy. Gibbs makes a comment, like, you know, you guys wanna wax this guy or what?” Morlock said.” And you know, he set it up, like, he grabbed the dude.” Morlock said that killing people came “too easy” to Gibbs (Moal).

Specialist Winfield, the lone soldier who had originally warned his parents that his fellow soldiers were executing innocent Afghan civilians, pled guilty to reduced charges; he was sentenced to three years in prison for his role in the third killing. Originally, military prosecutors had charged him with premeditated murder, which would have carried a sentence of life in prison without parole.

“Killing Rag-heads for Jesus”

In the article “Killing Ragheads for Jesus,” Chris Hedges dives deep into a discussion of the moral issues and contradictions that characterize military service in the contemporary U.S. It has become a feature of our culture that people reflexively confer praise on everyone that wears a uniform, “thanking” soldiers for their service. As a result, there is almost no critical thought afforded to how military culture can, by virtue of being good at making good soldiers, simultaneously produce killers and other ambiguous characters like Army sniper Chris Kyle. Our national narratives, it might be argued, memorialize and even lionize soldiers as heroes, without giving much thought to human complexity.

Hedges is perhaps best known for his prize-winning work, including War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) and Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009). He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent working in Central America, the Balkans, and the Middle East. In 2002 Hedges was part of a group of eight reporters at The New York Times awarded the Pulitzer Prize for that paper’s coverage of global terrorism. An educated theologian from Harvard’s Divinity School (he is also a Presbyterian Minister), Hedges has taught at Columbia University, New York University, and Princeton University. He now teaches at a maximum security prison in New Jersey.

As for the “Kill Team,” crime and deviance, which is to say “murder,” were produced as a byproduct of military training (it’s a feature, not a bug). Soldiers are taught to kill and to do so without thought. To put in another way, killing does not occur as part of a rational thought process; it’s conditioned behavior. Humans are emptied of their human contents in order to serve as targets. Our failure to recognize this to some extent dishonors people who serve.

As I have stated in my own research, when military service is celebrated to the point it is fetishized, soldiers are objectified; they are rendered object-like and are emptied of their humanity because we, as a nation, want to indulge collective national fantasies (Trappen, 2016).

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning

In his book, Hedges writes about his wartime experiences, where he observes that “in spite of its destructive capacity, war can give us what we long for most….a sense of purpose, meaning, and a reason for living….it allows us to be noble in a life often dominated by trivia and routine.” (p.3). Art and filmmaking play an important role in this process, as he asserts that art “becomes infected with the platitudes of patriotism; the use of a nation’s cultural resources to back up the war effort is essential to mask the contradictions needed to sustain the war.” (p.63).

One of the dangers he calls attention to is how culture plays a role in solidifying the wartime narrative. In the U.S. in particular, he points out, children are taught to believe in the superiority of their culture, where the U.S. and by association its soldiers are always depicted on the side of the angels. Once we see ourselves on the side of the angels, where we embrace an ideological belief system that defines itself in terms of goodness and light, it’s only a matter of HOW we carry out murder (p.9).

“War,” he says, “promotes killers and racists; each side reduces the other to objects” (p.21). “Rape, mutilation, sexual abuse are the natural outcome of a world in which human beings are objects” (p.103-104). Thus it follows, the excuse for immoral behavior derives from the belief that the work they carry out is merely their duty, which they carry out for the greater good (p.10).

“A soldier who is able to see the humanity of an enemy is not an effective killer” (p.73) Militaries want “believers” not “thinkers.” Because “thinkers might not follow orders; self-awareness and self-criticism must, therefore, be obliterated (p.74).

War as Myth

According to Hedges, “the dirty secret of war is that the ideals that propel us into war are myths…and in some cases lies.” In light of this, “when wars lose their mythic stature for the public, they are exposed for what they are—organized murder (p.21).

“The potency of myth is that it allows us to make sense of mayhem and violent death; it justifies human cruelty and stupidity; it disguises our powerlessness and hides the impotence and ordinariness of our leaders. It’s only when the veneer of the myth is punctured (as in Vietnam) that the press begins to report in a sensory, rather than a mythic manner (the press, in other words, does not lead, it follows) (p.23).

Most national myths, he says, “are at their core racist and fed by ignorance” (p.24).

“The myth of war sells and legitimizes the drug of war” (p. 25).

“The myth of war is necessary to justify the sacrifices of war, for its only by denying the reality of war that it can be turned into a heroic endeavor.”

“The rhetoric of patriotism is exposed as myth” (p.39)

“National myths ignite collective amnesia during war; they give past generations a nobility they never had” (p.46).

Inconsistencies are ignored by those who are intoxicated by a new found sense of national pride (p.47).

Nationalist triumphalism was discredited after Vietnam, but surged again under Reagan; they became ascendant once more in the Gulf War” (p.61).

“Peddling the myth of heroism is essential to entice soldiers to war.” Without this, recruiters wouldn’t be able to do their jobs.

“For those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed; collective glorification permits people to abandon their usual preoccupation with the petty concerns of daily life; they get to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama. This vision is accepted at the expense of self-annihilation” (p.54).

“The desire to give oneself over to the ‘crowd’ to become one of the masses is easier; it places fewer mental demands on the individual (See Erich Fromm’s work “Escape from Freedom,” where he discusses social-psychological escape mechanisms.)

Sources

“The Kill Team: How U.S. Soldiers in Afghanistan Murdered Innocent Civilians,” RollingStone Magazine article by Mark Boal

“Calvin Gibbs, Leader of ‘Thrill Kill’ Soldiers, Guilty of Murder,” by Mark Schone and Matthew Cole

War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges

Empty Metal Jacket: The Biopolitical Economy of War and Medicine, by Sandra Trappen

Discussion Questions

Are war crimes and other atrocities “naturally” occurring social phenomena and if so who is ultimately responsible, since they are by definition a crime – the soldier or the state?

Where does the law stand when people claim they were merely “doing their job” and/or just”following orders?”

When the institution (government/military) sanctions torture can we blame soldiers for war crimes?

How might our national narratives/ideals as it pertains to soldiers (the myths of war) preclude understanding the root of the problem as it pertains to war crimes? Is it a case of “bad apples” or a “rotten basket?”

What role to social group dynamics, particularly in-group/out-group dynamics, play in facilitating deviant behavior, including murder and torture?

What does it say about the military as an institution when only low-ranking soldiers are prosecuted for war crimes?

How might “religiosity” (i.e. Christian “Dominionism”) feed into the problem?

Why Do We Fight?

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Why Do We Fight?

It’s a simple question that is not easily answered. To be in a conversation about war, who serves, and why they fight is itself a fraught undertaking, We all enter into the “conversation” from different places, life experiences, and are socialized into different belief systems, which constitute the basic underpinning for “how we know what we know.”

Many of you by your own admission have not spent a lot of time thinking about war and veterans in a systematic way, nor do you have a lot of social contact with people who have served and/or fought in wars. When I talk to students, they respond to the basic question with responses like: money, power, resources, to defend national interests, and freedom. Some give indication that that they have given some thought to the socio-economic status of soldiers/recruits – a social group that tends to lack financial resources, wants education benefits, or simply wants to escape economically precarious small towns, where many grow up not having hope, opportunity, or desire to see/experience anything different.

Whatever the case may be or what you think, there are no “wrong” answers. We fight for a lot of different reasons. What we must do now is move the conversation forward, setting aside personal beliefs and thinking critically (in terms of knowledge and power) and sociologically (in terms of social structures and processes). Here it might be helpful, as the sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote, to think about war and veterans as both a “personal trouble” and a “public issue.” Put another way, we must learn to cultivate a sociological imagination.

Throughout this course, we’ll try to think simultaneously about issues of agency and structure. In particular, we want to think about how individuals and social groups may be situated within this structure – how they shape and are shaped by it.

So for example, we’ll look at the interlocking dynamics of race, class, and gender as this applies to military service. We’ll look at how our foreign policy reflects social dynamics bound up in issues of political economy.

At the same time, I want you to also think about how war makes people “feel.” Issues of nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, social solidarity, and group belonging are consequential to how we engage in what academics refer to as “self-making” projects. These issues, I think you will find, all have a major impact on who we are as people and what we come to believe as “truth.”

Film – Why We Fight

A documentary film that I sometimes show and encourage you to watch (Amazon Prime) is aptly titled “Why We Fight.” The title, in this case, refers to a series of World War II propaganda movies directed by Frank Capra that were commissioned by the U.S. government as means to justify their decision to enter the war.

The more recent film is directed by Eugene Jarecki and it charts the rise and proliferation of the military-industrial complex; it argues that in every decade since World War II, the American public has by and large been emotionally manipulated and misled. This made it easier for the the government to recruit “volunteers” and take them to war while fostering the rise of a military-industrial economy, which helped secure American political, economic, and military dominance throughout the world.

In terms of politics, the film does an admirable job of interviewing key players and thought leaders from all sides of the political spectrum. Interviewed are former politician/Senator John McCain, political scientist and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, neoconservative politician Richard Perle, neoconservative commentator William Kristol, writer Gore Vidal, and public policy expert Joseph Cirincione.

Although it won the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Film Production at the Sundance film festival, it received a limited public cinema release in Jan 2006, and was shortly thereafter released on DVD in June of the same year [the film also won a 2006 Grimme Award – a prize that is one of Germany’s most prestigious for television productions, as well as a Peabody Award in 2006].

Discussion Questions

Why do we fight? Is is for freedom or something else?

Who serves and why do you think they serve?

Why do mostly poor people serve, despite having very little chance of securing long-term financial advantages?

I’m Not Political

It’s not uncommon for college students to say things like “I’m not political.” This is actually very normal and very typical. College offers people an opportunity to join new social groups, where they hopefully meet people different in many ways from the friends and family with whom they grew up; where they can in the process experience new ideas. All these things may be true, however, it is an inescapable fact that if you are part of a society, you are a part of its politics.

Politics in the United States has become extremely polarized over the years. Where once people of different political ideologies worked together to solve problems, this is sadly no longer the case. Young people are being drawn into ideological conflict often without having had sufficient opportunity to learn and reflect on different points of view. The following essay presents a humorous look at our contemporary political landscape, as it explores the idea of how people attempt to rise above the fray and remain “not political.”

Essay (Humor)

Listen up guys, I get it. You hate the orange guy with the crazy hair. You love the old guy with the crazy hair. You think Hillary is a woman but she sends too many emails. Wow, you’re soooo political. Good for you. I just don’t like to get into that sort of thing. I’d rather abstain from all the petty name-calling and meme-swapping because I believe that life is about more than just politics. (Also, because I’m pretty sure that whatever happens will not affect my day-to-day life in any way because I’m not a member of a historically oppressed group.)

I guess politics has never appealed to me because I just don’t enjoy arguing (things I do enjoy: massages, sriracha, extreme privilege as the result of a class system rigged in my favor, NOT ARGUING). I don’t need to spend hours debating what led to the Iraq War—it feels like it went by super fast anyways (since no one in my social circle had to join the military to pay for college). It’s not important to me that I understand the best solution to economic inequality—my great-grandfather invented steel.

While some people need to always be right, I would rather always be kind. Maybe if everyone were always kind, we wouldn’t even need politics (I don’t know what poverty is because my father invested in soybean futures).

Honestly, if more people were like me (low-key, rich, able-bodied), we wouldn’t have to have these fights about things that don’t affect me and never will.

Another thing I don’t like about politics is how it divides people. I believe that we are all the same (almost all my friends went to the same college). So I think we should be able to find common ground when it comes to the major issues affecting our lives, whatever those may be. My best friend is actually a socially conservative libertarian and I have never once let that come between us because I have never asked her what that means and she always has weed.

If you’ve been on social media lately, you know that it can seem like politics is impossible to avoid. But imagine for a second what would happen if we replaced all the angry rants about healthcare and immigration with pictures of kittens and puppies. I, for one, would definitely feel better. I already have healthcare and don’t know why anyone would want to change countries—it sounds like it would be really difficult!

In conclusion, I know it’s fun sometimes to get all riled up and scream at the TV. But I’m pretty sure that, come November, whether we elect the guy from The Apprentice or the guy from Curb Your Enthusiasm, everything is going to be okay (at least for me).

Sources

Essay reposted from The Reductress – “I’m Not Political (Because I Assume I Will Retain All of My Privileges Forever)

Discussion Questions

Do you ever find yourself saying things like “I’m Not Political?”

If so, can you see how declaring yourself as such is a marker of privilege to some degree?

Faces of War

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Photographer and film maker Lalage Snow published a series of photos that she shot while working on location in the area of Kabul, Afghanistan. The 8-month-long project entitled We Are The Not Dead features portraits of British soldiers based in Helmand province. To produce the series, Snow shot three separate photo panels – a triptych –representing a moment in time before, during, and after their deployment. Her work captures more than the mere facial expressions of the men, but also their apparent physical changes, which she documented to have occurred over a time period of less than a year. Snow’s composition effectively captures their transformation and offers a dramatic representation of how stress is embodied as a result of living and fighting in a war zone. In many of the photos it is the soldiers’ eyes that haunt us, as they betray something of a sense of their physical and emotional state, which appears deteriorated not unlike the soiled uniforms that hang on their bodies.

Follow the link to view more photos in the series: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/lalage-snow-we-are-the-not-dead

According to author Elaine Scarry (1985) war is “the most radically embodying event in which human beings ever collectively participate.” (Scarry, p. 71). This particular series employs what is essentially a form of graphic art to demonstrate how war is potentially embodied.

Discussion

Please take a moment to look at the entire series of photos and offer your thoughts about what you see in the photos. Do you see evidence of an embodied physical change? If so, describe what you see.

Gender and War

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gender and war

The issue of gender and war is a contentious matter of debate, both inside as well as outside the military. Some would argue that men’s bodies and women’s bodies are inherently different; that men are made for war, whereas women are more “naturally” suited for domestic activities and should restrict their role to the home front. Roles for women have taken center stage recently, as the combat exclusion was set aside to clear the way for women to serve alongside men in combat roles. Our course readings engage a critique of gender dynamics as they relate to war by exploring them from a range of different viewpoints.

Tara Mckelvey takes up the issue of women’s invisibility in policy making as it relates to war; Angela Davis and Francine D’Amico look at institutional dynamics as they impact men and women in uniform. They also highlight the role of women as torturers in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal; Nancy Scheper-Hughes engages a critical analysis of the decision-making of mothers who send their children to war. We might also draw from Judith Butler’s work on gender and her idea that gender is constructed as a repetitive performance to help us think about gender as it relates to war.

The film Restrepo (the men pictured above appear in the film) deals with gender from the perspective of men. Yet one of the first things we notice is the absent presence of women. Sebastian Junger and the late British/American photojournalist Tim Hetherington spent more than a year documenting the lives of soldiers they lived with during combat operations in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan [AP Photo credit: David Guttenfelder. Specialist Taylor Jordan from U.S. Army 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry lifts weights in the rain in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan. May 8, 2009].

Discussion Questions

Why do bodies matter so much when it comes to military service and war?

How are issues and questions about war related to ideas about gender and power? Now that the combat exclusion has been set aside, do you think that women should be required (as men are required by law) to register with the selective service?

What are your thoughts about the different roles played by military men and women?

Is gender equality a problem in the military, or does the military simply have a “woman” problem only because feminists pursuing an agenda of “political correctness” are continuing to make gender an issue?

War & Cinema

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Full Metal Jacket

“This is my rifle.This is my gun. One is for killing. The other’s for fun.”

The Hurt Locker

“The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” –Chris Hedges

Restrepo

“Battle six Romeo this is two-six. Right now we have the hilltop.”

The idea that the evolution of cinema has proceed along a parallel track with the development of warfare technology is one that has been taken up by students of film theory as well as by philosophers and cultural studies theorists. Oddly enough, one of the first movie cameras was derived in part from the technology used to make the Gatling gun. Since then the imbrication of war with film has intensified over time. In our present era, we find the technology used in pilot headsets, night vision goggles, and un-piloted ROVs or “drones” has evolved to the extent that modern combat appears choreographed to mimic cinematic effects: war is like a movie or video game, only one that has life-altering and often deadly consequences for its players. Given that the overwhelming majority of us experience war and conflict, not from the front lines but indirectly, through entertainment venues, i.e. cinema, television, video, or online via the Internet, it is increasingly important that people exercise vigilance when it come to making choices about media information sources. The three films depicted here are all award winning pictures that in many respects make war their central character. Reflect on our classroom discussions and consider the following questions:

How are social hierarchies portrayed in the films? In other words, how are the characters ranked and organized into social groups; furthermore, who has access to social power and on what basis do they claim that power? How might gender concepts based on notions of what is considered proper masculine and feminine behavior be operating in the films, either overtly or covertly? What do the films tell us about what it means to be a man or woman who is at war? Do “parts” matter?

What underlying critique might be presented by the film makers that speaks to the social organization of violence in our culture?

What are the significant personal attributes, attitudes, and behaviors that define the major characters in these films? What stereotypes are indicated in terms of race, class, and gender?

How is group membership and social solidarity expressed and shared by the different group members? What happens to people when they become separated or separate themselves from their primary group?

Soldier or Police Officer?

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There is perhaps no other topic that generates public controversy and divisive opinion than that which pertains to the question: What is the proper role of police?

Doubtless, the criminal justice system has undergone massive change over the course of the last 20 years in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy in New York. World events have caused many Americans to question what they want their policemen and women to do on a daily basis. Should they, for example, be public servants, who “Serve & Protect?” Or should they be soldiers, policing the homeland to fight the war on terror? Do we want them to be exclusively focused on drug crimes, leaving violent crime, white collar crime, and other offenses to languish without resources and attention? Or perhaps we want them to be social workers, who just so happen to carry a gun to work every day?

Policing Evolution or Revolution? The New Military Urbanism

Authors Stephen Graham and Radley Balko both argue in their respective books, “Rise of the Warrior Cop:The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” (Balko) and “Cities Under Siege:The New Military Urbanism,” (Graham) that a shift is underway, where military doctrine, battlefield tactics, and methods of population control are increasingly being integrated into urban police forces. These developments, according to Graham, “dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence, and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national, and global operations.” The end result of this process is what he calls the “new military urbanism.”

Aggressive police practice, while not new, is getting increased attention due to the proliferation of social media and organizations dedicated to calling attention to high profile incidents of police crime and violence.

Normalizing Police Violence: Order Maintenance Policing

As we have discussed in class, the military equipment associated with SWAT operations and the military mentality that the use of such equipment apparently breeds is not confined to those special operations units. Increasingly, they’re permeating all forms of policing.

In the recent time period, since the turn to the 21st century, the two dominant models of policing have been the Community Policing Model and the Order Maintenance Policing Model. In terms of what we see put into practice (despite a lot of “happy talk” to the contrary) the Order Maintenance Model has apparently won out. This has occurred despite overwhelming research and evidence that demonstrates community policing models are more effective – Order Maintenance models potentially create more problems than may have existed in the first place. The Order Maintenance Model is a model that appears to be built for police militarization, with its emphasis on harsh counterinsurgency tactics.

Community Policing – officers wear traditional uniforms on foot patrol in Philadelphia

Karl Bickel, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Department’s Community Policing Services office, observes that police across America are being trained in ways that emphasize force and aggression. The dominant model in police training today is a stress-based regimen that aspires to mimic military boot camp. This model has replaced the more relaxed academic setting that a minority of police departments still employ. The result, in his view, is that young officers become acculturated to an idea of policing that privileges “kicking ass” rather than working with the community to make neighborhoods safe. Likewise, we increasingly see police departments adopting different versions of the military battle-dress uniforms (BDUs) for patrol officers. These militaristic, typically black or olive-drab jumpsuits, according to Bickel, make them less approachable and possibly also more aggressive in their interactions with the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

Oddly enough, the authoritarian approach stands in opposition to the dominant philosophy that distinguished twenty-first-century American police thinking: community policing. This model of policing was intended to emphasize “keeping the peace” by creating and maintaining partnerships of trust in the communities served. The community policing model, which also happens to be the official policing philosophy of the U.S. government, sees officers as protectors that are also problem solvers; they’re supposed to care who lives in their community and about how their community see them. According to this model, officers don’t command respect, so much as they earn it. Rather than aiming to instill fear, officers are supposed to work to foster trust.

Police Recruiting

Police recruiting videos (like those from California’s Newport Beach Police Department and New Mexico’s Hobbs Police Department) don’t play up the community policing angle, but rather emphasize military adventurism and aim to attract young men with the promise of Army-style high-tech toys. Policing, as depicted in videos like the one shown here, isn’t about calmly solving problems; it’s about the boys “getting their war on” and breaking down doors in the middle of the night.

Now compare this video to a recruitment video produced by a New Zealand police department. Can you see a difference? Compare and contrast the two approaches. What themes do you see being are emphasized in American and New Zealand videos and how are they different? How do you think the two approaches might result in different types of people being recruited and hired for police work? In which of the two examples do you see future officers being taught to operate as a domestic occupying army, where citizens are potentially viewed as enemy combatants? Which police force would you rather work for?

A small research project at Johns Hopkins University appears to back up Bickel’s claims. People were shown pictures of police officers in their traditional uniforms and in BDUs. Respondents in the survey indicated they would much rather have a police officer show up in traditional dress blues. Perhaps like this?

Summarizing the survey findings, Bickel writes, “The more militaristic look of the BDUs, much like what is seen in news stories of our military in war zones, gives rise to the notion of our police being an occupying force in some inner-city neighborhoods, instead of trusted community protectors.”

This is consistent with other research undertaken by researchers in criminology, who have concluded that the order policing model is deeply implicated in the rise of the new military urbanism. This model stands at odds with the community policing model – the “serve and protect” model – that many assume to be the dominant policing model.

Militarizing Childhood

Research on the interaction between police departments and children is presently lacking. Judging from the photos below, efforts to instill a military mindset appear to start early.

Drill Instructor, Asbury Park NJ Youth Police Academy

Summer camp for kids run by the Cumberland, MD police department.

Police Militarization Doesn’t Affect Me

Unfortunately, despite the torrent of photo/video evidence that has become commonplace in today’s fluid media environment, this is not enough to foster meaningful change in the way we deploy police officers in our communities. Absent action at the policy level or the grassroots level, where individual citizens organize and agitate for change, we are left to continue to speculate how long it will take to remove what we are told are simply “a few bad apples.” The images have become almost an entertaining source of “outrage” consumption, but again it’s not bringing about changes in practice.

For many of us (perhaps college students in particular), the brutality depicted in the video clips is not likely to touch our lives (or so we think). Police violence is quickly becoming normalized in U.S. culture and this is a problem. The vast majority of citizens don’t have regular police encounters, given that the focus of policing tends to be in poor minority communities, where the residents are poor, assumed to be violent, and are judged as deserving of the added police attention.

In light of all this, if you are still not disturbed by any of this, if you are not concerned about socializing children into a culture of violence (not simply firearms used for hunting) but more, and/or you simply don’t think police militarization is a problem for society, then it’s unlikely additional evidence or research will convince you otherwise. Perhaps at some point in the future, if you are subject to an accidental no-knock raid on your home that kills your dog or maims your child (it’s okay, it was an innocent mistake), you might arrive at a different understanding. But until then, you’re good.

Okay. Let’s take a different approach, since caring about the physical, emotional, and inhumane trauma inflicted upon your fellow citizens is not a priority; let’s look at how this hits you in your wallet. Consider the following statistics as a taxpaying citizen:

- San Diego paid $5.9 million to compensate for sexual assault against multiple women by one officer.
- A city southwest of Tucson AZ spent $3.4 million to pay for one deadly SWAT raid.
- Boston settled a single case of police brutality for $1.4 million that left a man with permanent brain injury.
- Scottsdale AZ paid $4.25 million for the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.
- Baltimore paid $5.7 million in private settlements plus an additional $5.8 million in legal fees for police brutality.
- Minneapolis paid close to $21 million since 2003
- Oakland CA paid $74 million from 1990 to present
- Los Angeles paid $54 million in 2011 alone; recently they paid $1.5 million on a single case of a California Highway Patrol officer beating a homeless woman senseless at a traffic stop.
- Chicago paid $521 million over the past decade; $84.6 million in 2013 (includes court and legal fees).

Pepper spraying cop goes to Kent State

And the King of them all ……

The New York City Police Department spent nearly 1 billion dollars on settlements in connection with police brutality; 964 million from 2000 – 2010; $765 million in 2012. The New York figure is expected to reach $815 million by 2016.

Keep in mind, most of these city-wide figures do not always take into account the legal costs of cases that are processed through the “justice” system, where violent police officers are excused and victims are left with nothing. It doesn’t count the money individuals who are not compensated must spend to take care of medical expenses (like the parents of the baby hit by the flash-bang grenade, who were recently told by their local municipality that there was no evidence of wrongdoing and that no damages would be awarded).

Discussion Questions:

What do you think about concerns as this pertains to the militarization of police? Do you think this is a problem?

Do you think police forces should patrol their neighborhoods like soldiers or should they interact with the public in a different way?

What if lawsuits and settlements were taken directly out of police budgets (instead of taxpayer funds)? Do you think that would have an impact decreasing police violence and brutality?

What if individual police officers were required to obtain the equivalent of malpractice insurance? [this is a standard practice for attorneys, medical doctors, and other professionals]

When you reflect on your own encounters with police, do you think of them as civil servants who “serve and protect,” or do you see them as agents of repression and/or “revenue generators” whom you regard as potentially hostile?

Do you think there may be links between socio-cultural factors, where people raised in a culture that glorifies gun ownership and violence may be prone to see police violence as a natural and just response to crime?

Do you think violence is “normal” within police culture (not a simple matter of a few bad apples) or do you think we can easily weed out the bad actors through disciplinary action?

How do you think police training might contribute to the problem of police brutality and violence?

When you see videos like the ones depicted here, do you think incidents of police violence are increasing, or are we finding that social media combined with aggressive reporting has simply increased visibility of a problem that has always existed?

Italian Police. Not bad.

Sources

Some of the content for this post appears in an article written by Matthew Harwood, entitled “To Terrify and Occupy: How the Excessive Militarization of the Police Is Turning Cops Into Counterinsurgents.” You can find the full content of the article posted here.

Nuclear Ruins & Mushroom Dreams

nuclear ruins

The invention of the atomic bomb is an important one in the annals of U.S. history. World War II and the Cold War that followed seamlessly in its wake were foundational to the shaping of present-day histories of scientific progress, social conflict, and war. The film “Atomic Cafe” explores this history and illustrates how the wars of what some scholars refer to as the “American Century” (20th century) provided a stimulus effect to U.S. capitlalism. Not only did it help fund high-tech R&D, it helped many men upon return from the wars secure loans for subsidized housing and provided benefits (GI Bill) for education. These benefits, however, were not provided to all service men, as discrimination prevented them from being extended to non-white service members.

Aside from these material benefits, the threat of nuclear war loomed heavy in the American psyche during this time period. Both Joe Masco in The Nuclear Borderlands and Jackie Orr in Panic Diaries address what might be termed the “affective dynamics” of nuclear war. “Nuclear panic” and the “national contemplation of ruins,” the both argue, are indicative of how modern warfare effectively blurs the boundary between public and private, inner and outer, and mind and body. This occurs to such a degreee that our private and what we typically think of as the “inner” terrain of our mind is rendered an accessible and legitimate target of mass violence and war.

Discussion Questions

How do the arguments presented by the two authors perhaps make you think differently about war and socio-political violence? For example, have you ever given much thought to how war targets not only bodies, but also the human psyche and its emotional capacities?

How might the manipulation of public feelings about war (this includes feeling as well as un-feeling) serve the strategic interests of powerful groups, who materially benefit from war? In what ways can yous see where you yourself have perhaps been subject to efforts to manipulate your emotions to manufacture support for war and militarism?

What analogies can you make between nuclear panic and the present day “War on Terror?”

What analogies can you make between 50’s era people customizing their personal bomb shelters and present day “doomsday preppers?”

Dancing with Death: War & The Body

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war and the body

The body as a figure is often conscripted to foster public approval and ongoing support for war. One of the more visible images circulating is a photo depicting hundreds of unidentified bodies wrapped in white shrouds. Here, the specter of the body was put on full display; the fragile mortal human body. In this instance the juxtaposition is particularly striking: stark white figures contrasted against an unremarkable background; nameless lifeless bodies foregrounded by the youthful vigor and innocence of a lone skipping child, whose playful stride negotiates the chasm between life and death. Bodies effectively disembodied—dead flesh uninhabited—the body reduced to a container —no longer a subject. Such bodies can no longer speak their trauma. But even in death they might communicate without benefit of a voice. Simple bodies laid out in neat tidy rows are suggestive of one of the many fictions that conflict narratives propagate: the idea that war’s human terrain is manageable and that order might be achieved from chaos—all while life dances in the balance.

The story of this photograph proved to be a great deal more complex than was originally assumed, as the bodies depicted in it were not from Syria, but from Iraq.The original photo, taken in March of 2003, documented a recovery operation from a mass grave outside of Baghdad. The deception in this case, deliberate or otherwise, was overlooked not only by the U.S., but by other news organizations and governments, many of whom were using the photo to support calls for attacks on Syria [photo credit: Marco di Lauro. The photographer’s online portfolio can be accessed on his personal website at http://www.marcodilauro.com/blog/bbc-mistakenly-runs-dated-iraq-photo-to-illustrate-the-syrian-massacre/].

How do different images of bodies make us feel about war? What are your feelings about seeing images of soldiers’ bodies, civilian bodies, and children’s bodies displayed in the media? Do you think your are seeing the complete picture when you look at media portrayals of war casualties? Are some bodies more noticeable than others? Do you think it is appropriate for the media to censor graphic images of war and if so, why?

War Games

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soldier

War is Fun

The notion of war as entertainment – and the idea that there might be a functioning military entertainment complex – is not the stuff of fantasy. On the contrary, there is a long and well-established history of collaboration between the military, entertainment, and even the education industries.

Research findings have established that public concerns about the potential links between violent video game playing and incidents of mass violence (i.e. school shootings) are not supported. Similar concerns were registered in the 1980s about violent Hollywood movies and the research produced similar results. But that is not to say that we should not be concerned about developments in the gaming industry and how they might impact the social development of young people.

In his book “War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict,”, CUNY professor, Corey Mead, documents the history of the military and the gaming industry. Mead writes about how they evolved together rather than separately – a fact that appears to not be well known. Even more interesting, he traces a path that reveals the history of the military’s engagement with education innovation and computer based learning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuzaxlddWbk

But Not for Girls

If recent trends are an indicator, the normalizing of violence (especially gender violence) in video games is culturally problematic, even if the effects as such cannot be quantified and measured. Military themed video games in particular are noted for their enforcement of gender norms in role play as well as scripting. Women who violate gender norms are almost always punished and/or sanctioned; both in the game and in society. Thus we see here how art imitates life.

Self-identified “gamers” on Twitter have been actively debating these issues, with some arguing that there’s no room to debate social issues and issues of political correctness in the arena of game play, which is designed solely for entertainment purposes. Others argue, alternatively, that it’s impossible to draw a rigid line between “game playing” and real life. This especially holds true in a medium that aims with every new release to constantly challenge that boundary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXGJGuH59qw

Discussion Questions

What do you think of the way war is portrayed in games, movies, music, and television?

Do you think violent video games are responsible for school shootings and other incidents of mass violence?

Do you think that violent video games have a corrosive social impact – that they might incite acts of violence among young people – or do you think such fears are overblown? What does the research say about this?

What happened when Amy Schumer’s character decided to play a military themed video game?

What is she saying about gender roles and violence with respect to both gamer culture and military culture?

How/why do video games appear to normalize misogyny and gender violence? Is this a reflection of the people who design/create the games? Or is it merely a reflection of sub-cultures they are trying to simulate (i.e. military)?

Why is misogyny being used as a marketing tool to sell video games to young males? What does this say about the significance of violence to the socialization of young males in our culture?

Censoring Disorder

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Freedom of Speech. Freedom of Press. Freedom to Peaceably Assemble. Citizens in the United States have the right to engage in peaceful protest activity, as guaranteed by the 1st amendment, regardless of whether they are doing so in public parks or on public sidewalks and streets.

Recent events, particularly those that occurred in connection with Ferguson Missouri and the different Occupy and Black Lives Matter (#BLM) Movements, suggest that these rights are being challenged by federal, state, and local authorities. Even members of the public have come out to criticize public protest when they find it is inconvenient or feel the cause is not one that affects them.

Student activists are increasingly coming under fire on college campuses around the country. For instance, U.C Davis students protesting campus governance and CUNY students protesting everything from tuition increases to the adjunct appointment of the former General and CIA Chief David Petraeus, who many accuse of complicity with war crimes, have all been variously pepper sprayed, beaten, and jailed by campus security and local police for engaging in constitutionally guaranteed free-speech activity.

Two of our authors, Stephen Graham and Radley Balko, look at the trend of criminalizing student protest activity; a development that they situate within a general critique of the militarization of society and police forces in particular. Instead of merely looking at the “small picture” of whether or not the students were polite/impolite or whether the protesters did/did not have permits, the authors help us to situate the activity within a larger social spectrum of developments taking place in the United States [note: you can find a concise rendering of information on what constitutes lawful protected protest activity on the New York Civil Liberties Union website http://www.occupyyourrights.org/].

The UC Davis pepper-spray incident occurred on November 18, 2011, in connection with an Occupy Movement demonstration. Students seated on a paved path on the campus quad were, after failing to respond to an order to vacate the premises, sprayed by UC Davis police officer Lt. John Pike. This photo and a video of the incident went viral and became an Internet meme. Later, in October 2013, a judge ruled the officer would be paid $38,000 to compensate for pain and suffering he claimed he was forced to endure as a result of his own actions.

CCNY Students Protest

In September of 2013, 6 CUNY students were arrested during a protest that took place on the street outside Macauley Honors College (see video below). Students and alumnae were similarly arrested together at City College, a major hub for student organizing activity in the CUNY system, when the Morales/Shakur Student and Community Center was closed without warning by the CCNY administration. Two CCNY students were “banned” from CUNY campuses without due process (one student was as forcibly removed from class by campus security). To make matters worse, the university’s proposed (and recently voted to change) policy on “expressive activity,” which essentially codifies/legitimizes this kind of violence against students in what can only be seen as an action intended to put a lid on student dissent at CUNY [a draft of the policy can be found here: http://www.cunyufs.org/EXPRESSIVEACTIVITIES.pdf].

Link to the full article: http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/11/tafadar_sourov_khalil_vasquez_ccny_

morales-shakur_criminal_charges.php

Discussion Questions

What do you think about the student protesters and the police interaction in the video clip? Have you ever participated in a student-led protest?

What is the purpose behind maintaining a campus police force separate from the local community’s police department? [there are actually clear and good reasons for this]. Nonetheless, why does it increasingly appear that the tactics applied to deal with students are no longer different from that which we might expect not only from a civilian police force, but from an occupying army?

What explains the recent uptick in violent encounters between students and police officers? Are students becoming more violent, compared to students in the past, or are the police? How does this make you feel as a student? Do you feel comfortable engaging in protest activity on important issues (i.e. tuition increases), or do you feel afraid?

Based on the current anti-protest climate that is being cultivated by institutions AGAINST students, what does this say about the values of higher education? Do you think universities perhaps now care more about money than students?

Why are peaceful protests that are completely lawful continuing to be criminalized?

Why are universities, who are charged with the educational development and care of students, forming league with law enforcement to monitor student organizing activity and in many cases physically hurt them?

To what extent do you think these aggressive policies might potentially threaten and undermine the democratic promise of higher education?

What institutional structural comparisons might you make between prisons and universities? Do you see any similarities in terms of how the “clients” of these institutions are treated?

Invisible Wounds of War

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the invisible

Suicide is Painless

Counting war casualties is in no small way dependent on how one defines war to begin with — this particularly holds true when it comes to accounting for the beginnings and endings of wars, as this discursive signpost represents one of the prime “cuts” of measure in casualty accounting. Thus, one finds that different conceptual and nominal understandings of war, when combined with different concepts of time and duration and what counts as a casualty, have an influence on statistical measures and outcomes.

Unstable identity categories like “civilian” and “soldier” also exert a major impact on casualty reporting. While it is well known among historians and statisticians that states and armies throughout history have not employed official standardized measures to account for war casualties, the tendency among most people is to accept the reporting of casualty statistics as cold, hard, fact. In view of these findings, one discovers rather quickly that what “counts” as a soldier, more specifically a soldier’s body, and particularly a wounded soldier’s body, is not categorically consistent. There is considerable variation with regard to who and how one counts, which differs dramatically depending on the contingencies of specific wars and conflicts.

Equally troubling is the fact that there are many circumstances where the body might be wounded, yet not reveal signs of an identifiable injury or physical scar; other bodies might be wounded without experiencing war; and some bodies are injured without ever being deployed to a conventional battle theater. The lack of a clear answer prompts Judith Butler (2006) to ask, “why is it that sometimes numbers don’t count at all?”

Discussion Questions

Do you think injuries that can be seen on a body are more significant than less visible injuries that affect the mind (i.e. like those reported/unreported by soldiers who evidence symptoms of PTSD)?

How should we count suicides? Are they combat injuries? Why might the military not want to count suicides?

What about civilian casualties from 9/11? Are they too combat casualties? If not, why not? What is the major difference?

What about other civilian casualties and casualties from countries with whom we are not officially “at war?” Are they combat casualties?

How should we count the civilians killed and wounded in missile/drone strikes in the Palestinian territories and in Pakistan? Are they war casualties? Are New York City, Gaza, and North Waziristan not battlefields?

The Working Class Goes to War

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working class goes to war
Young working class men prepare for their enlistment physical.

The old saying “rich man’s war, poor man’s blood” might be applied to nearly every conflict in the history of warfare. It also speaks to a recognition of how social inequality is bound up with military service. Sociologists can and should pose questions here about why and how this history continues to repeat itself. Why do mostly working class men continue to volunteer for military service? What do they get out of it?

On the policy side, what are some of the social policy dynamics in play here that help drive this predictable outcome (education policy, social mobility dynamics, economic incentives). Are working class people simply easy marks for wealthy con men, who recruit them to fight and die in wars, which help them secure their moneyed interests? Is that what they’re thankful for when they say “Thank you for your service?”

What about the middle class? Are they simply thankful that their stock portfolios profit so they can pay for their kids to go to fancy schools and not have to worry about military service (that’s for other people’s kids). Thank you too!

Think about it. What’s in it for the working class, given that it’s clearly not money, power, and wealth? Are working class people to some extent the chief agents of their own oppression? By being staunch advocates for nationalistic and patriotic values, are they not to some extent creating the basis for an emotional appeal to others like them, thereby socially reproducing themselves as a social class that is always and potentially ripe for military recruitment and exploitation?

There is a long standing tension that lies at the heart of sociology; the relation between “Agency” and “Social Structure.” It cuts to the heart of questions like: Who has power? Who can resist? Who is a victim? Who gets used and discarded?

And so, a critical sociologist might rephrase question: Are working class people merely victims of overwhelming structural economic forces? Or are they cultural dupes? Or are they empowered agents making individual choices, trying to maximize their opportunity within a range of other options, as they alone are the ones that typically serve in the military and fight the wars? The real answer, I’m afraid, is that it’s complex; it might be all of these things.

War Gives Us Meaning

“War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning,” is a book written by Chris Hedges. Hedges is a former combat journalist who writes about his wartime experiences as he reflects on the power of war to create existential meaning for people. Such meaning, he argues, is difficult to attain when people are struggling with life in dead-end towns with low wage jobs and little hope of social mobility. Under such circumstances, narratives of rugged individualism, American exceptionalism, and the American dream are difficult to sustain. But war can change all that. The “myth of heroism,” says Hedges, is a compelling social force that can entice young people to head off to war. According to him, “War is a Drug:”

“for those who swallow the nationalist myth, life is transformed….collective glorification permits people to abandon their usual preoccupation with the petty concerns of daily life…..they get to see themselves as players in a momentous historical drama….this vision is accepted at the expense of self-annihilation.”

This is one rationale we might consider to explain why poor, young, working class men and women willingly and even eagerly commit themselves to the cause of war. Perhaps it explains why, even when they retain some awareness of the fact that the cost benefit equation rarely works out in their favor, they are nonetheless willing to risk life and limb.

The decision to go to war then, while it clearly driven in large part by economics, is also motivated by affective (emotional) dynamics that cannot be measured or justified with rational economic actor modes. As Hedges infers, the meaning-making process is a lot more complicated. This is why we must aim to understand how there may be more powerful motivating factors not limited to economics, which motivate military service among working class men. Sebastian Junger, also a combat journalist, also takes up the issues of meaning-making in his book “War,” which accounts for his experiences in the Korengal valley, Afghanistan, where he and fellow journalist Tim Hetherington spent time embedded with a small unit of young male American soldiers. Junger in the following passage makes a point of distinguishing war from combat:

“combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly.”

Military service (combat in particular) offers a young person the “whole package,” which is to say, the perfect combination of public service, glory, heroism, social honor, street cred, and coolness, all wrapped in the flag. Service provides people with what they percieve to be an an opportunity to act honorably, rather than only attend to their own selfish interests, much ike a firefighter or police officer. Gender, furthermore, is also part of the equation, as these kinds of jobs are traditionally respected as appropriate masculine career alternatives for working class men who lack the means/desire to aspire to become a banker, doctor, or lawyer – instead of getting rich they get to protect their loved ones from the “bad guys.”

This narrative, once again, can be particularly compelling for young people who perceive they lack access to appropriate good-paying jobs, Some might volunteer service to escape their past as “fuckups” – joining the military gives them a way to redeem themselves at the same time as it potentially opens up doors to college. The latter issue is a point of contention in the United States, where it’s increasingly impossible for a lot of young people to go to college without incurring a life of debt peonage.

Junger goes on to say:

“these hillsides are where the men feel not most alive – that you can get skydiving – but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.”

Interviews with veterans establish that for many of them, military service gives them an opportunity to “get back in the game.” It helps them feel useful and purposeful through employment that supplies them with a certain level of dignity, which proved hard to come by in low wage jobs.

No Way Out

Matt Damon’s character in the film Good Will Hunting speaks to the struggles of the working class in the following video clip, where he illustrates how a lack of jobs in a difficult economy creates problems for poor and working class men and women, many of whom feel they have no choice but to turn to military service as their only means of escape.

Discussion Questions:

How does your social identity as an American, or for that matter an American man or woman, potentially influence what you think about veterans and war?

Do you think war is “natural” – an unavoidable necessary evil? Or do you think that most wars are engaged as a matter of choice? [Note: there is actually interesting research on this very question].

Do you think wars are conducted for reasons having to do with values (i.e. freedom), or do you think those values are used by powerful people to get others to fight their wars, so they can accomplish their own objectives, which may be independent of the stated values or, for that matter, any specified national interest?

Do you think it is the special destiny of the United States [American Exceptionalism] to bring freedom and democracy to other parts of the world?

Have you ever felt like you are personally “missing out” because you didn’t opt for military service or because you have not fought in a war? How might your gender influence the way you feel about this.

Does serving/not serving make you feel like less of a man or woman?

How might your social class position influence the way you think about U.S. martial power — do you think your material position has any bearing on what you think about veterans and war?

How might your social class position influence your ideas about whether or not you or your children might volunteer for military service?

Money isn’t the only reason and often it is not a primary reason for serving in the military. There are other perceived benefits related to self-esteem and status honor. These benefits are potentially more compelling for working class people, because they permit economically weak individuals make relevant claims to social power. What do you think?

Do you think the government should provide non-military funded service options for young people, particularly those who want to attain a college education, as a means to facilitate social mobility and career success. In other words, should we financially reward young people for serving their communities, rather than only providing them with benefits when they are willing to risk their life and/or kill people?

Is military service a disguised form of socialism—a government jobs program —that employs the unemployable when markets fail to provide?

Have your beliefs about any of these issues changed over time? If so, how?

Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken in Michael Cimino’s film “The Deer Hunter.”

Taxi to the Dark Side

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“You start looking at these people as less than human, and you start doing things to them you would never dream of. And that’s where it got scary.” – Sergeant Ken Davis

The Story of Dilawar

Taxi to the Dark Side is a documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and tells the story of the killing of a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who was beaten to death by U.S. soldiers while held as a prisoner at a military detention facility located at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan. Through a series of interviews with experts, journalists, prison guards, and former prisoners, the film takes a critical look at the USA’s policy on torture and interrogation.

Gibney’s argument is that what happened to Dilawar was not anomalous, but was instead indicative of a widespread policy that was sanctioned and executed systematically by the United States. From Bagram in 2002, the film charts a path around the world to Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, arguing that the brutal treatment of prisoners in those places was not the work of a few “bad apples,” as indicated by Pentagon officials (Ilene Feinman also critiques this argument).

Sexual humiliation, sensory deprivation, waterboarding and other well-documented practices were all sanctioned by high-ranking officials who were working at the top of military and civilian chains of command. In spite of this, the only people who were punished as a result of the prison practices were low-ranking soldiers, some of whom appear and talk about their experiences in the film.

What Happened?

More than a decade has transpired and much of what happened in the prisons still remains classified and under the control of military intelligence authorities. In a leaked memo, published on Oct 12 2003 that the Washington Post reported is a potential “smoking gun,” documentation linked prisoner abuse to the US high command – hard evidence that the maltreatment was not simply the fault of rogue military police guards. The document states that the list of tactics in the memorandum is derived from a Sept. 10, 2003, “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy” approved by Combined Joint Task Force-7, which Army General Sanchez directed [he has since retired]. While the document states that “at no time will detainees be treated inhumanely nor maliciously humiliated,” it permits the use of yelling, loud music, a reduction of heat in winter and air conditioning in summer, and “stress positions” for as long as 45 minutes every four hours — all without first gaining the permission of anyone more senior than the “interrogation officer in charge” at Abu Ghraib.

Prior to the memo, the conventional narrative portrayed the abuse as being the work of Corporal Charles Graner, who ran the night shift at Abu Ghraib’s interrogation wing.

Less Than Human

The process of dehumanizing an enemy “other” is a slippery slope. Once you start down that path, boundaries begin to break all around. Soldiers that dehumanized Iraqi and Afghan prisoners also dehumanized each other. Rape and sodomy within the ranks of the U.S. military is now well-documented behavior. It is worth considering how this too, like torture, is not the work of a few “bad apples.” Rather, the apples are in many respects spoiling the institution, considering the lengths to which institutional key players maneuvered to avoid accountability for their actions.

Lyndie England, the 28 year-old short pixie haired woman that was a central figure in a lot of the photos still refuses to apologize for her behavior. Ms England, who was 21 at the time of the abuse, was dishonorably discharged from military service after photographs like the one shown here emerged. She served half of a three-year sentence for maltreating prisoners. In an interview from her home in West Virginia, she was unrepentant. “Their lives are better,” she said. “They got the better end of the deal. They weren’t innocent. They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologize to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.”

Above Top Secret: US Soldiers Raped Boys In Front of Their Mothers

According to a number of global media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the other files in connection with the U.S. Senate torture report. Respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh (he broke the story about the My Lai massacre during Vietnam) the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed. Sadly, it appears that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.

While the video remains under wraps, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it comes out.

Giving a speech at the ACLU after the torture report was initially released, Hersh offered insight into what was on the Pentagon’s secret tape.

“Debating about it, ummm … some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”

“It’s impossible to say to yourself how did we get there? Who are we? Who are these people that sent us there? When I did My Lai, I was very troubled that anybody in his right mind would be about what happened. I ended up in something I wrote saying in the end I said that the people who did the killing were as much victims as the people they killed because of the scars they had, I can tell you some of the personal stories by some of the people who were in these units witnessed this. I can also tell you written complaints were made to the highest officers and so we’re dealing with a enormous massive amount of criminal wrongdoing that was covered up at the highest command out there and higher, and we have to get to it and we will. We will.”

Put into context with another speech that Hersh gave later, it becomes clear that the women who witnessed these young boys being raped were actually their mothers.

At a speech in Chicago Hersh was quoted as saying:“You haven’t begun to see evil… horrible things done to children of women prisoners, as the cameras run.”

The London Guardian also talked of young Iraqi detainees getting violently raped by US soldiers. Ten years ago when the initial Abu Ghraib scandal was in the news, the Guardian published the testimony of an Abu Ghraib detainee who allegedly witnessed one of these brutal attacks. Former detainee Kasim Hilas said in their testimony, which was also reported by the Washington post:

“I saw [name blacked out] fucking a kid. His age would be about 15-18 years. The kid was hurting very bad and they covered all the doors with sheets. Then when I heard the screaming, I climbed the door because on top it wasn’t covered and I saw [blacked out], who was wearing the military uniform putting his dick in the little kid’s ass, I couldn’t see the face of the kid because his face wasn’t in front of the door. And the female soldier was taking pictures.”

It is not clear from the testimony whether the rapist described by Mr Hilas was working for a private contractor or was a US soldier. A private contractor was arrested after the Taguba investigation was completed, but was freed when it was discovered the army had no jurisdiction over him under military or Iraqi law.

Now, over a decade later the evidence of these events started to surface, the U.S. Department of Defense is continuing to engage in efforts to keep the details like those expressed above under the radar. That is why now, more than ever, it is important to keep the pressure on and force the release of this evidence, while the torture report is fresh in the minds of the general population.

Sources

“Hersh: Children Sodomized At Abu Ghraib,” by Geraldine Sealy. Last accessed May 2016

“US Soldier Who Abused Prisoners At Abu Ghraib Refuses To Apologize For Her Actions” Article link here. Last accessed May 2016

“General Granted Latitude At Prison: Abu Ghraib Used Aggressive Tactics,” by R. Jeffrey Smith and Josh White, Washington Post Staff Writers. Last accessed May 2016.

Discussion Questions

Do you think that the United States government, including the military, exploit American fear and patriotism and use it to justify an interventionist military foreign policy around the world?

Why do you think Americans are so eager to advocate for war abroad to solve their problems?

In the same way that people avert their eyes from photos of war casualties, people who were interviewed during early screenings of this film made statements like “I would rather not look at violent images,” or that “I don’t need to see a documentary to know that ‘war is hell’.” What do you think people are trying to avoid looking at? Are the images just simply offensive, or do they perhaps challenge people and they mythical understandings about why we go to war as a country, and how many of us benefit, if only indirectly, from the foreign policy decisions that are undertaken for reasons that go beyond spreading the joy of democracy and freedom?

If war is being waged to enhance “freedom,” how do you explain the fact that a significant number of American freedoms have been eroded (due to the Patriot Act) as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? For despite the fact that these wars have wound down considerably, we still, even today, continue to operate on a war footing. In short, why do Americans so easily give up their cherished “freedoms” at home, even as they profess to be waging war to secure the very same freedom?

Torture is not “official” U.S. government policy. It is expressly not legally sanctioned by multiple international treaties and accords and has been proven by experts to not be a reliable way to extract information. Nonetheless, when U.S. citizens (unlike citizens of most all developed countries), are asked about the practice, they indicate high levels of support for the use of torture. How do you explain this contradiction? How can the U.S. condemn other countries for “torture” and human rights violations when we are, as a country (and many of our soldiers) are engaged in the use of these tactics? What does that say about us as a country?

Is there a moral argument to be made that justifies torture in your opinion? Can people claim moral high ground and at the same time justify torture? Do you think there are circumstances that justify torture and killing?

In Cities Under Siege, Stephen Graham writes about socio-political violence and points to Foucault as he argues there is a “boomerang effect” that can be seen traveling between “colonial frontiers and urban metropolitan heartlands.” [Note: Chalmers Johnson, in the film Why We Fight, uses the CIA term “blow back” to describe a similar dynamic].

What do you think may be some of the potential boomerang effects of the prisons at Abu Ghraib, Baghram, and Guantanamo? How are the events that transpired within the walls of those prisons, which were all under U.S. control, related to some extent to violent events (i.e. school shootings, mass shootings militia insurgencies and radical right wing domestic terrorism, prisoner abuse in U.S. prisons) occurring now in the U.S.? In other words, how are events and happenings that seem worlds apart related in many respects?

Rape Culture and the U.S. Military

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From the Tailhook scandal in 1991 to the arrest of Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski—the chief of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office—the The New York Times among others have been busy tracking the history of sexual assault in the U.S. military.

A Centers for Disease Control (CDC) survey now estimates that in the United States about 1 in 5 women are the victims of rape or attempted rape at some point in their lives, but such national statistics mask what happens within particular institutions. In the U.S. military, 1 in 3 servicewomen are sexually assaulted, and in 2011, 22,800 violent sex crimes were reported. What this means is that military women in combat are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. Adding insult to injury, the soldiers who commit rape have an estimated 86.5% chance of keeping their crime a secret. They have an even better chance— 92% —of avoiding a court-martial (military judicial punishment).

Sociologists argue that in order to make sense of the prevalence and persistence of such assaults, we need to face the fact that the problem is not a problem of a “few bad apples,” but is rather institutional, entrenched and systemic. The assaults need to be examined as manifestations of rape culture, which scolars refer to “a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women” (Buchwald, et. al).

Why is Sexual Assault so Prevalent in the Military?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PGPWp-4kvQ

The Invisible War

As we saw in the award-winning documentary film,The Invisible War, a senior officer dismissed reports of sexual assault at the Tailhook Convention by expressing a not uncommon belief that, “That’s what you get when you go down the hall with a bunch of drunk aviators.” The officer in this instance can be understood as drawing from a repertoire of myths that collectively characterize a rape culture — namely that such assaults are inevitable and perhaps natural.

Similarly, when the officer leading the Tailhook investigation remarks that “some of these women were kind of bringing it on themselves,” he is effectively blaming the victims for their assaults. The fact that these remarks were spoken by men with formal and legitimate power is added evidence that the sentiments run deep within the military, but it is also significant that these remarks are somewhat compatible, and taken together, formulate a relatively coherent logic.

Sadly, the movie illustrates a pernicious thread of thinking that comprises the military rape-cultural repetoire: First, servicewomen who do not learn their places in male-dominated spaces will inevitably be raped. Second, their rape will be no one’s fault but their own. On this score, Germaine Greer’s famous observation has a certain resonance: “Women have very little idea how much men hate them” [Greer is considered one of the major voices of second-wave feminism].

Bitch, Whore, Feminist, Terrorist

The following video is a spoken word performance given by Cassandra Faith, an Iraq veteran, in Brooklyn, New York. The transcript for the video follows here for the clip below:

September 2002, upon completing basic training, my Company Commander shared the following with the women of Bavo Company 795. “In this world you will always be a ‘bitch’ or a ‘whore’ — decide now which you prefer they call you.” We’d just learned to maintain and fire M-16s effectively, but we’ve not yet been indoctrinated properly. And her words were preparing us for front-lines of a different kind.

Like February 2003, when I had not yet mastered tactical maneuvers after dinner and drinks, was ill-prepared for the blockading of “no” from my mouth. It wasn’t forcefully. More like an apprehensive surrender. My exposed skin, white flag, soft target — I became easy prey to a Staff Sergeant who promised he’d square me away. This would later include $315, a drive to and from an abortion clinic, and a plea not to tell his wife about what we’d done.

June 2009, for refusing a [Depo-Provera Birth Control] shot strongly suggested to deploying female soldiers, a fellow squad member accused me of wanting to get pregnant. As if I had in mind an EPT Test “blue “+” sign to be my ticket home and early trip back from Iraq. As if my choice of birth control with anybody’s business but my own he stated, “Well if bitches can’t be counted on to keep their legs closed overseas, they damn sure can’t be trusted to take a pill every day.” I would later hold convoy security alongside him, drive, gun, or at the same checkpoints he did, search women and children he couldn’t, ensuring our safety. Once home, his wife thanked me for helping him to get back in one piece.

Today, planted along Capitol steps, a daisy chain of trip wires — Bills against women lie and await, rape redefined, the attempt to overturn of Roe v Wade, restrictions on birth control — politicians spew, “It is unpatriotic to use this phrase ‘War on Women.’” The phrase was somehow disrespectful to the millions of Americans who actually served in a real war. But each time they speak, they awake the 144 women who’ve died while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, spinning them over in graves and unearthing their sacrifice. Listen closely. You will hear a platoon of ghostly voices question, “What else should we call this, then, because war is a state of hostility, a struggle between opposing forces for a particular end, and this here is women against Right Wing so-called ‘Christian’ men. It’s a [Rush] Limbaugh or a [Donald] Trump verses ‘sluts’ or ‘prostitutes”’who are to to lay down, take it, roll over, beg like the good bitches they trained us to be — unable to make decisions concerning our own bodies, yet able to die unacknowledged for this country.”

It has always started with the name, bitch, whore, feminist, terrorist… And I fought enough wars to know labels, that strip us of our humanity, make mass murder easy.

U.S. Air Force Academy Rape Scandal

In this Friday, Jan. 20, 2012 photo cadets walk the campus at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo., on their way to the dinning hall for lunch. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

Cadets walk the campus at the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colo., on their way to the dinning hall for lunch. (AP Photo/Ed Andrieski)

An investigative report on sexual violence and other misconduct at the United States Air Force Academy (AFA) offers a wildly disturbing look at campus rape culture at the prestigious military school. Disturbing, but here once again the story is sadly familiar. In the latest incident, cadets on the school’s athletic teams were alleged to have sexually assaulted female classmates. To make matters worse, their crimes were largely ignored by coaches and administrators. When cadets were held accountable, the school took no further action to discipline the coaches and other officers who failed to act. The report exposes, as Alan Pyke of ThinkProgress put it, “the intersection of hero culture and rape culture.”

Here are just a few of the findings from Colorado Springs Gazette reporter Tom Roeder’s work on the story:

“‘The girls’ drink (Captain Morgan with the blue lid) was only for girls to drink (at one party at the school),’ [Office of Special Investigations] confidential informant cadet Eric Thomas told investigators in a written statement obtained by The Gazette. The blue-capped bottle, he explained, was laced with ‘roofies,’ a street term for flunitrazepam, a powerful sedative known as a date-rape drug.”

“After academy leaders were told about the allegations of rape and drug use, OSI agents planned their own party, one with informants in the crowd and special agents nearby to bust bad actors. But leaders determined that the risk that women would be raped was so high that the idea of a January 2012 sting was quashed, academy officials said.”

“In the 2012-2013 academic year, cadets reported 45 sexual assaults, representing nearly two thirds of the 70 reported assaults at all three service academies.”

These things are, of course, outrageous and unacceptable. They are also depressingly common, both at military and non-military schools. Roeder’s in-depth examination shows just how bad things are at AFA and with Title IX. Title IX — in all its weak imperfection — doesn’t protect cadets at AFA or any other service academy. So despite being taxpayer-funded institutions, they are all exempted from the federal anti-sex discrimination law. That means victims of sexual assault at these schools are more or less on their own, more so than students at other universities who are already quite on their own.

Sexual assault at these schools “is something that’s being tracked, but doesn’t get a lot of attention because the academies fall in this middle ground between an academic environment and a military environment,” Service Women’s Action Network (SWAN) policy director Greg Jacob told Salon. “But there is no reason the academies shouldn’t be included in Title IX. It would bridge the gap between what Congress is trying to do with colleges and what they tried to do with the active duty military.”

And as Roeder’s report makes clear, AFA officials mostly framed the sexual violence problem on their campus as a matter of a few bad apples who don’t meet the school’s “strict conduct rules” rather than a systemic lack of accountability that started at the very top.

There has been some movement toward reform — AFA Superintendent Lt. Gen. Michelle Johnson ordered a review of the athletic department, a few cadets were punished following the OSI investigation, and other cadets started a sexual assault awareness group — but, as Roeder points out, “While pains were taken to punish the cadets for the conduct, there’s little evidence that academy leaders asked wider questions about whether the misconduct of so many athletes exposed deeper problems within the sports programs.”

This is the problem with “bad apple” thinking, Jacob said. “How many times do you have to try to point out the bad apples before you realize the whole bushel basket needs to be thrown out? How many bad apples do you have to eat before you cut down the poison tree?”

Failures of accountability at the service academies can have serious consequences throughout the military, since most generals and admirals come from these elite schools. “When you look at the number of four-star generals in the military — the military academies are unique not only because of the nature of the education, but also the influence their graduates have on these institutions,” Jacob noted. “All of the top leaders come from the academies.”

Solutions

The solution is not just self-correction from AFA and other military schools, but for Congress to act to bring them under the umbrella of Title IX. “This is why we have Title IX,” Jacob explained. “We have an atmosphere right now where a student has to be worried about being sexually harassed or assaulted. How are they supposed to learn when they have to look over their shoulder walking to and from class?”

Thankfully, there’s real momentum right now to give the federal anti-sex discrimination law some teeth, but if service academies continue to be exempted, survivors at these schools won’t be able to share in those gains. “The service academies are the hothouse, where you’re either going to sprout leaders or predators,” Jacob said. “It’s a unique challenge, but it’s really one that Congress hasn’t taken up. They should.”

Sources

The Sociological Cinema. Downloaded from http://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/videos/the-us-military-and-its-rape-culture Last accessed March 2016.

“Rape culture at the Air Force Academy: The shocking truth no one wants to confront,” by Katie McDonough. Downloaded from http://www.salon.com/2014/08/05/rape_culture_at_the_air_force_academy_the_shocking_truth
_no_one_wants_to_confront/ Last accessed March 2016.

Discussion Questions

Were you aware of the magnitude of the problem of rape in the U.S. military?

In light of the statistics presented, both in the film and by the CDC, what do you think about the current state of affairs?

What do you think should be done to men who committ these crimes against service women and other men?

What do you think can be done to more effectively solve the problem?

After watching the film and becoming more aware of the crime statistics, are you more or less likely to recommend military service to women as a career option?