U.S. Marines Urinating on Afghan Corpses
January 13th, 2012Via: Washington Post:
Top U.S. officials moved swiftly Thursday to try to prevent diplomatic damage and contain public disgust from the release of a video that appeared to show Marines urinating on three Afghan corpses — images that spread quickly around the globe.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said he had viewed the video and considered it “utterly deplorable.” He telephoned Afghan President Hamid Karzai and pledged a full investigation.
Prior to the call, Karzai described the video as “completely inhumane and condemnable in the strongest possible terms.” His administration called on the U.S. military to “apply the most severe punishment to anyone found guilty in this crime.”
The video, which runs for less than a minute, depicts four Marines in combat gear laughing and joking as they urinate on three male bodies. The caption refers to the corpses as “dead Talibans,” but it is unclear whether the men were civilians or fighters killed after a battle.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed “total dismay” at the behavior depicted in the recording, and said the “vast, vast” majority of American military personnel would not engage in such actions.
“…U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton expressed “total dismay” at the behavior depicted in the recording, and said the “vast, vast” majority of American military personnel would not engage in such actions.”
Clearly, she hasn’t bothered to know or even gain the most basic understanding much about troop training at the most fundamental levels.
Recasting the individual personality to be able to dehumanize any and all potential foes “on command” is what it’s all about.
Followed closely by the required assortment of proficiencies for killing and the administration of the various limbs of the “mechanical bride”.
Diplomacy is for officers and scoundrels, that is, the politicians and patricians and their ilk; distraction and diversion under the false pretense of peace and honor — while they shuffle pieces on the grand chessboard for their next bloody maneuver.
Those Marines are FAR from the exception. I was trained as one. The difference is that they never broke my body, my will or my spirit.
@Miraculix
six years ago, i gathered together in this page accounts of the changes in U.S. military enlistment, purely from a lay person’s position of no personal authority of the subject.
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/warandhate.htm
the page depicts a core theme of overtly institutionalized hatred in linking to accounts of recruited racists and mysogynists. i was wondering if you could speak on it further -just how overt and blatant was it actually explicitly presented to the troops? and, with the coming of obama’s administration, have you detected even a whiff of any retraction of any such practice from explicit (if at all so) to implicit?
thank you.
@ Zuma…
About as overt and explicit as could be without actually codifying it all in writing.
The entire Marine cultural milieu is steeped in the act, art and application of physical and psychological domination and laser-guided hate.
For example, the “songs” one sings while running in formation with your cohorts tend to invoke the name “Suzy” repeatedly in a clearly misogynist context. If a surname is invoked, it is most commonly (avert your eyes now PC readers) “Rottencrotch”.
Other memes and themes include successfully avoiding detection and death by way infiltrating “enemy” territory, etc.
Various ethnic minorities are consistently referred to with less-than-friendly euphemism, a feature I’m quite sure hasn’t changed over the nearly thirty years since I successfully waded my way through the sands of Southern California in search of college money I never ended up spending.
By the time I was playing the Semper Fi game in the mid-80’s, blacks were referred to as “dark green” and whites as “light green”, while Asians still (we had a couple in our platoon) received a fair amount of grief and “special attention” if they f**ked things up. I don’t recall any specific Latino nicknames, but that’s probably because our “senior” DI’s last name (Garcia) and cultural heritage color didn’t exactly encourage such usage.
Therefore, asking me about current practices is therefore fruitless, as my military affiliations ended way back when — quite intentionally and a little ahead of schedule, if you get my drift… =)
@Miraculix
I’ll be the first to purchase your autobio, when you get around to it. Or perhaps Kevin can solicit submissions to “Tales from the Crypt (ogoners)”. har.
Kubrick outlined this in ‘Full Metal Jacket’. The dehumanization of military personnel. What is happening today is only a continuation of decades of gradual ‘out-sourcing’ of the patriotic military.
I just recently heard (in great depth) a friend discuss his disillusionment with the military, how he’d gone into it determined to excel and serve his Country…only to discover that that sort of integrity wasn’t valued in the slightest. What was valued was just enough idiocy to be mindless, and yet not enough to be outright dangerous to your own. The problem with troops who worked ‘on the ground’, he said, was how fine a line it was to hit both marks. So the Armed Forces ended-up with a small number of intelligent soldiers who began to understand they’d been sold out by their country, and hate themselves, or a larger number of frickin’ weirdos that no one civilized wanted to be around.
And in my understanding, the Pat Tillman biography tells pretty much the same story in detail.
The objective reality is that – in the long-term view – warfare has undergone a steady degradation from being an honorable, even spiritual and humanizing role, through an almost complete devolution into something only machines will presently suffice to excel in. Which is why so much value is being placed today on mechanical warfare. War is no longer actually about culture or country. It’s about service to non-human, feudal ideologies. Only machines owe no allegiance to humanity. Only via machines will American kill American.
The honorable and spiritual role model in warfare is a fictionalized archetype perpetuated for many centuries, make that millennium, by those who would glorify killing for their own ends.
It is only through the actions of the INDIVIDUAL thrust into such tragic circumstances that such characteristics *may* emerge. These are not a by-product of the nature of war or combat. Rather, they are coping mechanisms erected between the psyche and the physical to protect the sense of one’s personal self-worth from that which the person is coerced into doing to others.
Though I see where you’re headed with your thoughts, I hesitate to use the word “humanizing” to describe such psychological activity.
Honor among thieves is just as famous as military honor, which walks hand-in-hand with duty and sacrifice, lest we forget.
The honorable individual may perhaps find their way into soldiering, but there is no such thing as honorable state-sanctioned murder. Genocide remains pure evil, no matter how you tart it up.
That said, you’re *dead* right about the role of machines.
http://newscentralasia.net/2012/01/16/american-military-pit-bulls-and-their-handlers/
It is not what the few do but what the many don’t do. That really represents what we are all about, co-conspirators in a sea of silence. Marines who view despicable acts committed by other marines remain silent; the officers, who are well aware of this behavior, condone it, invariably following the “ethical criminal” attitude in war morality of “when in war, shit happens”; and the nation prefers to play the part of Pontius Pilates.
…i can’t even begin to relay the convoluted path that led to that url but it began by clicking through a seemingly unrelated link (the Hydra book) on the cryptogon librarything sidebar -that keeps changing! i wish there was a way to see a whole cryptogon-librarything index…