"subsumed yourself into the industrial machinery of death": Beautifully expressed to describe the sniper. But what about the rest of us, the voyeurs. What cost will every day of attention to these unabated murders bring, every moment of fecklessness, of inability to reach out the giant Olympian hand of a deity to throttle the murderers, to make it stop? What will such singular focus-at-a-distance (with graphic images) on the horrors, the casual executions, without any power to intervene ultimately do to each of us? What post-traumatic traces will we come away with? Certainly minuscule compared to the poor souls at the wrong ends of those sniper rifles, but real nonetheless. In that sense, Aysenur's sniper is murdering some aspect of love in us all.
Thank you, Vin, for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I struggle everyday with feelings of helplessness, anger and frustration as the genocide continues while most of those I know refuse to even acknowledge it. I know from experience what it feels like to be victimized and alone without support and understanding from those around me - it is a soul crushing trauma. Be well Vin.
I wonder if anyone gets out of life without an experience of the "victim." At some level, I sense it is in all of us. To become aware of such an identification when it's in operation becomes one location where free will, personal agency, consciously choosing not to identify with the inner victim, restores a person to an experience of wholeness that includes an activated capacity to not become the "perpetrator." To harbor within oneself the inflated notion of being one of God's "chosen" while simultaneously identifying with "victim" seems like a terrible brew. The only way to not be torn to shreds must be to split them off from each other. The behavior of the Israelis, its citizens, appears to be re-playing the myths of "Biblical" times given us by its various authors.
Hello Vin. I agree with your perception of "voyeurs". Voyeurs are accomplice to the unseeing soul. The non-person of witness. The unstained rapist, who silently delights the offence...
Modern 'belief' is the reduced experience of television and video format. Video producers have brilliantly reduced life to detached definitions of glory, epic, horror, and perversion.
Perhaps the sniper was only hungry. Perhaps the sniper was only bored. His remote control was the trigger. The following of some unsaid horror. We experience the fallen, and order another pizza... We are the executioners...
I'd frame it that we are both complicit as executioners and simultaneously experience the execution of some aspect of ourselves. But we are even worse off than the sniper because (unless we're willing to actually get physically involved) our only choice is to stop watching, stop commenting, disconnect. The sniper at least has the choice to not pull the trigger.
I loved (still love) a man and I read him in every word. He was a soldier. I don't know if killed anyone in Vietnam, but he was part of a killing machine that took out innocent people fighting for their right to be free. I loved him and he loved me with what he had left still able to love. He was tortured with dreams, nightmares. He let disease ravage him. It was his form of suicide. I loved him. I love him still, and grieve that my love was not enough to save him. War is hell for the warrior and those who love them. And for those who love, and still love, their victims. War is hell.
I was a pilot for a large all cargo airline. We flew a lot for the military. I delivered to Afghanistan many many times. Thankfully we mostly carried food which eased my conscience even though I knew it was immaterial as I was helping the slaughter. I needed the job. I know my father would never had done it. He would have quit without a clue as to how he would support the family, but he would have refused. He was a lead navigator and bombardier on B-17s in WWII. If the squadron was unable to get to the target due to cloud cover, they were supposed to return to England and bomb "targets of opportunity" which usually meant civilians. The planes could not land with the bombs on board so they had to drop them. He refused to bomb civilians and led his squadron to drop over the English channel. No one thought about the environmental damage, I'm sure, but at least they didn't murder civilians.
When I was in ground school for the aforementioned airline we had a lot of ex military and reservists. One day during a break many of them were gathered around one guys computer watching a video of bombs blowing up buildings and bridges and what have you in Afghanistan. One clip showed a bomb or missile striking a building and as it exploded a man came flying out of it, already dead, I imagine, but he didn't look it. My classmates roared with laughter and cheers. It still makes me sick to think about it.
The company also flew shipments of weapons to Saudi Arabia. I got assigned a trip originating in Tucson AZ and I knew it was most likely missiles or guidance systems from Raytheon. They would have been used to slaughter civilians in Yemen. I wanted to refuse the trip on the grounds that I would not participate in a war crime. I checked with the union and, as expected, they said they couldn't protect me. My father would have refused anyway. I called in sick.
I am sure you would not have been the only one feeling a sense of guilt over having a job which supported the military. This is exactly what the people of Ireland are protesting about - the landing of US military flights at Shannon Airport - either in the days of renditioning people for torture or for sending weaponry to Zelenskiy's Ukraine "meat-grinder" or to the Zionists of Israel to aid the slaughter of Palestinians. Here in Australia those same companies - Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc. are now operating - setting up weapons manufacturing and a university at which I completed some Japanese language courses (Newcastle U) is now offering scholarships to young people to staff those weapons manufacturers. How obscene. My local Federal Member - Pat Conroy is now the Minister for Weapons (or some such name - but essentially that) and stands behind the Minister for Defence - a buddy of US equivalent Austin - and nods his head at the most appalling of statements about our best buddies the US - and "shoulder-to-shoulder" propagandist rubbish - because Ministers or Secretaries of Defence (Offence in fact) are no one's - neither your nor my - buddies. Brava, Anonymous!
Powerful truth - from front-line experience and understanding of the trauma of wartime murder. Thank-you for this extraordinary piece of writing, Christopher. May the sniper who murdered Aysenour get to read this - and all the other snipers from all the other wars you have covered - and not covered - also read this.
Yes but the point he is making it’s grim. It’s their own death as well. It’s is an abyss. This is a society of intolerant and pathetic men and women. And that’s their legacy as a society.
This ridiculous fairy story people tell themselves about "sociopaths" (there are no intelligible diagnostic criteria, there is no distinct nor dispositive checklist, it is all pseudoscientific drivel, the realm of glorified self help gurus) is merely a method of othering the sinful. Human beings are all fundamentally evil or at least capable of it at the drop of a hat. War criminals are just like you or me. They are able to be "sociopaths" to their enemies and be full of cameraderie with their own tribe. That is what it is to be human. That is why redemption is beyond almost everyone who commits this kind of crime. But the nightmares plague most of them.
Yes Al . Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil". Hitler's Henchmen were every day ordinary Germans. School teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Clergy, Tradesmen, Laborer's, Police. I remember the story of a Holocaust survivor who played a personal game in her mind afterwards and the personalities they had. Who would give up and die, who would speak out and be murdered, who would turn quisling or Kapo, who would steal, who would be the survivors and escape knowing they crossed no lines with their humanity still intact. Who would be Death Camp Guards, who would be torturers, who would commit war crimes and slaughter humans in front of mass pits, who would be the propagandists to make it all happen. Goebbels and others were merely former Advertising Men after all. Arendt when seeing Eichmann. Small bespectacled in civilian clothes. Remembering him in uniform as a giant monster with the power of life and death, may have been how she came to the conclusion how Banal humans are if put in the "right" circumstances!
Doing the job assigned - following orders. Banal - ordinary looking. Though I am now horrified that the people who judged Eichmann are the forerunners of those committing the slaughter/genocide in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank/East Jerusalem, Southern Lebanon, and in Iran, Jordan, Syria!
The guy is right from my experience. There is a small percentage of society that aren’t human; they have no human emotion as we currently define it. They are inherently nasty people. I know; my father was one of those people.
I agree with you that there are some people who are inherently nasty. Whether they experienced something growing up that damaged them, or simply grew up with a sense of entitlement coupled with misanthropy and a lust for power-over, they enjoy behaving cruelly towards others. It sounds like your father was one of these, and you have my best wishes for a full and bountiful recovery!
However, I've known dangerous people who had some goodness in them, and I learned compassion from knowing them. This little bit of goodness meant that they could sometimes be reached, but it didn't that they could be trusted.
I've also known people who were virtuous in many ways, most days, but had an aspect of their character that made them dangerous under certain conditions.
I can't speculate which of these the sniper might be. If the first type, as you say, they might never experience repentence.
I think snipers are just extraordinarily good shots with a weapon and are put into the position of killing and after the propaganda has worked its charm on them - they delight in the role - that god-like power of determining who dies and when - surely consumes them - till it doesn't any more? And so Chris Hedges is able to outline for these "monsters" what lies in the nightmarish futures.
Normal folk who are great shots go on to win medals at international events such as the Olympic Games, etc. They don't become snipers murdering the innocents...
I find your point about sociopaths interesting but want to move it from people to institutions. Many institutions (most, almost all?) are sociopathic. Some are because they only maximize profit, some are because they follow bureaucratic rules whatever suffering that causes. Let us not forget that the sniper is part of an institution. Maybe the interesting question is not whether the sniper is a sociopath. Maybe a more interesting question is how we can create institutions that are not sociopathic.
It's not that you can't be bothered, it's that you can't. The cargo cult nonsense of "sociopathy" is well established to be pseudoscientific waffle at this point. The reason Nazis only repented when caught isn't "they were sociopaths". The lesson is "they were humans". Repentance is beyond almost everyone, whereas atrocities are within easy reach of almost everyone. That includes you, that includes me.
Way to tell me you wish to reserve to yourself the right to make fantastical and counterfactual assertions, without actually telling me. Claiming that people are "sociopaths" is at this point the exact intellectual equivalent of claiming they've been possessed by demons.
Claiming that we're all child-murdering Israeli snipers in waiting just waiting for an opportunity to murder children seems even more irrational. I can say with absolute confidence that I would never kill a child with a rifle. if you can't, that's on you, not humanity.
I read somewhere recently that becoming a CEO or a power-holding politician wreaks changes within the brain which I think equate with hubris. One's decisions are the best decisions - and generally such people are surrounded by the nodding yes-men/sycophants! And away we go. Not a psychopath/sociopath - until handed or coming into possession of - the levers of power - after which anything can go.
Correct, but until someone experiences such a person, they don’t”get” it. There is a saying, “When the soulful meet up with the soulless, life will never again be the same.” Until that point it is easy to rationalize that we are all capable of such evil as coldblooded murder such as this blog is describing. I don’t believe that.
I can't say anything. Dumbfounded. I, like all my American sisters and brothers, know personally people who have been subjected to the industrial machinery of death, lived, and now suffer the hellish torment that follows them like a ball and chain. I cry.
The problem is, Israel is a society that glorifies murder and extinguishes conscience. The sniper may well go public with his crime, but not as an act of contrition. Remember the Bible itself: Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands. That's the lagacy under which the sniper operates.
This should be required reading for Israelis who support the genocide in Gaza. Even if/when they succeed in destroying the Palestinians, they are simultaneously destroying morally their own sons and daughters in (and out of) uniform, their future, and along with it their continued existence as a civil society.
The Holocaust they tried so hard to escape being the victims of, they have recreated as perpetrators in Palestine, and so it consumes them still.
Actually very unlikely to be more than a handful of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world now - and none of whom would support the murder/slaughter/genocide of Palestinians.
Literal living survivors? Sure, very few. But trauma is easily, often (almost always?) passed down through generations and can also be culturally ingrained. The children/descendants of holocaust survivors, have, I think, legitimately some share of that trauma. And culturally, I would say, Israel has an abundance of it.
Fair enough, your comment - there are hundreds of thousands of Australians of First Peoples descent living with that kind of trauma. Though I don't see any of them going around on genocidal slaughters of others.
True. There are indigenous peoples throughout the Americas (US, Canada, much of South America, and elsewhere too I'm guessing) also descendants of that sort of genocidal trauma. But in Palestine the killing was both more recent and ongoing even before Oct 7.
Here is a link showing the ongoing atrocities of the Israeli regime, only in the year prior (2023) to Oct 7. And lest you question the motives/political slant of the source, I would emphasize that it comes from Jewish Voice for Peace.
" . . . the angel of death has made a Faustian bargain. It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. You will carry this death inside you for the rest of your life. It corrodes your soul. Yes. We have souls. You sold yours." Sounds as if it could have been lifted right out of Dostoevsky. Seriously, this is a tremendous essay.
Thanks so much Chris. Like the U.S. Army, the Israeli Army records each day the name of every person on each patrol . They know the name of the sniper; his unit members know his name; your article will get to him.
I believe neither the sniper nor Biden would be allowed to read this report, and anyway, it would not provoke any reaction on them. Biden already declared that this murder was unacceptable but, hey, Israel, I'm sending you more guns so you can continue with genocide.
Humanity has doomed itself to death. The very fact that genocide is now considered normal and fine by so many nations and people as they actively support Israels slaughter of innocent Palestinians is the final nail in humanity’s coffin. I know it has gone on since the dawn of man, but that is still exists in this day and age clearly shows there is no future left for life on earth at the hands of humankind. Humanity’s downfall was having too large a brain that allowed abstract thought, which led to artificial wealth that led to a few powerful folks wanting everything for themselves and the commodification of the very environment upon which life depends. And in the case of war making, it is one of the most profitable enterprises for those few who have no value for life itself. And then once everything is all blown to bits in war zones, folks line up to rebuild the destruction at yet more hefty profits. On and on it goes until we finally kill ourselves off once and for all. Humanity is that very sniper when all is said and done.
Our capacity for abstract thinking has been misused but it could have been different. I don't blame our brain for leaving us with the last flower. Perhaps we can learn to use our intelligence for the benefit of mankind and avoid the approaching doom.
Considering that genocide has now been normalized by so many, along with the ongoing exponential climate catastrophe that is unfolding daily now, with nary a care by those in “power” tells me that our time has run out to learn to use our “intelligence” in any timely manner left to us now. And personally I don’t consider humans to be an intelligent species, but rather a clever one that does things because it can, rather than thinking through the possible consequences of such action and thereby not doing them in the first place. Thinking it through implies intelligence which clearly does not happen or we certainly would have learned by now. And clearly we have not. Perhaps in some alternate multiverse, humans have used their collective brains for the good of all, but not in this one. Not by a long shot and I just don’t see any possible change in the time that is necessary.
Yes, I am also so pessimistic about our future that in my selfishness I feel a relief when I'm reminded that my natural death is coming soon and will not have to suffer the effects of climate change nor to witness the beginning of a nuclear war, but also, I hope the survivors of this catastrophes will learn to use properly their big brain.
I think your comment about abstract thinking is deep. I do abstract thinking every day in my work, but I do see how one has to be careful to not go in the wrong direction. I dont have a clear idea of what to do about it. When you say "it could have been different", can you say more?
Alexander, I'm an ignorant man but curious and therefore I read a little and my perspective is that we all are made of vile mud and mind meaning that we can address our problems with sufficient thinking of the consequences of our actions and are not fated to cause evil actions. I think Anthropology can illuminate modern man on how to avoid falling into the abysm. Following are some few notes on Professor Scott M. Lacy, Ph.D. in his lecture series "Anthropology and the Study of Humanity":
"Anthropology, with its 4-field approach, can clear up 3 major myths about humanity and our so-called violent nature. Myth 1 is that there has always been warfare. Myth 2 is that we are biologically predisposed to violence. Myth 3 is that warfare is universal.
Regarding myth 1: War is a recent development in our human history. Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. But the archaeological record indicates that war, as we understand it today, only emerged some 10,000 years ago, around the advent of agriculture. Before agriculture, the survival of small hunter-gatherer groups required a level of cooperation that made conflict counterproductive for all parties.
Now for myth 2, the idea that we are biologically predisposed to violence. Are we programmed for conflict? In some ways, it appears so. But there might be other
biological factors at work that show us that we’re not predestined for violence and war.
In their book Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson show that chimpanzees, like some humans, beat, rape, and kill other chimpanzees. But this predilection of our chimpanzee cousins is not an inevitable dimension of our own biological being. Wrangham and Peterson remind us to look at bonobo apes too. Unlike the violence we see in chimpanzees and gorillas, bonobos are relatively
peaceful. Bonobo males do occasionally become aggressive and violent, but
they rarely kill or rape. Why? Tight-knit bands of female bonobos gang up on and
attack male counterparts who act up. Now for the 3rd myth: the idea that war is universal. There are people in the human family tree who make peace seem as inevitable as war. The Amish, for example, refuse to fight in wars. They don’t even take disputes to court unless all internal efforts to resolve a conflict have failed. One of the core Amish beliefs is the doctrine of nonresistance. Similarly, India’s Jain religion
sees the path to peace as our ultimate purpose. The San of the Kalahari region are
super-sharers. They’re one of the oldest indigenous populations on earth, tracing
their cultural history back some 20,000 years. They are known as peaceful people
who discourage fighting, aggression, and even competition."
Thanks, I didnt know about Lacey but have read some Wrangham. That addresses the relationship between human disposition and violence. But I dont think that violence by humans is the problem. I think the problem is violence by non-human persons and organizations. And I see a relation to abstract thinking there. Non-human persons and organization are always based on legal abstractions.
Completely agreed. The abstraction of corporations as entities with personhood and the power it gives to them is the force that generate our wars against other nations and the ecology. So, I believe that a better use of our big brain is to recognize what you just said, that this kind of abstraction is hurtful and try to eliminate it by voting out of power politicians that are benefiting from the bribes of those "persons"
I listened to an interview with Gideon Levy from years ago in which he was asked why Israelis condone such crimes against the Palestinians. He said, three things: they believe they are God's chosen people, that they are always the victims, and that the Palestinians are sub-human. Thus, I hate to say the person you are addressing is not likely to suffer a moral problem.
Biden either, and he is supposed to be a Christian (Catholic) and recently he declared that nobody has done more for the Palestinians than himself. I believe he will dye proud of his legacy, and the rest of America and the world... well, we will forget the genocide perpetrated in our name and with our taxes and will hide it under the rug. IMO the only people who have morality are the hundreds that have been protesting the war and the murderers that commit suicide out of repentance.
And the USA and other nations that have been supporting the genocide, and all of their inhabitants?
Indeed I believe that we might well be damned but not perhaps in the moral sense that you mean, but damned to suffer and die out within another generation because we were manufacturing and using weapons of destruction when we should have been taking action to address global warming.
True. This is also uttered by Noam Chomsky's 2006 book "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project)" :
"Half a century ago, in July 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an extraordinary appeal to the people of the world, asking them “to set aside” the strong feelings they have about many issues and to consider themselves “only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.” The choice facing the world is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” The world has not renounced war. Quite the contrary. By now, the world’s hegemonic power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” with unstated bounds. International law, treaties, and rules of world order are sternly imposed on others with much self-righteous posturing but dismissed as irrelevant for the United States—a long-standing practice, driven to new depths by the Reagan and Bush II administrations. Among the most elementary of moral truisms is the principle of universality: we must apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, if not more stringent ones. It is a remarkable comment on Western intellectual culture that this principle is so often ignored and, if occasionally mentioned, condemned as outrageous. This is particularly shameful on the part of those who flaunt their Christian piety, and therefore have presumably at least heard of the definition of the hypocrite in the Gospels."
"Nobody," I first read Bertrand Russell as a youth. I am old enough to remember his last televised interview. He said what mankind needed most is TOLERANCE. He was correct. Still is.
Chris describes poignantly the self-induced curse that is the "Mark of Cain." As the biblical story goes, Cain cold-blooded murders his brother, Abel. When God confronts Cain, "Where is your brother, Abel?", Cain sarcastically retorts, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Basically, God tells Cain that he will be a soul-less alien upon earth.
Tragically, the American public is fascinated by the myth of the noble sniper. The box office hit movie, "American Sniper," regales the story of the real Chris Kyle who claimed he sniper-killed 320 people (the military confirmed 160. Kyle died in a shooting range accident. But beyond the singular incidents of military snipers are the millions of youngsters and adults who play sniper-type video games. War psychologist Dave Grossman has written extensively on the desensitization to homicidal violence that violent video games induce.
Yes. It requires a lot of effort to change a normal human being into a murderer. The military knows well this fact. Talking of movies, the following is a dialog in the fictional movie Full Metal jacket:
Drill Sergeant to new recruits being trained for Vietnam:
-Do any of you know who Charles Whitman was?
-Sir, he shot all those people from that tower in Austin, Texas, sir.
-Charles Whitman killed 12 people...from a 28-story observation tower at the University of Texas...from a distance of up to 400 yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswal was?
-Sir, he shot Kennedy, sir.
-And do you know how far away he was?
-Sir, it was far! from that book depository building, sir.
-250 feet. It was 250 feet away and shooting to a moving target. He got off three rounds...with an Italian-bolt action rifle in six seconds...and scored two hits including a head shot! Do any of you know where these individuals learned to shoot?
-Sir, in the Marines, sir.
-In the Marines! outstanding! Those individuals showed what a motivated Marine and his rifle can do! And before you leave you will all be able to do the same thing!
"subsumed yourself into the industrial machinery of death": Beautifully expressed to describe the sniper. But what about the rest of us, the voyeurs. What cost will every day of attention to these unabated murders bring, every moment of fecklessness, of inability to reach out the giant Olympian hand of a deity to throttle the murderers, to make it stop? What will such singular focus-at-a-distance (with graphic images) on the horrors, the casual executions, without any power to intervene ultimately do to each of us? What post-traumatic traces will we come away with? Certainly minuscule compared to the poor souls at the wrong ends of those sniper rifles, but real nonetheless. In that sense, Aysenur's sniper is murdering some aspect of love in us all.
Thank you, Vin, for sharing your thoughts and feelings. I struggle everyday with feelings of helplessness, anger and frustration as the genocide continues while most of those I know refuse to even acknowledge it. I know from experience what it feels like to be victimized and alone without support and understanding from those around me - it is a soul crushing trauma. Be well Vin.
I wonder if anyone gets out of life without an experience of the "victim." At some level, I sense it is in all of us. To become aware of such an identification when it's in operation becomes one location where free will, personal agency, consciously choosing not to identify with the inner victim, restores a person to an experience of wholeness that includes an activated capacity to not become the "perpetrator." To harbor within oneself the inflated notion of being one of God's "chosen" while simultaneously identifying with "victim" seems like a terrible brew. The only way to not be torn to shreds must be to split them off from each other. The behavior of the Israelis, its citizens, appears to be re-playing the myths of "Biblical" times given us by its various authors.
I've been scapegoated by my family, but it's in their minds. They don't know who I am. Ultimately, you don't need support. Alone, you are enough.
Hello Vin. I agree with your perception of "voyeurs". Voyeurs are accomplice to the unseeing soul. The non-person of witness. The unstained rapist, who silently delights the offence...
Modern 'belief' is the reduced experience of television and video format. Video producers have brilliantly reduced life to detached definitions of glory, epic, horror, and perversion.
Perhaps the sniper was only hungry. Perhaps the sniper was only bored. His remote control was the trigger. The following of some unsaid horror. We experience the fallen, and order another pizza... We are the executioners...
I'd frame it that we are both complicit as executioners and simultaneously experience the execution of some aspect of ourselves. But we are even worse off than the sniper because (unless we're willing to actually get physically involved) our only choice is to stop watching, stop commenting, disconnect. The sniper at least has the choice to not pull the trigger.
Spot on. As I submitted, we are the unseen - executioners.
I loved (still love) a man and I read him in every word. He was a soldier. I don't know if killed anyone in Vietnam, but he was part of a killing machine that took out innocent people fighting for their right to be free. I loved him and he loved me with what he had left still able to love. He was tortured with dreams, nightmares. He let disease ravage him. It was his form of suicide. I loved him. I love him still, and grieve that my love was not enough to save him. War is hell for the warrior and those who love them. And for those who love, and still love, their victims. War is hell.
I was a pilot for a large all cargo airline. We flew a lot for the military. I delivered to Afghanistan many many times. Thankfully we mostly carried food which eased my conscience even though I knew it was immaterial as I was helping the slaughter. I needed the job. I know my father would never had done it. He would have quit without a clue as to how he would support the family, but he would have refused. He was a lead navigator and bombardier on B-17s in WWII. If the squadron was unable to get to the target due to cloud cover, they were supposed to return to England and bomb "targets of opportunity" which usually meant civilians. The planes could not land with the bombs on board so they had to drop them. He refused to bomb civilians and led his squadron to drop over the English channel. No one thought about the environmental damage, I'm sure, but at least they didn't murder civilians.
When I was in ground school for the aforementioned airline we had a lot of ex military and reservists. One day during a break many of them were gathered around one guys computer watching a video of bombs blowing up buildings and bridges and what have you in Afghanistan. One clip showed a bomb or missile striking a building and as it exploded a man came flying out of it, already dead, I imagine, but he didn't look it. My classmates roared with laughter and cheers. It still makes me sick to think about it.
The company also flew shipments of weapons to Saudi Arabia. I got assigned a trip originating in Tucson AZ and I knew it was most likely missiles or guidance systems from Raytheon. They would have been used to slaughter civilians in Yemen. I wanted to refuse the trip on the grounds that I would not participate in a war crime. I checked with the union and, as expected, they said they couldn't protect me. My father would have refused anyway. I called in sick.
I am sure you would not have been the only one feeling a sense of guilt over having a job which supported the military. This is exactly what the people of Ireland are protesting about - the landing of US military flights at Shannon Airport - either in the days of renditioning people for torture or for sending weaponry to Zelenskiy's Ukraine "meat-grinder" or to the Zionists of Israel to aid the slaughter of Palestinians. Here in Australia those same companies - Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, etc. are now operating - setting up weapons manufacturing and a university at which I completed some Japanese language courses (Newcastle U) is now offering scholarships to young people to staff those weapons manufacturers. How obscene. My local Federal Member - Pat Conroy is now the Minister for Weapons (or some such name - but essentially that) and stands behind the Minister for Defence - a buddy of US equivalent Austin - and nods his head at the most appalling of statements about our best buddies the US - and "shoulder-to-shoulder" propagandist rubbish - because Ministers or Secretaries of Defence (Offence in fact) are no one's - neither your nor my - buddies. Brava, Anonymous!
Thank you.
Powerful truth - from front-line experience and understanding of the trauma of wartime murder. Thank-you for this extraordinary piece of writing, Christopher. May the sniper who murdered Aysenour get to read this - and all the other snipers from all the other wars you have covered - and not covered - also read this.
Yes but the point he is making it’s grim. It’s their own death as well. It’s is an abyss. This is a society of intolerant and pathetic men and women. And that’s their legacy as a society.
95% of Israeli society feels starvation is OK. Full stop. 🛑
once they're
Dehumanized
what's the diff?
So what does one do ? Only sustained pressure works. Slavery did not end because of goodwill.
With all due respect, I don't think you understand how sociopaths operate.
Once you pull back the mask, Once you look to something beyond The Will To Power, you will stare into the abyss.
Because There Is Nothing There.
This ridiculous fairy story people tell themselves about "sociopaths" (there are no intelligible diagnostic criteria, there is no distinct nor dispositive checklist, it is all pseudoscientific drivel, the realm of glorified self help gurus) is merely a method of othering the sinful. Human beings are all fundamentally evil or at least capable of it at the drop of a hat. War criminals are just like you or me. They are able to be "sociopaths" to their enemies and be full of cameraderie with their own tribe. That is what it is to be human. That is why redemption is beyond almost everyone who commits this kind of crime. But the nightmares plague most of them.
Yes Al . Hannah Arendt's "The Banality of Evil". Hitler's Henchmen were every day ordinary Germans. School teachers, Doctors, Lawyers, Clergy, Tradesmen, Laborer's, Police. I remember the story of a Holocaust survivor who played a personal game in her mind afterwards and the personalities they had. Who would give up and die, who would speak out and be murdered, who would turn quisling or Kapo, who would steal, who would be the survivors and escape knowing they crossed no lines with their humanity still intact. Who would be Death Camp Guards, who would be torturers, who would commit war crimes and slaughter humans in front of mass pits, who would be the propagandists to make it all happen. Goebbels and others were merely former Advertising Men after all. Arendt when seeing Eichmann. Small bespectacled in civilian clothes. Remembering him in uniform as a giant monster with the power of life and death, may have been how she came to the conclusion how Banal humans are if put in the "right" circumstances!
Doing the job assigned - following orders. Banal - ordinary looking. Though I am now horrified that the people who judged Eichmann are the forerunners of those committing the slaughter/genocide in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank/East Jerusalem, Southern Lebanon, and in Iran, Jordan, Syria!
The guy is right from my experience. There is a small percentage of society that aren’t human; they have no human emotion as we currently define it. They are inherently nasty people. I know; my father was one of those people.
I agree with you that there are some people who are inherently nasty. Whether they experienced something growing up that damaged them, or simply grew up with a sense of entitlement coupled with misanthropy and a lust for power-over, they enjoy behaving cruelly towards others. It sounds like your father was one of these, and you have my best wishes for a full and bountiful recovery!
However, I've known dangerous people who had some goodness in them, and I learned compassion from knowing them. This little bit of goodness meant that they could sometimes be reached, but it didn't that they could be trusted.
I've also known people who were virtuous in many ways, most days, but had an aspect of their character that made them dangerous under certain conditions.
I can't speculate which of these the sniper might be. If the first type, as you say, they might never experience repentence.
I think snipers are just extraordinarily good shots with a weapon and are put into the position of killing and after the propaganda has worked its charm on them - they delight in the role - that god-like power of determining who dies and when - surely consumes them - till it doesn't any more? And so Chris Hedges is able to outline for these "monsters" what lies in the nightmarish futures.
Such a skill would tend to be corrupting. :( However, if one can set personal moral boundaries, I don't believe that it has to be.
Normal folk who are great shots go on to win medals at international events such as the Olympic Games, etc. They don't become snipers murdering the innocents...
I'm sorry you had to go through that.
I find your point about sociopaths interesting but want to move it from people to institutions. Many institutions (most, almost all?) are sociopathic. Some are because they only maximize profit, some are because they follow bureaucratic rules whatever suffering that causes. Let us not forget that the sniper is part of an institution. Maybe the interesting question is not whether the sniper is a sociopath. Maybe a more interesting question is how we can create institutions that are not sociopathic.
Without bothering to address your point in detail, the only Nazis who repented were the ones who were caught.
It's not that you can't be bothered, it's that you can't. The cargo cult nonsense of "sociopathy" is well established to be pseudoscientific waffle at this point. The reason Nazis only repented when caught isn't "they were sociopaths". The lesson is "they were humans". Repentance is beyond almost everyone, whereas atrocities are within easy reach of almost everyone. That includes you, that includes me.
I forgot that if you can't quantify it, then it doesn't exist.
Way to tell me you wish to reserve to yourself the right to make fantastical and counterfactual assertions, without actually telling me. Claiming that people are "sociopaths" is at this point the exact intellectual equivalent of claiming they've been possessed by demons.
Claiming that we're all child-murdering Israeli snipers in waiting just waiting for an opportunity to murder children seems even more irrational. I can say with absolute confidence that I would never kill a child with a rifle. if you can't, that's on you, not humanity.
I read somewhere recently that becoming a CEO or a power-holding politician wreaks changes within the brain which I think equate with hubris. One's decisions are the best decisions - and generally such people are surrounded by the nodding yes-men/sycophants! And away we go. Not a psychopath/sociopath - until handed or coming into possession of - the levers of power - after which anything can go.
You prove my point, although apparently the latest DSM uses the term "antisocial personality disorder" and provides diagnostic criteria.
Well said.
Correct, but until someone experiences such a person, they don’t”get” it. There is a saying, “When the soulful meet up with the soulless, life will never again be the same.” Until that point it is easy to rationalize that we are all capable of such evil as coldblooded murder such as this blog is describing. I don’t believe that.
I can't say anything. Dumbfounded. I, like all my American sisters and brothers, know personally people who have been subjected to the industrial machinery of death, lived, and now suffer the hellish torment that follows them like a ball and chain. I cry.
The problem is, Israel is a society that glorifies murder and extinguishes conscience. The sniper may well go public with his crime, but not as an act of contrition. Remember the Bible itself: Saul has slain his thousands, but David has slain his tens of thousands. That's the lagacy under which the sniper operates.
Yes, the chief rapist of Palestinian prisoners is being lionized on TV programs in Israel.
This should be required reading for Israelis who support the genocide in Gaza. Even if/when they succeed in destroying the Palestinians, they are simultaneously destroying morally their own sons and daughters in (and out of) uniform, their future, and along with it their continued existence as a civil society.
The Holocaust they tried so hard to escape being the victims of, they have recreated as perpetrators in Palestine, and so it consumes them still.
Actually very unlikely to be more than a handful of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world now - and none of whom would support the murder/slaughter/genocide of Palestinians.
Literal living survivors? Sure, very few. But trauma is easily, often (almost always?) passed down through generations and can also be culturally ingrained. The children/descendants of holocaust survivors, have, I think, legitimately some share of that trauma. And culturally, I would say, Israel has an abundance of it.
Fair enough, your comment - there are hundreds of thousands of Australians of First Peoples descent living with that kind of trauma. Though I don't see any of them going around on genocidal slaughters of others.
True. There are indigenous peoples throughout the Americas (US, Canada, much of South America, and elsewhere too I'm guessing) also descendants of that sort of genocidal trauma. But in Palestine the killing was both more recent and ongoing even before Oct 7.
Here is a link showing the ongoing atrocities of the Israeli regime, only in the year prior (2023) to Oct 7. And lest you question the motives/political slant of the source, I would emphasize that it comes from Jewish Voice for Peace.
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/11/24/countdown-to-genocide/
(tl/dr: 2023 was already (before Oct 7) "the most deadly year on record for Palestinians in the West Bank")
I agree with everything you say here.
For Aysenur 💝
" . . . the angel of death has made a Faustian bargain. It is this. It is the hell of not being able to love. You will carry this death inside you for the rest of your life. It corrodes your soul. Yes. We have souls. You sold yours." Sounds as if it could have been lifted right out of Dostoevsky. Seriously, this is a tremendous essay.
I thought the same, a lot of Dostoyevsky in there ...
Thanks so much Chris. Like the U.S. Army, the Israeli Army records each day the name of every person on each patrol . They know the name of the sniper; his unit members know his name; your article will get to him.
I believe neither the sniper nor Biden would be allowed to read this report, and anyway, it would not provoke any reaction on them. Biden already declared that this murder was unacceptable but, hey, Israel, I'm sending you more guns so you can continue with genocide.
He wouldn't care.
Interesting point. Even if this Israeli sniper doesn't read this article, the truth tends to out.
Humanity has doomed itself to death. The very fact that genocide is now considered normal and fine by so many nations and people as they actively support Israels slaughter of innocent Palestinians is the final nail in humanity’s coffin. I know it has gone on since the dawn of man, but that is still exists in this day and age clearly shows there is no future left for life on earth at the hands of humankind. Humanity’s downfall was having too large a brain that allowed abstract thought, which led to artificial wealth that led to a few powerful folks wanting everything for themselves and the commodification of the very environment upon which life depends. And in the case of war making, it is one of the most profitable enterprises for those few who have no value for life itself. And then once everything is all blown to bits in war zones, folks line up to rebuild the destruction at yet more hefty profits. On and on it goes until we finally kill ourselves off once and for all. Humanity is that very sniper when all is said and done.
I leave you with the following:
https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/thurberlastflower.pdf
Our capacity for abstract thinking has been misused but it could have been different. I don't blame our brain for leaving us with the last flower. Perhaps we can learn to use our intelligence for the benefit of mankind and avoid the approaching doom.
Considering that genocide has now been normalized by so many, along with the ongoing exponential climate catastrophe that is unfolding daily now, with nary a care by those in “power” tells me that our time has run out to learn to use our “intelligence” in any timely manner left to us now. And personally I don’t consider humans to be an intelligent species, but rather a clever one that does things because it can, rather than thinking through the possible consequences of such action and thereby not doing them in the first place. Thinking it through implies intelligence which clearly does not happen or we certainly would have learned by now. And clearly we have not. Perhaps in some alternate multiverse, humans have used their collective brains for the good of all, but not in this one. Not by a long shot and I just don’t see any possible change in the time that is necessary.
Yes, I am also so pessimistic about our future that in my selfishness I feel a relief when I'm reminded that my natural death is coming soon and will not have to suffer the effects of climate change nor to witness the beginning of a nuclear war, but also, I hope the survivors of this catastrophes will learn to use properly their big brain.
I think your comment about abstract thinking is deep. I do abstract thinking every day in my work, but I do see how one has to be careful to not go in the wrong direction. I dont have a clear idea of what to do about it. When you say "it could have been different", can you say more?
Alexander, I'm an ignorant man but curious and therefore I read a little and my perspective is that we all are made of vile mud and mind meaning that we can address our problems with sufficient thinking of the consequences of our actions and are not fated to cause evil actions. I think Anthropology can illuminate modern man on how to avoid falling into the abysm. Following are some few notes on Professor Scott M. Lacy, Ph.D. in his lecture series "Anthropology and the Study of Humanity":
"Anthropology, with its 4-field approach, can clear up 3 major myths about humanity and our so-called violent nature. Myth 1 is that there has always been warfare. Myth 2 is that we are biologically predisposed to violence. Myth 3 is that warfare is universal.
Regarding myth 1: War is a recent development in our human history. Homo sapiens have been around for 200,000 years. But the archaeological record indicates that war, as we understand it today, only emerged some 10,000 years ago, around the advent of agriculture. Before agriculture, the survival of small hunter-gatherer groups required a level of cooperation that made conflict counterproductive for all parties.
Now for myth 2, the idea that we are biologically predisposed to violence. Are we programmed for conflict? In some ways, it appears so. But there might be other
biological factors at work that show us that we’re not predestined for violence and war.
In their book Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson show that chimpanzees, like some humans, beat, rape, and kill other chimpanzees. But this predilection of our chimpanzee cousins is not an inevitable dimension of our own biological being. Wrangham and Peterson remind us to look at bonobo apes too. Unlike the violence we see in chimpanzees and gorillas, bonobos are relatively
peaceful. Bonobo males do occasionally become aggressive and violent, but
they rarely kill or rape. Why? Tight-knit bands of female bonobos gang up on and
attack male counterparts who act up. Now for the 3rd myth: the idea that war is universal. There are people in the human family tree who make peace seem as inevitable as war. The Amish, for example, refuse to fight in wars. They don’t even take disputes to court unless all internal efforts to resolve a conflict have failed. One of the core Amish beliefs is the doctrine of nonresistance. Similarly, India’s Jain religion
sees the path to peace as our ultimate purpose. The San of the Kalahari region are
super-sharers. They’re one of the oldest indigenous populations on earth, tracing
their cultural history back some 20,000 years. They are known as peaceful people
who discourage fighting, aggression, and even competition."
Thanks, I didnt know about Lacey but have read some Wrangham. That addresses the relationship between human disposition and violence. But I dont think that violence by humans is the problem. I think the problem is violence by non-human persons and organizations. And I see a relation to abstract thinking there. Non-human persons and organization are always based on legal abstractions.
Completely agreed. The abstraction of corporations as entities with personhood and the power it gives to them is the force that generate our wars against other nations and the ecology. So, I believe that a better use of our big brain is to recognize what you just said, that this kind of abstraction is hurtful and try to eliminate it by voting out of power politicians that are benefiting from the bribes of those "persons"
thank you so much for thurber's last flower!
human history = the inexorable succession of doom and bloom. and doom.
I listened to an interview with Gideon Levy from years ago in which he was asked why Israelis condone such crimes against the Palestinians. He said, three things: they believe they are God's chosen people, that they are always the victims, and that the Palestinians are sub-human. Thus, I hate to say the person you are addressing is not likely to suffer a moral problem.
Biden either, and he is supposed to be a Christian (Catholic) and recently he declared that nobody has done more for the Palestinians than himself. I believe he will dye proud of his legacy, and the rest of America and the world... well, we will forget the genocide perpetrated in our name and with our taxes and will hide it under the rug. IMO the only people who have morality are the hundreds that have been protesting the war and the murderers that commit suicide out of repentance.
Too kind. But I sincerely hope Israel will itself be damned throughout the world for all eternity.
And the USA and other nations that have been supporting the genocide, and all of their inhabitants?
Indeed I believe that we might well be damned but not perhaps in the moral sense that you mean, but damned to suffer and die out within another generation because we were manufacturing and using weapons of destruction when we should have been taking action to address global warming.
True. This is also uttered by Noam Chomsky's 2006 book "Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project)" :
"Half a century ago, in July 1955, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein issued an extraordinary appeal to the people of the world, asking them “to set aside” the strong feelings they have about many issues and to consider themselves “only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.” The choice facing the world is “stark and dreadful and inescapable: shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?” The world has not renounced war. Quite the contrary. By now, the world’s hegemonic power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” with unstated bounds. International law, treaties, and rules of world order are sternly imposed on others with much self-righteous posturing but dismissed as irrelevant for the United States—a long-standing practice, driven to new depths by the Reagan and Bush II administrations. Among the most elementary of moral truisms is the principle of universality: we must apply to ourselves the same standards we do to others, if not more stringent ones. It is a remarkable comment on Western intellectual culture that this principle is so often ignored and, if occasionally mentioned, condemned as outrageous. This is particularly shameful on the part of those who flaunt their Christian piety, and therefore have presumably at least heard of the definition of the hypocrite in the Gospels."
"Nobody," I first read Bertrand Russell as a youth. I am old enough to remember his last televised interview. He said what mankind needed most is TOLERANCE. He was correct. Still is.
True. Russell was agnostic and he knew the danger of intolerance in religion.
Well, that, too is true.
Chris describes poignantly the self-induced curse that is the "Mark of Cain." As the biblical story goes, Cain cold-blooded murders his brother, Abel. When God confronts Cain, "Where is your brother, Abel?", Cain sarcastically retorts, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Basically, God tells Cain that he will be a soul-less alien upon earth.
Tragically, the American public is fascinated by the myth of the noble sniper. The box office hit movie, "American Sniper," regales the story of the real Chris Kyle who claimed he sniper-killed 320 people (the military confirmed 160. Kyle died in a shooting range accident. But beyond the singular incidents of military snipers are the millions of youngsters and adults who play sniper-type video games. War psychologist Dave Grossman has written extensively on the desensitization to homicidal violence that violent video games induce.
Yes. It requires a lot of effort to change a normal human being into a murderer. The military knows well this fact. Talking of movies, the following is a dialog in the fictional movie Full Metal jacket:
Drill Sergeant to new recruits being trained for Vietnam:
-Do any of you know who Charles Whitman was?
-Sir, he shot all those people from that tower in Austin, Texas, sir.
-Charles Whitman killed 12 people...from a 28-story observation tower at the University of Texas...from a distance of up to 400 yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswal was?
-Sir, he shot Kennedy, sir.
-And do you know how far away he was?
-Sir, it was far! from that book depository building, sir.
-250 feet. It was 250 feet away and shooting to a moving target. He got off three rounds...with an Italian-bolt action rifle in six seconds...and scored two hits including a head shot! Do any of you know where these individuals learned to shoot?
-Sir, in the Marines, sir.
-In the Marines! outstanding! Those individuals showed what a motivated Marine and his rifle can do! And before you leave you will all be able to do the same thing!