Excerpt
Chapter One A Bad-Taste Business Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. w. h. auden, herman melville on monday, september 20, 2004, Islamic militants in Iraq executed an American construction worker named Eugene Armstrong. Four men, masked and clothed in black, tensely clutched their automatic weapons while the bound and blindfolded Armstrong knelt in front of them. “Gods soldiers from Tawhid and Jihad were able to abduct three infidels of Gods enemies in Baghdad,” the leader intoned, “. . . by the name of God, these three hostages will get nothing from us except their throats slit and necks chopped, so they will serve as an example.” The long knife sliced through Armstrongs flesh. He screamed. Blood gushed from his neck. His body shuddered and became limp. The executioner placed the dripping, severed head on the back of Armstrongs lifeless body. Do you think that this is a shocking image? When the video was broadcast on national television, it was interrupted before any blood was spilled. Perhaps this discretion was a good thing; the image was, after all, very disturbing. But perhaps it would have been better to show it. Armstrongs execution was an act of war, and war is terrible. Like many terrible things, it is something that we do not want to think about too much if we can help it. Many people conceive of war in terms of manly, granite-chinned heroes duking it out with the forces of evil. The reality is very different from this comic-book picture. It is something from which we collectively avert our gaze. The news and entertainment media obligingly maintain our illusions, protecting our sensibilities from too potent a dose of reality. This is why, during the dark days of the Cambodian genocide, the Associated Press rejected photographs of a smiling soldier eating the liver of a Khmer Rouge fighter whom he had just gutted and a soldier lowering a human head by the hair into a pot of boiling water. And it is why U.S. newspapers avoided British photographer Kenneth Jareckes photograph of the charred head of an Iraqi soldier who was among those burned alive on Mutla Ridge during the closing chapter of the First Gulf War.1 When the British journalist Martin Bell reported on the war in Bosnia, he quickly realized that he was expected to sacrifice reality to “good taste.” The version of the war presented to television audiences was, he remarked, “about as close to reality as a Hollywood action movie,” later remarking that “in our desire not to offend and upset people, we were not only sanitizing war but even prettifying it. . . . But war is real and war is terrible. War is a bad taste business.”2 The cosmetic transformation of war is nothing new. Painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries denuded war of its horror, portraying soldiers with “neatly-bandaged head-wounds” and “manly and heroic expressions.” Much the same is true of popular literature. The literary misrepresentation of war is exemplified by the writings of Rudyard Kipling, who, despite having no combat experience himself, confidently portrayed war in ludicrously glowing terms. Kiplings romantic fantasies lured a generation of young men to their deaths in the trenches of World War I. With the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century, representations of war took on a new dimension of realism. But even the early photographers of the American Civil War, Spanish-American War, and World War I were not above manipulating things to suit their expectations. They dragged bodies into position before snapping them and passed off cleaned-up reenactments of military engagements as the genuine article.3 The advent of moving pictures opened new vistas for dishonestly representing battle. Most filmmakers steer safely clear of the horror and degradation of war, and most film viewers have no direct experience to act as a corrective to the Hollywood version. Consequently, many of us have an extremely distorted picture of combat. A real battlefield is not much like the typical movie version. “On the screen,” writes General Sir John Hackett, “there are particular conventions to be observed.” Men blown up by high explosives in real war . . . are often torn apart quite hideously; in films there is a big bang and bodies, intact, fly through the air with the greatest of ease. If they are shot . . . they fall down like children in a game, to lie motionless. The most harrowing thing in real battle is that they usually dont lie still; only the lucky ones are killed outright.4 Life imitates art, and the glorification of war in modern cinema has had serious consequences for the lives of its consumers. Amazingly, many young men chose to join the U.S. Marines during the Vietnam War under the influence of John Wayne films. In their minds, going to war was like being a character in a movie: good guys killing bad guys, cowboys killing Indians. In fact, during the first four months of 1968, sixty U.S. soldiers in Vietnam died trying to outdraw one another just as they had seen actors do in cowboy films.5 Because of these and other compelling illusions about war, it is easyin fact, all too easyto regard the perpetrators of mass violence as depraved monsters or madmen. For example, George W. Bush proclaimed that he ordered the invasion of Iraq and toppled Saddam Husseins regime because he “was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman.” French president Jacques Chirac described Osama bin Laden as “a raving madman,” while British foreign secretary Jack Straw described Bin Laden as “psychotic and paranoid.”6 What evidence was there that these people were insane? There is usually none at all. The psychologists who painstakingly sifted through data on the senior Nazi officers brought to justice in the Nuremberg trials found that “high-ranking Nazi war criminals . . . participated in atrocities without having diagnosable impairments that would account for their actions.”7 They were “as diverse a group as one might find in our government today, or in the leadership of the PTA.”8 If the Nazi leaders were not deranged, what about the rank and file who did Hitlers dirty work? What about the members of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that committed atrocities like the mass killing at Babi Yar, where 33,000 Jews, as well as many gypsies and mental patients, were machine-gunned to death during two crisp autumn days in 1941? Do you think that these men must have been psychopaths or Nazi zealots? If so, you are wrong. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that they were anything other than ordinary German citizens. “The system and rhythm of mass extermination,” observes journalist Heinz Hohne, “were directed by . . . worthy family men.” The men of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, a killing squad in Poland who were involved in the shooting of at least 38,000 Jews and the deportation of a further 83,000 to the Treblinka death camp, were ordinary middle-aged family men without either military training or ideological indoctrination. “The truth seems to be,” writes social psychologist James Waller, “that the most outstanding characteristic of perpetrators of extraordinary evil lies in their normality, not their abnormality.”9 Purveyors of violence, terrorists, and merchants of genocidal destruction are, more oft