Reply #282: Excellent and thoughtful post [View All]

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Yes, the most disturbing thing about the military mindset is the idea that one is supposed to surrender one's conscience to the Group.

A few years ago, I translated a book about the Nanjing Massacre, and it contained some stories of individual Japanese soldiers who helped individual Chinese escape. But these stories were in there because they were so rare.

The Japanese army was made up of young draftees who mostly had a sixth grade education and who had probably never been more than 100 miles away from home. Their society was quite stratified, so the draftees were at the bottom of the heap at home and even more so in the military, which was notorious for brutal training methods.

So you give a bunch of resentful 18-year-olds firearms, send them to a strange country full of people that they have a superiority complex toward, and, to top it off, issue a policy statement saying that it "doesn't matter" what they do with prisoners and civilians. The book that I translated showed an escalating pattern of atrocities against civilians as the Japanese army crossed China, beginning with looting farms for extra food, then killing farmers who resisted, then killing farmers before they resisted, then raping the women of the family before killing them, and so on, all the way to Nanjing, where the orgy of rape, looting, and killing went on for weeks. The officers encouraged the atrocities in some cases and ignored them in others.

It's safe to say that the Japanese soldiers were not brought up to be monsters. But groupthink among late adolescents is a powerful force. Having worked through that book, I can easly see how Abu Ghraib happened.