Dogs of War: Urinating Marines and the bestiality of conflict

“In modern war,” wrote Ernest Hemingway in a 1935 essay on the utter imbecility of armed conflicts, “you will die like a dog for no good reason.” In these post-modern times, however, even death doesn’t end the bestiality of war. In post-modern war, you will die like a dog - and be pissed on by your killers. And grainy videos tracing the arc of the adrenaline-driven trickle of martial madness will be posted on YouTube for the world to see – and, in some cases, cackle over. The video footage of four US Marine soldiers (editor’s note: we are not providing the link but it is available on YouTube for anyone who wishes to see it) emptying their bladders on their dead Taliban victims somewhere in a godforsaken Afghan battlefield has given rise to predictable outrage. Even to a world inured to the shocking images of torture and worse from the Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, this macabre marking of battlefield territory by four men in fatigues represents an image too morbid to make sense of. [caption id=“attachment_181933” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“War, we always knew, is dirty business. Reuters”]  [/caption] War, we always knew, is dirty business. Which is why societies try very hard to shut out the horrors of war inflicted by their men on the frontline – or on foreign soil. Or they validate them with elaborate and circular justifications that “war is dirty business”. Shit happens (and occasionally piss does too). And since wars are also theatres for ‘propaganda wars’, we readily discount allegations of atrocities by “our side” – be it in Kashmir (where the AFSPA provides immunity to our soldiers) or in Sri Lanka (where the LTTE, in its time, successfully milked allegations of atrocities by IPKF forces to project itself as the only protectors of the Tamil race). The other side happily believes that atrocities are only committed by the army or the state. The atrocities of the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and the ethnic cleansing of Pandits from Kashmir, have been seen as minor downsides in the war for “freedom”. Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who has, among other things, exposed war crimes from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, where US troops mass murdered unarmed civilians in March 1968, to the Abu Ghraib perversion, pointed, in a 2004 interview, to this state of societal denial. “When I wrote my first stories about My Lai, I remember vividly a Minnesota public opinion poll that showed that more than half of the American people didn’t think I should have published that story. They weren’t accusing me of doing anything wrong, but they didn’t think I should have written about it. So you always have this resistance to an ugly truth.” Except that, as Abu Ghraib and the Urinating Marines episode shows, in the post-modern war, it’s no longer war correspondents who expose atrocities or the ritual abuse and humiliation inflicted on the vanquished. The combatants themselves are willful participants or complicit in the filming of the abuse – perhaps for private circulation as some kind of perverse “war trophy”. In her book Private Pictures: Soldiers’ Inside View of War, Janina Struk writes that “only one aspect of the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib seemed certain, that they were private pictures intended as souvenirs to be shared only among friends and fellow soldiers, not to be seen by the public and transmitted worldwide.” The idea of taking photographs intended to humiliate or degrade the enemy, she notes, is not new. During Saddam Hussein’s time in Iraq, videos were made of the brutal treatment of prisoners by security policy in order to humiliate and dishonour them. Even further back, in 1933, the National Socialists took photographs to intimidate and publicly shame those who did not comply with an order to boycott Jewish shops. And during the Second World War, Struck recalls, German soldiers took hundreds of thousands of photographs in the erstwhile Soviet Union and in Poland, most of them showing ritual humiliation of Jews. The Abu Muqawama blog on the Center for a New American Security points out that such ritual humiliation is about “dehumanising” the enemy, thereby justifying the horrors that you inflict on them. The “dehumanising” instinct runs so deep that even a soldier at Abu Ghraib who exposed the abuses there referred to a prisoner as “it”. And far from being punished or censured for the Abu Ghraib perversion, commanders and civilian leaders who were found responsible for failure to discipline their subordinates were promoted. That dehumanising instinct is as old as human history - but more recently it goes back to the Second World War. “Just look at the official propaganda from the Second World War, a conflict most Americans have seen only through a sanitised Spielbergian lens. Look at the lengths to which the United States and Japan went to dehumanise the other. Now imagine how that translated down at the platoon and squad level in heavy combat.” The big difference between then and now, the blog notes, is that today the diffusion of camera phones and other media allows the “ugly dehumanising effect of war to go viral.” In a way, the blogger says, that’s a good thing. “Since so few Americans actually fight in our wars. It’s good that Americans see the effect war can have on other people’s sons and daughters.”