Lurking
in the Hearts of Men
The
Shadow, the fictional hero of pulp magazines and classic
radio shows, used to begin every show with the rhetorical
question, "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"
Recent reports of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib have had the
world asking the same question. According to a United States
Army report, the abuses included:
a. Punching, slapping,
and kicking detainees; jumping on their naked feet;
b. Videotaping
and photographing naked male and female detainees;
c. Forcibly arranging
detainees in various sexually explicit positions for photographing;
d. Forcing detainees
to remove their clothing and keeping them naked for several
days at a time;
e. Forcing naked
male detainees to wear women's underwear;
f. Forcing groups
of male detainees to masturbate themselves while being photographed
and videotaped;
g. Arranging naked
male detainees in a pile and then jumping on them;
h. Positioning
a naked detainee on a MRE Box, with a sandbag on his head,
and attaching wires to his fingers, toes, and penis to simulate
electric torture;
i. Writing "I
am a Rapest" (sic) on the leg of a detainee alleged to have
forcibly raped a 15-year old fellow detainee, and then photographing
him naked;
j. Placing a dog
chain or strap around a naked detainee's neck and having a
female Soldier pose for a picture;
k. A male MP guard
having sex with a female detainee;
l. Using military
working dogs (without muzzles) to intimidate and frighten
detainees, and in at least one case biting and severely injuring
a detainee;
m. Taking photographs
of dead Iraqi detainees (Taguba, 2004).
No doubt, the
psychology that motivated these atrocities will be examined
for years to come. Already, social psychologists have drawn
parallels between Abu Ghraib and the famous simulated prison
experiment conducted by Philip G. Zimbardo at Stanford University
in the summer of 1971. Zimbardo wanted to find out what happened
when you put good people in a bad place. Would humanity overcome
evil or would evil overcome humanity? To test these questions,
Zimbardo recruited students in creating a facsimile of a prison.
Certain students were designated "prisoners" while others
were designated "guards." Initially intended to be a two-week
experiment, the project had to be aborted after only six days.
Why? The "guards" became abusive and sadistic while the "prisoners"
became seriously depressed. Faced with the potential of worse
abuses occurring, Zimbardo prematurely halted the experiment.
While Zimbardo's
case study is certainly pertinent to understanding the tragedy
of Abu Ghraib, another case study might prove more profitable.
This case study, however, does not involve overt abuse or
simulated prison experiments. Instead, as a whole, this body
of work constitutes a collective psychological profile of
a small, shadowy segment of the population. That insular and
exclusive segment is the power elite.
Authoritarian
Hierarchicalization
In his seminal book entitled The Power Elite,
sociologist C. Wright Mills defines this wealthy and powerful
stratum of society:
The power elite
is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend
the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they
are in positions to make decisions having major consequences.
Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important
than the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions:
their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is
itself an act that is often of greater consequence than the
decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major
hierarchies and organisations of modern society. They rule
the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state
and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment.
They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure,
in which are now centered the effective means of the power
and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy (Mills,
pp. 3-4, 1956).
It should not
be lost on the astute reader that, in addition to running
the various other machinations comprising modern society,
the power elite also "direct the military establishment."
Because of its firm grip on this institution, the power elite
plays a large part in sculpting the paradigms that govern
the military establishment. This transformation from within
the military is the direct corollary of authoritarian hierarchalization.
In The Architecture of Modern Political Power, Daniel
Pouzzner explains this concept:
When a superior
determines to encourage, discourage, demand, or forbid among
his subordinates a mode of action, thought, or awareness,
those modes will tend to be encouraged or discouraged among
everyone below him in the hierarchy. If that superior is a
nuclear establishment leader, then these modes will tend to
be encouraged or discouraged throughout most of society. In
this case, only those not within the conventional hierarchy
of civilized society escape the brunt of the behavioral tyranny
(Pouzzner, p. 17, 2001).
As modes of thought
and behavior are selectively encouraged or discouraged, those
who occupy the lower layers of hierarchical strata begin to
tangibly enact the vision of those in the upper layers. In
other words, the world above shapes the world below. This
is accomplished through a Pavlovian system of reward and punishment.
The lower level individual notices "whatever characteristics
favor ascension to higher echelons" and adopts this mode of
thought or behavior (Pouzzner, pp. 17-18, 2001). After all,
given the lowly conditions of his/her current tier in the
hierarchical framework, who would not want to ascend. Oh,
and just who determines what characteristics guarantee ascension?
The elite above, of course! Pouzzner explains:
The characteristics
are arbitrarily dictated by those who are already in the upper
echelons of the hierarchy, and once those who exhibit them
have ascended, the characteristics are themselves efficiently
spread through society (Pouzzner, pp. 17-18, 2001).
Thus, a meme (a
contagious idea) is implanted and the status quo is born.
The military establishment, with its hierarchical configuration
and Pavlovian system of behavioral control, is the ideal transmission
belt for memes. Abu Ghraib represents the final product of
memetic metastasis. The characteristics exhibited by the torturers
of Abu Ghraib were "arbitrarily dictated by those who are
already in the upper echelons of the hierarchy." Who controls
the upper echelons of the military's hierarchy? As Mills has
already made clear, it is the power elite.
As Above,
So Below
Indeed, the military's hierarchy seems to conform
with the Hermetic dictum of "As above, so below." This prompts
a very disturbing question. If the soldiers below were so
horribly cruel, what modes of thought and behavior were promulgated
from above? To answer this question, one must examine the
collective psychology of the elite a little closer.
In the book, Secret
and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History,
Jim Keith reprinted a document that supposedly records much
of the criminal activities of the elite throughout history.
Of the manuscript, which he referred to as simply "The Franciscan
Document," Keith stated the following:
It purports to
be a secret history of Western civilization gleaned from secret
documents in the Vatican library by a member of the Franciscan
order. The inked imprint of a Vatican library entrance chit
affixed to the original document and duplicated at the end
of the article is a strong indication that the author does
have access to Vatican sources… (Keith, 1993, pg. 215).
While some of
the document's findings maybe inaccurate or disinformation,
its author does provide a very precise description of the
psychology of the ruling class. He writes:
The elite are
an insular, clannish clique, given to raging idiosyncrasies
and immense deposits of superstition. Their insulation from
the rest of us, and from the world which we inhabit, has rendered
them emotionally undeveloped, incapable of loving, of caring,
of giving - to them, the sacrifice of an innocent is no more
noteworthy than swatting of an annoying fly, and eminently
more useful (Keith, Secret and Suppressed, 1993, pg.234).
The Franciscan's
words should not be dismissed as hyperbole. Indeed, several
elitist tracts bear out this contention. One such tract is
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, the manual for elite
control authored by Hatford Van Dyke. The document states
that, in 1954, an issue of chief concern amongst the elite
was the problem of managing the masses. The unknown writer
claims that the hidden rulers arrived at the following conclusion:
Although the so-called
"moral issues" were raised, in view of the law of natural
selection it was agreed that a nation or world of people who
will not use their intelligence are no better than animals
who do not have intelligence (Keith, Secret and Suppressed,
1993, p. 203).
The elite surmised
that:
…the low-class
elements of society must be brought under total control, i.e.
must be housebroken, trained, and assigned a yoke and long-term
social duties from a very early age, before they have the
opportunity the propriety of the matter (Keith, Secret
and Suppressed, 1993, p. 203).
Other elite treatises
have expressed identical sentiments and prescribed similar
methods. There is no more appropriate example than Zbigniew
Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard, which delineates
the geostrategy that he believes will insure the Western elite's
global primacy. The methods and means prescribed by Brzezinski
reflect the elite's overwhelming disdain for those they wish
to subjugate. Painting a vivid portrait of his geostrategy,
Brzezinski writes:
…to put it
in terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of
ancient empires, the grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy
are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence
among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected,
and to keep the barbarians from coming together (Brzezinski,
1997, p. 40).
"Vassals?" "Barbarians?"
Indeed, such terminology does recall a more brutal age. Those
with the slightest modicum of moral compunction would gasp
with outrage at such words. Yet, they are more than words,
as is evidenced by America's military expedition into Afghanistan
shortly after September 11. Returning to The Grand
Chessboard, Brzezinski refers to an area known as the
"Eurasian Balkans," a region that must be controlled in order
to insure American primacy. Afghanistan is nestled comfortably
within the "Eurasian Balkans," thus making her a nation of
geostrategic significance (1997, pg. 124). The transmission
of Brzezinski's virulent strain of thought to the military
establishment was tangibly evidenced by America's invasion
and subjugation of Afghanistan.
As for the "barbarians"
of Afghanistan, the devastation visited upon them could very
well keep them from "coming together" for many years. No target
was spared in the attempt to capture or kill Bin Laden, civilians
included. In an article in the Toronto Sun, Eric Margolis
described some of the results of the "war on terrorism":
To date, the U.S.
has dropped 10,000 bombs on Afghanistan, killing sizable numbers-in
the range of 1,500-2,000, according to Afghan sources. U.S.
bombing of cities, towns, and villages has driven over 160,000
people into refugee camps (pg. 1).
Inflicting such
massive losses also carries a psychological effect for the
"barbarians." It was the Western elites' hope that, after
sufficient suffering had been induced, the average Afghan
would become tractable enough to be "housebroken, trained,
and assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very
early age." Indeed, a new duty had been assigned to the "vassals"
of Afghanistan… planting and harvesting opium.
In 2000, Taliban
leader Mullah Omar decreed that opium production was illegal
(Harding, 2002). At the time, Afghanistan was the largest
producer of heroin and the Taliban reaped enormous profits
from the trafficking of the drug (Harding, 2002). Any number
of motives could have underpinned Mullah Omar's decision to
ban opium, including Islamic tradition, appeasement of the
international community, or increase in heroin prices (Harding,
2000). Whatever the case may be, much of the available data
suggests that opium production declined significantly:
United Nations
officials last month confirmed that poppy production in Afghanistan
fell by 91% last year - from 82,172 hectares to 7,606, with
most of that grown in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance
(Harding, 2002).
Yet, with America's
invasion of Afghanistan and the installation of the Northern
Alliance as the dominant regime, this trend has come to an
abrupt halt:
One senior UN
official based in Kandahar said: "The Taliban ban was implemented
almost 100%. Already we know that farmers are planting
opium again. Without any proper enforcement, advocacy
and assistance from the donor community, the problem won't
go away" (Harding, 2002).
In the minds of
the elites, Afghanis were "barbarians" who were neglecting
their duties as loyal "vassals" on the global drug plantation.
Through authoritarian hierarchalization, this virulent strain
of thought was promulgated within America's military establishment.
The final result is a paradoxical one indeed. Soldiers of
a free constitutional republic subjugated another country
and enforced a feudal form of control. The characteristics
of those in the upper echelons are made painfully evident
by the actions of their surrogates on lower levels of the
hierarchy. As above, so below.
MacNamara
and the "Moron Corps"
There are even more examples of when the elite have
eagerly practiced what they have preached concerning the masses.
These examples are almost too voluminous to document. However,
one case should be cited to demonstrate that this mentality
precedes the post-September 11th world. This is the case of
Robert MacNamara and his "Moron Corps."
MacNamara's practice
of the elitist tradition is plainly illustrated by his approach
to the question of military recruitment. This Secretary of
Defense devised "a cynical recruitment gambit aimed at the
underclass known as ‘Project 100,000'" (MacPherson, 2002).
Myra MacPherson describes this dubious project:
Under his direction,
an alternative army was systematically recruited from the
ranks of those who had previously been rejected for failing
to meet the armed services' physical and mental requirements.
Recruiters swept through urban ghettos and Southern rural
back roads, even taking at least one youth with an IQ of 62.
In all, 354,000 men were rolled up by Project 100,000. Touted
as a Great Society program that would provide remedial education
and an escape from poverty, the recruitment program offered
a one-way ticket to Vietnam, where "the Moron Corps," as they
were pathetically nicknamed by other soldiers, entered combat
in disproportionate numbers. Although Johnson was a vociferous
civil rights advocate, the program took a heavy toll on young
blacks. A 1970 Defense Department study disclosed that 41
percent of Project 100,000 recruits were black, compared with
12 percent in the armed forces as a whole. What is more, 40
percent of Project 100,000 recruits were trained for combat,
compared with 25 percent for the services generally (MacPherson,
2002).
It should be noted
that MacNamara put this plan together after privately declaring
that there was no way of winning the Vietnam conflict (MacPherson,
2002). Project 100,000 took place in 1966, a time when the
civil rights movement was beginning to gain momentum. Even
with the cry for equality going out everywhere, elite MacNamara
was still willing to wage class warfare.
Peters'
"Warrior" Thesis: Indoctrinating the Military Establishment
Recall C. Wright Mills' contention that the power
elite wields a substantial amount of control over the military.
With the exercise of this control, elitist thought has gradually
permeated the armed forces. No doubt, many individuals have
acted as conduits for the instillation of the ruling class
paradigm within the military establishment. Perhaps one of
the best examples of the elite's meme transmitters is Ralph
Peters, a particularly smug Army Major with a penchant for
unabashedly elitist rhetoric. Peters' elitist evangel is most
thoroughly delineated in his article entitled "The New Warrior
Class." The article can be found in Parameters Magazine,
the official publication of the Army War College. He begins
the tract with the following remarks:
The soldiers of
the United States Army are brilliantly prepared to defeat
other soldiers. Unfortunately, the enemies we are likely to
face through the rest of this decade and beyond will not be
"soldiers," with the disciplined modernity that term conveys
in Euro-America, but "warriors"--erratic primitives of shifting
allegiance, habituated to violence, with no stake in civil
order. Unlike soldiers, warriors do not play by our rules,
do not respect treaties, and do not obey orders they do not
like. Warriors have always been around, but with the rise
of professional soldieries their importance was eclipsed.
Now, thanks to a unique confluence of breaking empire, overcultivated
Western consciences, and a worldwide cultural crisis, the
warrior is back, as brutal as ever and distinctly better-armed
(Peters, 1994).
Who are the "erratic
primitives" that constitute the "new warrior class?" Peters
states: "Most warriors emerge from four social pools which
exist in some form in all significant cultures" (Peters, 1994).
He proceeds to enumerate the four social pools and their respective
warrior offspring:
First-pool warriors
come, as they always have, from the underclass (although their
leaders often have fallen from the upper registers of society).
The archetype of the new warrior class is a male who has no
stake in peace, a loser with little education, no legal earning
power, no abiding attractiveness to women, and no future.
With gun in hand and the spittle of nationalist ideology dripping
from his mouth, today's warrior murders those who once slighted
him, seizes the women who avoided him, and plunders that which
he would never otherwise have possessed (Peters, 1994).
In other words,
the "first-pool" of "erratic primitives" is composed of unattractive
and patriotic males who suffer the misfortune of occupying
a lower layer of socioeconomic stratum.
Peters proceeds
to examine the "second pool warriors":
…as society's
preparatory structures such as schools, formal worship systems,
communities, and families are disrupted, young males who might
otherwise have led productive lives are drawn into the warrior
milieu. These form a second pool. For these boys and young
men, deprived of education and orientation, the company of
warriors provides a powerful behavioral framework (Peters,
1994).
As the elite co-opts
traditional institutions, Peters foresees the emergence of
youthful dissenters. These younger "erratic primitives" are
potential recruits for the "warriors." They, too, must be
expunged. Reiterating his globalist Weltanschauung, Peters
proceeds to identify patriots as the next class of "warrior":
The third pool
of warriordom consists of the patriots. These may be men who
fight out of strong belief, either in ethnic, religious, or
national superiority or endangerment, or those who have suffered
a personal loss in the course of a conflict that motivates
them to take up arms (Peters, 1994).
This particular
variety of "warrior" would probably oppose the amalgamation
of its respective nation-state into the elite's world dictatorship.
Therefore, it must be eradicated as well. Finally, Peters
reveals the fourth "pool" of "warriors":
Dispossessed,
cashiered, or otherwise failed military men form the fourth
and most dangerous pool of warriors. Officers, NCOs, or just
charismatic privates who could not function in a traditional
military environment, these men bring other warriors the rudiments
of the military art - just enough to inspire faith and encourage
folly in many cases, although the fittest of these men become
the warrior chieftains or warlords with whom we must finally
cope (Peters, 1994).
These soldiers
of the "obsolete military paradigm" have no place in the elite's
military establishment. The duty of the new soldier no longer
involves the protection of nation, family, or the traditional
way of life. These are outdated constructs embraced only by
the "warriors" awaiting their coming extermination. Thus,
the soldier of the past also constitutes a threat.
According to Peters,
the "erratic primitives" that comprise this emergent "warrior"
class represent a global epidemic:
Worldwide, the
new warrior class already numbers in the millions. If the
current trend toward national dissolution continues, by the
end of the century there may be more of these warriors than
soldiers in armies worthy of the name. While exact figures
will never be available, and statistics-junkies can quibble
endlessly as to how many warriors are really out there, the
forest looks dark and ominous enough without counting each
last tree. And perhaps the worst news comes right out of Macbeth:
the trees are moving (Peters, 1994).
Peters predicts
a period of protracted conflict with these "warriors":
The US Army will
fight warriors far more often than it fights soldiers in the
future. This does not mean the Army should not train to fight
other organized militaries--they remain the most lethal, although
not the most frequent, threat. But it would be foolish not
to recognize and study the nasty little men who will haunt
the brutal little wars we will be called upon to fight within
the career spans of virtually every officer reading this text
(Peters, 1994).
To counter this
threat, Peters recommends the following prescriptive measures:
Although there
are nearly infinite variations, this type of threat generally
requires a two-track approach-an active campaign to win over
the populace coupled with irresistible violence directed against
the warlord(s) and the warriors. You cannot bargain or compromise
with warriors. You cannot "teach them a lesson" (unless you
believe that Saddam Hussein or General Aideed have learned
anything worthwhile from our fecklessness in the clinch).
You either win or you lose. This kind of warfare is
a zero-sum game. And it takes guts to play (Peters, 1994).
In other words,
campaigns of propaganda and brutal aggression are the solutions
to the "warrior" problem. Doesn't Abu Ghraib conform to this
"two-track approach"? As is painfully evidenced by his reference
to Saddam Hussein, Peters contends that one of the regions
infected by the global "warrior" epidemic is Iraq. Because
the alleged "warrior" problem is widespread, Saddam is not
alone. No, the Iraqi people are "warriors" as well.
According to Peters'
criterion, which is vigorously promoted within the military
establishment, the prisoners being held at Abu Ghraib were
not soldiers. They were "warriors." Thus, the possibility
of prisoner rehabilitation was automatically precluded. After
all, Peters himself opines: "You cannot ‘teach them a
lesson.'" Following Peters' prescribed approach, the American
soldiers at Abu Ghraib acted with "irresistible violence directed
against the warlord(s) and the warriors."
If Peters is right
about anything at all, he is correct to call this war a "zero-sum
game." However, the war is not between soldiers and "warriors."
It is between the elite and the rest of humanity. Yes, it
takes guts to play. However, something else is required to
give the player the ultimate advantage. That pivotal element
is the human spirit. Given the elite's history of parasitic
usury and brutal suppression, it is safe to say that they
have forsaken this crucial attribute.
Sources
Cited
Brzezinski, Zbigniew,
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Geostrategic
Objectives, Basic Books, 1997.
Harding, Luke,
"Afghanistan's Deadly Crop Flourishes Again," http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v02/n354/a03.html,
February 28, 2002.
Keith, Jim, Secret
and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History, Feral
House, Portland, Oregon, 1993.
MacPherson, Myra,
"MacNamara's ‘Moron Corps'," http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/29/mcnamara/,
May 29, 2002.
Margolis, Eric,
"America's New War: A Progress Report", http://www.commondreams.org/views01/1209-02.htm,
2001.
Mills, C. Wright,
The Power Elite, Oxford University Press, London/New
York, 1956.
Peters, Ralph,
"The New Warrior Class," Parameters, http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/1994/peters.htm,
1994.
Pouzzner, Daniel,
The Architecture of Modern Political Power: The New Feudalism,
2001, http://www.mega.nu:8080.
Taguba, Maj.
General Antonio, "U.S. Army report on Iraqi prisoner abuse,"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4894001/, May 4, 2004.
Paul
D. Collins has studied suppressed history and the shadowy
undercurrents of world political dynamics for roughly eleven
years. In 1999, he completed his Associate of Arts and Science
degree. He is working to complete his Bachelor's degree, with
a major in Communications and a minor in Political Science.
Paul has authored another book entitled The Hidden Face
of Terrorism: The Dark Side of Social Engineering, From Antiquity
to September 11. Published in November 2002, the book
is available online from www.1stbooks.com/bookview/13401,
http://www.barnesandnoble.com, and also http://www.amazon.com.
It can be purchased as an e-book (ISBN 1-4033-6798-1) or in
paperback format (ISBN 1-4033-6799-X). He is also the co-author
of The Ascendancy of the Scientific Dictatorship, which is
available at http://www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/book_detail.asp?&isbn=0-595-31164-4
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