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I’m Yves, and in this post I explore the degree of coercion and manipulation required to get people to kill and die for evil causes like the proxy wars of the US Empire.
Nicholas J.S. Davies is an independent journalist and researcher at CODEPINK. Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraqand The Ukraine War: Understanding a Pointless Conflictco-authored with Medea Benjamin
“It takes courage to admit fear” – Ukrainian recruitment poster. Photo courtesy of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
Associated Press Reports Many of the soldiers conscripted under Ukraine’s new conscription law lack the motivation and military indoctrination needed to actually point their weapons and fire at Russian soldiers.
“Some people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the trenches taking a firing position, but they don’t fire… That’s why soldiers are dying,” said an exasperated battalion commander of the Ukrainian 47th Brigade. “If you don’t use your weapons, they’re not effective.”
This is familiar territory to anyone who has studied the work of Brigadier General Samuel “Slam” Marshall, a World War I veteran and the U.S. Army’s chief combat historian in World War II. Marshall He conducted hundreds of post-combat small group sessions with U.S. soldiers in the Pacific and Europe, and documented his findings in his book, Men Against Fire: the Problem of Battle Command.
One of Slam Marshall’s most surprising and controversial findings was that only about 15 percent of U.S. soldiers in combat actually fired their weapons at the enemy — a figure that never rose above 25 percent, even when not firing would have put the soldier’s own life at greater risk.
Marshall concluded that most humans have a natural aversion to killing other human beings, often reinforced by their upbringing or religious beliefs, and therefore turning civilians into effective combat soldiers requires training and indoctrination specifically designed to disregard their natural respect for other human lives.This dichotomy between killing in war and human nature is now understood to underlie much of the PTSD suffered by combat veterans.
Marshall’s conclusions were incorporated into U.S. military training, including the introduction of firing-range targets resembling enemy soldiers and deliberate indoctrination to dehumanize the enemy in soldiers’ minds. When he conducted a similar study during the Korean War, Marshall found that changes to infantry training based on his World War II work had already led to increased rates of fire.
This trend continued in the Vietnam War and in more recent U.S. wars. The shocking brutality of the U.S. hostile military occupation of Iraq can be directly attributed in part to the dehumanizing indoctrination by the U.S. occupying forces, which included falsely linking Iraq with the September 11 terrorist crimes in the United States and labeling Iraqis who resisted the U.S. invasion and occupation of their country as “terrorists.”
a Zogby Poll In February 2006, a survey of US troops in Iraq found that 85% of US soldiers believed their mission was “revenge for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,” and 77% believed the war’s main objective was “to stop Saddam from protecting Al Qaeda in Iraq.” This is all a complete fabrication, completely fabricated by Washington propaganda, and yet, three years into the US occupation, the Pentagon is still misleading the US military and falsely linking 9/11 to Iraq.
The effects of this dehumanization were also demonstrated by court-martial testimony in the rare cases in which U.S. troops were charged with killing Iraqi civilians. Court Martial In July 2007, at Camp Pendleton, California, a defense corporal told the court that he did not consider the cold-blooded killing of innocent civilians to be a summary execution: “I view it as an enemy killing,” he told the court, adding that “the Marines view all Iraqi males as insurgents.”
We Death in combat The number of Americans killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (6,257) is a fraction of the total killed in the Vietnam War (47,434) and the Korean War (33,686), and even less than the roughly 300,000 Americans who died in World War II, in both cases far more dead in other countries.
But U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan have sparked a political backlash in the United States and raised recruitment problems for the military. last Today, the U.S. government has responded by shifting away from wars involving the deployment of large U.S. ground forces toward greater reliance on proxy wars and air strikes.
After the end of the Cold War, the US military-industrial complex and political class thought They “overcame the Vietnam syndrome” and Released Having escaped the danger of starting a third world war with the Soviet Union, they were now free to use military force without restraint to strengthen and extend American global power, an ambition that cut across party lines from Republican to Democrat. “Neocon” to Democratic hawks like Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden;
in speech In October 2000, one month before she was elected to the U.S. Senate, Hillary Clinton spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) about her mentor, Madeleine Albright’s Notorious Reject the “Powell Doctrine” of limited war.
“Again,” Clinton said. Declared“We should intervene only when we are faced with a great, small war that we can surely win, preferably in a relatively short time and with overwhelming force. To those who think we should intervene only when it is easy, I think I have to say that America has never and should never shy away from a difficult task, when it is the right thing to do.”
During the question-and-answer session, a banking executive in the audience challenged Clinton’s comments. “Do you think that all foreign countries, the majority of countries, including a billion Muslims, would actually welcome this new assertiveness?” he asked. “And isn’t this new imperialism, not this new internationalism, a significant risk to the United States?”
When the aggressive war policies promoted by the neoconservatives and Democratic hawks failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should have prompted a serious reconsideration of their flawed assumptions about the impact of aggressive and illegal use of U.S. military power.
Instead, the reaction of the US political class to the fallout from the devastating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been to simply avoid large-scale deployment of US ground troops or “ground forces.” They have instead adopted a devastating bombing and artillery campaign in Afghanistan. Mosul Iraq and Raqqa In Syria, a proxy war is being waged with the full and “ironclad” support of the United States. Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemenand now Ukraine and Palestine.
Because these wars did not result in many American casualties, they did not make the front pages at home and avoided the political backlash that occurred in the Vietnam and Iraq wars. With little media coverage and public debate, most Americans knew little about these recent wars until the shocking genocidal atrocities in Gaza finally began to break the wall of silence and indifference.
The results of these US proxy wars have predictably been no less disastrous than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: while the domestic political consequences for the US have been mitigated, the real-world impacts in the countries and regions involved remain as deadly, destructive and destabilizing, undermining US “soft power” and global leadership ambitions in the eyes of much of the world.
In fact, these policies have widened the gulf between the worldview of ignorant Americans who cling to the view of their country as peaceful and good for the world, and the peoples of other countries, particularly in the Global South, who are more outraged than ever by the violence, chaos, and poverty caused by U.S. wars, proxy wars, bombing campaigns, coups, economic sanctions, and other aggressive projections of U.S. military and economic power.
Currently, the US-backed wars in Palestine and Ukraine are increasingly sparking public opposition among US partners in those wars. Israel’s rescue of the bodies of six more hostages in Rafah has sparked widespread Israeli union protests. strikeHe argued that Netanyahu’s government must prioritize the lives of Israeli hostages over its desire to continue killing Palestinians and destroy Gaza.
In Ukraine, the expansion of conscription means that most young Ukrainians I don’t want Killing and dying in an endless, unwinnable war. Seasoned veterans New Employees It’s exactly what Siegfried Sassoon wrote in his November 2016 book, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, about the British conscripts he was training: “The raw material to be trained was getting worse and worse. Most of those now enlisting were involuntarily, and there was no reason to think they would be fit for service.”
A few months later, with the help of Bertrand Russell, Sasson wrote The War is Over: A Soldier’s Manifesto. Open Letter The letter accused political leaders, who had the power to end the war, of deliberately prolonging it. The letter was published in newspapers and read in Parliament. It concluded, “On behalf of those who are currently suffering, I issue this protest against the deceptions being perpetrated against them, and I believe that it will help to shatter the cold complacency felt by the majority of the people of the country at the continuing suffering which they do not share, and which they lack the imagination to comprehend.”
As Israeli and Ukrainian leaders see their political support crumbling, Messrs. Netanyahu and Zelensky are taking increasingly desperate risks, insisting that the United States must come to the rescue. By “leading from behind,” our leaders have ceded the initiative to these foreign leaders. They will continue to pressure the United States to fulfill its promise of unconditional support, a promise that will, sooner or later, include sending young U.S. soldiers to kill and die alongside their own people.
Proxy wars have failed to solve the problems they were meant to solve. Far from serving as a substitute for a ground war involving U.S. forces, U.S. proxy wars have created ever-escalating crises and now make war between the U.S., Iran, and Russia increasingly likely.
Neither the changes in U.S. military training since World War II nor our current proxy warfare strategy have resolved the age-old contradiction described by Slam Marshall in Men of the Fire between the carnage of war and our natural respect for human life. We have come full circle, back to this same historical crossroads, where we must once again make a fateful and clear choice between the path of war and the path of peace.
If we choose war, or allow our leaders and their foreign friends to choose it for us, we must be prepared. Military Expert They are saying we are willing to risk escalating to a nuclear war that would again kill tens of thousands of young Americans and kill us all at the same time.
If we truly choose peace, we must actively resist the tactics of our political leaders who repeatedly try to push us into war. We must refuse to let our bodies, or the bodies of our children and grandchildren, become cannon fodder for them, and allow that fate to be inflicted on our neighbors, friends, and “allies” in other countries.
We must insist that misguided leaders recommit to diplomacy, negotiation, and peaceful means of resolving disputes with other nations. The UN Charter is, in fact, the true “rules-based order.” need.
