[Vision2020] Shocked!

[Tom Hansen]

Greetings Visionaires -

Although I may agree with Mr. Ferner's opinion of the latent disregard for
human dignity shown at Abu Ghraib prison, I totally disqualify his analogy
of that behavior and basic combat training conducted at Army installations.

Having completed basic combat training at Fort Ord, California (as did
hundreds of thousands before me and tens of thousands subsequently) I have
yet to sexually abuse or wrongfully violate another human being as a result
of that training.  Nor am I aware of evidence that such training develops
criminal and inhumane behavior to epidemic proportions.  The degree of
harshness evident in basic combat training has dramatically reduced since I
went through it in June 1969.

To associate such behavior with training conducted by the military well over
the past 150+ years is absolutely ludicrous.

One primary purpose of basic combat training is to convert a group of
civilian individuals into a military unit.  And what may be contrary to Ms.
Palmer's philosophy, this I seriously believe cannot be accomplished without
harshness.

If you do not believe that this is so . . . (as has been said so many times)
. . . "Talk to a Marine."

Pro patria,

Tom Hansen
SFC, US Army (Retired)



-----Original Message-----
From: vision2020-admin@moscow.com [mailto:vision2020-admin@moscow.com]On
Behalf Of Pam Palmer
Sent: Wednesday, May 12, 2004 11:36 PM
To: Vision 2020
Subject: [Vision2020] Shocked!


Visionaries-

The following article is written by Mike Ferner, from Toledo, Ohio, who
recently returned from two months in Iraq. Mike served as a Navy Corpsman
during Viet Nam, is a member of Veterans for Peace
<www.veteransforpeace.org> and a former member of Toledo City Council.

Pam Palmer
Moscow


Wednesday, May 12, 2004

Shocked!  I’m simply shocked that abuse is going on here!
© 2004 by Mike Ferner


George “that’s not the way Americans do things” Bush is outraged.

General “those troops let us down” Kimmit is outraged.

Senators and Congressmen are outraged.

Everyone is shocked, simply shocked to hear that abuse is going on at Abu
Ghraib prison!

Of course it’s an outrage that American soldiers and mercenaries are
torturing Iraqi prisoners.  But ask anyone who has gone through military
basic training and they might well respond: “What did you THINK was going on
in Iraq?”

What could be more naked abuse than cluster-bombing children and terrorizing
whole cities?  What could be more obscene than sending armless and legless
GIs home by the planeload?  Our leaders are outraged at what is happening
inside Abu Ghraib?  When they know full well that next door in Fallujah our
troops were killing so many people—including women and children—that the
soccer stadium was turned into a cemetery?  There have been pictures of all
this, too.  Not on 19th Century Fox, or other corporate news outlets, but
there were pictures aplenty.

In 1984, Orwell described how Big Brother kept the citizens of Oceania in
line with a daily, televised “Two Minutes Hate” directed at the nation’s
Public Enemy #1.

“He was the primal traitor…all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies,
deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching…(he) seemed like some
sinister enchanter, capable by the mere power of his voice of wrecking the
structure of civilization.”

Once the good people of Oceania worked up a good hate, they were ready to
let Big Brother do whatever he wanted to “protect” them from their supposed
enemies: bomb them, kill them young and old, put them in places like Abu
Ghraib.

We of course don’t do this personally.  We prepare a vulnerable segment of
our own population to do it for us.  It’s called basic training.

We take kids hoping for college or looking for direction, heads full of
myths about how Oceania always stands for freedom and democracy.  We
systematically dehumanize them in basic training and teach them how to
dehumanize “others,” “over there” until those others become “the enemy.”
Surely whatever happens to the enemy is fair game.  They are, after all, the
enemy.

Consider this from Hal Muskat, who went through basic training at Ft. Dix,
NJ, describing a frightening scene during bayonet practice for 1,000 young
men:

“In between the call/response of, ‘What's the spirit of bayonet?’  ‘Kill!
Kill! Kill!’ drill instructors (DIs) would pick up megaphones and scream,
‘See those C-130s landing? They are bringing in bodies of dead Americans
killed by gooks. The gooks murdered our soldiers!  Do you want to be a body
on that plane? I can't hear you?  What's the spirit of bayonet?’  Every once
in a while, a DI would pull several of us aside and give us lessons on the
proper use of bayonet in performing a ‘field abortion.’  Stick the bayonet
in the gook’s cunt and pull up towards her throat.  A dead gook in the womb
saves Americans lives!’”

Or this, from Roger Domagalski, describing what he was told as a recruit and
his duties after basic training: “From the first moment we arrived, we often
heard the words, ‘girls, ladies, sissies, pussies, and worse’ when insulting
us. Thus ‘women’ as a whole became a derogatory concept; very sexist and
very dehumanizing…I had been dehumanized to such an extent that I completely
lacked all empathy for these frightened, new trainees. Instead of treating
them decently, I mistreated them as I had been mistreated. Once you
dehumanize a person, you need to maintain control because such a person is
liable to do anything, from the relatively mild ‘hazing’ I engaged in, to
the Nazi-like terror tactics used by the guards against Iraqi prisoners.
Yes, basic training works...all too well sometimes.”

Should we be shocked that good American kids are filling Fallujah’s soccer
field with corpses, torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, raping their own
female comrades?

While in Baghdad recently, more than one Iraqi asked me this tough question:
“How can your soldiers do these things for America?  Don’t you live in a
democracy?”

Perhaps some day we will live in a democracy and will no longer train
soldiers to do these things in our name.  But until then, we continue to
live much closer to the condition Eugene Debs described in the closing
months of World War One’s butchery, in his famous Canton, Ohio speech:
“…when the feudal lords concluded to enlarge their domains…they declared war
upon one another.  But they themselves did not go to war any more than the
modern feudal lords, the barons of Wall Street go to war…The serfs had been
taught to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another it
was their patriotic duty to cut one another’s throats…The working class who
fight the battles and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in
either declaring war or making peace.”

George Bush can be outraged at the news from Abu Ghraib, but he is the one
who unleashed the dogs of war at the behest of our modern feudal lords.  The
result is never pretty.  Are we shocked?
########
Ferner visited Iraq for two months earlier this year.  He served as a Navy
Corpsman during Viet Nam, is a member of  Veterans for Peace
<www.veteransforpeace.org>   and a former member of Toledo City Council.