Every virtue has its potential weakness. Patience and adaptability are important characteristics in most African societies. These have their good and bad sides. If you're not patient in most African countries, you will go insane. When I was in Guinea, if I got an invitation for a baptism or marriage that said the ceremony would start "at 1:00 PM very precisely" (and it always said 'precisely' or 'exactly'), I learned not to bother showing up until 2:30-ish and even then I'd inevitably have to wait: anywhere from half an hour to 90 minutes. Most governments in Africa don't do anything except get in the way. If you're not adaptable, you die.
But there's a flip side. It means that people collectively people accept things they shouldn't accept. They are so patient, they often don't react to injustice. They just adapt. Sometimes people do react and a civil war breaks out, a civil war which is inevitably more injust and destructive than the dictatorship it purported to overthrow.
These examples understandably makes other Africans cautious. A Guinean may not like the dictatorship that's running the country into the ground economically; but he looks to his southern neighbors in Liberia and Sierra Leone and suddenly things at home don't seem so bad. Things aren't moving forward in Guinea, but at least they're not really moving backward. But running in place isn't a great way to expend a lot of energy.
Americans, on the other hand, are supremely self-confident. This is called American Exceptionalism. We don't think we're great; we know we're great. And as such, we expect to act like a great power. Modesty and restraint are not part of our modus operandi.
This Exceptionalism is why we led the fight against Soviet expansionism (and make no mistake about it: the USSR was just as imperalistic as they accused the US of being). There were certainly abuses and bad misjudgements, as I've chronicled before. But while trying to temper the excesses, most people in western countries accepted the United States as flawed but undisputed leader of the "good guys" in the Cold War. It's no coincidence that since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most Eastern European countries have adopted pro-American foreign policy.
This Exceptionalism has also led to overreach in unwinnable wars as in Vietnam. It lead us to offer unquestioning support odious regimes such Pinochet's Chile, Mobutu's Zaire, apartheid South Africa, the genocidal Guatemalan junta and Saddam's regime, which was also genocidal. We explained away any abuses, excesses and bad judgement with the teflon of "good intentions."
And this continues today. The House of Saud, where they chop people's hands off for stealing. Egypt (the second largest recipient of American aid), where they have mass roundups and kangaroo trials of gays. Eritrea, one of the five worst countries in the world for press freedom (they rank below Saudi Arabia, Libya and Syria). Uzbekistan, where the regime's secret police boils prisoners alive. These are all either close allies or part of the so-called coalition of the willing.
But the United States has good intentions and are working for freedom and liberty so it's ok to keep this company. Our Exceptionalism and certainty about the rightness of our intentions severely blinds us to the consequences of our actions.
I recently finished reading the brilliant novel The Quiet American by Graham Greene; the classic is still timely some half century after its publication. The book exploresthe strained rapport between a hardened British journalist (named Fowler) covering the French war in Indochina and a young American military attache (named Pyle) sent to Vietnam to channel aid into a "third force": neither the French colonialists nor the Vietminh. Fowler was the old, cynical, hardened European; Pyle, the young, idealistic, naive American. Fowler said of Pyle, "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."
There's a reason I don't label myself as liberal or socialist or whatever. I don't want to be a slave to an ideology. I want to make my ideology fit my morals, conscience and beliefs, not the other way around. Too many times throughout history, people have their certainty about an ideology blind themselves to the human consequences of the implementation of that ideology.
They shrug and say something trite like, "You can't make omelettes without breaking a few eggs." But if a movement thinks that some people's lives or well-being can be sacrificed, then anyone's life or well-being can be sacrificed. Even the ideology's original supporters or people who might otherwise be somewhat sympathetic to it. Think Orwell's Hommage to Catalonia. An ideology must work for the benefit of people, not the other way around.
The main problem with strict adherence to ideology and theory is that they often work well in a textbook but poorly in practice. In some cases, theories work well in small, controlled settings but are not adaptable to larger situations. The collective is an example of this. Any ideology that fails to take into account human nature is bound to fail. This is why communism was great in theory but was always a disaster in practice.
Americans have been shocked by the images of Iraqis tortured and humiliated by American soldiers. Why were they shocked? Because of their belief in Exceptionalism (and because we've spent the last year and a half canonizing soldiers, so the sense of betrayal is all the more bitter).
As Zombywoof correctly wrote:
First of all, don't be so shocked. This is how soldiers act. It's how the military has been acting since beginning of time.
Soldiers kill people. They blow things up. They may engage in other activities, but these are two of fundamental things they do that no one else is allowed to do. To be a combat soldier, you need a lot of adrenaline. In combat situations, you are going to kill someone else if there's even the remotest possibility they might kill you. You are hypersensitive to any danger, senses on full alert, justifiably paranoid.
I'm sure I'd be the same way in the same situation. And that's exactly the point. You put people in extreme situations and they will act in extreme ways. Being a soldier is not being a ballet dancer. The job of a combat soldier is not to create, but to destroy. It might be necessary, but society should not engage in self-delusion as to the nature of the job.
An an article in the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out:
In 1971 researchers created a simulated prison in a basement on Stanford University campus. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.
Within days, the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts.
Adrenaline. Hypersensitive. Combine these with the group mentality that pushes many people to do things they ordinarily wouldn't do on their own. Give them guns and control over prisoners. Be honest: is it really that surprising that they would go on power trips and humilitate the soldiers they'd been conditioned to see as villains defending the "Axis of Evil"?
It's only surprising if you believe in Exceptionalism and that Americans are somehow exempt from the laws of nature.
It's disgusting. It's not surprising.
There's only outrage because some soldiers were stupid enough to shoot the images. Except they weren't stupid, they were arrogant. They had excessive power and, as usually happens, they became arrogant. The soldiers thought they'd never get caught or punished. They thought impunity applied to them. And it would have if the images hadn't gotten out.
"All power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
[to be continued]
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