I've been talking about dehumanization a lot recently, as it pertains to race versus a sense of ascendancy and entitlement among some of our fellow citizens, how the latter allows one to do things one wouldn't otherwise if he considered someone different to be human versus Other.
Dehumanization requires indoctrination, in the subtle code of Otherification. Indoctrination, also called brainwashing, prompts one to blindly follow orders, even if illegal, even if it impedes the job versus smooths it. Sure, people in war will obviously come to hate their enemy, but to cavalierly dismiss whole populations, their anguish, the horrors wrought against them, their very humanity, is worse, because it enables unimaginable acts such as My Lai and Haditha. In our Philippine conquest, American soldiers dehumanized Filipinos en toto with the imported epithet "nigger," in Vietnam they used "gook," in Iraq "haji," all with the guttural vindictiveness of hatespeech. Such subjugative mindsets, of us against All Around Us, yielded the most ugly, unconscionable crimes against humanity — not just, as some will inevitably, mincingly argue, the inevitable collateral damages, the bugfuck insanity, of war — but the acts of an oppressor, routine torture, summary mass executions, concentrations camps by other names that smell as fetid.
This becomes especially problematic when you're dehumanizing, and making enemies of, the people you are ostensibly liberating. This always and ever can not, by any whit of logic, work.
It hearkens to the old, dark joke that infamously circulated among soldiers in Vietnam: "The way you win the war is, you load up all the friendlies onto ships and send em out into the Gulf of Tonkin. Then you bomb the country flat. Then you sink the ships."
Wrong wars stem from wrong policy, which, falsely justified and endlessly rationalized, results in wrong actions. Wrong actions, blessed by both chain-of-command and cover-up after the fact, beget more wrong actions.
Do not fucking even take my word for it, because it is also what brings well-meant, conscience-rent soldiers home to do the theretofore unthinkable, question that for which they fought and suffered. Iraq Veterans Against the War this past weekend held a series of unofficial hearings in DC under the aegis of "Winter Soldier," so called because of a similar program staged by Vietnam vets in 1971. If you haven't heard of it — as it has yet to get a remote spark of interest from the mainstream media even as they continue forwarding the fiction that John "100 years in Iraq" McCain is not just fucking batshit nuts — go here and watch these soldiers' testimony. Watch all of it, click the links, read more, however uncomfortable it makes you. It fuckwell should. Appreciate it.
McCain, I think, would call these men traitors.