As you may have seen here, a series of members of the Alþing (Iceland's parliament) nominated Bradley Manning, the famous wikileaker, for a Nobel Peace Prize. The feelings in the comments on that article were intense on both sides of the issue.
I have a personal connection to two aspects of this. On one hand, I work for an Icelandic company and am preparing to move to Iceland, so I tend to keep up on all things Iceland. On the other -- and more importantly -- I once had a good friend who was in the exact same situation as Manning. And had Wikileaks existed back then, it's possible she could have ended up doing what Manning did.
(A quick shout-out to fellow Kossak TransActivist, who's the only person on this site who knew my friend better than I)
The reason for this diary begins with this quote from a commenter:
The result of his actions were vast and many were positive. However, he was mentally disturbed and his motives were not that of some heroic, self-sacrificing hero rather a self-destructive mentally unstable individual... the mentally unstable part is from Bradley Manning's own letter to his superiors.
I guess being mentally unstable and self-destructive should not disqualify someone from getting a reward. At the same time I am not sure Bradley was acting in a noble fashion or just acting out. He was on the verge of being discharged for adjustment disorder after punching a female officer in the face. In his communications with the AOL guy he reported "im a mess". In his communications he said he would not mind being caught if it wasn't for the fact that he would be portrayed as a male doing these things instead of a female (because of his gender crisis).
This kid needed and needs mental help. Celebrating acts he did when in this sort of mental desperation is a little messed up in my opinion.
I get the sentiment but I am not so sure this is appropriate.
It should first be pointed out that anyone who risks arrest (or, as Manning noted, execution) to do what they thought was right requires a serious degree of self-destructive behavior. No matter the field. Ghandi, MLK, you name it. Another name for self-destructive behavior, when it's channelled toward good purposes, is "self-sacrificing".
But let's backtrack for a moment and talk about Rachel.
The army is America's largest closet. You wouldn't believe how many trans women have a military past, whether to try to "fix" themselves or to develop masculine "credentials" to hide under. I was once very close friends with a trans woman named Rachel. She joined the army during the Reagan era -- believed in all of that "Evil Empire" stuff. She had a gift for (and love of) languages, and went into military intelligence.
In time, however, she began to develop a serious moral issue with the job. It really humanizes your enemies -- you're listening in on their daily lives. They talk about the exact same sort of stuff that you and your army buddies talk about. They talk about their significant others, their families, their hopes and dreams, the cafeteria food, everything. As she mentioned to me once, if the order had come down to suit up, that we were going to war with the Russians, her response would have been as though they had just said that we were going to war with ourselves.
Concerning Manning, I can tell you that the gender issues ironically probably made the moral issues all the easier to deal. Facing gender issues, a person feels like they're basically throwing their life away anyway -- that they're going to be rejected by everyone they care about and live the rest of their life as an unloved freak. If you already have something self-destructive going on in your life, a crisis of conscience becomes much easier to face, as it would make self-destructive, and thus self-sacrificing, behavior much easier.
A job which can give a person a crisis of conscience is a rather dangerous place for such a person to be, from a security standpoint.
During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union negotiated several arms reductions treaties. Rachel was brought to the USSR as a translator on one of the missions to supervise nuclear weapons disarmament. She immediately hit it off with the Soviets, joking with them, talking about everything from music to children's cartoons in the USSR. Whenever she could, she'd leave her team and walk around whatever town she was in (generally followed by a surprisingly poorly disguised Soviet tail) to chat with the locals and try to blend in with daily life. Some of her colleagues began to wonder whether she'd even return to the US (she ultimately did).
I doubt they would have brought her over there had they known that back on base in Germany, she had spent many hours in her depression watching the scene in "Tora! Tora! Tora!" where the Japanese destroy Pearl Harbor over and over again, as a form of release. I don't know her motives, but I'm sure they were somewhere between a symbolic destruction of the machine that she was part of and her self-destructive tendencies.
Rachel wasn't anti-American. She simply had her eyes opened to the humanity of those who were presented as "her enemy", those presented as sub-humans who deserved to be killed. Such a realization is the nature of the line of work she -- and Manning -- were in. Combine that with a conscience and a self-destructive streak brought about by gender identity disorder... well, while some people have trouble picturing how Manning ended up doing what was done, I have no such difficulty.
I wish I could have sought Rachel's input on this diary; however, she is no longer with us. When she could no longer contain her gender dysphoria, when the choice came down to "transition or death", she chose "transition"-- but not without tremendous guilt for what she was putting her family through. When she lost everything in her divorce, she didn't fight it. When she was fired from her job (and lost her health insurance), she didn't fight it. And without health insurance, I watched as a sore on her head festered untreated. It ultimately turned out to be cancerous. It was removed, but a few years later the cancer came back to claim her life. The world lost an awful lot that day.
To anyone who has had difficulty understanding why Manning did what was done, I hope this offers at least some insight. And as a side note, for those who say that the letter from the members of the Alþing just represents a few parliamentarians: actually that letter is just from one political party (Hreyfingin), and represents all of their MPs. Undoubtedly there are MPs in other political parties who feel likewise.