Non-violent grass roots reform and Democracy: Teach a soldier to kill and he just might

In my previous post States with high murder rates have larger veteran populations I reviewed statistics about an increase in murders by veterans reported previously in several articles including Across America, Deadly Echoes of Foreign Battles and Wash. Post: Sharp Rise in Violent Crimes Cited Among Returning Iraq Veterans in Colo. Unit. The statistics are not always easy to sort out but they seem to indicate that although veterans have lower rates of incarceration than non-veterans this is partly due to their recruiting in areas where crime rates are lower. If they didn't include the high rates of crimes from inner cities where they recruit much less than they would almost certainly be much closer.

However the statistics also showed that veterans were more likely to be incarcerated for violent crimes than non-veterans and it is almost certainly easier to determine why by looking at different types of research to understand why including some of the research that was done by the reported that investigated the previous articles or research that explains how violence escalates in general. This may also include research into training methods for the military. Most of these stories are about veterans that didn't have a previous history of violence or criminal activity but they all went through military training and many of them were involved in combat. The leading stories following the recent wars are mostly about those who may have PTSD from war related combat but many of the veterans that have been incarcerated for one reason or another, often murder, haven't been in combat, although they still went through military training and indoctrination.

Serious consideration should be given to the possibility that a leading cause of this problem is the training they went through and that the leading amount of responsibility might belong with those that controlled that training and started wars based on misleading information, if not outright lies; yet when these incidents happen the leading response by some people is to often blame the veteran, without considering the background and what needs to be done to reduce future incidents. If a major contributing cause of this problem is their training then this needs to be reviewed and changed, especially since the wars we've been fighting are based on lies.

Military training isn't known for trying to teach creative thinking, in most cases; instead they're more concerned about teaching obedience to authority. This often involves recruiting people that were raised in an Authoritarian manner and escalating that method starting with boot camp.

Most of the discussion about the root causes of these shootings focuses primarily on PTSD related to combat related trauma but this doesn't account for all the recruits that have gone on shooting sprees and it almost certainly isn't the beginning of what may have made them more predisposed to violence. There is an enormous amount of research that indicates that violence often starts at an early age and escalates from there although if some of the later steps aren't taken like encounters with traumatic stress during combat then people may be less inclined to turn to excessive violence. In previous posts including Does child abuse and bullying lead to more violence? and Child abuse and bullying link in study long over due I explained why some of this research indicates that early child abuse including corporal punishment often escalates to bullying, hazing and additional violence later in life.

The military has worked with psychologists that understand this to some degree, or at least they should understand this; if they don't it is probably for ideological reasons that involve denying the research that doesn't suit their purposes. The Office of Navel Research has supported numerous research projects dating back decades about psychology including some about obedience to authority and research that clearly seems to have helped them develop their training practices for boot camp. This includes Stanley Milgram's research into Obedience to Authority, which was financed by the National Science Foundation with the support of the Office of Naval Research. It also includes Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment which was supposed to be about prison research. However as I explained in the post about his work, and Milgram's experiments as well in the same post, the claims they made about their work is almost certainly misleading.

Stanley Milgram claimed that he wanted to do research to understand why the Nazi's all blindly obeyed orders, clearly implying that he wanted to learn how to avoid doing the same thing again. However, if he wanted to do that he could have done a much better job teaching the public about when they should stand up to authority. Instead the military seems to have used this research to learn how to convince their recruits to obey authority without question more effectively, which is what the military has been trying to do for centuries. A close look at the Stanford Prison Experiment indicates that it might be an extension of the obedience to Authority experiments, which would explain why those two are often mentioned together and the researchers that did the two experiments both studied together from an early age at the instruction of Professor Irving Janis, who researched "Groupthink" in the fifties.

I went into more detail into this in the post about Zimbardo but there is an enormous amount of evidence including a lot from Zimbardo himself as well as some research from other professors including Professor Philip Greven, who researched how childhood corporal punishment leads to escalating violence and authoritarianism and Professor Alfred McCoy who researched the CIA's psychological research into torture programs and indicated that Irving Janis and Stanley Milgram were almost certainly involved in this.

There is also almost certainly a lot of research into propaganda about how they train their recruits to hate the enemy and this includes stereo types about how they're evil and it only shows one side of the issue which often ignores many of the most important facts including many of the lies that get us into these wars in the first place like the Weapons of mass destruction that weren't there in the second Gulf War and were only there in the first because the U.S. sold them to Saddam Hussein before the war, as well as the Gulf of Tonkin incident which was proven to be faked and many other lies that soldiers are trained not to scrutinize.

But they can't convince them to believe everything which is why some of this comes out in some of the articles including the following excerpts; even if they could indoctrinate them to believe everything there would still have major problems since many of the most important decisions they would be making would be based on lies.

Casualties of War, Part I: The hell of war comes home

Before the murders started, Anthony Marquez’s mom dialed his sergeant at Fort Carson to warn that her son was poised to kill.

It was February 2006, and the 21-year-old soldier had not been the same since being wounded and coming home from Iraq eight months before. He had violent outbursts and thrashing nightmares. He was devouring pain pills and drinking too much. He always packed a gun.

“It was a dangerous combination. I told them he was a walking time bomb,” said his mother, Teresa Hernandez.

His sergeant told her there was nothing he could do. Then, she said, he started taunting her son, saying things like, “Your mommy called. She says you are going crazy.”

Eight months later, the time bomb exploded when her son used a stun gun to repeatedly shock a small-time drug dealer in Widefield over an ounce of marijuana, then shot him through the heart. ....

“The Army trains you to be this way. In bayonet training, the sergeant would yell, ‘What makes the grass grow?’ and we would yell, ‘Blood! Blood! Blood!’ as we stabbed the dummy. The Army pounds it into your head until it is instinct: Kill everybody, kill everybody. And you do. Then they just think you can just come home and turn it off. ... If they don’t figure out how to take care of the soldiers they trained to kill, this is just going to keep happening.” .....

The Colorado Springs Police Department doesn’t track the crime statistics of individual units, but according to the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, jail bookings of military personnel as a whole increased 66 percent in the 12 months after the brigade returned.

The “Kumbaya period” lasted about six months, soldiers said.

Eastridge said he blew through almost $27,000, mostly drinking at bars, but the first thing he did was buy guns: pistols, shotguns and an assault rifle similar to the one he carried in Iraq.

“After being in Iraq, it feels like everyone is the enemy,” he said. “You feel like you need a gun so they don’t come to get you.” .....

This spring, Eastridge said it was funny that sex and drugs were what got him court-martialed, considering the things he did in Iraq, “Things that can never be told, but that everybody knew about and approved of — basically war crimes.” Complete article

There are numerous stories of the military denying to acknowledge the problems of PTSD and even ridiculing those that might be subject to it making many people reluctant to report it which is virtually guaranteed to make the problem worse. This is part of a culture of hazing that is designed to keep people in line and encourage recruits to follow orders and go along with the crowd without question. It is virtually guaranteed to increase the paranoia which war also seems to escalate.

Philip Greven's research in Spare the Child demonstrates how paranoia often starts in early childhood when children are abused. It is hard to tell if specific recruits went through this without further research but there are numerous examples where the paranoia that may begin in early childhood could escalate as a result of bullying or hazing later in life including in the military.

One of the leading military spokespeople to refute this and perhaps provide additional propaganda that attempts to distract the public is Lt. Col. Dave Grossman author of The “Myth” of our Returning Veterans and Violent Crime which seems to refute the "lethal Warriors" series as well as the New York Times series and many other stories. He refers to someone that tells him that "Over a hundred veterans have come home and committed murder!" which clearly seems to refer to the New York Times story. In this series they indicate that this isn't a complete list and they also refer to another 349 over a six year period that includes all veterans that they were able to find newspaper articles.

Dave Grossman seems to make the assumption that these are all the murders that are taking place; then he goes on to cite selective statistics from The Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics and does his own math the come to the conclusion that the murder rate for "is less than a tenth of that for other citizens of the same age." However the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics provides numerous statistics that contradict that. As I indicated in the previous post which cites the same source they claim that the rate of imprisonment for veterans is less than half for veterans but the rate of violent crime for veterans is higher than non-veterans. This is a much smaller difference than Dave Grossman indicates; but as I explained in the previous post, it would be even smaller if they considered the fact that a large portion of the highest crime areas are in cities where the military doesn't recruit as much.

My previous post also cites some of the same sources but it includes links to those sources so that they can be confirmed or refuted and I have no doubt that it is far closer to the truth than Grossman's statistics. Grossman isn't the only one that seems to be presenting selective use of statistics to support their claims so when considering statistics it may not be helpful without some background to determine if they're out of context.

Grossman also expresses shock that when Vietnam veterans returned they were accused of being "baby killers" as if there was no justification for this, which in some cases there wasn't; however there were a lot of examples where there was some justification for it. The most famous example is of course the My Lai massacre where evidence indicated that there was a large amount of killing of innocent civilians. There were many more of these incidents which didn't receive as much attention. And even when it wasn't taking place up close and personal bombing raids routinely kill large numbers of civilians.

This is generally refereed to as "collateral damage."

When Timothy McVeigh used the same language he learned in the military to refer to the American children he killed as "collateral damage" everyone was outraged.

If it is unjustifiable for McVeigh to use that term when talking about American children how can it be justified when our military does it?

What ever reason Grossman comes up with can anyone expect the opposing side to accept this double standard?

On top of that there are even several examples recently where returning veterans struck out in rage and killed their own children when they couldn't control their own emotions. That doesn't mean that stereotyping all veterans as being "baby killers" is justified but the self righteous indignation at the suggestion that members of the military have killed babies isn't justified either.

David Grossman's argument doesn't stand up to simple reviews which could make it a far better argument in support of the assumption that there is a big problem with soldiers turning to violence when they don't get treatment, or at least those that really need it. If he was right about his claims then shouldn't he be able to come up with a better argument that stands up to scrutiny?

Perhaps this indicates that it is very bad propaganda; or is it?

The quality of propaganda is often not how good it is when it is held up to scrutiny but whether they manage to prevent it from being scrutinized in the first place by their target audience. This propaganda isn't fooling many people that actually scrutinize it but there are a lot of people that are discouraged from checking different sources at all. The New York Times cites one of the soldiers who plead guilty to manslaughter who devours books by David Grossman’s “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.”

Many people in the military may only be inclined to read material that supports the ideology that they're trained to believe in during training or that other soldiers might be inclined to read. If some of them do read only certain types of books that support their ideology and don't rad material like the New York Times article or David Phillips "Lethal Warriors" series then this is when propaganda is most successful because it means some of these people amy not get both sides of the story.

Fortunately that clearly doesn't appear to be the case for all military men, including many that ahve become involved in Iraq veterans against the war or done more to address PTSD but those that don't might be more at risk, since they might be less inclined to acknowledge possible problems or get treatment if necessary.

Apparently in this book Grossman blames media violence for our problem with mass shootings, which is almost certainly at least partially true. He also indicates that the defenders of the media are biased because they get their money from the media which is also almost certainly true; however the same could just as easily be said for him and that he gets his money from the military. He claims that media violence teaches the public the same way the military does only without the safeguards.

The large volume of veterans that are involved in mass shootings or other kinds of violence clearly raises some doubts about whether these so called safeguards are actually working.

The real myth isn't that many veterans have problem with PTSD or that there might be a problem with the way the military trains veterans; it is that the military has been "fighting for our freedom" for decades. The war in Vietnam, which Grossman doesn't seem to question at all in his article was based on lies; the Vietnamese never supported the military government that the U.S. propped up; instead they provided more support for the opposing side. The war in Iraq was also based on lies about weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist although during the first one Saddam did have weapons of mass destruction including chemical weapons since the U.S. sold them to him.

This is typical of our military activities for decades the CIA conducted coups in Iran and Guatemala; they armed both sides of the Iran/Iraq war they helped create the Mujaheddin which became the Taliban and AL-Qaeda and they armed many of our other enemies before they became enemies. Environmentalists Against War created an extensive list of wars that were fought based on misleading information or outright lies in 'Fighting for Freedom' -- America's Abiding Myth; and this can also be confirmed in numerous books that the traditional media rarely if ever mention. In many cases the traditional media even acknowledge many of the lies; but they do so briefly then quickly forget about them while repeating the propaganda that contradicts the truth over and over again.

Both the attacks on 9/11 and the Boston bombings were blowback from people that were angry about U.S. activities abroad. Rather than protecting the country the military has been inciting those that have been fighting us. it is only an enormous amount of propaganda that makes it seem as if the U.S. has been "fighting for freedom."

This propaganda is coming from both the so-called left and the right, including Rachel Maddow, who many people on the left seem to consider more reliable than most media spokespeople since she occasionally does a better job covering some subjects, or at least she seems to. She attempted to dismiss any claim that PTSD or military training might have something to do with the Fort Hood shooting with the following statements:

Rachel Maddow Rebukes 'Lazy Civilian Media' On Fort Hood Coverage 04/04/2014

Maddow said Thursday that the coverage seemed to suggest "that the most important deciding factor on what explains the [shooting] must be the fact that the suspected perpetrator is an Iraq War veteran. As if veterans are uniquely dangerous. As if knowing the suspected shooter served in Iraq explains why this happened." ....

"If we think of every other mass shooting in America as somehow particular to the circumstances of that shooting but this one as explained away as 'Oh he was an Iraq vet'... not only does that not help us understand what happened here, it is an offense against every other veteran who right now is getting that stigma shoveled onto them by a lazy civilian world and a lazy civilian media who find this dangerous veteran stereotype to be an easier thing to point to than America has a bad mass shooting problem." Complete article

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Friday, August 22, 2014

Teach a soldier to kill and he just might

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