he
thundering voice rang out from the large speakers situated across the
damp, cement floor: “Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real
Americans love the sting and clash of battle…you are here because you
are real men and all real men like to fight. Americans love a winner.
Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards.
Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell
for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost or
will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an
American.” The words surged violently from the mesh screens, ostensibly
louder by the second. A quick glance across the concrete quad produced a
herd of silhouettes, all frantically running to their predetermined
spots in the haze of a 4:00 AM fog.
“We don’t want yellow
cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they
will go home after this war and breed more cowards. The brave men will
breed more brave men. Kill off the God-damned cowards and we will have a
nation of brave men.” It was the summer of 1994. I was 19-years-old.
The words screaming from those speakers—a daily sound that I would
become accustomed to over the course of a few weeks—were those of U.S.
Army General George Patton (through the voice of George C. Scott). The
location was Columbia, South Carolina, though it might as well have been
halfway across the world because the only things I would see for the
next two months were marching drills, firing ranges, fields of mud and
grass, and miles upon miles of indistinguishable running terrain. This
was U.S. Army basic training and I was one of thousands of recruits
eager to soak up the glory of “defending our country.”
Military Training
Everything that is done
in basic military training is done with intent. The primary goal is to
develop and condition killing machines—human beings who are capable of
exterminating other human beings on command. The corollary effects of
this development are vast. The transforming of one’s self to a component
of a “well-oiled machine.” The suppressing of human emotion, and even
human reason. The extraction of, as Patton suggested, cowardice—in other
words, compassion, understanding, empathy, or anything that would cause
a soldier to stop and question what they are doing at any given time.
The ultimate goal of this training is to make one robotic—the finished
product of a process of dehumanization, whereas one is forced to shed
elements of humanity out of necessity. In doing so, runs the risk of
viewing others in less than humane ways. It is difficult to deny that,
in the event a person finds themselves in the midst of war, this
training becomes invaluable. The chaotic, unpredictable, and
nerve-rattling environment that is inherent with any battlefield does
not allow for time to think. It does not allow for time to reflect. It
only allows for conditioned reaction—proactive and reactive measures
that are designed to create efficient “soldiering” and optimum survival.
Soldiers lose a great deal of
autonomy in this process. On a hot and hazy July afternoon, just a few
days before my introduction to the words of Patton, as I joined hundreds
of others in a frantic scramble off a convoy of refurbished school
buses, I lost myself. I became a blank slate. I became a shell of a
young man, readily available for shaping, sculpting, and conditioning as
my new makers saw fit. Life suddenly took on a whole new meaning. I was
now accountable to others, as they were accountable to me; and our
accountability was on parade for all to see. If anyone stepped out of
line, questioned anything, considered alternatives, or attempted to
think for themselves, their “irresponsible defiance” was immediately
transferred to public humiliation. However, our forced accountability to
one another—something we as a society could certainly use more of—was
not an issue. It was the underlying purpose of this accountability that
becomes questionable in retrospect. Ultimately, it rested on the
acceptance of our roles as tools of war, something that would develop
steadily in our subconscious. Already armed with abstract notions of
patriotism, American exceptionalism, and moral superiority, our
self-inscribed greater good was now supplemented with an inescapable
obligation to fulfill orders. This is the inherent psychology of
soldiering.
An Internalized Culture of War and Oppression
In the United States,
the process of objectification begins at a young age. Americans are
conditioned by everything from television, music, and marketing to
sports, pornography—and even their parents—to objectify others. Gender
roles play a major part in this process. Males are taught to objectify
the female body and females are taught to embrace this objectification
by basing their self-worth on outward appearance. Correspondingly,
females are taught to objectify males as dominant protectors and males
are taught to embrace this objectification by basing their worth on
machismo, aggression, and physical prowess. According
to philosopher Martha Nussbaum, objectification occurs in various ways.
A person may be objectified if they are treated:
Our collective
conditioning runs the gamut of Nussbaum’s list. First and foremost,
objectification (or reification) is a prerequisite to our dominant
economic system of capitalism. By objectifying others, people become
more suitable participants in this scheme that thrives off exploitation
and alienation. With this conditioning, the CEO is more apt at seeing
employees as numbers on a spreadsheet, the banker is able to view
clients as nothing more than borrowers, the landlord is able to view a
family simply as renters, and the boss sees nothing but workers who need
to be prodded like cattle. People, essentially, become sources of
income and profit to those who are willing to use them as such. And,
perhaps more importantly, these “sources” are gradually shaped into
willing participants along the way, apathetically giving in to systems
of power and control.
This coercive nature
naturally extends into the socio-political realm, where wealthy
politicians are more than willing to use working class children as pawns
of war, allowing their lives to be extinguished and bodies to be
mangled for stock portfolios. This dehumanizing process also creates a
world where these same politicians see citizens as nothing but fickle
subjects, the government seeks to control “the mob,” the soldier sees
only enemies, and the police officer only criminals in desperate need of
order and discipline.
Essentially,
the more we dehumanize interactions, or the more we make human contact
impersonal, the more willing we are to engage in forceful, aggressive,
and unempathic interactions with others—behaviors that are (it’s worth
noting) viewed as positive attributes within the sports world many of us
grow up in, and the business world many of us enter as adults. In this
sense, it is not competition—in and of itself—that represents a problem;
but, rather, it is the objectifying nature of coercive relations that
pose as competition within any hierarchical society.
The act of objectifying
others—whether treating them as “interchangeable tools” to be used at
your disposal or simply stunting their self-determination in some
manner—is a reciprocal process that is internalized by both parties. The
objectifier, through the process of dehumanizing the objectified,
becomes less human themselves. This internalization is what allows for a
culture of war and oppression to persist. America’s “war culture” is
shaped by a myriad of factors. First and foremost, we are an imperialist
country. The U.S. has been at war, involved in a foreign conflict, or
militarily occupied foreign territory (or all 3) for 216 years of its
237-year existence.
War is our business,
and we do it well. And, yes, Americans have benefitted in some form or
another from war (i.e., the formation of an “industrialized middle
class”). However, these “benefits” haven’t come without sacrifice—the
most prominent of which is a collective misery that has been brought
to much of the world’s population through colonialism, geopolitical land
grabs, and the theft of natural resources. War is, essentially,
nourishment for a parasitical corporate hierarchy that takes what it
wants and discards the scraps, allowing them to “trickle down” to the
rest of the world, including the working class in the U.S.
With a vast majority of
Americans coming from this working class, widespread victimization—and a
stubborn acceptance of it—represents a “rite of passage” in our
culture. Whether through impoverished circumstances, socioeconomic
limitations, substandard education, a general sense of exploitation that
is realized as we grow older, or the grueling, existential crisis we
all seem to face at one point or another, we are all victims of
repression and exploitation on some level. This has never been more
evident than during the past four decades. And the notion that we are to
avoid “the victim card” at all costs—as it is supposedly a sign of
“weakness”—is laughable when considering the immense amount of injustice
we face as a whole: drowned out by corporate power, strangled by
government suppression, working more and more while making less and
less, forced into debt, dealing with skyrocketing costs of living,
chained by student debt, etc.
The fact that soldiers
and police officers—the hired guns of the ruling classes—almost always
come from working-class backgrounds is especially interesting when
considering their roles as enforcers of the very ideology that attacks
their class peers. However, when combined with this process of
objectification that has become commonplace, an immersion into a
deep-seated “war culture” and militarism, and the robotic programming of
military or police training, it comes as little surprise that a
demographic consisting predominantly of white males is able to complete
this transition from working-class oppressed to working-class oppressor
with relative ease. Educator and philosopher Paulo Freire, eloquently
describes this process of transformation through internalization: “The
very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the
contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were
shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be
oppressors. This is their model of humanity…. At this level, their
perception of themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not yet
signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction; the one
pole aspires not to liberation, but to identification with its opposite
pole.”
This widespread process
of internalization is crucial to those wishing to maintain an
inherently unjust and oppressive status quo. For, in order to keep such a
system intact, the very few who benefit from this arrangement must rely
on some members of the working class to ignore or shed themselves of
class-consciousness on their way to breaking class ranks and carrying
out the violent acts needed to sustain it. Without this internalization,
human beings—and especially those coming from the working classes—would
be left to act on their own interests, something that would not serve
the ruling classes well.
Militarism and White Supremacy
Any discussion
involving American militarism must include the underpinnings of white
supremacy, an all-encompassing ideology which has ravaged the lives and
communities of non-white peoples for centuries. White supremacy is
fueled by objectification and, more specifically, the collective
dehumanization of people of color. Its power lies in the fact that it
not only transcends the fundamental societal arrangement of class, but
that it is embraced largely by working class whites who have shown a
willingness to internalize and project their own oppression on others—in
this case, the non-white working classes.
Not surprisingly, this
foundation extends far beyond the geographic confines of the U.S.,
representing the basis for which the White Man’s Burden and age-old
foreign policies like the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine
operate. The ties that bind what Martin Luther King, Jr. once referred
to as “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism” cannot
be underestimated, as they provide the self-righteous, societal
“justification” necessary to carry out indiscriminate acts of aggression
both here and abroad. Social theorist bell hooks’s assessment of George
Zimmerman, the self-appointed neighborhood watch-person turned murderer
of Trayvon Martin, captures this mindset: “White supremacy has taught
him that all people of color are threats irrespective of their behavior.
Capitalism has taught him that, at all costs, his property can and must
be protected. Patriarchy has taught him that his masculinity has to be
proved by the willingness to conquer fear through aggression; that it
would be unmanly to ask questions before taking action.”
When
Muhammad Ali refused to fight in Vietnam, famously stating, “I ain’t
got no quarrel with them Viet Cong; No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,”
he was referring to the dominant power structure of white supremacy
that had not only subjugated him in his own country, but also had global
implications regarding imperialism, colonialism, and ever-increasing
militarism. Ali, along with other conscious Black Americans, recognized
life in the U.S. as a microcosm of the war in Vietnam. Whether in
Birmingham, Alabama or the Ben Tre Province in South Vietnam, black and
brown people were being murdered indiscriminately. African Americans had
their share of enemies at home—Bull Connor, George Wallace, the Ku Klux
Klan, the FBI, Jim Crow—and, for good reason, had no vested interest in
wars abroad. Their priorities were defense and self-preservation in
their homeland, not offense and destruction in Vietnam.
Racism is a cousin to
militarism and its influence on shaping American culture over the years
is undeniable. Despite misconceptions, reconstruction in the
post-slavery U.S. was no more kind to Black Americans than during
colonial years, especially in the southern states. “In the last decades
of the nineteenth century, the lynching of Black people in the Southern
and border states became an institutionalized method used by whites to
terrorize Blacks and maintain white supremacy,” explains Robert A.
Gibson. “In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was
deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro which led
white mobs to turn to ‘lynch law’ as a means of social control.” These
lynchings were almost always spontaneous, rooted in white supremacist
and racist emotion, and void any semblance of due process. They were
also mostly supported—whether through direct supervision or “turning a
blind eye”—by local politicians, judges, and police forces.
According to Tuskegee
Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 3,437 African
Americans were lynched in the United States—roughly 50 per year, or a
little over 4 per month through the lifespan of an entire generation.
Essentially, for nearly a century, “freed” slaves were still very much
at the mercy of, as WEB DuBois once noted, “men who hated and despised
Negroes and regarded it as loyalty to blood, patriotism to country, and
filial tribute to the fathers to lie, steal or kill in order to
discredit these black folk.” This general hatred was not only projected
by white citizens throughout the country, but remained institutionalized
by laws of racial segregation—also known as “Jim Crow”—in much of the
U.S. until the 1960s.
While the courageous
and awe-inspiring Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was successful in
curbing some government-backed segregation, the ugly stain of white
supremacy has endured well into the 21st century through a convoluted
lens of extreme poverty, poor education, lack of opportunity, and
disproportionate imprisonment. It has become blatantly evident within
the world of “criminal justice”—and more specifically through the ways
in which law enforcement engages and interacts with Black communities
across America.
Modern forms of
lynching have gained a foothold with laws such as New York City’s “Stop
and Frisk” and Florida’s infamous “Stand Your Ground”—with both
providing legal outlets to harass and kill Black Americans at an
alarming rate. However, even before such laws, police officers had
terrorized inner-cities for decades. The most glaring example occurred
in 1991 with the beating of Rodney King—an incident that uncovered a
deliberate and widespread brand of racist policing as well as “an
organizational culture that alienates itself from the public it is
designed to serve” while teaching “to command and confront, not to
communicate.”
The 2012 murder of
Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman served as a sobering reminder of the
tragically subhuman value that has been placed on black life in America.
Martin’s death rightfully brought on cries of an “open season on young
black men,” while another 2012 murder, this time of 17-year-old Jordan
Davis—who was shot and killed by Michael Dunn in broad daylight while
sitting in a car with three friends—reiterated this fact. Like Martin,
Davis was unarmed and posed no threat—and certainly not enough of a
threat to justify lethal force. In Davis’s case, the murderer, Dunn,
indiscriminately fired eight bullets into the vehicle where Davis and
his friends were sitting. The public reaction to the two murders (adults
killing unarmed children, mind you), especially from those who somehow
felt compelled to defend the killers, as well as the subsequent trials,
the posthumous (and false) “criminalizing” of the victims with
decontextualized images and information, and the total absence of
justice on both accounts—all products of a long-standing culture of
white supremacy—exposed the lie that is “post-racial” America.
However, these
reactions were and are nothing new. One study estimates that “one Black
person is killed every 24 hours by police, security guards, or
vigilantes.” Furthermore, “43% of the(se) shootings occurred after an
incident of racial profiling,” Adam Hudson tells us. “This means police
saw a person who looked or behaved ‘suspiciously’ largely because of
their skin color and attempted to detain the suspect before killing
them. ”
Many of the victims of
these “extrajudicial” killings posed no threat at the time of their
murders, as was the case with Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Oscar Grant,
Aaron Campbell, Orlando Barlow, Steven Eugene Washington, Ervin
Jefferson, Kendrec Mcdade, Kimani Gray, Wendell Allen, Ronald Madison,
James Brisette, Tavares McGill, and Victor Steen, to name a few. Some,
like Brisette (17), Gray (16), McGill (16), and Steen (17), were
children. Others, like Madison and Steven Eugene Washington, were
mentally ill or autistic. All were unarmed.
If the Rodney King
trial taught us anything, it was that officers in the U.S. can
inexplicably beat an unarmed and non-threatening Black man to near-death
and face no consequences. Twenty years later, this unaccountability on
the part of law enforcement has evolved into an overly-aggressive and
often fatal approach to interacting with innocent, young black men. This
has never been more evident than during a rash of indiscriminate and
blatant acts of police brutality in recent years. All people of color
have become viable targets, and some of the most alarming examples have
been directed at children and people with special needs and
disabilities.
In 2009, a 16-year-old
autistic boy, Oscar Guzman, was chased into his family’s restaurant by
two Chicago police officers after they questioned him for “watching
pigeons.” Guzman, who was posing no threat and breaking no laws, was
“struck in the head with a retractable baton, causing a four-centimeter
laceration that had to be closed with staples at a nearby hospital.”
In 2011, two Miami-Dade
officers stopped 22-year- old Gilberto Powell, who has Down syndrome,
due to a “suspicious bulge” coming from his waistband. When the officers
confronted Powell and began patting him down, Powell became frightened
and ran. The officers caught up and beat him. The “bulge” turned out to
be a colostomy bag. Powell was unarmed and breaking no laws.
In November 2013, a
14-year-old child was “roughed up” and tasered by police in Tullytown,
Pennsylvania after being caught shoplifting at a local Wal-Mart. The
child suffered a broken nose, multiple abrasions, and two swollen and
black eyes as a result. He was unarmed and posed no threat to the
officers.
On
January 3, 2014, 64-year-old Pearl Pearson was pulled over by police on
suspicion of leaving the scene of an accident. After Pearson failed to
show his hands when instructed by officers, a “7-minute altercation
ensued” and Pearson was severely beaten. He was unarmed and posed no
threat. The reason he did not show his hands as ordered: he’s deaf—a
fact that is displayed on a sign attached to his car.
Other examples include
the unnecessary brutalization of incapacitated individuals, as well as
the emergence of a universal, reckless “shoot-first” mentality. The most
recognizable incident was the 2009 street execution of Oscar Grant by
Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) Policeman, Johannes Mehserle. Following a
brush-up with other passengers, Grant and a friend were apprehended by
officers who had them lay prone on the ground. Grant was “restrained,
unarmed,” and had “his hands behind his back,” when the officer shot him
in the back, killing him. The entire incident was caught on video.
Shockingly, occurrences
like this have become common with relatively little fanfare. In May
2013, 33-year-old David Sal Silva was beaten to death by California
officers after he was stopped and questioned for suspected public
intoxication. “When I got outside I saw two officers beating a man with
batons, and they were hitting his head so every time they would swing, I
could hear the blows to his head,” said witness Ruben Ceballos, who
told the Californian the noise was so loud it woke him up. Sal
Silva, unarmed, “begged for his life” before being bludgeoned to death
for no apparent reason.
In September 2013,
following a car accident, 24-year-old Jonathan Ferrell was shot 10 times
by Charlotte police officer, Randall Kerrick. After knocking on the
door of a nearby home, Ferrell spotted the officer and began running
towards him for help when Kerrick opened fire. Ferrell was unarmed,
posed no threat, and was merely seeking assistance after accidentally
crashing his car into a tree line off the road. He died instantly. That
same month, Long Beach police officers were captured on a video posted
to YouTube repeatedly tasering and striking Porfirio Lopez with a baton
as he lay in the street. Lopez was unarmed and posed no threat to the
officers.
In October 2013,
Sheriff’s deputies in Santa Rosa, California shot and killed a
13-year-old boy who was carrying a pellet gun. The boy, Andy Lopez, was
walking down the sidewalk on his way to return the “low-powered, air
pellet gun” to a friend who he had borrowed it from. Before realizing
the gun was a toy, and despite having no reason to believe the child was
a threat, an officer shot him dead.
In 1968, Huey P. Newton
noted that, “the country cannot implement its racist program without
the guns. And the guns are the military and the police.” Forty-five
years later, this comment rings true. Institutions and lawmakers alone
cannot carry out racial and class-based oppression on their own—they
need willing participants. Domestically, police officers must become
these willing participants. And their psychological makeup, which is
shaped by a process of objectification and a prolonged internalization
of “war culture”—is crucial. On a global scale, this task is left to our
soldiers—working-class women and men who are routinely placed in harm’s
way for the wrong reasons, many of whom suffer a compounded and severe
mental toll in the process.
The Mental Toll and Savagery of War
America’s “war culture”
goes far beyond psychological preparation and conditioning. Ultimately,
and most significantly, it includes the physical projection of this
collective mentality. It includes, as social commentator Joe Rogan put
it, “sending these big metal machines that kill people” halfway across
the world. The young, working-class women and men (like myself) who
become the willing participants of this projection are the very products
of this conditioned mentality. As children, our inherent submission to
objectification and subsequent immersion into “war culture” makes this
possible.
Unfortunately, the
effects of war are real. They are shocking. And they are horrifying. The
mental health effects on the participants of these wars are vast,
especially with regards to the modern battlefield. Soldiers are
returning to the U.S. with a variety of such conditions—most notably
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI),
depression, and anxiety.
Dr. Deborah Warden, of
the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center, noted in a report for the Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation
that elements specifically related to modern warfare have resulted in a
significant increase in head trauma-related injuries. Two major factors
in this development are technological advances in protective equipment
and a relative increase in “blast attacks.” “In the current conflict,
mortality has declined and it is believed that this is because of the
advances in body armor worn by the military personnel,” explains Dr.
Warden. “With the high-quality body armor, individuals who may have died
in previous wars may survive with possible injuries to extremities and
head and neck.” In addition to this, “more TBI may be occurring in the
current war because of the frequency of explosive or blast attacks.
Military sources report that approximately two thirds of army war zone
evacuations are due to blast,” and “88% of injuries seen at second
echelon treatment sites were due to blast.”
In a study conducted
nearly 6 years after the beginning of the U.S. occupations of Iraq and
Afghanistan, it was determined that, out of 1.64 million military
service members who were deployed into these arenas, “approximately
300,000 individuals currently suffer from PTSD or major depression, and
that 320,000 individuals experienced a probable TBI during deployment.”
Additionally, “about one-third of those previously deployed have at
least one of these three conditions, and about 5 percent report symptoms
of all three.” A separate study found that “21 percent of active duty
soldiers and 43 percent of reserve soldiers developed symptoms
significantly related to mental health disorders.”
According to another
study: “15,204 soldiers who had completed their first deployment
participated in two questionnaires about their mental health and sleep
patterns from 2001 to 2008. During baseline questionnaires before
deployment, most soldiers did not have any psychiatric disorders or a
history of one. However, during follow-up questionnaires, 522 soldiers
had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 151 had anxiety, and 303 were
depressed. Fifty percent of the soldiers studied reported
combat-related trauma and 17 percent reported having insomnia prior to
their deployment.”
The increase in mental
illness among soldiers has been identified as the main cause of
increasing suicide rates. In 2012, the Army reported that 325 suicides
occurred within its ranks —“Our highest on record,” according to Lt.
Gen. Howard Bromberg, deputy chief of staff and personnel for the Army.
Naturally, within any arena of combat where young, impressionable adults
are moved around like pawns on a chessboard, human emotion runs wild.
Despite the robotic
conditioning that occurs during basic training, this chaotic environment
has a tendency to penetrate the human psyche, bringing about an extreme
range of feelings, vexations, actions, and reactions. Human beings are
simply not equipped to handle the terrors that accompany war—the sight
of human corpses, charred and mangled bodies, some of them children—in
their totality. And coping skills, whether inherent or forced, vary in
effectiveness from person to person. Unfortunately, some cope by
internalizing the terror. In these cases, we see the worst in humanity.
The
infamous Wikileaks video that leaked in 2010, showing “thirty-eight
grisly minutes of U.S. airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in
2007”—including two Reuters newspeople—puts this savagery into focus
“not because it shows us something we didn’t know, but because we can
watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down
from above in a hellish rain of fire.” The video footage, which
immediately went viral, came on the heels of the haunting images taken
at Abu Ghraib where Iraqi prisoners were physically and sexually abused,
tortured, raped, sodomized, and killed by American and Iraqi soldiers.
Other such incidents were inevitable. A February 12 nighttime raid by
U.S. Special Operations forces near Gardez killed 5 people, including 2
pregnant women. Another airstrike by U.S. Special Operations forces
helicopters on February 23 killed more than 20 civilians and injured
numerous others. Among the injured was a 4-year-old boy who lost both of
his legs. A few months later, during a visit with the child at a
hospital in Kabul, Afghan President Hamid Karzai “scooped him up from
his mattress and walked out to the hospital courtyard,” and asked, “Who
injured you?” as helicopters passed overhead. “The boy, crying alongside
his relatives, pointed at the sky.” A few months later, in April,
American troops “raked a large passenger bus with gunfire” near
Kandahar, Afghanistan, killing 5 civilians and wounding 18.
In January 2014,
numerous photos showing U.S. Marines burning and looting the dead bodies
of Iraqi soldiers were obtained by the media. “Two of the photos show a
Marine apparently pouring a flammable liquid on two bodies. Other shots
show the remains on fire and, after the flames went out, charred. A
Marine in another photo is shown apparently rifling through clothing
amid one corpse’s skeletal remains. Another Marine is shown posing in a
crouch with his rifle pointing toward a human skull.” Overall, more than
a dozen bodies were shown in the photos.
Considering the
savagery that accompanies such an environment, it is not difficult to
see how undervalued human life becomes. The soldiers who carry out,
witness, or even hear of this brutality are almost certain to suffer
long- standing mental health effects. According to the Department of
Veterans Affairs website, symptoms of PTSD include “bad memories or
nightmares” and “flashbacks”; triggered and impulsive emotions; intense
feelings of fear, guilt, or shame; and “hyperarousal”—feeling jittery,
paranoid, and “always on the lookout for danger.” The effects of TBI
include numerous sensory problems, depression and anxiety, and severe
mood swings and/or aggressive behaviors, among many other things.
When all is said and
done, and the politicians decide to bring them home, the soldiers who
are lucky enough to return in one physical piece are often shattered
into fragments of mental and emotional distress. Often, they face
limited options—one of the most common of which is transitioning to a
career in law enforcement.
From Fallujah to Philadelphia: Bringing the Wars Home
Police training mimics military training, both physically and
mentally. Transition programs that funnel soldiers to police forces have
become common at all levels of government. The changing face of law
enforcement is indicative of this process as forces that are
traditionally advertised to “protect and serve” have become noticeably
militaristic. Perhaps even more concerning is the fact that soldiers,
many of whom carry the mental baggage of war, are being streamlined from
the streets of Fallujah to the city blocks of the US.
In a recent article
for “Police: The Law Enforcement Magazine,” Mark Clark tells us that
military veterans seeking employment in police ranks “is happening right
now in numbers unseen since the closing days of the Vietnam War.” To
assist with job placement and transitioning, organizations like “Hire
Heroes USA” works with “about 100 veterans each week” – at least 20% of
whom are seeking law enforcement jobs. Law enforcement agencies like the
Philadelphia Police Department and San Jose
PD, which boast of being structured as “a paramilitary organization,”
actively seek military veterans by awarding preferential treatment. Many
police departments across the country have added increased incentives
and benefits, including the acceptance of military active duty time
towards retirement, to acquire veterans.
An October 2013 edition of the Army Times
reports that “more than seven in 10 (local law enforcement agencies)
said they attend military-specific job fairs, and three quarters
reported developing relationships with the Labor Department’s local
veterans employment representatives.” Also, “Half said they work with
military transition assistance programs, and half also said they develop
relationships with local National Guard and reserve units.” Most local
departments also have some type of veterans hiring preference, and “more
than 90 percent reported having at least one vet in a senior leadership
position.”
An example of this trend can be found in Hillsborough County,
Florida, where the Sheriff’s department is seeking to hire “200 law
enforcement deputies and another 130 detention deputies,” and Major Alan
Hill has set his sights on veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to fill
these roles. Ironically, Hill points to “coping skills” as a main
reason. “A lot of them know how to operate under stress. All of them
know how to take orders,” Hill said.
“We want to get the best of the best, and bring them in here, and give
them a home, and allow them to continue to serve.” Other departments
across the country — such as the City of Austin Police Department and
the Webb County Sheriff’s Office, both in Texas; the Denver Police
Department in Colorado; the Hillsborough County and Orange County
sheriff’s offices in Florida; and the Tucson Police Department in
Arizona — have initiated similar efforts.
The correlation between the mental baggage of war, the increased
hiring of military combat veterans as police officers, and an observable
escalation of aggressive and violent police brutality is difficult to
ignore. Police departments have screening processes, but many are
lacking. The lingering effects from being in a war zone are
unquestionable, and signs and symptoms which often are suppressed during
“downtimes” tend to surface and intensify under distress — a common
occurrence for police officers.
A 2006 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found
that “19 percent of the 912 police officers surveyed in the New Orleans
Police Department reported PTSD symptoms and 26 percent reported
symptoms of major depression.”
A 2008 report by the US Department of Justice concluded that “police
who have unresolved mental health concerns — whether or not those
concerns are associated with their combat-related experiences — are at
risk of harming themselves or others because of the nature of their
jobs.”
Furthermore, the “mental health effects of combat deployment can
manifest themselves in the daily activities of police work with more
severity than perhaps other lines of work.” Specifically, “Officers’
combat experiences can affect how they use their weapons, their
adherence to use-of-force policies, how they drive their police
vehicles, and how they treat citizens with whom they come into contact.”
Despite the potential dangers of these mental health effects, police
departments fail to adequately assess them during the evaluation and
hiring process. And even in cases where they are considered, the
presence of such conditions are either (1) intentionally hidden by
candidates, (2) undetectable due to their impulsive nature, or (3)
simply not considered a reasonable basis for disqualification.
Soldiers transitioning from military to civilian life will often mask
the psychological effects of combat out of fears of being stigmatized
or disqualified for employment. “Of those reporting a probable TBI, 57 percent had not been evaluated by a physician for brain injury.” In a recent study conducted at the Naval Center for Combat and Operational Stress Control (COCS),
Kara Ballenger-Browning reported that “many of these soldiers are
self-conscious about the diagnosis.” In her findings, Ballenger-Browning
cited a poll where “half of Iraq/Afghanistan combat veterans with
suspected mental disorders believed that receiving treatment would harm
their careers; and another 65% stated that they would be considered weak
for seeking help and many were afraid that their peers would lose
confidence in their abilities.”
The study also focused on military-sponsored “soldier-to-civilian”
transition programs which sought to assist veterans with civilian job
placement. Within such programs, “anonymous questions about PTSD
treatment and future employment dominate online discussion forums, and
many erroneously assume and advise that outside agencies embrace a
‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.” Consequently, “these findings give
reason to believe that veterans may not seek treatment for PTSD, fearing
automatic disqualification from employment based on the diagnosis.”
Since the transition from soldier to police officer has become
commonplace, the COCS study included an assessment of the typical
candidate evaluation process used by police departments to determine how
or if the lingering mental health effects of combat would influence
hiring decisions. Information was gathered from a dozen random
departments throughout the US. The study found that:
- In each case, a psychological evaluation of the applicant was
required; however, a separate evaluation for PTSD was not typically
administered.
- The vast majority stated that a history of PTSD would not result in automatic disqualification.
- Although screening tools, such as the Clinician Administered PTSD
Scale (CAPS), exist to evaluate levels of PTSD severity, no law
enforcement agencies reported using one.
- In cases where mental health diagnoses were known, “most agencies
suggested that medication, including psychotropic medication, was
evaluated to ensure that safe and efficient job performance would not be
adversely affected.”
While many advocate groups view this lack of screening as a positive
thing — because it’s one less obstruction for veterans to face when
seeking employment with law enforcement — it should be concerning to
members of the communities that are subjected to the ill effects of
officers who suffer from combat-related conditions like PTSD or TBI.
“Despite the challenges faced by veterans leaving active-duty military
service for new or existing police careers,” lauds Clark, “the ranks of
police forces are swelling with veterans of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan.” Considering
that one-third of all soldiers returning from deployment suffer from
PTSD, TBI, some form of depressive disorder, or a combination of these,
it’s probable that many of these new recruits who are “swelling the
ranks” are bringing significant mental baggage with them.
The combination of this development with the standard process of
objectification and internalized oppression, as well as the ingrained
mentality of “war culture,” is a volatile one. Add the deliberate
militarization of domestic police forces to the mix and we have an
alarming trend — one that is highlighted by the near-daily occurrence of
indiscriminate police violence across the country.
The Evolution of Domestic Militarism
The militarization of America’s police forces has been a gradual
process which began as blowback from the cultural revolution of the
1960s. Radley Balko, an investigative journalist for the Huffington Post,
has spent much of the past decade following this alarmingly fascistic
development. What Matt Taibbi is to the mortgage banking scandal, and
Jeremy Scahill is to US imperialism, Balko is to the militarization of
domestic law enforcement agencies. Likening modern police forces to a
“standing army,” Balko has made compelling arguments
– using constitutional law and the 13th amendment, as well as deploying
a historical analysis extending back to old English law – that the mere
existence of these forces are unconstitutional.
“We got here by way of a number of political decisions and policies passed over 40 years,” explains
Balko. “There was never a single law or policy that militarized our
police departments – so there was never really a public debate over
whether this was a good or bad thing.”
Over the course of several decades, Balko points to three main
developments that have led to this massive domestic militarization:
First, as a general response to the grassroots militancy of the
Cultural Revolution — which sought greater degrees of liberty, freedom,
and equality — police forces began borrowing from the “special forces”
model of the military. “They were largely a reaction to riots, violent
protest groups like the Black Panthers and Symbionese Liberation Army,
and a couple mass shooting incidents, like the Texas clock tower
massacre in 1966.” This led to the development and proliferation of SWAT
teams. “Darryl Gates started the first SWAT team in L.A. in 1969,” explains Balko. “By 1975, there were 500 of them across the country.”
The second development was the “war on drugs,” which “overlapped” and
developed simultaneously with the reactive militarization of the late
’60s. Balko captures
the vibe: “Nixon was declaring an ‘all-out war on drugs.’ He was
pushing policies like the no-knock raid, dehumanizing drug users and
dealers, and sending federal agents to storm private homes on raids that
were really more about headlines and photo-ops than diminishing the
supply of illicit drugs.” Shortly thereafter, with the arrival of
Reagan, “the two trends converged, and we started to see SWAT teams used
on an almost daily basis – mostly to serve drug warrants.”
Two decades later, domestic militarization reached new heights with
the third development in this evolution: The World Trade Center attacks
of 9/11 and the Patriot Act. Broadening the “war on drugs” to include an
all-encompassing and often-times ambiguous “war on terror” opened the
door for massive increases in “domestic security measures,” which led to
seemingly limitless funding of police forces, the creation of new
“security” agencies such as Homeland Security, and the opportunity for
millions of dollars of profit to be made through the privatization of
these services.
Private corporations like G4S Secure Solutions (formerly “The Wackenhut Corporation”), mimicking their international counterparts like Academi (formerly “Xe Services” and originally “Blackwater“), jumped at the chance to secure government contracts (including US Customs and Border Protection)
and boost revenue. The creation of a “police industrial complex” has
allowed companies like these to benefit from a “business to business
global security market that is estimated to generate revenues
of up to $14.9 billion per year” while being heavily subsidized by
government contracts. As a complementary development, the privatization
of prisons works hand in hand with this newly-found,
multi-billion-dollar law enforcement industry by creating even more
incentive to seek out arrests and incarcerations.
“Federal funding in the billions of dollars has allowed state and
local police departments to gain access to weapons and tactics created
for overseas combat theaters.” In an ongoing study
by the ACLU, which is awaiting responses to “over 260 public records
requests with law enforcement agencies in 25 states,” enough discernable
evidence has been gathered to determine that “the use of military
machinery such as tanks and grenades, as well as counter-terrorism
tactics, encourage overly aggressive policing – too often with
devastating consequences.” The study highlights random developments
across the country:
- A county sheriff’s department in South Carolina has an armored
personnel carrier dubbed “The Peacemaker,” which can shoot weapons that
the U.S. military specifically refrains from using on people.
- New Hampshire police received federal funds for a counter-attack vehicle, asking “what red-blooded American cop isn’t going to be excited about getting a toy like this?”
- Police in North Dakota borrowed a $154 million Predator drone from Homeland Security to arrest a family who refused to return six cows that wandered onto their farm.
- Two SWAT Teams shut down a neighborhood in Colorado for four hours to search for a man suspected of stealing a bicycle and merchandise from Wal-Mart.
- Police in Arkansas announced plans to patrol streets wearing full SWAT gear and carrying AR-15 assault rifles.
Furthermore, during a 2007 House subcommittee hearing, Balko reported a
“1,500% increase in the use of SWAT teams over the last two decades.”
Today, in America, “SWAT teams violently smash into private homes more than 100 times per day.”
The equipment and machinery regularly utilized by local police forces
across the US now mimics that of a war zone. They possess everything
from body armor to high-powered weaponry to tanks, armored vehicles, and
even drones. But why? Are the duties of police officers really as
dangerous as they’re made out to be? Out of approximately 900,000 police
officers in the US, there are roughly 150 fatalities per year. Nearly
100 of these fatalities are accidental; therefore, 50 out of 900,000
officers — or 1 out of every 18,000 (five hundred thousandths of one
percent of the entire force) — are ‘maliciously’ killed each year. The odds of being struck by lightning
over the course of a lifetime are 1 in 3,000. Yet police are armed to
the teeth — a fact that suggests conscious shifts from “defense” to
“offense” and “protecting and serving” to “confronting and repressing.”
Citizens — most notably poor, working class, and people of color — who
are intended to be the beneficiaries of this “protective service” are
now viewed and treated as enemy combatants on a battlefield.
Coming Home to Roost
It was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home
to roost.’ I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the
killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread
unchecked, had finally struck down this country’s Chief Magistrate.
— Malcolm X, explaining his “chickens” quote
America’s culture of war and violence was bound to catch up to all of
us. Over the past decade, yearly US military expenditures more than
doubled from a little over $300 billion in 2001 to over $682 billion in
2013.
US military spending represents 39% of global spending — more than the
combined spending of China, Russia, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Saudi
Arabia, Germany, India, Italy, Canada, and Australia. Since 1945, the
US military has invaded, intervened in, or occupied, at least 50
countries.
Currently, the US operates and/or controls between 700 and 800 military
bases worldwide, a list that includes locations in 63 countries. In
addition to these bases, there are 255,065 US military personnel
deployed in 156 countries worldwide.
This global military presence has real and often disastrous consequences for human life. In the 2011 book, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars,
author John Tirman estimates that “between six and seven million people
died in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq alone, the majority of them civilians.”
However, wartime casualties pale in comparison to the lingering
effects, chaos, and disorder stemming from prolonged military
occupations. “In the period 1950-2005, there have been 82 million
avoidable deaths from deprivation (avoidable mortality, excess deaths,
excess mortality, deaths that did not have to happen) associated with
countries occupied by the US in the post-1945 era.
While it’s difficult to gauge how much of a role the military
occupations played in this devastation, it’s safe to assume the
instability created by such occupations factor significantly.
The violence that is perpetrated abroad mimics the violent culture at home. As of June 2013, it’s estimated that there are up to 310 million guns
in the US, which amounts to just about one gun per person (the US
population is 314 million). The next highest number of guns per capita
by country is Serbia at 58% and Yemen at 55%, compared to the US at
90%.
Since 1968, there have been 1,384,171 gunfire deaths in the US — which
amounts to more American deaths than from all of the US wars in the
nation’s history combined (1,171,177).
The US averages 10.2 “firearm-related deaths” per every 100,000 people.
Americans are 10 times more likely to suffer gun-related deaths than
people in Australia and Ireland; 15 times more likely than people in
Turkey; 40 times more likely than those in England; and 170 times more
likely than those in Japan.
America’s police forces also reflect this culture. And while law
enforcement agencies across the US have delivered pain and devastation
to poorer, inner-city communities for nearly a half-century, their
militarization has only recently begun to attract national attention.
Much of this attention can be pinpointed to the Occupy Wall Street
movement and the response it received from police, which included
unadulterated brutality against peaceful protesters, unnecessary use of
force, and the negligent use of tasers and Oleoresin Capsicum (pepper)
spray — a substance that has been proven
to cause “adverse cardiac, respiratory, and neurologic effects,
including arrhythmias and even sudden death” in some cases. However, it
was not merely these careless and sadistic actions which have attracted
such attention, but rather the changing profile of the victims of this
brutality: young, white, “middle-class” women and men.
“For 25 years, the primary ‘beneficiaries’ of police militarization
have been poor people in high-crime areas — people who generally haven’t
had the power or platform to speak up,” explains
Balko. “The Occupy protesters were largely affluent, white, and deft at
using cell phones and social media to document and publicize incidents
of excessive force.” Their public victimization, despite falling far
short of the police brutality that has existed within communities of
color for decades, inevitably struck a chord with a nation still
inundated with white supremacist ideals that assign varying degrees of
value to American lives — mainly based on the color of one’s skin and
their socioeconomic background. Ultimately, white members of the media,
seeing reflections of their own sons and daughters being abused,
suddenly chose to report en masse. White viewers, seeing reflections of
their neighbors and relatives, suddenly expressed widespread disgust.
This was no longer an episode of COPS, “glamorizing controversial police
tactics” and perpetuating “implicit biases regarding race and class.” These were now white, middle-class lives being affected and brutalized.
Essentially, the hate that Malcolm X spoke of, historically reserved
for “defenseless black people,” is now developing into indiscriminate
rage — targeting poor and working-class people of all colors throughout
the US. Through this ongoing process, it is becoming apparent that even
white privilege, in itself, is beginning to lose its immunity from this
unaccountable wrath.
The 2011 beating of a homeless schizophrenic man, Kelly Thomas,
in a transit parking lot in Fullerton, California confirmed this wrath.
The incident was, unbeknown to officers, recorded by security cameras
on the night of July 5, 2011, and later viewed by millions of Americans
as the officers’ trial was closely followed. Thomas was unarmed and
posed no threat at the time of the beating. “The surveillance camera
footage shows Thomas being beaten, clubbed and stunned with a Taser by
police.” Thomas suffered a coma and died five days later in a hospital
bed.
November of 2011 showcased yet another incident of blatant disregard as a police officer doused UC-Davis students
with streams of pepper spray. At the time, the students were engaged in
non-violent protest by sitting together with their arms locked. Video
footage of the officer calmly and methodically walking up and down the
line of students, spraying in and around their faces without pause,
epitomized the sadistic nature of modern policing.
On August 10, 2013, Tallahassee police officers, while conducting a field sobriety test on 44-year-old Christina West,
forcefully slammed her face-first into the road as one officer screamed
in rage. While obviously inebriated, Ms. West was subjected to what
City Commissioner Scott Maddox later described as “a disturbing use of
force against a completely non-aggressive arrestee.”
In September of 2013, 20-year-old David Connor Castellani was arrested, beaten by police,
and attacked by a K-9 unit after a verbal altercation outside of an
Atlantic City casino. Castellani was unarmed. The following month, after
a disagreement with his father over cigarettes, 19-year-old Tyler Comstock found
himself the target of a police chase in Iowa. Despite being told to
“back off” in order to defuse the situation, officers escalated the
incident by pursuing Comstock, crashing into the truck he was driving,
and shooting and killing him. He was unarmed.
In January of 2014, a 2009 surveillance video
from a Seabrook, New Hampshire police station was leaked, showing
police slamming Mike Bergeron face-first into a concrete wall and
dousing him with pepper spray while he was on the floor. Bergeron was
arrested under suspicion of drunk driving and was unarmed, handcuffed,
and relatively calm when one officer decided to violently slam his face
into the wall, to the apparent joy of the other officers who could be
seen laughing.
Incidents like these and many others have signified the donning of a
new age — one that is eerily reminiscent of authoritarian societies gone
by, draped with violently oppressive, daily interactions between agents
of government and the citizenry, and dripping of fascistic notions
built upon a culture of militarism and war. A violence historically
reserved for the most disenfranchised of the population — and ignored by
most of the rest — is finally extending itself beyond the oppressive
structures of old, transcending targeted demographics to include a
working-class-wide assault.
Conclusion
An extensive 2006 report by the United Nations Human Rights Committee
concluded that, in the United States, the War on Terror has “created a
generalized climate of impunity for law enforcement officers, and
contributed to the erosion of what few accountability mechanisms exist
for civilian control over law enforcement agencies. As a result, police
brutality and abuse persist unabated and undeterred across the country.”
“For 30 years, politicians and public officials have been arming,
training, and dressing cops as if they’re fighting a war,” explains
Balko. “They’ve been dehumanizing drug offenders and criminal suspects
as the enemy. And of course they’ve explicitly and repeatedly told them
they’re fighting a war. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that a lot
of cops have started to believe it.”
This development, while unwanted, was inevitable for a nation that
was built on a foundation of Native American genocide, African
enslavement, the ruthlessness of capitalism, a culture of misogyny, and
persistent strains of racism and classism. The process of
objectification which has become pervasive for America’s youth has
served as an expedient catalyst to a culture of war and oppression; and
the insidious victimization of America’s working class has worked in
tandem with the internalization of this oppressive culture, producing
willing participants eager to earn a place in the master’s good graces by brutalizing their working class peers.
As products of this conditioning, the mindset of the modern police
officer in the US remains peculiar. As individuals, within the confines
of their own lives — amongst their families, loved ones, children, and
friends — they aren’t much different than many of us. Ironically,
despite being enforcers of government policy in their professional
capacity, many do not hesitate to jump on the soapbox of anti-government
rhetoric — often opposing things like Obamacare, welfare, gun control,
open immigration policy, and even taxation — on their “personal time.”
Right-wing fringe groups like the Tea Party and Oath Keepers
have actively recruited both military personnel and police officers,
finding an abundance of narrow and impressionably ripe minds within
these ranks. While claiming to “return to the basics” and “serve the US
Constitution,” their actions (even when serving their “public” duties)
ultimately rely on literal interpretations of a highly-subjective, often
vague, and antiquated document that was written by wealthy, white (some
slave-owning) landowners nearly 250 years ago.
Naturally, these interpretations are skewed by a myriad of
privileges. Regardless of the officer’s own ethnicity or socioeconomic
background, it is the role that ultimately represents a virtual
arm of white supremacy and class oppression. Regarding the racist
dynamics of law enforcement in the US, “It’s useful to understand this
as an allegory about how white skin privilege works,” explains Annalee
Newitz. “The police uniform (and) the badge are like white skin, and the
person who wears that skin is allowed to enforce laws which he doesn’t
himself intend to follow.”
Within their roles as “officers of the law,” they become the embodiment
of the government-backed suppression they often despise in their
private lives. Only the suppression they carry out is against a specific
target population (people of color, the poor and disenfranchised, and
the working class). And, despite coming from that very working class,
they undoubtedly lose any and all sense of class consciousness in their
roles as ruling class watchdogs.
Within this role, they take ownership of a wide array of hypocritical
entitlements – a mindset that wholeheartedly believes the US
Constitution protects my rights to own guns, and my rights to protect my privileged status in society, and my rights to protect my property, and so on. However, those rights don’t apply to you.
And they certainly don’t apply to young men of color who happen to be
walking home at night. Nor do they apply to striking workers demanding a
living wage. Nor do they apply to Occupy protestors collectively
sitting in protest of illegal wars, corporate greed, and corrupt banks.
Nor do they apply to evicted homeowners who were exploited by deceitful
mortgage schemes. Nor do they apply to homeless people who are simply
trying to survive on the streets.
Rather than seeing themselves as public servants, police officers
have increasingly embraced the “us vs. them” mentality: anyone who isn’t
a cop is a potential threat. In doing so, they have become “mindless
drones” void of any conscience amidst a world that is becoming
increasingly unconscionable: the ultimate tool on an ever-intensifying
class-war landscape. The collective baggage they bring with them —
products of objectification, war culture, militarism, and combat-induced
mental illness — serve as positive attributes in the eyes of those who
use them as tools of oppression, while representing erratic triggers of
violence to everyone else. The war has come home. The chickens are here
to roost.
*******************
OneLove
:::MME:::