There’s Blood on Their Hands—Lots of It

Anti-colonialism demonstrators before the 1945 Sétif and Guelma massacre of Algerians by the French
Image by Vikoula5 and in the public domain.

The recent massacre of civilians in Paris was horrific, unconscionable, and despicable—as has been the response in Paris, the US, and elsewhere in the West. Revenge, revenge, revenge is the resonating cry. The innocent victims of the terrorist attacks did not deserve their fate; nor did the innocent victims of centuries of French—and other Western, including American–colonialism.

The ethic of reciprocity, that “do unto others” Golden Rule, is a life- and fairness-promoting mantra; too often, we hear instead an “eye for an eye” refrain. Here we go again, with violence begetting violence and  it is fool-hardy to think further violence will put an end to the discontent, the rage, the enmity associated in part with centuries of Western exploitation, repression, and violence in other parts of the world.

Let’s take the case of France. During the 1600s, France began establishing colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and India—although “establish” is a euphemism. What France did was aggressively seize control of areas far from its own borders, and rule them until control was seized by someone else, generally Great Britain (another model of ruthless imperialism).

In the mid-nineteenth century, France extended its strong arm into Africa, Indochina, and the South Pacific. When people whose skin is black, brown, or yellow—“people of color”—are ruled over by white people, history has shown us that the rulers do not grasp the hands of the indigenous people in brotherhood, whatever their national mottos might be. The bloody wars in Algeria and Vietnam were in my lifetime. Hard for me to believe that there are nations in these “modern” and “civilized” times whose leaders view it as okay to take over land long occupied by other people, or leaders who do not think of “colonization” as a dirty word.

Historical memory tends to be very long. For many decades after the last rebellious Native American Indian went to his reward, American children played “Cowboys and Indians,” and all those children, like you, knew who the “bad guys” were–at least according to the stories told to them.

Let’s start working on better ways of dealing with violence then engaging in yet more acts of revenge that can only perpetuate the cycle.

P.S. The attacks on Beirut and the Russian plane were just as unconscionable as the one in Paris and should not be brushed aside just because we are better able to see the French as like us.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Investing in Moral Repair, Part 3, by Ross Caputi*

This is part 3 of a 3 part series by Ross Caputi.

Investing in Moral Repair, Part 1

Investing in Moral Repair, Part 2

Three children wounded by a US bomb in Nangrahar province of Afghanistan

There are good reasons why in her book Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers (2015) Nancy Sherman might have wanted to avoid a discussion of afterwar ethical obligations to the victims of American military campaigns. She explains that her lack of focus on the injustices of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq was simply because it was not the focus of the veterans she interviewed. Their moral injury was most often the result of what they perceived to be their failures to protect their fellow soldiers, and in some cases, individual Iraqis and Afghans too. Most of the veterans that she interviewed did not feel burdened by the ethical question of whether the wars they participated in were just or unjust.

That has been my experience too. I’ve met few veterans who were raised with the internationalist perspective that I was, and even fewer who feel, as I do, that the relationship between occupier and occupied is an inherently immoral one. If Sherman were to advocate that we should feel morally responsible for the justness or unjustness of the war itself, as I am willing to do, she would run the risk of burdening veterans with new moral dilemmas that hadn’t previously occurred to them.

She might further have made a deliberate choice to avoid topics that are interpreted in our culture as being radical—such as responsibility for civilian deaths or war crimes, topics that might just be interpreted as ethical issues in other parts of the world—in order to avoid alienating her audience. Instead, by limiting her focus to the invisible wounds that veterans carry, wounds that cannot be healed by prescribing them more medication, and the ways in which the civilian community is essential to their process of moral repair, this book stands to do a great service to veterans by building the sympathetic community that they need. However, such an approach does not fully address all of the post war responsibilities of civilians.

Afterwar is an important challenge to our national war culture. Sherman provides us with a matrix of concepts—such as “affective access” and “self-forgiveness”—that act as a set of tools for a national discussion about moral injury and how best to care for our veterans. This valuable contribution provides a starting point from which we can begin to have a discussion about the jus post bellum that is not limited to the actions of nation states, but rather addresses the ways in which we as citizens can live ethically in a globally connected world. It is a step towards a deeper understanding of the ways in which we as individuals are connected to global events, such as war, and the responsibilities we have towards one another, and the ways in which we can begin to repair what has been broken.

*This review by Engaging Peace Board member Ross Caputi is reprinted from the American Book Review, Volume 36, Number 5, July/August 2015.

Ross is currently on the Board of Directors of ISLAH. He is also a graduate student and a writer. In 2004, he was a US Marine in the US-led occupation of Iraq. His experience there, in particular his experience during the 2nd siege of Fallujah, compelled him to leave the US military and join the anti-war movement. His activism has focused on our society’s moral obligation to our victims in Iraq, and to the responsibility of veterans to renounce their hero status in America.

Investing in Moral Repair, Part 2, by Ross Caputi*

This is part 2 of a 3 part series by Ross Caputi.  See Investing in Moral Repair, Part 1

Afghanistan War 2001
Collage of four photos for the Afghanistan War.
By Youngottoman (Own work) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
The common assumption that there is a military-civilian gap in our country is not totally unrelated to another conventional wisdom—that Vietnam veterans were spat on, maltreated, and repudiated by their fellow citizens upon their return from war. Nancy Sherman, in her book Afterwar: Healing the Moral Wounds of Our Soldiers (2015,) devotes 32 pages to analyzing the common refrain “Thank you for your service,” which she argues is a “national reaction to a past negative reaction” when “[r]esistance to [the Vietnam] war turned into antipathy toward its warriors” (30-31). Again, Sherman does not engage with the works that question this assumption. For example, Jerry Lembcke fails to find evidence that a significant number of Vietnam veterans were maltreated by protestors in his The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (2000). Instead, he reminds us that veterans were a large, and very welcomed, constituent of the anti-war movement.

These two assumptions taken together ground a common perception of veterans as a special interest group deserving of special care and special benefits. Perhaps it is this cultural assumption about veterans that motivates Sherman’s assertion that civilians’ post war responsibilities are limited to veterans; though, again, she gives no argument for why this is the case. If civilians are morally responsible for the harm that results from war due to their causal contributions to starting and facilitating wars, why aren’t civilians morally responsible to all parties that are harmed by war, including the civilians of other nations involved in the conflict? Particularly in the case of the recent US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, which caused hundreds of thousands of excess Iraqi deaths, displaced millions, internally and externally, and caused an environmental and public health catastrophe with some of the highest rates of birth defects and cancers the world has ever seen; why are we not morally responsible for what has been done to Iraqis?

Sherman analyzes “Thank you for your service” as a performative expression of gratitude, which she argues is a “token acceptance of . . . shared responsibility and accountability for sending fellow citizens to war, independent of specific causal contributions to war activity or to its support” (39). Correspondingly, she points out the resentment that so many veterans feel towards the ease with which civilians relieve themselves of responsibility by uttering such platitudes. Resentment, after all, is a reactive attitude that “[holds] someone to account” (46). However, there is no acknowledgement of the widespread resentment that Iraqis feel towards Americans and other citizens of Coalition nations. Furthermore, by leaving the vocabulary of our traditional war culture unchallenged, the infelicitous use of the word “service”—and its corresponding semantic frame of a beneficiary, a benevolent act, and a recipient—goes unexamined. By preserving the notion that the war was a service to Americans, a service consciously and willingly performed by our veterans, it obscures any understanding that the war was a wrong done to others and that we might be responsible for the harm that our war caused them. *This review by Engaging Peace Board member Ross Caputi is reprinted from the American Book Review, Volume 36, Number 5, July/August 2015.

Ross is currently on the Board of Directors of ISLAH. He is also a graduate student and a writer. In 2004, he was a US Marine in the US-led occupation of Iraq. His experience there, in particular his experience during the 2nd siege of Fallujah, compelled him to leave the US military and join the anti-war movement. His activism has focused on our society’s moral obligation to our victims in Iraq, and to the responsibility of veterans to renounce their hero status in America.