'Nother Solent

Zimbabwe arrests heads of private schools. The dragon is eating its own tail: 90% of the children in these schools are black, and include the children of members of the cabinet, including Mugabe himself.

More on "What were they thinking of?"

Jeffrey Murphy writes from Australia:

I'm reading Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners at the moment. He often mentions and discusses the delight with which German death-march personnel photographed their vile deeds. They had an attitude to this that almost resembled a hunting party's joie de vivre. These were not regulars, nor were they engaged in front-line responsibilities. Many, if not most, were ill suited for regular soldiering because of age or other factors.

Apart from the impracticality of toting cameras in actual combat situations, most regular soldiers speak for the rest of their lives about how they do not want to talk about, let alone revel in the photographic memorialisation of their service. I think this points to the psychology in play, as regards the actions of those callous German prison guards and the rear-echelon nobodies at Abu Ghraib.

Both groups knew that they were on the fringes of momentous historical events and that their service did not constitute, and would not be regarded by others as being, front-line fighting. I believe the compulsion to record their actions was driven by the desire to make sure that they were immortalised as participants in a great campaign. I therefore presume their intended audience was regular soldiers, with whom they hoped to form some kind of espirit de corps through their documented hatred for the enemy. Humiliation was an ersatz version of killing. Perhaps also, it was hoped the pictures could be sent back home to like-minded friends of similarly deprived moral sensibility. Lacking the fraternity and expedited maturation that attends combat, the sad thing is their soldierly audience would have regarded them with contempt as mere poseurs.

Why did they take the pictures? In short, to say what humans have been saying with hand-prints in caves and by any number of other means for millennia: "I woz 'ere." In war, most soldiers would prefer not to be there, then spend a lifetime forgetting they actually were. These foolish people at Abu Ghraib were there alright and they'll live with the memory and be aware of their deeds always.

I think they'll enjoy that, punishments notwithstanding.

I agree with every word, except perhaps the last line. I suspect that people often live in several different worlds, each with its own ethos, and keep boundaries between them. Hence the phenomenon of the ruthless criminal who is also a devoted family man. For some, if not all, of those who carry out brutal acts in the heated camaraderie of a military unit "gone bad", when the boundary round the little world of that unit is ripped open and the bad air let out then they will suddenly see themselves as the world sees them.

However Mr Murphy's general argument, and in particular his suggestion that the intended audience for the pictures was (looking up the status hierarchy) combat soldiers and (looking down) drinking buddies back home, strikes me as extremely convincing.

What were they thinking of when they took those photos?

There is a particular film image from World War II that will stay in my mind until I die. Yet, unlike many more famous segments of film, it does not show anything you could describe as an atrocity. Not exactly an atrocity. It was taken by a German soldier with his personal ciné camera; this wasn't as rare an occurence as one might think, as home cinema had been a popular hobby in Germany throughout the thirties. Also, surprisingly, German soldiers wishing to take their own cameras or ciné cameras with them were subject to fewer restrictions than their British counterparts. I'm not sure but I think cameras may have been forbidden to British troops entirely.

Anyway, the image I am thinking of shows a great crowd of Russian prisoners. The man filming them was obviously standing on a hill looking down at them. As was common practice of the German army on the Eastern Front, except for being penned in by a fence of some sort, their Russian prisoners were left to themselves to live or die. Here were no Stalags with ordered rows of huts, no shelter of any kind, no doctors - and no food. They ate leaves or grass or their boots or each other.

Then the viewer sees some object describe a trajectory down from the ridge where the camera is. Down, down it curves - the filmmaker doing a nice job of panning the camera to match the object's trajectory. It lands among the crowd. It is a lump of food. The Russians scramble for it, like - undeniably like - animals converging on a lump of food thrown by a man.

One can quite see why one German soldier of that era would think it amusing to do that and another to film him doing it. It suited the Nazi idea of Germanic masters and Slavic subhumans perfectly. One can also see (and this is a separate issue) why the soldier filming it had no worries about doing so. He thought the Nazis would win. He thought that no one would ever see the film who would possibly object to seeing Russians humiliated, or if some weakling did object, he would have no power to make that objection count. (I don't know by what chain of events the film eventually ended up on a British documentary, and whether the man who shot it was ever asked "what do you think now?" after the war. Nor do I know if any of the Russians shown ever came forward.)

You have probably guessed the question that is in my mind. When the prison guards at Abu Ghraib took humiliating pictures of Iraqi detainees, why did they think that those pictures would not come back to haunt them? I don't ask why did they do it - the reason they humiliated prisoners is the same as the reason for uncounted similar acts throughout history. Cruelty will ever be with us, as will the notion of adding to the victim's humiliation by recording it in permanent form; which is why the duty to make sure cruelty doesn't pay is so pressing. But the modern US isn't Nazi Germany - the pronouncements of idiots like Ted Rall notwithstanding. (Nor is modern Germany Nazi Germany, for all that prisoners are beaten and terrified there, too. The difference is that abuses in modern democracies are seen as abuses.) Getting back to the snap-happy guards at Abu Ghraib: why didn't they figure out that eventually someone would see who would object and would have power to make that objection count?

As you know, I've been out of it for a while. I may have simply missed the news story where the people who took those pictures were asked that question and gave their answer. In the absence of such an answer this is just my guess. I wonder if the sheer ubiquity and disposability of digital cameras has degraded the idea that photographs count. They are now seen as more like speech than writing. Adding to this effect may be the fact that everyone knows that pictures can be changed in minutes, as the multiple versions of the picture of the Iraqi boy holding a sign demonstrate.

And what of the future? We now have a situation where images flow like speech and are as mutable as memory. I am quite sure that legions of journalists are hard at work searching for similar true images, and legions of photoshoppers are hard at work making similar fake images. The jury is still out on whether the Mirror's photos showing British soldiers kicking a hooded Iraqi are fakes - most people I know do think they are fakes on the grounds that the equipment is wrong and the whole thing too clean and sharp, but no one can say "it cannot happen."

Will all this be a brake on the next person who wants to photograph their victim while comitting a crime - or an encouragement?

(Link to Dorkafork post via Public Interest.)

That'll teach thee to think thou knowest it all, Natalie.

In Poul Anderson's The Boat of a Million Years there's a scene set before the American Civil War in which some Quakers give shelter and aid to an escaped slave woman (who happens to have a rare gene that means she does not grow old, but that's irrelevant to this post.) I used to feel irritated reading this scene as the Quaker characters all say things like, "Hast thee eaten?" Grrr, I thought. Anderson thinks he can just replace "you" with "thee" and sprinkle a few hasts and dosts to get it right. Pah! I know better!

Pride goeth before a fall. I learn from Eugene Volokh who knoweth jolly nearly everything under the sun that Poul Anderson was right all along:

Quakers also use or once used "thee" (though for some reason they use it instead of "thou" as the nominative as well as in the objective, essentially the equivalent of using "me" both for "I" and "me") amongst themselves instead of "you"...

While swirling this post around on Google I found Quaker Science Fiction, a webpage that lists references to Quakers in SF. I love the internet. Following the pointer in that page I found http://www.adherents.com/, which looks to be a rich source of factoids about the world's religions. The author or authors seem to be SF fans. It's a splendid browsing ground for a blogger with my sidebar, but counting every single mention of Dizzy Gillespie in SF as being a reference to the Bahai faith is perhaps a little obsessive.

Hurrah for me!

I can make libertarian propaganda out of absolutely anything. Think of it as recycling.

I haven't listened to the news much recently.

Deprived of the hour-by-hour trickle of new developments, I perceive the news in a more compressed way than I usually do. It seems only the day before yesterday that a pregnant Israeli woman and her four young daughters were shot in cold blood one by one, and only yesterday that the stories of American (and possibly British, but that story seems more doubtful) abuse of Iraqi prisoners broke. As a result a certain contrast is clearer to me than it usually would be. The Western media is awash with outrage at the mistreatment of Iraqis by Westerners. So it should be, but -

Where was the Arab outrage at the murder by Arabs of Tali Hatuel and her children? Why does no one even expect there to be any outrage?

Re-read what David Warren wrote in his essay "Wrestling with Islam":

These are, still today, cultures of the "pre-Enlightenment"; people not incapable of sympathy, for their own, but not yet versed in the imaginative projection of that sympathy into people who are not their own. And at this level, it is not Islam, but the Enlightenment, that stands between East and West in these matters. For we have largely lost the category of an "infidel", and they still have it.

To say that the Enlightenment has not yet reached the Arab culture is not to say that we enlightened ones are necessarily the good guys. No light of reason was bright enough to stop post-Enlightenment Europe slaughtering millions. It is to say that this whole business of apologies and shame over the mistreatment of enemy prisoners is not the human norm. In a sense that makes the Arab world's double standards less deserving of condemnation.

But not less deserving of being pointed out.

ADDED LATER: Why bother to point it out, since I am apparently claiming that the Arabs just don't get it? Because cultures change, and that takes place by means of individual changes of heart. And, thanks to modern technology those changes of heart can take place at a rate never before seen.

The prisons of Britain had been stinking hell-holes for centuries before John Howard denounced the abuses in them. They hadn't changed; the culture of Britain had. Civilians sympathetic to the enemy had been starved and maltreated by occupying soldiers for centuries before Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman denounced the British army for employing "methods of barbarism". That hadn't changed; the culture of Britain had.

The punishment for any soldiers found guilty of torturing prisoners must be exemplary.

Sorry for the long absence

. I had hoped to get back to blogging last week, but a combination of other members of the household needing the use of the computer and a sick kid made it all too difficult. Besides, I haven't liked the look of the news lately.

Back in a couple of days, I hope. Apols to all those to whom I said exactly the same thing a couple of days ago.