On killing
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There is a sound argument for changing the way we view and apply First Amendment rights, but I do not advocate it. I do, however, believe that the time has come for our society to censure (not censor) those who exploit violence for profit. In A. M. Rosenthal's words we must "turn entirely away from those ugly people, defeating them by refusing them tolerance or respectability."
What we must realize is that our society is trapped in a pathological spiral with all vectors pulling inward toward a tighter and tighter cycle of violence and destruction.
The prescription for resensitization is as complex and interactive as has been the path to our current dark state. Guns, drugs, poverty, gangs, war, racism, sexism, and the destruction of the nuclear family are just a few of the factors that can act to cheapen human life. The current debates over euthanasia, abortion, and the death penalty indicate that we are divided over the ethics of life and death. To greater or lesser degrees each of these factors helps to 328
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pull us toward destruction, and any comprehensive war on crime needs to consider all of them. But these factors have always been there. The new factor that is at work today is the same factor that increased the firing rate from 15 to 20 percent in World War II to 90 to 95 percent in Vietnam. The new factor is desensitization and killing enabling in the media.
Television programmers have always tried to claim the "best of two uncomfortably contradictory worlds," as Michael Medved puts it. It is really not new or profound to point out that television executives have for years claimed that they are not capable of influencing our actions or changing behavior, but for decades America's major corporations have paid them billions of dollars for a paltry few seconds or a minute to do just that. To sponsors, media executives claim that just a few well-placed seconds can control how America will spend its hard-earned money. But to Congress and other watchdog agencies they argue that they are not responsible for causing viewers to change the way they will respond to any emotionally charged, potentially violent circumstance that they may subsequently find themselves in. This in spite of the fact that, as of 1994, there have been more than two hundred studies demonstrating the correlation between television and violence.3
This body of scientific evidence against the media is overwhelming. In March 1994, Professor Elizabeth Newson, head of the child-development unit at Nottingham University, in England, released a report signed by twenty-five psychologists and pediatri-cians. They wrote:
Many of us hold our liberal ideals of freedom of expression dear, but now begin to feel that we were naive in our failure to predict the extent of damaging material and its all-too-free availability to children. By restricting such material from home viewing, society must take on a necessary responsibility in protecting children from this, as from other forms of child abuse.
By calling for legislation to limit the availability of "video nasties,"
Professor Newson and her colleagues raised a storm of controversy in Britain. They also became the latest in a series of scientists to publicly join the ever-swelling ranks of those who are convinced T H E RESENSTTIZATION OF A M E R I C A 329
by the scientific research linking violence in the media to violent crime.
In the spring 1993 issue of The Public Interest, Dr. Brandon Canterwall, professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington, summarized the overwhelming nature of this body of evidence. His report focused on the effect of television when it was introduced to rural, isolated communities in Canada and when English-language TV broadcasts were permitted in South Africa in 1975, having previously been banned by the Afrikaans-speaking government. In each case, violent crime among children increased spectacularly.
Canterwall points out that aggressive impulses, like most human phenomena, are distributed along a bell-shaped curve, and the significant effect of any change will occur at the margins. He notes: It is an intrinsic effect of such "bell curve" distribution that small changes in the average imply major changes at the extremes. Thus, if an exposure to television causes 8 percent of the population to shift from below-average aggression to above-average aggression, it follows that the homicide rate will double.
In statistical terms, an increase in the aggressive predisposition of 8 percent of the population is very small. Anything less than 5
percent is not even considered to be statistically significant. But in human terms, the impact of doubling the homicide rate is enormous. Canterwall concludes:
The evidence indicates that if, hypothetically, television technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer homicides each year in the United States, 70,000 fewer rapes, and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults. Violent crime would be half what it is.
The evidence is quite simply overwhelming. The American Psychological Association's commission on violence and youth concluded in 1993 that "there is absolutely no doubt that higher levels of viewing violence on television are correlated with increased acceptance of aggressive attitudes and increased aggressive b e -
havior."
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Ultimately, in the face of all this evidence, the deglamorization and condemnation of violence in the media are inevitable. It will be done in simple self-defense as our society rises up against the enabling of the violent crimes that are destroying our lives, our cities, and our civilization. When it occurs this process will probably be similar to the deglamorization of drugs and tobacco that has occurred in recent years, and for much the same reasons.
Throughout history nations, corporations, and individuals have used noble-sounding concepts such as states' rights, lebensraum, free-market economics, and First or Second Amendment rights to mask their actions, but ultimately what they are doing is for their own personal gain and the result — intentional or not — is killing innocent men, women, and children. They participate in a diffusion of responsibility by referring to themselves as "the tobacco industry" or "the entertainment industry," and we permit it, but they are ultimately individuals making individual moral decisions to participate in the destruction of their fellow citizens.
The ever-ascending tide of violence in our society must be stopped. Each act of violence breeds ever-greater levels of violence, and at some point the genie can never be put back in the bottle.
The study of killing in combat teaches us that soldiers who have had friends or relatives injured or killed in combat are much more likely to kill and commit war crimes. Each individual who is injured or killed by criminal violence becomes a focal point for further violence on the part of their friends and family. Every destructive act gnaws away at the restraint of other men. Each act of violence eats away at the fabric of our society like a cancer, spreading and reproducing itself in ever-expanding cycles of horror and destruction. The genie of violence cannot really ever be stuffed back into the bottle. It can only be cut off here and now, and then the slow process of healing and resensitization can begin.
It can be done. It has been done in the past. As Richard Heckler observes, there is a precedent for limiting violence-enabling technology. It started with the classical Greeks, who for four centuries refused to implement the bow and arrow even after being introduced to it in a most unpleasant way by Persian archers.
In Giving Up the Gun, Noel Perrin tells how the Japanese banned firearms after their introduction by the Portuguese in the 1500s.
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The Japanese quickly recognized that the military use of gunpowder threatened the very fabric of their society and culture, and they moved aggressively to defend their way of life. The feuding Japanese warlords destroyed all existing weapons and made the production or import of any new guns punishable by death. Three centuries later, when Commodore Perry forced the Japanese to open their ports, they did not even have the technology to make firearms. Similarly, the Chinese invented gunpowder but elected not to use it in warfare.
But the most encouraging examples of rest
raining killing technology have all occurred in this century. After the tragic experience of using poisonous gases in World War I the world has generally rejected their use ever since. The atmospheric nuclear test ban treaty continues after almost three decades, the ban on the deployment of antisatellite weapons is still going strong after two decades, and the United States and the former USSR have been steadily reducing the quantity of nuclear weapons for over a decade. As we have de-escalated instruments of mass destruction, so too can we de-escalate instruments of mass desensitization.
Heckler points out that there has been "an almost unnoticed series of precedents for reducing military technology on moral grounds," precedents that show the way for understanding that we do have a choice about how we think about war, about killing, and about the value of human life in our society. In recent years we have exercised the choice to move ourselves from the brink of nuclear destruction. In the same way, our society can move away from the technology that enables killing. Education and understanding are the first step. The end result may be that we will come through these dark years as a healthier, more self-aware society.
To fail to do this leaves us with only two possible results: to go the route of the Mongols and the Third Reich, or the route of Lebanon and Yugoslavia. No other result is possible if successive generations continue to grow up with greater and greater desensitization to the suffering of their fellow human beings. We must put the safety catch back on our society.
We have to understand, as we have never understood before, why it is that men fight and kill and, equally important, why it is 332
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that they will not. Only on the basis of understanding human behavior can we hope to influence it. The essence of this book has been that there is a force within man that will cause men to rebel against killing even at the risk of their own lives. That force has existed in man throughout recorded history, and military history can be interpreted as a record of society's attempt to force its members to overcome their resistance in order to kill more effectively in battle.
But that force for life, Freud's Eros, is balanced by the Thanatos, the death force. And we have seen how pervasive and consistent has been the battle between these two forces throughout history.
We have learned how to enable the Thanatos. We know how to take the psychological safety catch off of human beings almost as easily as you would switch a weapon from "safe" to "fire." We must understand where and what that psychological safety catch is, how it works, and how to put it back on. That is the purpose of killology, and that has been the purpose of this book.
Notes
Introduction: Killing and Science
1. I would like to note that some friends (such as the noted historian Bill Lind, author of the superb book Retroculture) disagree with this representation of Victorian sexual repression, but I have yet to meet a single individual who disagrees with the analysis of our modern repression outlined here, and that is the pertinent point.
2. There is not even a name for the specific study of killing. "Necrology"
would be the study of the dead, and "homicidology" would have undesired connotations of murder. Perhaps we should consider coining the simple and precise term "killology" for this study, just as "suicidology" and "sexology"
are terms that have been recently created for the legitimate study of these precise fields.
Section I: Killing and the Existence of Resistance 1. There has been considerable controversy concerning the quality of Marshall's research in this area. Some modern writers (such as Harold Leinbaugh, author of The Men of Company K), are particularly vociferous in their belief that the firing rate in World War II was significantly higher than Marshall represented it to be. But we shall see that at every turn my research has uncovered information that would corroborate Marshall's basic thesis, if not his exact percentages.
Paddy Griffith's studies of infantry regimental killing rates in Napoleonic and U.S. Civil War battles; Ardant du Picq's surveys; the research of soldiers and scholars such as Colonel Dyer, Colonel (Dr.) Gabriel, Colonel (Dr.) Holmes, and General (Dr.) Kinnard; and the observations of World War I and World War II veterans like Colonel Mater and Lieutenant Roupell — all of these corroborate General Marshall's findings.
Certainly this subject needs more research and study, but I cannot conceive of any motive for these researchers, writers, and veterans to misrepresent the truth. I can, however, understand and appreciate the very noble emotions that could cause men to be offended by anything that would seem to besmirch the honor of those infantrymen who have sacrificed so much in our nation's (or any nation's) past.
The latest volley in this ongoing battle was on the side of Marshall. His grandson, John Douglas Marshall, in his book Reconciliation Road put forth one of the most interesting and convincing rebuttals. John Marshall was a 334
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conscientious objector in the Vietnam War and was completely disowned by his grandfather. He had no cause to love his grandfather, but he concludes in his book that most of what S. L. A. Marshall wrote "still stands, while much of the way he lived deserves criticism."
2. The universal distribution of automatic weapons is probably responsible for much of this large number of shots fired per kill. Much of this firing was also suppressive fire and reconnaissance by fire. And much of it was by crew-served weapons (e.g., squad machine guns, helicopter door gunners, and aircraft-mounted miniguns firing thousands of rounds per minute), which, as mentioned before, almost always fire. But even when these factors are taken into consideration, the fact that so much fire occurred and that so many individual soldiers were willing to fire indicate that something different and unusual was happening in Vietnam. This subject is addressed in detail later in this book, in the section entitled "Killing in Vietnam."
3. This is an important concept. In both this section and in later sections we will observe the vital role of groups (including nonkillers) and leaders as we look at "An Anatomy of Killing."
4. Marshall also observed that if a leader came close to an individual and ordered him to fire, then he would do so, but as soon as the obedience-demanding authority departed, the firing would stop. However, the focus in this section is upon the average soldier armed with a rifle or musket and his apparent unwillingness to kill in combat. The impact of obedience-demanding authority and the effect of group processes on crew-served weapons, i.e., machine guns, which almost always fire, and key weapons (i.e., flamethrowers and automatic rifles), which usually fire, are both addressed in "An Anatomy of Killing."
5. I too have graduated from many a U.S. Army leadership school, including basic training, advanced individual training, the XVIII Airborne Corps N C O
Academy, Officer Candidate School, the Infantry Officer Basic Course, Ranger school, the Infantry Officer Advanced Course, the Combined Arms and Services Staff School, and the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
Not at any time in any of these schools do I remember this problem being mentioned.
Section II: Killing and Combat Trauma
1. The information in this section has been taken largely from Gabriel's No More Heroes, which in turn was taken largely from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association and from Military Psychiatry: A Comparative Perspective, an anthology that he edited.
2. The cause of PTSD is associated primarily with the nature of the support structure the soldier receives upon returning to society from combat. This section is primarily concerned with the nature and etiology of psychiatric casualties occurring during combat. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a distinctly N O T E S
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different type of psychiatric illness that will be addressed in detail in the section of this study entitled "Killing in Vietnam."
3. It is important to note here that, although the lack of battlefield psychiatric casualties among medical personnel has held true in all wars about which I have data, Vietnam was ve
ry different in that the incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder appears to have been higher among medical personnel. I believe that this was due to the unique nature of what happened after the veteran returned from that war, and we will look at this in greater detail in the section "Killing in Vietnam."
4. Frankl (1959), Bettelheim (1960), and Davidson (1967) are but a few of the many who have studied the psychological impact of this environment.
5. For example, Weinberg (1946), Weinstein (1947, 1973), and Spiegel (1973).
6. This is an excerpt from World War I veteran James H. Knight-Adkin's "No Man's Land," a powerful poem that does a superb job of communicating some of the horror of the soldier's dilemma:
No Man's Land is an eerie sight
At early dawn in the pale gray light . . .
And never a living soul walks there
To taste the fresh of the morning air;
Only some lumps of rotting clay,
that were friends or foemen yesterday . . .
But No Man's Land is a goblin sight
When patrols crawl over at dead o' night;
Boche or British, Belgian or French,
You dice with death when you cross the trench.
When the "rapid," like fireflies in the dark, Flits down the parapet spark by spark,
And you drop for cover to keep your head
With your face on the breast of the four months' dead.
The man who ranges in No Man's Land
Is dogged by shadows on either hand