 |
| The concept of 'war crimes' is a western luxury. (Zoriah.net) |
By Sarah Gillespie
'Western civilization? I think it would be a good idea.' -- Mahatma Gandhi
The US army staff sergeant Robert Bales, who shot dead Afghani civilians in their homes two weeks ago, has now been formally charged with 17 counts of murder. Aside from the heartbreaking tragedy of this incident, it’s clear that, in the West, the prototype of the ‘lone wolf soldier’ has some advantageous side effects. He plants a false discrepancy between murder that is permissible, and murder that is a violation of our collective moral code.
We in the West slaughter innocent men, women and children en masse - but we prefer to do it remotely, ‘humanely’, from a palatable distance. We kill without looking into the faces of our victims. We kill with regret, not pride. We do not own our actions. Yet this gap between authorized violence and renegade barbarism is imaginary. From the victim’s perspective there cannot be a significant difference between being executed by a robotic drone or blown up by one American soldier. It is estimated that at least 40,000 civilians have so far been killed in Afghanistan since 2001. Add to that the 36,000 members of the Taliban, the 14,000 from the Northern Alliance and the 10,000 members of the Afghan Security Forces, and the figure is shockingly high. As painful as it may be to admit, Robert Bale’s murder of 17 Muslim peasants was totally consistent with the very ideology that planted him on Afghani soil in the first place. The decorated American father of three was not transgressing the ideology that his uniform represents. He was merely seeing it through. For us to imagine otherwise is a subtle form of self-congratulation, implying that we live in an ethical culture temporarily punctured by the arbitrary whims of a mad man. This is not the case.
READ MORE......................
......................Perhaps its time that we ponder on the clue loaded in the often-used phrase describing this phenomenon: ‘the lone wolf’. In the animal kingdom and in war, the lone wolf’s singularity is shaped by his essentialist nature as a pack animal. It is because of the pack, not in spite of the pack, that he strikes out alone.
