I wouldn’t say they “kill and rape indiscriminately”. They just kill and rape he enemy. It’s not like they’re people, right? Because if they were, that might make killing them wrong. Can’t have our soldiers thinking that, can we? (I understand the US army, at least, has switched away from demonizing their enemies in Basic Training for precisely this reason.)
This is a complicated subject. To begin with, it’s pretty hard to get more than a small percentage of soldiers to kill people at all: until after WWII, somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of combatants in any given battle didn’t fire their weapons, and the great majority of shots fired weren’t aimed. Modern training methods aim to reduce this through associative conditioning, making training as realistic as practical, and a variety of other techniques that sometimes include dehumanization of the enemy.
Now, there’s a spectrum running from battlefield killing to full-blown atrocity, but atrocity’s also got some unique features. If you’re ordered to execute prisoners, for example, the prisoners end up dead or they don’t: you can’t shoot over their heads, or run ammunition or tend to the wounded instead of fighting, as you could in pitched battle. Because of this atrocity can be used as a tool of policy: soldiers who’ve committed war crimes have no choice but to justify them to themselves and each other, distancing them from their enemies and bonding them with a shared rationalization.
This is bidirectional, of course; committing atrocity makes it easier to commit further atrocities, and a war where many gray-area cases come up (engaging enemy fighters in civilian clothes, for example, or mistakenly shooting a surrendering soldier) is one in which deliberate atrocity becomes more likely. The US army in the last few wars has tried very hard to draw a line, partly for PR reasons and partly because atrocity isn’t well suited to recent strategic models, but the psychology involved doesn’t lie entirely within institutional hands—though institutions can of course exploit it, and many do.
soldiers who’ve committed war crimes have no choice but to justify them to themselves and each other, distancing them from their enemies and bonding them with a shared rationalization.
That occurred to me, and I decided not to bother adding a caveat, since they presumably justify it by demonizing the enemy anyway. Although I guess that some “accidental” rapists probably rationalize their crime as not a big deal when if realize what they did, which could indeed lead to more rapes. That’s a different proposition to actually turning them into a cartoon villain, but still.
This is a complicated subject. To begin with, it’s pretty hard to get more than a small percentage of soldiers to kill people at all: until after WWII, somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of combatants in any given battle didn’t fire their weapons, and the great majority of shots fired weren’t aimed. Modern training methods aim to reduce this through associative conditioning, making training as realistic as practical, and a variety of other techniques that sometimes include dehumanization of the enemy.
Now, there’s a spectrum running from battlefield killing to full-blown atrocity, but atrocity’s also got some unique features. If you’re ordered to execute prisoners, for example, the prisoners end up dead or they don’t: you can’t shoot over their heads, or run ammunition or tend to the wounded instead of fighting, as you could in pitched battle. Because of this atrocity can be used as a tool of policy: soldiers who’ve committed war crimes have no choice but to justify them to themselves and each other, distancing them from their enemies and bonding them with a shared rationalization.
This is bidirectional, of course; committing atrocity makes it easier to commit further atrocities, and a war where many gray-area cases come up (engaging enemy fighters in civilian clothes, for example, or mistakenly shooting a surrendering soldier) is one in which deliberate atrocity becomes more likely. The US army in the last few wars has tried very hard to draw a line, partly for PR reasons and partly because atrocity isn’t well suited to recent strategic models, but the psychology involved doesn’t lie entirely within institutional hands—though institutions can of course exploit it, and many do.
Yay, an expert!
That occurred to me, and I decided not to bother adding a caveat, since they presumably justify it by demonizing the enemy anyway. Although I guess that some “accidental” rapists probably rationalize their crime as not a big deal when if realize what they did, which could indeed lead to more rapes. That’s a different proposition to actually turning them into a cartoon villain, but still.