On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (3 page)

I N T R O D U C T I O N T O THE PAPERBACK E D I T I O N

nation with draconian control of not just guns but many other aspects of life.

Thus, the Japanese have very few cultural, social, "forebrain"

violence-enabling factors working against them, so we do not see nearly as much violence in their society. But they (like any nation that has a significant number of citizens with "acquired violence immune deficiency") are like weapons, sitting loaded with the safety off, just waiting for someone (another Tojo?) to pull the trigger.

The bottom line is that Japan can "accept" a higher degree of midbrain violence-enabling in the media because that variable is being held down by all the other factors. For a while.

But this restraint can defy gravity for only so long. Certainly their recent terrorist nerve-gas attacks have been sufficient to cause some soul-searching as Japan examines the degree to which media violence is causing its citizens to accept violence as a viable alternative.

Most of the world has
not
been able to protect its citizens.

Governments around the globe, try as they might, have not been able to keep their immune-deficient citizens in a bubble. And they will never truly be able to control violent crime unless they stop infecting their children.

"Just Turn It Off," or "Let Them Eat Cake"

One common response to any concern about media violence is,

"We
have
adequate controls. They are called the 'off switch. If you don't like it, just turn it off."

Unfortunately, this is a tragically inadequate response to the problem. In today's society the family structure is breaking down and even in intact families there is enormous economic and social pressure for mothers to work. Single mothers, broken homes, latchkey kids, and parental neglect are increasingly the norm.

Through herculean effort, parents
might
be able to protect their own kids in today's world, but that doesn't do much good if the kid next door is a killer.

The worst thing about the "off switch" solution is that it is so blatantly, profoundly racist in its effect, if not its intent, because I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE PAPERBACK E D I T I O N xxi the black community in America is the "culture" or "nation" that has borne the brunt of the electronic media's violence-enabling.

In this case, poverty, drugs, gangs, discrimination, and the availability of firearms all predispose more blacks than whites toward violence. These factors defeat the first filter; then the absence of the second, midbrain filter becomes noticeable.

Bronson James, a black Texas-based radio commentator whose show I was on, observed that this is identical to the genocidal process in which for centuries the white man used alcohol in a systematic policy to destroy the culture of the American Indian.

For a variety of cultural and genetic reasons, the Indians were predisposed toward alcoholism, and we dumped it into them as a crucial part of the process that ultimately destroyed their civilization.

The pumping of media violence into the ghettos today is equally genocidal. Media violence-enabling in the ghetto is the moral equivalent of shouting, "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. As a result, murder is the number-one cause of death among black male teens, and 25 percent of all black males in their twenties are in jail, on probation, or on parole.

If this isn't genocide, then it is close.

What makes the "off switch" solution so racist is that, if these murders and incarceration rates were happening to the sons of white upper- and middle-class America, you can bet that we would have seen some drastic action by now. Viewed in this light, I think that most individuals would agree that the "just turn it off' solution probably rates right up there with "let them eat cake" and "I was just following orders" as all-time offensive statements.

In developmental psychology there is a general understanding that an individual must master the twin areas of sexuality and aggression (Freud's Eros and Thanatos) in order to have truly achieved adulthood. In the same way, the maturation of the human race necessitates our collective mastery of these two areas. In recent years we have made significant progress in the field of sexology, and this book is dedicated to the creation and exploration of the equivalent field of "killology."

xxii I N T R O D U C T I O N TO THE PAPERBACK E D I T I O N

After nuclear holocaust, the next major threat to our existence is the violent decay of our civilization due to violence-enabling in the electronic media. This book appears to be well on its way to making a difference in the desperate worldwide battle against the virus of violence.

May it be so, and may you, the reader, find what you seek in these pages.

Introduction

Killing and Science: On Dangerous Ground

This is the time of year when people would slaughter, back when people did that — Rollie and Eunice Hochstetter, I think, were the last in Lake Wobegon. They kept pigs, and they'd slaughter them in the fall when the weather got cold and the meat would keep. I went out to see them slaughter hogs once when I was a kid, along with my cousin and my uncle, who was going to help Rollie.

Today, if you are going to slaughter an animal for meat, you send it in to the locker plant and pay to have the guys there do it. When you slaughter pigs, it takes away your appetite for pork for a while. Because the pigs let you know that they don't care for it. They don't care
to
be grabbed and dragged over to where the other pigs went and didn't come back.

It was quite a thing for a kid to see. To see living flesh, and the living insides of another creature. I expected to be disgusted by it, but I wasn't — I was fascinated. I got as close as I could.

And I remember that my cousin and I sort of got carried away in the excitement of it all and we went down to the pigpen and we started throwing little stones at pigs to watch them jump and squeal and run. And all of a sudden, I felt a big hand on my shoulder, and I was spun around, and my uncle's face was three inches away from mine. He said "If I ever see you do that again I'll beat you 'til you can't stand up, you hear?" And we heard.

xxiv I N T R O D U C T I O N

I knew at the time that his anger had to do with the slaughter, that it was a ritual and it was done as a Ritual. It was done swiftly, and there was no foolishness. No joking around, very little conversation. People went about their jobs — men and women —

knowing exactly what to do. And always with respect for the animals that would become our food. And our throwing stones at pigs violated this ceremony, and this ritual, which they went through.

Rollie was the last one to slaughter his own hogs. One year he had an accident; the knife slipped, and an animal that was only wounded got loose and ran across the yard before it fell. He never kept pigs after that. He didn't feel he was worthy of it.

It's all gone. Children growing up in Lake Wobegon will never have a chance to see it.

It was a powerful experience, life and death hung in the balance.

A life in which people made do, made their own, lived off the land, lived between the ground and God. It's lost, not only to this world: but also to memory.

— Garrison Keillor

"Hog Slaughter"

W h y should we study killing? O n e might just as readily ask, W h y study sex? The two questions have much in common. Richard Heckler points out that "it is in the mythological marriage of Ares and Aphrodite that Harmonia is b o r n . " Peace will not come until we have mastered both sex and war, and to master war we must study it with at least the diligence of Kinsey or Masters and Johnson.

Every society has a blind spot, an area into which it has great difficulty looking. Today that blind spot is killing. A century ago it was sex.

For millennia man sheltered himself and his family in caves, or huts, or one-room hovels. T h e whole extended family — grandparents, parents, and children — all huddled together around the warmth of a single fire, within the protection of a single wall. And for thousands of years sex between a husband and wife could generally only take place at night, in the darkness, in this crowded central room.

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xxv

I once interviewed a woman who grew up in an American Gypsy family, sleeping in a big communal tent with aunts, uncles, grandparents, parents, cousins, brothers, and sisters all around her.

As a young child, sex was to her something funny, noisy, and slightly bothersome that grown-ups did in the night.

In this environment there were no private bedrooms. Until very recently in human history, for the average human being, there was no such luxury as a bedroom, or even a bed. Although by today's sexual standards this situation may seem awkward, it was not without its advantages. One advantage was that sexual abuse of children could not happen without at least the knowledge and tacit consent of the entire family. Another, less obvious benefit of this age-old living arrangement was that throughout the life cycle, from birth to death, sex was always before you, and no one could deny that it was a vital, essential, and a not-too-mysterious aspect of daily human existence.

And then, by the period that we know as the Victorian era, everything had changed. Suddenly the average middle-class family lived in a multiroom dwelling. Children grew up having never witnessed the primal act. And suddenly sex became hidden, private, mysterious, frightening, and dirty. The era of sexual repression in Western civilization had begun.

In this repressed society, women were covered from neck to ankle, and even the furniture legs were covered with skirts, since the sight of these legs disturbed the delicate sensitivities of that era. Yet at the same time that this society repressed sex, it appears to have become obsessed by it. Pornography as we know it blossomed.

Child prostitution flourished. And a wave of sexual child abuse began to ripple down through the generations.1

Sex is a natural and essential part of life. A society that has no sex has no society in one generation. Today our society has begun the slow, painful process of escaping from this pathological dichotomy of simultaneous sexual repression and obsession. But we may have begun our escape from one denial only to fall into a new and possibly even more dangerous one.

A new repression, revolving around killing and death, precisely parallels the pattern established by the previous sexual repression.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

Throughout history man has been surrounded by close and personal death and killing. When family members died of disease, lingering injury, or old age they died in the home. When they died anywhere close to home, their corpses were brought to the house — or cave, or hut, or hovel — and prepared for burial by the family.

Places in the Heart
is a movie in which Sally Field portrays a woman on a small cotton farm early in this century. Her husband has been shot and killed and is brought to the house. And, repeating a Ritual that has been enacted for countless centuries by countless millions of wives, she lovingly washes his naked corpse, preparing it for burial as tears streak down her face.

In that world each family did its own killing and cleaning of domestic animals. Death was a part of life. Killing was undeniably essential to living. Cruelty was seldom, if ever, a part of this killing.

Mankind understood its place in life, and respected the place of the creatures whose deaths were required to perpetuate existence.

The American Indian asked forgiveness of the spirit of the deer he killed, and the American farmer respected the dignity of the hogs he slaughtered.

As Garrison Keillor records in "Hog Slaughter," the slaughter of animals has been a vital Ritual of daily and seasonal activity for most people until this last half century of human existence. Despite the rise of the city, by the opening of the twentieth century the majority of the population, even in the most advanced industrial societies, remained rural. The housewife who wanted a chicken dinner went out and wrung the chicken's neck herself, or had her children do it. The children watched the daily and seasonal killings, and to them killing was a serious, messy, and slightly boring thing that everyone did as a part of life.

In this environment there was no refrigeration, and few slaughterhouses, mortuaries, or hospitals. And in this age-old living arrangement, throughout the life cycle, from birth to death, death and killing were always before you — either as a participant or a bored spectator — and no one could deny that it was a vital, essential, and common aspect of daily human existence.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

xxvii

And then, in just the last few generations, everything began to change. Slaughterhouses and refrigeration insulated us from the necessity of killing our own food animals. Modern medicine began to cure diseases, and it became increasingly rare for us to die in the youth and prime of our lives, and nursing homes, hospitals, and mortuaries insulated us from the death of the elderly. Children began to grow up having never truly understood where their food came from, and suddenly Western civilization seemed to have decided that killing, killing anything at all, was increasingly hidden, private, mysterious, frightening, and dirty.

The impact of this ranges from the trivial to the bizarre. Just as the Victorians put skirts around their furniture to hide the legs, now mousetraps come equipped with covers to hide the killer's handiwork. And laboratories conducting medical research with animals are broken into, and lifesaving research is destroyed by animal-rights activists. These activists, while partaking of the medical fruits of their society — fruits based upon centuries of animal research — attack researchers. Chris DeRose, head of the Los Angeles-based activist group Last Chance for Animals, says: "If the death of one rat cured all diseases it wouldn't make any difference to me. In the scheme of life we're equal."

Any killing offends this new sensibility. People wearing fur or leather coats are verbally and physically attacked. In this new order people are condemned as racists (or "speciests") and murderers when they eat meat. Animal-rights leader Ingrid Newkirk says,

"A rat is a pig is a boy," and compares the killing of chickens to the Nazi Holocaust. "Six million people died in concentration camps," she told the
Washington Post,
"but six billion broiler chickens will die this year in slaughterhouses."

Yet at the same time that our society represses killing, a new obsession with the depiction of violent and brutal death and dis-memberment of humans has flourished. The public appetite for violence in movies, particularly in splatter movies such as
Friday
the 13th, Halloween,
and
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre;
the cult status of "heroes" like Jason and Freddy; the popularity of bands with names like Megadeth and Guns N' Roses; and skyrocketing XXV111

I N T R O D U C T I O N

murder and violent crime rates — all these are symptoms of a bizarre, pathological dichotomy of simultaneous repression and obsession with violence.

Sex and death are natural and essential parts of life. Just as a society without sex would disappear in a generation, so too would a society without killing. Every major city in our nation must exterminate millions of rats and mice each year or become uninhab-itable. And granaries and grain elevators must exterminate millions of rats and mice each year. If they fail to do this, instead of being the world's breadbasket the United States would be unable to feed itself, and millions of people around the world would face starvation.

Certain genteel sensitivities of the Victorian era are not without value and benefit to our society, and few would argue for a return to communal sleeping arrangements. In the same way, those who hold and espouse modern sensibilities about killing are generally gentle and sincere human beings who in many ways represent the most idealistic characteristics of our species, and their concerns have great potential value once we bring them into perspective.

As technology enables us to butcher and exterminate whole species (including our own), it is vital that we learn restraint and self-discipline. But we must also remember that death has its place in the natural order of life.

It seems that when a society does not have natural processes (such as sex, death, and killing) before it, that society will respond by denying and warping that aspect of nature. As our technology insulates us from a specific aspect of reality, our societal response seems to be to slip deep into bizarre dreams about that which we flee. Dreams spun from the fantasy stuff of denial. Dreams that can become dangerous societal nightmares as we sink deeper into their tempting web of fantasy.

Today, even as we waken from the nightmare of sexual repression, our society is beginning to sink into a new denial dream, that of violence and horror. This book is an attempt to bring the objective light of scientific scrutiny into the process of killing.

A. M. Rosenthal tells us:

I N T R O D U C T I O N

XXIX

The health of humankind is not measured just by its coughs and wheezes but by the fevers of its soul. Or perhaps more important yet, by the quickness and care we bring against them.

If our history suggests unreason's durability, our experience teaches that to neglect it is to indulge it and that to indulge it is to prepare hate's triumph.

"To neglect it is to indulge it." This is, therefore, a study of aggression, a study of violence, and a study of killing. Most specifically, it is an attempt to conduct a scientific study of the act of killing within the Western way of war and of the psychological and sociological processes and prices exacted when men kill each other in combat.

Sheldon Bidwell held that such a study would by its very nature lay
on
"dangerous ground because the union between soldier and scientist has not yet passed beyond flirtation." I would seek to go in harm's way and effect not just a serious union between soldier and scientist, but a tentative
menage a trois
between soldier, scientist, and historian.

I have combined these skills to conduct a five-year program of research into the previously taboo topic of killing in combat. In this study it is my intention to delve into this taboo subject of killing and to provide insight into the following:

• The existence of a powerful, innate human resistance toward killing one's own species and the psychological mechanisms that have been developed by armies
over the centuries
to overcome that resistance

• The role of atrocity in war and the mechanisms by which armies are both empowered and entrapped by atrocity

• What it feels like to kill, a set of standard response stages to killing in combat, and the psychological price of killing