The dark power of atrocity

The title of this post comes out of the celebrated study on modern violence by American Colonel Dave Grossman, On Killing. It's one of the few books I've come across which tries to understand the "rationale" of a wide range of hysterically destructive violence - uh, atrocities - in times of "conflict." I wondered while reading it, and the many case studies Grossman explores, which came first the atrocities or the conflicts. It seems to me that there's a bit of a feedback loop at work in these sorts of things. The massacre and rape of villagers most certainly exemplifies both an atrocity and a conflict, but I wonder if we place too much emphasis on the latter, as though it in some why helps to "explain" the former. I want to claim that conflict doesn't tell the whole story, that stated differences on whatever issue do not "explain" why gangs of males pillage, murder and rape innocents in times of crisis. It seems to me more about base opportunism and group mentality, the desire to belong in a deeply significant way to your pals. "Let's all rape her!" a young man exclaims, a flush of excitement coursing through his body as he sees the reciprocated excitement in the faces of the men who dress, talk and behave like him.

For some reason I can't get away from this stuff. Everywhere I look I'm struck by the insane barbarity of males against the innocents in their midsts, most especially women and the people they most regularly tend after, children and old folks. Just the other day, another harrowing article by one of the English-speaking world's canaries in the coal mine, Nicholas Kristof, told about the ongoing culture of mass rape which characterized life of the vast majority of women in Liberia. The war-ravaged country isn't even technically in a "conflict" yet many of the lads there think nothing of forcing women and girls to do whatever they want, and without the slightest consequence. While Liberia deserves plaudits for electing the first female president on the continent, the culture of male violence towards women is an issue which deserves far wider recognition. Kristof says the world's political leaders must work "to demystify it, dismantle the taboos, and address it directly." Hundreds of thousands of profoundly disempowered and demoralized women are expected to carry on without slightest mention of justice in their cases.

Of the cultures of mass rape ongoing in our time, perhaps the most famous and thoroughly studied is that which characterized the Rwandan genocide of 1994. A recent book was published entitled, The Men Who Killed Me: Rwandan Survivors of Sexual Violence. The first hand accounts in this book bear repeating but are hard to repeat, and I'll not bother here. The most ridiculous B-movie horror violence might approximate it, but when you consider the real lives ripped apart in the case of Rwanda, the impact is decidedly more affective than the crap movie-makers film in Los Angeles sound stages. As I'm sure any female who has experienced sexual violence in her past, the trauma echoes down through the years. It is not and should not be forgotten. It is not and should not be forgiven. And the violence, rape and atrocity has only been continued, indeed continued since the genocide itself in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Rape is a vitally useful tool for terrorizing and demoralizing civilian populations and is common everywhere. It was a technique used in the horrific civil war in Guatemala between 1975-1985. Recently unearthed police records from that time show conclusively that rape was systematic and widespread. Rape was also a prominent feature of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam in March 1968, when young American infantry men rampaged a series of villages murdering and raping almost everything in sight. The American military worked hard to deny and cover up these atrocities and just one soldier was ever convicted of the madness, his sentence mitigated by a personal pardon from President Nixon.

It is vital to me that my interests and inquiries cleave to the remotest regions of obscurity and neglect. I want to trumpet issues which are difficult to acknowledge let alone do anything about. It's not something I understand too well myself, I just seem to have a natural inclination towards these topics, some taboo, others though not taboo are nonetheless easily and regularly overlooked, ignored or under emphasized. Here's a simple example. In our post feminist age, when many look at the "affirmative action" initiatives of the 1980s and 90s as bungled failures, there appears to me to be a general sense that things have been pushed far enough. Women are sort of visible in a variety of formerly male-only domains, they seem relatively successful, and though persistent wage inequality remains the norm, only a foolish cynic would deny that women have achieved some measure of social - political and professional - mobility. I too admit that the lot of women, to generalize about a little more than half the globe's population, have wrestled some power away from the old boys clubs which are everywhere deeply woven into the customs and ethos of societies the world over. But the way I see it, through the little bit of experience apportioned to me, James Brown was correct when he emphatically observed, "It's a man's man's world."

That's why I'm always irked when I see something on the old idiot box or this new one, that gatherings of violence and anger around the world are described as involving "people" not more accurately "males." There are so many examples of this I'll leave it to you to notice for yourself where the women are at these momentous gatherings. Yet the euphemism "people" is almost always chosen to describe enormous crowds of males. Sure, there might be the odd odd-ball female in among the herd, saying no to American imperialism or throwing rocks at fashion boutiques, just like the boys do. So perhaps editors and writers are deeply earnest in their feminism, and spying a lonely female among the throng of lads inspires them to use the humane and capacious signifier "people." I hope that's what it is. But I have my doubts. I choose to look at the remote fringes of civilization so that I can help Kristof and others sound the alarm. We need to pay more attention to the use of rape in conflicts! There, I said it.