motivation can be seen in the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
In the last hundred years we have moved slightly away from moral affirmation as a justification for starting wars and have focused more on the punishment aspect of moral distance. In the Spanish-American War it was the sinking of the
It is interesting to note that although punishment was used to justify starting American involvement in these wars, moral affirmation came into play later and lent a very American flavor to some of these conflicts. Once the Allies began to liberate concentration camps, General Eisenhower began to view World War II as a Crusade, and the justification for the Cold War had consistent underpinnings as a moral battle against totalitarianism and oppression.
Moral distance processes tend to provide a foundation upon which other killing-enabling processes can be built. In general they are less likely to produce atrocities than cultural distance processes, and they are more in keeping with the kind of “rules” (deterring aggression and upholding individual human dignity) that organizations such as the United Nations have attempted to uphold. But as with cultural distance, there is a danger associated with moral distance. That danger is, of course, that every nation seems to think that God is on its side.
Social Distance: Death Across the Swine Log
While working as a sergeant in the 82d Airborne Division in the 1970s, I once visited a sister battalion’s operations office. Most such offices have a large in-out roster as you come in the door. Usually these rosters have a list of all the people in the office, organized by rank; but this one had a different twist. On top of the list were the officers, then there was a divider section labeled “Swine Log,” and then there was a list of all the enlisted personnel in the office. This concept of the “Swine Log” was a fairly common one, and although it was usually used in good humor, and usually more subtly, there is a social distance between officers and enlisted personnel. I have been a private, a sergeant, and an officer. My wife, my children, and I have all experienced this class structure and the social distance that goes with it. Officers, noncommissioned officers (NCOs), and enlisted members (EMs) all have separate clubs on a military base. Their wives go to separate social functions. Their families five in separate housing areas.
To understand the role of the Swine Log in the military we must understand how hard it is to be the one to give the orders that will send your friends to their deaths, and how easy is the alternative of surrendering honorably and ending the horror. The essence of the military is that to be a good leader you must truly love (in a strangely detached fashion) your men, and then you must be willing to kill (or at least give the orders that will result in the deaths of) that which you love. The paradox of war is that those leaders who are most willing to endanger that which they love can be the ones who are most liable to win, and therefore most likely to protect their men. The social class structure that exists in the military provides a denial mechanism that makes it possible for leaders to order their men to their deaths. But it makes military leadership a very lonely thing.
This class structure is even more pronounced in the British army. During my year at the British Army Staff College, the British officers who were my friends felt very strongly (and I agree with them) that their lifetime of experience in the British class system made them better officers. The influence of social distance must have been very powerful in ages past, when all officers came from the nobility and had a lifetime’s experience in wielding the power of life and death.
In nearly all historical battles prior to the age of Napoleon, the serf who looked down his spear or musket at the enemy saw another hapless serf very much like himself, and we can understand that he was not particularly inclined to kill his mirror image. And so it is that the great majority of close-combat killing in ancient history was not done by the mobs of serfs and peasants who formed the great mass of combatants. It was the elite, the nobility, who were the real killers in these battles, and they were enabled by, among other things, social distance.
Mechanical Distance: “I Don’t See People…”
The development of new weapon systems enables the soldier, even on the battlefield, to fire more lethal weapons more accurately to longer ranges: his enemy is, increasingly, an anonymous figure encircled by a gunsight, glowing on a thermal imager, or shrouded in armour plate.
Social distance is generally fading as a form of killing enabling in Western war. But even as it disappears in this more egalitarian age, it is being replaced by a new, technologically based form of psychological distance. During the Gulf War this was referred to as “Nintendo warfare.”
The infantry kills the enemy up close and personal, but in recent decades the nature of this close-in battle has changed significantly. Until recently in the U.S. Army the night sight was a rare and exotic piece of equipment. Now we fight primarily at night, and there is a thermal-imagery device or a night-vision device for almost every combat soldier. Thermal imagery “sees” the heat emitted by a body as if it were light. Thus it works to see through rain, fog, and smoke. It permits you to perceive through camouflage, and it makes it possible to detect enemy soldiers deep in wood lines and vegetation that would once have completely concealed them.
Night-vision devices provide a superb form of psychological distance by converting the target into an inhuman green blob.
The complete integration of thermal-imagery technology into the modern battlefield will extend to daylight hours the mechanical distance process that currently exists during the night. When this happens the battlefield will appear to every soldier as it did to Gad, an Israeli tank gunner who told Holmes that “you see it all as if it were happening on a TV screen…. It occurred to me at the time; I see someone running and I shoot at him, and he falls, and it all looks like something on TV. I don’t see people, that’s one good thing about it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Shalit Factors: Means, Motive, and Opportunity
Given an opportunity to kill and time to think about it, a soldier in combat becomes very much like a killer in a classical murder mystery, assessing his “means, motive, and opportunity.” Israeli military psychologist Ben Shalit has developed a model of target attractiveness revolving around the nature of the victim, which has been modified slightly and incorporated into our overall model of the killing-enabling factors.
Shalit takes into consideration:
• The relevance and effectiveness of available strategies for killing the victim (that is, the means and opportunity)
• The relevance of the victim and the payoff of killing in terms of the killer’s gain and the enemy’s loss (the
