Be: Environment of Evil

Saturday, April 14, 2007
On this day:

Environment of Evil

Henry See
Signs of the Times
Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:51 EDT

There is much evil in the world. A large part of it seems to be centered in the United States, radiating out in its wars of conquest, its television shows, movies, and music, in the fascination with which the world follows the pointless excesses of its stars, in its politics and self-absorption and disdain for the rest of the world. The mythos of the Wild West and men with six-shooters settling arguments with a bullet at high noon before riding off to wipe out the Indians has congealed and hardened the hearts of its population to the reality of invasion and occupations eternally justified with noble slogans as vapid as they are preposterous.

Proud sons and daughters of America, patriots all, engage in the vilest and basest of cruelty in Iraq and the many secret detention centres the US empire has positioned strategically across the globe. No one is more than a few hours away from a hell in red, white, and blue.

Looking out over this landscape that surpasses Hieronymous Bosch in its horrors, men and women, those at least who are still capable of thought, are moved to ponder the question of good and evil.

One such meditation appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle this week:

How Did It Come To This

San Francisco psychologist says environment plays big role in evil behavior

Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Naked men in hoods form a human pyramid. A prisoner crawls on the floor tethered to a dog leash. And next to them, grinning at the camera like soul-dead fools, are the Army reservists, one of whom dismissed the torture of Iraqi detainees as "fun and games."

No one can forget those images from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Now, three years later, San Francisco psychologist Philip Zimbardo has written a book arguing that the men and women who participated in the torture were not just "rotten apples," as the Bush administration has argued, but the unfortunate products of a "rotten barrel" mind-set that left them unsupervised, poorly trained and ignorant of Iraqi culture. He sees the American military establishment in Iraq as complicit in what happened at Abu Ghraib.

First warning sign: the American military establishment is "complicit". Only complicit? According to Philip Zimbardo the problem is that these soldiers were left "unsupervised, poorly trained and ignorant of Iraqi culture". That's the problem? We think it goes much deeper than that.

The real rotten apples are in all the positions of power in the Bush Reich. The soldiers were blamed, and the story of "a few rotten apples" was circulated in order to whitewash the real problem and get the truly guilty parties off the hook. The explanation we are about to read below, given by Zimbardo, only serves to further hide the truth.

In "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil," Zimbardo writes that human nature is dualistic: Each of us, given certain uncontrolled circumstances, is capable of sadistic or abusive behavior. A professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, Zimbardo, 74, believes this so strongly that he spoke as an expert witness in defense of Staff Sgt. Ivan "Chip" Frederick, the military guard who supervised the night shift on Tiers 1A and 1B at Abu Ghraib, where the beatings, torture and sexual humiliation took place.

"Each of us, given certain uncontrolled circumstances, is capable of sadistic or abusive behavior."

There you have it. Anyone put into a similar set of circumstances will react in the same way. You, gentle reader of this web site, are capable of the kinds of horrors we have seen at Abu Ghraib, that have been reported at Guantanamo, or that we imagine take place in any one of the many US secret detention centres around the globe.

This idea is a very popular one. It is also used to explain the horrors of Nazi Germany. It implicates each of us because each of us has committed acts for which we are ashamed, for which we feel guilty. Therefore we buy into such an explanation. We will see below why such an idea is pernicious and false.

Zimbardo describes Frederick, the son of a West Virginia coal miner and a devout Baptist, as "superpatriotic," a man who considers himself spiritual even in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Despite Zimbardo's testimony, Frederick was sentenced to an eight-year prison term, which Zimbardo calls "outrageous."

"Superpatriotic" and "spiritual" is a very bad mix. Those are the makings of a religious zealot, a modern Crusader, someone who is able to be easily manipulated through the conflating of God and country. Funny how we are told over and over again that this type of manipulation is occuring so often under Islam when in fact the United States is likely to be the primary manufacturer of such dehumanized and programmed religious warriors.

"What I'm saying is that they're good soldiers," Zimbardo explains during a conversation at his Russian Hill home. "The whole point of the book is to change people's minds. ... (The perpetrators) were just at the bottom of this barrel; there was all this pressure on them to do this."

Sure, they are good soldiers, in the worst sense of being so dehumanized that they unthinkingly obey orders regardless of their morality or legality. Of course they were only "at the bottom of the barrel". In a world of conscience, such a statement would not even need to be asserted. It is only because the United States is so far removed from a direction set by any moral compass and its citizens so far removed from reality, brainwashed by its media into believing the fairy stories of Islamo-fascism, that it must be carefully explained to its citizens that if such torture was regular and wide-spread, it was because the orders came down from the top.

Yes, there was pressure on them to do these things. And being good, mindless automatons, they obeyed.

Trying to understand the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he says, isn't the same as excusing it. "If you don't understand the dynamics -- and if you don't change the situation -- then it's going to happen over and over again."

Exactly, which is why it is necessary to really get to the bottom of the issue, to really uncover the roots, which, unfortunately, Zimbardo has not done.

Even apart from the lack of proper supervision, Zimbardo writes, the environment at Abu Ghraib -- a 280-acre complex, where Saddam Hussein tortured and executed critics of his Ba'athist government -- was so hellish that everyone was on the verge of cracking.

Porta Potties overflowed in 110-degree heat, leaving a nonstop stench. There were no mess halls, no proper showers, no separate facilities for prisoners with mental illness or contagious diseases such as tuberculosis.

In two months, the population on Tiers 1A and 1B swelled from 200 to 1,000 prisoners -- most of them innocent men rounded up in random military sweeps. Mortar and rocket-propelled grenade attacks on prison guard towers, launched by insurgents from the roofs of nearby buildings, occurred as often as 20 times per week.

"We all got numb in different ways," Zimbardo quotes one reservist saying.

We have no doubt that the conditions at Abu Ghraib were hellish, even moreso than under Saddam Hussein. The conditions in all of Iraq are hellish, as the article An Angry Arab Woman Speaks - The World Would Do Well to Listen so painfully and passionately shows. Does that mean that everyone living under those conditions would turn into a monster?

According to Zimbardo, the answer is yes. But how, then, can we explain those individuals, too few and too rare, who are willing to risk their lives in situations such as that, to help others and go against the tide?

Studying evil, which he defines as "intentionally behaving in ways that harm others," has occupied Zimbardo for years. He's lectured on the psychology of evil in classrooms and at professional conferences, and traveled to Brazil where he interviewed men who had been torturers and death-squad executioners. In the book, he draws examples from the 1994 Rwandan genocide of the early '90s, the lynching of blacks by whites in the American South and the more recent phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalist suicide bombers.

He cites examples of men who, at the same time they inflicted evil in the context of work, maintained parallel lives as family men and loving fathers.

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Labels: environment+of+evil+psychopath