A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator from a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
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The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance, whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, had sought to enroll followers in the Army to get training for a race war.
The groups are being abetted, the report says, by pressure on recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq.
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
It would explain a few things, if it's true and as widespread as SPLC claims. It would help explain the seeming ease with which torture was instituted as policy in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and in countless secret prisons around the world to which people are disappeared and rendered. The real aim of torture is not to gather information, but to dehumanize, and if you have someone who already regards his adversary as subhuman, as "mud people", you got a leg up on breaking your subject.
It explains Haditha, and it explains the recent rape/murder of a teenage girl, and the slaughter of her family, including her seven-year-old sister. It explains a disgusting "song" like Hadji Girl, which is apparently just another in a long line of big fucking jokes, like poisoning Supreme Court justices and blowing up Times Square. It explains the pathetic war-trolls masturbating in their pajamas to the song's lyrics, and excoriating anyone who might find the imagery a tad, well, atrocious.
It would be a mistake to imagine that the casual brutality of "Hadji Girl" is coming from people who are simply evil or racist or cruel. The soldiers occupying Iraq are normal men and women who, in other circumstances, would never commit the abuses that have been documented in Bagram and Abu Ghraib and that are now alleged in Haditha. The situations in which this war has placed them -- far from home, surrounded by a foreign language and foreign culture, carrying guns and fearful for their lives -- have brought out behaviors that we would not see otherwise. If American soldiers and Iraqis could meet under different circumstances, things would be different.
I think there's a lot of truth to that; it would be irresponsible to simply take the SPLC's assertions as gospel and instantly conflate it to causality of every atrocity. Still, Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad. That's a sign of something, and with recruitment numbers chronically down, it behooves the Army to take it seriously, not only in weeding out potential recruits, but in spotting existing service personnel and getting them out of there before, at the very least, they do something stupid and spark a retaliation torture-murder on their own squad.
And yes, it also bespeaks a certain part of what the soul of the nation has come to, but a lot of it is still a manifestation of desperation and ignorance, rather than out-and-out hatred. For now.
In the meantime, I have no faith whatsoever in the SecDef's ability or desire to rectify this situation, or any other for that matter. I don't think he could even if he wanted to, which is why we are where we are in the first place.
3 comments:
I think I'll have to disagree with this one, Heywood. Neo-Nazis and skinheads enrolling in the military don't explain either Haditha or Abu-Ghraib or 'Hadji Girl'. All of these problems have empirically discoverable answers--it is, in principle, possible to find out whether the perpetrators of these abominations were themselves skinheads or obviously influenced by extreme right-wing ideologies. My guess is, they weren't. Rushing to make a connection between these two--an increased enrolment of neo-Nazis and awful things committed by some of the soldiers--prevents us from looking at possibly deeper, but more insidious causes of such behaviour: the increasingly acceptable eliminationist rhetoric* according to which fragging a Supreme Court justice or politician you don't like or killing a political opponent is OK in these "partisan times"; the subtle dehumanization of most Arabs, by certain not-so-subtle parts of the mass media (look at how they react with virulent outrage whenever The Righteous 51st State incurs a minor loss, but shrug indifferently when the same state collectively punishes them hadjis in Gaza and the West Bank); and the very likely possibility that the sub-human rednecks at Abu Ghraib were given a free hand, indeed encouraged, by a leadership who knew what they'd be up to, but preferred to send in a bunch of untrained hicks to 'soften up' them sandniggers into confessing--after all, they're all terrorists, right?
Blaming it all on the neo-Nazis is the easy way out--relentless decades of bashing by Hollywood and the media have prepared us all to instinctively believe that only skinheads would do such things as killing civilians in cold blood and raping 15-year old Iraqi girls before they shoot their entire families. It's certainly comfortable to believe it--much more comfortable than facing the prospect that it's 'normal' boys in the military descending to such inhuman lows.
--Marius
*I'm trying to put you and the two guys at Dumbocracy in touch with each other--methinks that you see things from pretty much the same vantage point.
Marius:
Yeah, you make some good points. Unless it's suddenly revealed that Steven Green or one of his buddies has "White Power" emblazoned across his chest, I'd have to punt for now, as far as making any connections to specific instances.
And as the U.S. Army is very integrated, and does have a larger proportion of minorities than the civilian population, it's hard to make a strong case for specific behavioral dysfunctions caused by blatant racist activities. It may be anecdotal rather than systematic. For now.
Some of these supremacist groups are pretty serious and focused though, and if recruitment levels remain low, I could see them changing their approach just a bit to beat the screening process. Their overall goal isn't really to directly affect unit behavior anyway -- it's to acquire weapons and combat training to bring back home with them, in the eventuality of (whether or not they instigate it) the apocalyptic race war much of their literature apparently foresees and encourages.
I thought about all this as I was writing the post, but what tended to push me more into the "this is a real problem" camp was the "Hadji Girl" song; more specifically, how well and how popularly it was received.
But you're right about that as well, I think, upon further reflection -- behavioral science is a rather esoteric discipline, but it does appear to have a multitude of functional group models where previously "normal" personalities will not only accept, but aggressively endorse and encourage aberrant (and abhorrent) behavior patterns.
And it is almost tempting to find a convenient explanation for patterns and incidents of atrocious behavior. Chalking it up to "the fog of war" is perhaps too vague; it's much easier to simply attribute the patterns to a detestable ideology with aggressively pernicious aims.
As to the basic question of whether or not the Army is trying hard enough to weed these people out in the recruiting stage, I definitely have my doubts. Over the past year, there have been stories of them recruiting mentally ill and even autistic people, and juvenile criminals, as well as anecdotes of outright coercion and lying, in order to pressure kids to join.
It's not a huge leap to think they might be waving a few Aryan Nations guys through, but yeah, maybe more info should come out before we start reflexively attributing every atrocity to them.
As for Dumbocracy, thanks for the link. I checked it out, I like it, and they're on the blogroll. Hopefully they get some extra traffic and stay in the game. As you said in your comment to them, now's the time to really fight. I definitely understand that frustration from time to time, feeling that maybe I'm not reaching quite as many people as I'd like.
But ultimately you gotta do it for yourself. As Wayne Campbell once sagely advised, "Led Zeppelin didn't try to write music everybody would like. They left that shit to the Bee Gees."
"And as the U.S. Army is very integrated, and does have a larger proportion of minorities than the civilian population, it's hard to make a strong case for specific behavioral dysfunctions caused by blatant racist activities. "
Actually, the warfighters are predominantly white, Dan. This article squares with my own observations of the makeup of the infantry, even though I am support I still see these guys.
"The tendency of whites to cluster in front-line combat units and blacks in support jobs is well known among a small group of experts who study the military. Although there are a number of theories, no one is exactly sure why."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2003-01-20-army-race-usat-_x.htm
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