Another tragedy

Another brutality. And the cycle of blood makes another turn.

(CNN, June 18) - Al Qaeda militants kept a pledge to kill their American hostage, posting three chilling photographs Friday on an Islamist Web site to prove they had beheaded Paul Johnson Jr. ...

"As we promised, we the mujahedeen from the Falluja Squadron slaughtered the American hostage Paul Johnson after the deadline we gave to the Saudi tyrants," a statement said on the Web site. It has been translated from the Arabic.

"So he got his fair share from this life and for him to taste a bit of what the Muslims have been suffering from Apache helicopter attacks. They were tortured by its missiles."

Johnson, 49, worked on Apache helicopters in Saudi Arabia and had lived there for more than a decade.

This follows the posting of a video on a similar (or perhaps the same, I'm not sure) website that

allegedly shows the murder of American Robert Jacob, 44, who worked for the US Vinnell Corp, which helps train the Saudi National Guard. He was shot dead at his home in Riyadh last Tuesday,

according to Information Clearinghouse.

I expect what follows will be somewhat disjointed because I'm to some extent trying to work it out as I go. But what I sometimes wonder about these sorts of atrocities - or, more exactly, the broadcasting of them - is what they are (or it is) intended to accomplish. The obvious answer is that they are meant to terrorize and demoralize your enemies. For example, in the European wars of the 1500s to the 1700s, it was common to allow a few to survive a massacre just so they could return home to tell the story of the horror and thereby, it was supposed, frighten their fellow citizens.

Down through history people have pursued that logic.

And down through history it has rarely worked and very unlikely it has ever worked at all standing alone. In fact, the effect more often than not has been the exact opposite of what was intended: provoking anger, inflaming passions, actually increasing support for the very cause the terrorizers opposed.

To cite one historical example of which I know, in 1623 a Dutch force tortured and murdered a British contingent on the island of Amboyna (now usually called Ambon), one of the Moluccas. It was part of the long conflict among European nations for control of the immensely profitable trade in spices. The tortures, undertaken by "civilized, Christian" Europeans, included forcing water down their victims' throats until their stomachs swelled up, then beating them with clubs; blowing off limbs with gunpowder; and in one case tying a man up with his arms outstretched, then lighting candles under his arms which were allowed to burn until the fat dripping from his charred flesh extinguished them.

The Dutch did succeed in driving the English out of the East Indies, but it wasn't out of fear or intimidation, but rather that the crown was forced to accept that the Dutch were too well established in the area to be uprooted. (England switched it's attention to the Asian subcontinent - that is, India.)

Instead, what the massacre did do, when the English East India Company published a pamphlet about it in 1624, was to so inflame public opinion against the Dutch that it nearly changed European history by rupturing an English-Dutch alliance against the Spanish, which might well have changed the outcome of the decades of intermittent war of the 1600s. Ultimately, the Dutch agreed to pay 300,000 guilders to the descendents of those killed and cede colonial "ownership" of two islands in the East Indies to England as compensation.

Things haven't really changed in the interim. Did the desecration of bodies in Fallujah or the beheading of Nick Berg cause any measurable drop in support for the war? Support has been declining for some time, but it's clearly based more on a "What the hell is the point? What are we accomplishing that's worth the cost?" response than any variation of "Oh no! Run away! Run away!" And certainly the military's response to Fallujah was much more along the lines of "We'll fix you!" than anything else. (In fact, rather then being used to urge withdrawal, those incidents were adopted by some to maintain that we had to continue current policies in order to prove that we were not intimidated. The argument was to little effect, but the point is which argument was being used.)

It has ever been thus: horror used as a means of intimidation and failing.

So why does it keep appearing? I ventured one thought on April 8, talking about Fallujah:

[S]uch things as dragging bodies of the dead through the streets or the meant-to-be-horrifying hanging of charred corpses from a bridge are expressions of power, their intent purely psychological. They can be used by the powerful to demonstrate that power or by the powerless in an attempt to assert power (or at least to feel powerful), but the root impulse is the same.

In addition, in considering the more generalized question of torture and broadcasting of atrocities, I'll raise the idea that, as I've long maintained, the single, bottom-line, unavoidable requirement for getting someone to inflict harm on another person or their culture is to define them as "other," as alien, as in some pertinent way "not me."

Because "they" are evil, corrupt, because "they" don't have our values, because "they" don't respect life like we of course do (which was said of the Vietnamese during Vietnam and of both Asians and Muslims in general recently), "they" can't be expected to respond the way we do, and "they" are cowards. (Remember how much trouble Bill Maher got in when he said the 9/11 hijackers, whatever else they were, were not cowards? Enemies are always cowards.) So people who can't imagine their own side in a conflict retreating in the face of hardship, of fear - of horror - find it easy to imagine "they" will. Note here that I am not saying "we" are the US and "they" are terrorists or vice versa; I'm making a general observation about all "we"s and all "they"s.

To break that deadlock, that cycle, will take time. It will take effort. And it will take risk. The tragedy is, despite the insistence that "they" are the cowards, risks of this sort are what "we" are usually unwilling to take.