Death once came as a thief in the night
But now it may come all year
If the purpose is to create a fright
Or grip your soul with fear
We look to weapons as a right
While death itself is the purpose
For the thrill or maybe God’s will
And excuses rise to the surface
As killing becomes less a mystery
Looking backward at history
As I thought more about Larry DiStasi’s last two essays, I
realized that we have been wringing our hands about our American “culture” of
death, but that much more is involved.
Several cultures influence our views on killing and we have developed a
unique set of beliefs to support killing.
I will outline a few and leave the sociological studies to smarter
writers. In the 1600s, our early European
immigrants brought an extreme European religion to the Massachusetts Bay
Colony. The name Puritan is ironic, at best, for they
were only ideologically pure and death was high on their list of social and
religious sanctions. While
claiming to be Christian, they also believed in predestination and that only
the Elect would be saved. Only God
chose the Elect. Mere mortals were
not party to the process…except to help it along where they saw
violations. They hanged some
nineteen witches. They authorized
the killing of Jesuit priests who were sent by the French to evangelize the
natives, but they also killed the natives who dared to be evangelized or dared
to breath Puritan air. They
sometimes killed their own for engaging in “wrongful” sex, but not always. Remember, they were only helping their God select the Elect.
Now lest you think that it was solely the strict Puritans,
a retrospective would indicate that the Spanish influence was well formed about
a hundred fifty years earlier during the Inquisition. When the Spanish came to America, the aim was conquest. Subjugation, slavery and death were the
tools of conquest. When they
witnessed the Inca human sacrifice (another American culture embracing death),
they were scandalized by the removal of a beating heart from the living body of
the person sacrificed, but they used Spanish steel and musketry to dispatch the
natives without remorse. Note that
except for the religious human sacrifice that the rationale for killing was
usually a widely held belief that the life forms being snuffed out were
sub-human. The Puritans and
Spaniards both felt that they were far superior to the “savages” they
killed. The underlying fabrics of
religion were flexible enough to exempt killing “savages” from the 6th
Commandment. Invaders claimed
superiority in religion or ethnicity and then used that as a basis for killing
others. Even in the late
nineteenth century we slaughtered Native Americans and, on one occasion, blamed
Indians for the Mountain Meadows Massacre (1857) that was later determined to
be the work of Mormans. In that
incident, Mormans in southern Utah killed about 120 emigrees bound for the far
west and they used Indian war paint and even the white flag of truce to kill
the hapless travelers. The Mormans
were themselves sometimes earlier subjected to harassment and death in their
travels usually due to their religion and polygamist practices, but turnabout
was no motive here.
At this point, I need to remind the reader that much of
the killing in our chronicles of humanity is tied to the ugly practice of using
words that indicate a sub-human aspect to our targets. I will deal with this again when
dealing with wars, but it has always been convenient and effective to view the
enemy as a lower form of life. We
spoke of savages and evil Indians, or perhaps, “red devils.” We took on the white man’s burden of
taming their evil inclinations and failing that we killed them as we looked
down upon them because they did not have our superior religion, ethnicity or
language or: name your favorite cultural
item. The American way of death
carved trails west as those hostile Indians did not move fast enough to get out
of our way. Then we imported
inferior beings to lay our rails and build our cities. They were German, Chinese, Irish and
Italian and sociologists wrote scientific-like treatises to prove that southern
Europeans and Blacks and Poles were inferior as were Jews and Chinese and
Mexicans. The cry, still heard,
was “They are not like us!” It is
time to make a note: Using names
and slurs helps provide distance, both psychological and physical, between “superiors”
and “inferiors.” As we recall,
this comes in handy in case of bus seats, drinking fountains or restaurants as
well as wars. While fences may
make good neighbors, distance and the fences we build in our minds and hearts
allow us to avoid the guilt that we might otherwise feel for violating the 6th
commandment. Distance removes us
from responsibility and changes us from murderers to victims and protectors. If not a license, it is a learner’s
permit to kill so we can learn how to do it without hurting ourselves or our
religious sensitivity.
Let us examine some of the common language benefits that
epithets provide. Listing even a
few may seem offensive, but it makes the point of the visceral jarring they
provide. They are listed in no
special order and are far from complete but they have been insoluble lumps in
our melting pot:
Nigger, rag-head, krout, jap, wop, dago, slope, cracker, slant
eyes, wetback, camel jockey, hebe, kike, chink, coon, coolie, frog, gringo,
kafir, paddy, squinty, spade, redneck, polock, paki, haji, goy.
As you perhaps wretched reading the abbreviated list, you
may also have been touched with a little guilt for using these terms and falling
into the trap of marginalizing and labeling others. It is nasty and yet common and often effective. When distance is critical, this
practice provides psychological distance.
In war, we also build up a hate reflex so that killing the enemy is
motivated by emotions stronger than disgust or psychological distance. We train soldiers under the universal
anthem: Kill or be killed. We do not want our soldiers seriously
thinking about taking a life, but we want them to act viscerally from our
ingrained fight or flight reactions and to force them into “fight” rather than “flight.” In war, we use targets that simulate
the enemy visually and in their tactics.
We use unusual means to insert distance into our actions. Dresden and Hiroshima were possible, not
only because of the available technology, but because we were distant from the inherent
horror of the attacks. Julius
Caesar’s army killed 500,000 men, women and children in a single day in Gaul
when the broadsword was the weapon of the day. That may have been
exaggeration. It is documented,
but by chroniclers who perhaps wanted to praise the exploits of Caesar (before
killing him). Our more recent
documentation is photographic.
Another aspect of killing during war is that it is practiced and
repeated until the extraordinary becomes routine. This too, removes the person from the long built in controls
that restrain and control killing.
We are taught from birth that killing as an individual is wrong and we
condemn people for it. We are
taught that killing as a member of an army is right and we praise people for
it. Sanctions are critical in
killing. This derives from our
spiritual or religious beliefs. It
also helps explain why some who feel that their religion is under attack can
kill in defense of religion. Facts
do not count. We recently have
been reminded that personal religious harm is not needed as in Boston. Syria may have violated the
international sanction of using chemical weapons. We are upset that they did not follow our rules for killing
their own people. Are not the
people killed from conventional artillery attacks just as dead as those killed
by Sarin? Side note: War is a game
marked by rule-books and umpires.
We sometimes stretch the rules but, by definition, we do not break rules. Perhaps this is a prelude to justifying
our killing…maybe even by remote controlled aircraft that give us the distance
for “clean” killings. Those are
killings when our hands don’t get dirty and we can be thousands of miles
distant from our targets (not people).
In reality, we draw from many cultures in our use of death
as a tool for control and power. We know violence begets violence and violence
is used to kill. We need to face
our culpability in promoting violence as a cultural highlight and then change
the process. “Immunizing” our people with hate brings violence. Stop killing at home and school and
street and lower the number of guns.
Teach ways of solving problems without violence and change our cultures
or our melting pot will become a pressure cooker always ready to explode in the
heat of hate and always question extremism whether in religion or ourselves.
Peace,
George Giacoppe
30 April 2013
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