Points Summer Book Club

About dehumanization in war: I'm writing this morning from south Louisiana, where I'm visiting my folks, and also my sister and her family. Last week, her husband left with his Louisiana National Guard unit for Iraq. I was telling my dad yesterday about how when my three-year-old son prayed for his uncle the night before, the child had prayed that Uncle Mike would "shoot the bad guys" in Iraq. I'd gently corrected the boy, and had him pray for peace, and that Uncle Mike would never have to shoot anybody.

My dad got a pained look on his face, and said how worried he was about the possibility that Mike will have to kill someone. Dad was in the Coast Guard in the 1950s, and said that he was part of a boat crew that killed some sort of fugitive. They were shooting at his fleeing boat, and hit the fuel tank, causing it to explode. The fugitive died. Said my tough-guy dad, "He was a bad guy, and we didn't do anything wrong. It was a tragedy. But still, it took me years to get over that. I had nightmares for a long time after that. You never come away clean from killing a man, even if you're in the right."

But armies have to dehumanize their enemies in order to put their soldiers into a psychological state capable of carrying out their battlefield tasks. Once I talked with a childhood friend about his basic training as a Marine. It was startling to me to hear his stories about how the Marine Corps takes a young country boy and turns him into a killing machine. As Fussell indicates in his 1996 memoir "Doing Battle," this is necessary, if only for the soldier to survive in war. I spoke on Monday by phone to Fussell, and recalling his infantry experience, said that it was kill or be killed, simple as that. Fussell said that you "felt no shame" over doing what you had no choice but to do, though you did feel guilt -- a guilt that you distanced yourself from through the practice of irony.

Fussell is 83 years old, and you can still hear the anger in his voice over what war did to him.

I do question, though, whether WWI was the first instance of the mass dehumanization of the enemy. Earlier this year, I read a history that took in part of the Crusades, and in general the centuries of Christian-Muslim conflict. The Christian armies of western Europe regarded their enemies as subhuman, and slaughtered them. But the Muslim armies did the same to the Christians in occupied Europe. You can still hear that today in the rhetoric from jihadists, who consider non-Muslims to be not fully human. I'm not sure I am persuaded that the Great War was the first time this stark "versus" dynamic was introduced as a psychological technique to guide soldiers, and indeed a nation, toward embracing mass slaughter. Though perhaps it was perfected as never before.

Did you hear that recent public radio program in which they discussed an experiment involving this kind of thing? Researchers randomly surveyed the public, asking them to consider a situation in which they could see a train coming down the tracks, and it stood to kill five people. They could save the five people by pulling a lever that would divert the train to another set of tracks -- but in so doing, would kill one person standing on the other tracks. Would they pull the lever, dooming one man but saving five? Nearly everyone polled said they would.

Then the researchers set up the same scenario, but said this time to save the five, they had to push a man over a bridge onto the tracks. Would they do it in that case? Nearly everyone polled said they would not.

The math was the same: sacrifice one life to save five. People were willing to do it when technology abstracted them from the inhuman act. But they couldn't bring themselves to do it when it involved no technological medium. On the radio show, the psychological researcher running the experiment postulated that there's something deep inside the brain that recoils from that kind of personalized inhumanity.

Here's something I can't figure out: Fussell writes about how awful the popular press was in the Great War, feeding the home front with jingoistic lies about conditions on the front, stoking the fires of war in the English people, who were kept in the dark about what their troops were undergoing. To be fair, the press was also censored. Today, in the Iraq War, people can perfectly well see via the news media, and in savage detail, what our troops are facing in Iraq. I suspect this is what has caused public support for the war to collapse -- not the idea of suffering per se, but the idea that the suffering seems to be taking place for no defensible reason or achievable goal. Still, though, there has been no effective antiwar movement. I wonder why?