Military Review English Edition September-October 2013 | Page 61

SOLDIER MYTHS

elite human being.13 The anti-Semite is perhaps at first conscious of his fallibility, but finally rejects it through his hatreds. He lifts himself up by simply “being,” in this case by being non-Jew, rather than by “doing,” by acting in a manner that would in fact elevate himself. As Sartre points out, if the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would create him. Sartre concludes, “Anti-Semitism is thus seen to be at bottom a form of Manichaeism.”14 By this he means the extreme, dehumanizing black-and-white outlook that led to pogroms against Jews and the Holocaust of World War II. Such attitudes are not entirely unfamiliar to some American service members. There is, for example, the American soldier in Iraq who said, “A lot of guys really supported the whole concept that if they don’t speak English and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we want.”15 There is the soldier at Abu Ghraib who, while forcing a detainee to masturbate above the face of another detainee, remarked, “Look at what these animals do when you leave them alone for two seconds.”16 And then there is the Army chief

of staff who compared Fallujah to “a huge rat’s nest” that was “festering” and needed to be “dealt with”—a metaphor that may be more unconsidered machismo than willful dehumanization, but that is still unsettlingly reminiscent of the depiction of Jews as a scurrying horde of rats in the infamous Nazi propaganda film, “The Eternal Jew.”17 Such extreme, dehumanizing words about the “other” is today the exception rather than the rule within our ranks. More commonly, this form of self-deception asserts itself as half-hearted applications of the ethic of reciprocity (what is more commonly known as “The Golden Rule”). That is, to some American “exceptionalists,” a restriction that applies to other nations and militaries does not necessarily or fully apply to the United States if, by applying it, an apparent American advantage is taken away. The slippery slope of dehumanization. Failure to fully consider the ethic of reciprocity is apparent in the ongoing debate on torture. Nearly all American service members would call it “torture” if they were subjected to waterboarding, forced nudity, water

U.S. Army official SHARP poster. The Army’s problems with sexual harrassment illustrate the efforts to overcome objectification of others.

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