Nobody but Neocons Created Lynndie

[Sapphocrat]

From The Observer comes a damning indictment of Lynndie England and the system blamed for her metamorphosis into sadistic torturer.

I post this for several reasons -- as an interesting take on the aforementioned system; as a not-uncommon example of damnation from overseas; and as a warning that it's not just us librul elitists tossing around such fightin' words as "trailer trash."

Perhaps more than anything else, however: This is the first article I've seen that even begins to touch on the issue of women as torturers (at least in an intelligent way). Despite my lifelong commitment to the idea that men and woman are "equal" in everything, I've never lost sight of the fact that we are still different.

There's nothing wrong with recognizing differences, of course -- and it's downright stupid to pretend those differences don't exist. As for what those differences are, just think math & mechanics versus intimate friendships & passing toilet paper under the walls of the stall; i.e., we have differences that are neither good nor bad -- we are in many ways inclined toward different behaviors. Whether that is a result of "nature or nurture" isn't the point, and probably best left to a different discussion. Maybe.

What this article begins to touch upon -- for me -- is a dis-ease with which I have been grappling since the first torture pictures hit the wires. I am not proud of this feeling; in fact, I hate that part of myself that feels this way, because my good, liberal, egalitarian sense tells me it is wrong, wrong, wrong to feel the way I do...

And that feeling is: I hate this Lynndie England with all my being, because she has betrayed my sex. And (taking a deep breath) because I expect more from women that that.

Don't hate me, men. Try not to flame me. You have your nearly-hard-wired prejudices about women (and, actually, so do I). And don't take me for a "man-hating lesbian" -- it has nothing to do with my being gay. It's just that this issue has forced me to confront a deep-seated belief that violence is primarily the dominion of men (straight men, to be specific).

Funny thing is, the root of this idea is no different from that of many ideas men often take for granted about women. I see women as nurturers, lovers, Earth mothers -- not sadists or killers... and so do many of you, gentlemen.

That said (and as I brace for the onslaught of flames), this is what the following op/ed brought out in me.

I hope you will forgive me for feeling the way I do. It isn't a conscious decision -- and I suppose it's something I need to work on, to remedy, because it's so very, very unfair to you (men) for me to think this way.

Well, maybe that's one more tiny bright light to come out of this horrible event: It's forced me to confront my own prejudices.

And it's forced me to confront my fantasy-ideal of women, as... as people who wouldn't, couldn't, do this.

I don't know whether to be grateful for the destruction of the false myths I hold to be true, or to hate Lynndie England even more for exploding the last Santa Claus myth I held dear.

You want to know what I'm most ashamed of? The sense of relief I felt when I learned that England was not a lesbian. My first thought was: Thank God -- at least they can't pin this on us, on top of everything else straight people hate us for.

Here are just a few brief excerpts from the piece -- it's well worth the full read:

(T)he response to the Abu Ghraib pictures sandwiches (Pvt. Lynndie R. England) somewhere between Myra Hindley and Maxine Carr in an all-women axis of evil. England reminds me a little of Carr. Same childish physique, same small town background, same terrible taste in men. Though England’s lover and co-abuser, Charles Graner, is hardly Ian Huntley, there is not much to commend a grinning torturer with a Bible fetish and an alleged history of wife-beating. Like Carr, England is a bit-player who came to symbolize a wider horror story. Back home, family and friends are trying to work out how a "sweet, down-to-earth" paper-pusher who wanted to be a weather girl turned into a preening sexual predator.

Nor are violent women the aberration they are sometimes painted. Mothers ready to defend their children to the death are a common stereotype, while any notion that women are Stepford soldiers, caring and compliant, was challenged way before Boudicca headed the Iceni. But, though female warriors have a long history, their legends rarely dabble in gory detail, let alone the fact that bloodlust can be triggered more by role than gender. ...

Even so, revulsion at the England case stems partly from evidence that women soldiers, more often mentioned in Pentagon dispatches as victims of sexual assault by male colleagues, also revel in power and cruelty. The more troubling issue is who helped turn Lynndie England into an apprentice torturer. The list of suspects stretches from her superiors, through the CIA, to a president who called for the blood of "evil" men and a society who watched him spill it. Somewhere in her obscene behavior are the traces of all our fear.

The story that centers on Pvt. England goes beyond gender. ... Mythology is a casualty of this war. Fairytales of female innocence are dead, laid to rest with the dream of the British soldier as an updated Rupert Brooke. If Frances Cornford’s “young Apollo, golden-haired, ... dreaming on the verge of strife,” still exists, then he didn’t train at Deepcut. Yet stories of bullying at home and atrocities abroad have never sullied the notion that something in the squaddie’s soul is forever Journey’s End. There are many fine soldiers, obviously, but nostalgia sits uneasily with a shot, even if mocked-up, of a rifle butt crashing into a prisoner’s groin. ...

Much more:
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/May/10o/Nobody%20but%20Neocons%20Created%20Lynndie,%20Mary%20Riddell.htm

[Solly Mack]

1. I've been feeling like the odd-woman out on DU over this

I'm neither shocked nor surprised by the cruelty of women.

Great read! Thanks!

[oldcoot]

20. You are not alone

I really do not believe that women are any more or less cruel than men. I have always believe that the differences between men and women have been highly exaggerated. Yes, there are some biological differences between the sexes but we should not exaggerate these differences. We should not assume that because the average man can lift more than the average women that all men will be stronger than all women. Many women also have an aptitude for math while many men have an aptitude for the liberal arts. I even knew a teenage girl who liked to work on cars. Unfortunately, she might have a hard time turning her hobby into a career because of the outdated assumptions about what women and girls are capable of.

For this reason and many others, I really wish that people would stop buying into these outdated stereotypes about men and women because they only hurt men and women in the long run. Indeed, the idea that men and women are radically different can be a trap for both sexes. Fathers often complain that the courts are unwilling to give them custody of their children. I suspect one of the reasons for this is that the courts often incorrectly view women as being more nurturing than men.

Historically, our society has tended to place women on a pedestal. Women have been described as the "fairer sex" with many assuming that they are more naturally moral, nurturing and loving. Of course women who do not conform this stereotype have often had to pay a high price. One example would be the sexual double standard which condemns women for being sexual beings.

I have no doubt that Pvt. England is a war criminal and believe that she should pay for her crimes. I feel the same way about each one of the men who were accused of these crimes. However, she should not be judged on whether or not she conforms to traditional beliefs about women. I really look forward to the day when we start to view men and women as individuals. I just hope that I live long enough to see it.

[displacedtexan]

2. My favorite line from that Deborah Winger "Black Widow" film...

when the FBI agent asks her male superior:
What part is a woman not up to, the seduction or the murder?

I've always believed that women just don't get caught or punished as often.

[Solly Mack]

3. I love that line!

The very fact that women are human means they are capable of every horror/every good any human is capable of...

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. Hm...

your view of women as somehow "better", "nurturing", et cetera, is, quite honestly, most charitably described as sexist stereotype not that far removed in quality from certain other, converse sexist stereotypes about men, that they are "more decisive", "make better leaders", and so on. Yes, men and women are different, physiology and neurology adapted over millions of years of primate evolution to better fulfill those gender roles which are most viable for the tribal hunter-gatherer humans were until not too long ago.

But one thing I became aware of quite early is this: males and females are alike in that both are possessed of a deep and frightening capacity for cruelty and violence. And, in fact, in my own personal experience (I do not presume to state that it is a universal) women seem to have the greater capacity for what might be termed psychological cruelty and humiliation. And while Private England may be subhumanoid inbred white-trash scum, I certainly find it plausible that other women of better background and more education would be capable of similar acts, given the right circumstances and psychological motivation to commit them.

[Sapphocrat]

7. You're right...

It is sexist. You've nailed the reason I'm going to be awake all night over this.

This attitude is not something I would have believed about myself. I didn't see it coming.

Maybe I'm operating under a misguided notion that it has anything to do with sex at all. Maybe it's simply that I don't perceive the capability of cruelty in myself, or in any "important" female in my life. The result may be entirely one borne of nurture (v. nature).

Whatever the root cause (and rest assured that's what I'm going to lose sleep over: where did this idea come from, and what do I do about readjusting my perception after half a lifetime?), the final revelation disturbs me to no end: I harbor some serious sexism, and I have to deal with it.

Damn it, you hit the nail on the head. Thanks, SJ. It hurts like hell to hear my worst fears confirmed, but I thank you for it.

God! Sometimes self-awareness really sucks!


On edit: Stupid typo. It's late, and I'm very bothered.

[Spider Jerusalem]

8. You shouldn't be bothered, really...

It may be rather painful to recognise mental habits in oneself that mirror beliefs one would find repugnant in others, but...sometimes things like that can be hard to see. You really need distance to get perspective, which means you won't see or be aware of something like that until a) something brings it out or challenges it and b) someone else points it out.

And while not necessarily a desirable way of thinking, it is, at least, understandable and easily explicable...stereotypes are lazy, but they are also convenient, enabling one to generalise when thinking of a group of people, whether classed by race, gender, or sexual orientation, in the abstract. And, as you say, nurture and one's general environment help shape the stereotypes one develops...it's almost a sort of mental shortcut, a way of thinking without thinking. And it can be painful when you find something that doesn't square with those perceptions...something that's so antithetical to what you've thought your entire life that it forces you to reassess your beliefs in the light of this conflicting knowledge.

But it's also ultimately beneficial. Stereotypes are kind of like Plato's ideal forms....the shadow you were seeing on the cave wall was blurry, dim, indistinct, but you thought you knew what it was. Now someone's trained a flashlight over there instead of the dim, flickering candle, and you can see that whatever's casting the shadow is a bit more sinister and has more angles than you thought it did. Sure, it seems a it frightening at first, and you're kicking yourself for not seeing what it was before, but all you needed was the proper illumination.

You really shouldn't lose too much sleep over it...

[Sapphocrat]

12. It's difficult to know which...

...is more painful: the destruction of a perception I took for granted, or the recognition of my own "thinking without thinking" -- a trait I absolutely abhor. (Thus, my violently-ill reaction to Republicans. LOL)

"But it's also ultimately beneficial." Yes, without question. In the course of the peculiar, hybrid path I try so hard to follow, the most difficult lesson is the appreciation of everything -- including everything from mild discomfort to outright despair -- as an opportunity for introspection, healing, and ultimately a chance to turn what I've learned outward in order to help someone else.

I think feeling humbled by such revelations as this becomes easier as one ages -- that is, it gets easier to admit I'm wrong as soon as I recognize I'm wrong, and then commit myself to doing something about it. (Honest humility, IMO, is truly a virtue, while stubborn pride is pointless and destructive.)

Still, I think it also gets harder to recognize the flaws in my own thinking, because I think I've come such a long way from being that brash, hard-headed (and far less liberal) young adult I was 20 years ago. It's not pride, but frustration: How could I have missed that? Perhaps the thing I kick myself for the most is forgetting the fact that even on my deathbed, I won't yet be the person I want to be.

But it's all in the journey, isn't it? And as long we're willing to acknowledge the monsters hiding in the shadows, we can slay them.

Thanks for taking the time with me, JS. You've given me a lot to think about -- and you made me feel a little less "self-flagellant."

[bobbieinok]

27. it's one thing to 'know' something in your mind; it's another to 'believe/

accept' that something in your heart/soul

I say this as a white woman over 60.

To put a 'positive' spin on going from 'knowing' to 'believing/accepting' - the process could be viewed as moving from 'credulous child' to 'thinking adult.'

Examples of this movement in my own world view - going from 'knowing' about US crimes in the world to 'believing/accepting' that they have occurred.

One of the most difficult examples for me personally has been to 'believe/accept' how women got the vote in the US. They finally persuaded white male legislators with the argument that 'black and immigrant men were able to vote but that white, native-born women could not.' Not nearly as horrendous as torture, but a difficult reality for me to 'believe/accept.'

[progdonkey]

10. Women and Men

I just want to second what Spider Jerusalem stated. I definitely believe that women and men are capable of equally barbaric and inhuman treatment, but that the treatment is presented in different forms. Men engage more in physical torture, whereas women engage in psychological humiliation and torture.
Not only is this readily apparent in schools (male bullies beat other kids up, and female bullies tease and spread rumors), but it is seen quite well in the prison photos themselves.
The images that include physical torture show only men (the specialist sitting on a prisoner; the naked prisoner cowering--and then apparently being bitten--by attack dogs guided by male MPs), and the only pictures PFC England is in are those that show torture of a more psychological and humiliating form (pointing at the genitals of naked and masturbating detainees; treating a prisoner like a dog, but not actively beating him).
I hope people at large stop believing that only men are capable of inflicting pain. Women are just as adept at it, but the pain inflicted is most often psychological instead of physical.

[Sapphocrat]

14. I can't argue with that...

And I'll readily admit that the pain inflicted by women is characteristically more psychological than physical... which, in my experience, leaves deeper scars.

But then, I have no doubt that's exactly why the female guards (particularly England, a small, slight, chipmunk-cheeked girl) played such a visible role in the torture. Her victims are men whose value system is such that each would most likely rather suffer a hundred times the physical pain inflicted by the worst of Saddam's guards than be subjected to a moment's humiliation by this... girl.

[Piperay]

5. Thanks...

very interesting read. As a woman myself I am particularly disgusted by England even though I know from personal experience women can be very cruel but usually they inflict cruelty in less obvious ways and usually are cruel by ostracizing someone and not being so overt (anyway in my experience).

[tomreedtoon]

6. No surprise here...

You could have asked any heterosexual male whether women are cruel. Especially teenage ones. It's just that Ms. England happened to have a taste for physical cruelty. Not surprising at all.

[Sapphocrat]

15. Perhaps she looks too familiar...

Meaning: England looks like any number of kids we all knew from high school. Not a revoltingly bright-eyed Mary Lou Retton, exactly, but certainly that type.

I can look at the photos of those female Nazi guards (I believe it was saigon68 who posted pictures of them on DU a couple of days ago) who carried out even worse atrocties than England ever did, and make no association between them and me. They look psychotic to me -- like no one I have known... and certainly nothing like the image of the All-American Girl that's been hammered into our heads from birth.

Ditto Aileen Wuornos, Myra Hindley, and the rest of the handful of known female serial killers throughout history -- to me, they look capable of anything, because they look so foreign to me. (I mean "foreign" in the sense of "unfamiliar," not having anything to do with nationality, of course.)

Oh, no... Now I'm lookist as well as sexist! I'm only half-joking with that; perhaps the extreme discomfort in watching a woman carry out torture is compounded by the fact that she looks so damned familiar.

[Hekate]

9. Thanks for sharing your feelings and the article, Sapphocrat

It's helped me find a way to look at her and not just block her out. Oddly enough it never occured to me to stereotype her by class (I already know most of the "volunteers" are the poor and near-poor looking to better their condition, and I don't characterize them as any sort of "trash"), nor by sexual orientation.

No, as a mother of a son and daughter in their twenties, as a woman, what socked me in the gut was that she and the other two were female and so small and so young. As much as I believe in personal responsibility, I wanted to blame those who put them there and taught them that.

Like you, I want to believe that we Americans are better than that, but since it's been an interior battle of mine during the whole Bush administration, all this did was put a female face on it.

The goddess Nemesis is on to the Neocons, but the working-out of the vengeance of the gods for their hubris is being done on the soldiers first.

Hekate

[Sapphocrat]

16. As far as Americans being 'better than that'...

Sadly, I don't have any trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that we're not. (That's the collective "we," of course.)

My last big sock-in-the-gut came the day I started learning about the School of the Americas, and understanding just who the masters of torture really were (and still are). Did that ever hurt, to wake up to the fact that just about everything I had willingly believed about my beloved country was a lie... and that another couple-of-hundred-million people, just like me, still believed the red, white, and blue symbolized something truly virtuous and above-board at all times.

I pity da fools who have yet to realize how their own willing ignorance has (as did mine) enabled this long history of cruelty, unabated... on their behalf.

So, tragically, I know Americans (or, rather, America, in the abstract) are no "better than that." I hate it, but I acknowledge it.

My biggest problem here has been my own narrow thinking about the capacity for physical cruelty in women. I know better... but trying to get my head and my heart in sync is going to be one hell of an undertaking. Just as the American people need to understand this incident of torture was not at all isolated, I need to understand that Lynndie England is not an aberration herself.

It's a painful change in perception. But a necessary one.

Who was it that first said that greater understanding only leads to greater disillusionment?

[xchrom]

11. the first act of cruelty is bush's

lyndie simply had opportunity and took it in the circumstances provided. but so did queen elizabeth the first --and no one accused her of being white trash.
lyndie, in some ways, is keeping good company.

[Delano]

13. To be fair to Lyndie

She is 21 years old. She needs to take responsibilty for what she did, but she is a dumb kid. I shudder to think of the things I did at 21 and am grateful there were no cameras snapping me doing them for posterity.

She may grow to be a fine person, even an activist on our side, or she might become a rightwing shill ala Oliver North, or a druggie derelict. My point is that she is a work in progress, and at the time of the abuses was fairly fresh out of the mindfuck that is US military basic training (something else I know a bit about).

I hate what she did, but I hope she learns from it and does better in the future.

If she had been 30, or even 25, I'd be a lot less forgiving...

[Cleita]

18. I shudder some of what I did when I was twenty one too, but

what I did was to myself, taking chances that curl my hair, thinking about them right now. I know I would have thought twice about hurting someone else because my parents raised me to be empathetic about others. I think there is a real undercurrent of racism here, which she was taught in her community and church.

[Sapphocrat]

21. I can't give anyone even a partial pass based on age...

If 18-years-olds can vote, fight, and die, and 21-year-olds can drink...

Sure, we all do things in our teens and 20s we wouldn't dream of doing now -- that's a given. But this isn't just a lapse in judgment, along the lines of drinking too much, doing dope, having unprotected sex... This is in a whole different league. Civilized human beings don't torture one another, which is something so basic, any five-year-old should be able to comprehend the simple wrongness of it.

You bring up the thought, however, that perhaps there is something inherently sociopathic in a person who can willingly inflict such abuse on one's fellow human beings. That doesn't mean I think England was born a "bad seed"; I think we all have that capacity, in varying degrees -- but I expect England is the product of a military culture is designed to cultivate the seed of sociopathy to its best advantage, especially in such an "easy target" as she appears to be.

And I don't think England was particularly susceptible to brainwashing because of her age; she appears to be one of those disadvantaged, direction-less soldiers who enlisted for the college money, and had no idea she might actually get shot at.

I know how stereotypical that sounds, but it can't be denied that this faction of our military exists; we've heard the same "backstory" too many times, and I've known more than a few "Lynndies" (minus the sociopathy) myself.

In fact, I've got a cousin who (to my shock and horror) enlisted just over a year ago. In short, he had quite a nice life happening, until he was dumped by his fiancee, and succumbed to a deep depression that still hasn't lifted. After foundering around for a while, the U.S. Army was something "to do." So he did.

He hasn't been deployed, but I won't be surprised when it happens. And -- because he still exists in that direction-less fog -- I won't be surprised if, one day, his picture ends up on the front page for some nefarious act carried out in the name of Mom and apple pie.

He's 30 years old -- and a former high-school football star, a real all-American guy, from a well-off, church-going family... and IMO he's just as vulnerable to the sort of humanity-killing indoctrination that I surmise turned Lynndie England into the conscience-free inquisitor she's become.

I hope I'm wrong. And I hope you're right in that England has a lot of years ahead of her to decompress, turn her life around, and maybe even do some good in the world.

But I can't be any more or less forgiving of a person's actions because of his or her age. Torture, murder... It's just basic stuff you don't do.

[Skittles]

23. when I was 21 I was a sergeant in the Air Force

and I never came even CLOSE to doing something that f***ing despicable.

[Sapphocrat]

25. Skittles...

I can always count on you to say in 25 words or less what it takes me half a page to get out of my system -- and with greater clarity and impact than I could even hope to approach. ;)

Bingo. Exactly.

[Skittles]

28. I won't pretend to know what combat conditions feel like

but I'd like to think the extreme empathy I feel for humans and animals - even bugs in distress - would prevent me from sinking to such a disgusting level.

[Cleita]

17. Women can be as dark as men. We are not the sweet, gentle

souls, patriarchy would like us to believe. Look into the mythology of women of the ancient world. Greek mythology teams with wicked women. Medea who killed her children to get even with Jason, Clytemnestra who killed Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to Artemis. Ariadne betrayed her father the king of Crete to help Theseus escape the labyrinth and the Minotaur. These are stories, but the bards must have found enough truth in real life to spin these tales.

Historically, there was Cleopatra, who had no problem offing her siblings to become queen of Egypt and a few unsavory Roman Empresses as well. As for Bouddicea, archaelogical digs have revealed a wholesale slaughter in the cities she and her tribesmen attacked. Women are capable of all the atrocities men are capable because they are human after all, not a separate species.

[Hotler]

19. Wow! You ladies sure are deep.

I don't think it's gender specific. Human beings are the cruelest animals on the planet.

[Skittles]

22. dig deep into Ms. England's background

and you will probably find severe emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

[Sapphocrat]

26. I expect you're right. n/t

[Sapphocrat]

24. Here's some more food for thought...

I wish I'd read this earlier. It doesn't assuage my discomfort over my own flawed perceptions -- and in fact, increases it several degrees. But I'm glad I read it -- it articulates just what I'm wrestling with... which I now think is not so much a view of men as the sole barbarians, but a cherished, romanticized image of women I don't want taken away from me.

Maybe that's why this is so hard to comes to grips with -- I know I idealize women, and I see now how much an obstacle that can be...

It's sexist. It's not reality. But I'm already grieving its loss.

So long, Santa Claus... again:

Equal opportunity

... As horrifying as the images of degradation and brutality, for many, there was the additional and unexpected sting of seeing gleeful, American women involved. Even for those who don't subscribe to the notion that women are inherently more virtuous, the images of the women in the photographs broke with a deep-seated, if idealized sense of female decency.

"The first thing you notice, 'Oh my God, that's a woman that's doing this,'" said Lory Manning, a retired Navy captain with 30 years experience in the military. "I suppose it's because we think of torture as something that men do, when we see women there, it is emotionally more gripping, more appalling." ...

Logically, no one seriously doubts women are capable of acts of violence and abuse, whether domestic or political. Female murderers are far from unheard of, and the ranks of suicide bombers in Israel have recently included more women. The shock we feel over the women participants at Abu Ghraib, said Amy Kaplan of the University of Pennsylvania, has less to do with an awareness that women are capable of torture, but more with the break from a romanticized imagery of women. ...

And it is a stereotype we have often incorporated in our imagery during times of war. During World War II, women were often depicted as dutifully maintaining the home front while their men were away fighting on their behalf. "The images were distinct between the civilizing influence of women at the home front and the brutality the men faced in the war" ... Even though women actually served in the military during that war or worked in factories, the warm representations of domesticity, Kaplan said, gave a comforting "narrative coherence" to the war. ...

Probably one of the reasons we are so shocked by the involvement of the women at Abu Ghraib is that historically, women have not been implicated in wartime torture. But that is not because of greater nobility on the part of women, said Darius Rejali, a political scientist at Reed College who studies torture and interrogation. It is because of sexism. ...

Much more:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bal-to.women08may08,0,4427759.story?coll=bal-features-headlines