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kindkitBuying that inexpensive secondhand copy of Joanna Bourke's An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in 20th Century Warfare seemed like a good idea at the time.
In retrospect, I could probably have done without such delightful anecdotes as the squad of U.S, Marines in Vietnam who, whenever they got bored, would kidnap a village woman, gang-rape her, and then kill her, a pastime which was perfectly well known to their superiors. Or the moment during the My Lai massacre when Lt. Calley stopped a soldier from raping a woman--because he ought to have been killing her instead. Calley then killed the woman and her baby himself.
Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to have an analytical framework beyond, "many soldiers had no particular problem with killing and some of them deeply enjoyed it." Especially since she's lumping different kinds of violence together--treating, for example, the rape, torture, and killing of civilians as essentially no different, in terms of its causes and meanings, from killing soldiers in combat. Nor does she properly distinguish simple killing from killing plus sadism (e.g. rape, torture, deliberate mutilation of living or dead bodies, etc.) The limitations of Bourke's analysis are particularly clear when she's arguing that atrocities have been a part of all twentieth century warfare, and her examples from the First World War are about the battlefield killing of surrendering combatants or new POWs, while by the time she gets to Vietnam, it's the sort of thing I described above. Pretty clearly something had changed. Bourke does at least talk about racism as a factor, and it's undoubtedly a big one, but I do wonder about a changing conception of war itself (fuelled in part by the brutality of the two world wars) and perhaps an increasing "effectiveness" of military training in making soldiers eager to destroy an enemy they're learnt to dehumanize. My fairly ignorant sense is that mass rape, in particular, is more likely to occur when the victims from the enemy population are seen either as racially inferior or as deserving of punishment (e.g. the rape of German women by Red Army soldiers at the end of WWII). So it's not simply about war per se.
I should add that rape in warfare is actually not a topic I want to read any more about, so there's no need to suggest other sources. I'm just musing on my problems with Bourke's approach.
And now I should go and read something else so I don't have nightmares.
In retrospect, I could probably have done without such delightful anecdotes as the squad of U.S, Marines in Vietnam who, whenever they got bored, would kidnap a village woman, gang-rape her, and then kill her, a pastime which was perfectly well known to their superiors. Or the moment during the My Lai massacre when Lt. Calley stopped a soldier from raping a woman--because he ought to have been killing her instead. Calley then killed the woman and her baby himself.
Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to have an analytical framework beyond, "many soldiers had no particular problem with killing and some of them deeply enjoyed it." Especially since she's lumping different kinds of violence together--treating, for example, the rape, torture, and killing of civilians as essentially no different, in terms of its causes and meanings, from killing soldiers in combat. Nor does she properly distinguish simple killing from killing plus sadism (e.g. rape, torture, deliberate mutilation of living or dead bodies, etc.) The limitations of Bourke's analysis are particularly clear when she's arguing that atrocities have been a part of all twentieth century warfare, and her examples from the First World War are about the battlefield killing of surrendering combatants or new POWs, while by the time she gets to Vietnam, it's the sort of thing I described above. Pretty clearly something had changed. Bourke does at least talk about racism as a factor, and it's undoubtedly a big one, but I do wonder about a changing conception of war itself (fuelled in part by the brutality of the two world wars) and perhaps an increasing "effectiveness" of military training in making soldiers eager to destroy an enemy they're learnt to dehumanize. My fairly ignorant sense is that mass rape, in particular, is more likely to occur when the victims from the enemy population are seen either as racially inferior or as deserving of punishment (e.g. the rape of German women by Red Army soldiers at the end of WWII). So it's not simply about war per se.
I should add that rape in warfare is actually not a topic I want to read any more about, so there's no need to suggest other sources. I'm just musing on my problems with Bourke's approach.
And now I should go and read something else so I don't have nightmares.
