Truly Blessed
Even better than victory? Enemies who don’t mind defeat one bit
BY JONATHAN SCHWARZ • One of the great things about being American is we’re just lucky. For example: lots of other countries through history have killed millions of people—it sorta comes with the whole wealth and power thing. Afterwards, it’s only natural for the killing country to feel bad. But when America’s done what it had to do, we’ve always lucked out and picked people who turned out not to mind being killed.
I know you’re thinking, “How can this be? Aren’t people pretty much the same everywhere, especially when it comes to liking being alive?” Apparently not! And I have the data to prove it!
Take Afghanistan: In 2012, Steve Inskeep of NPR and Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post discussed how Afghans haven’t gotten all bent out of shape about a U.S. soldier massacring sixteen of them. Why? Because “human life is already cheap” way over there.
Well, what about Iraqis? Were they whiny bitches when we killed them? No way, according to Fred Kagan, architect of the Iraq “surge”:
“If anyone has seen pictures of Ramadi or Fallujah, they looked like Stalingrad. Cities absolutely crushed...
“The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage...the Iraqis don’t on the whole say “darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses.” They sort of accept that.”
I don’t know if I could accept that, could you? But the Iraqis are a really easy-going people. Just take the 1920s, when they were being slaughtered by the British:
“The natives of these tribes love fighting for fighting’s sake,” Chief of Air Staff Hugh Trenchard assured Parliament. “They have no objection to being killed.” The military’s argument was that, though the often indiscriminate air attacks might perturb some civilized folks back in London, such acts were viewed differently by the Arabs. As one British commander observed, “[Sheikhs]...do not seem to resent...that women and children are accidentally killed by bombs.”
Is it just the legendary hospitality of desert peoples? No. In Vietnam, human life wasn’t just cheap but also plentiful, as U.S. General William Westmoreland pointed out. Obviously, it’s just supply and demand:
“The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.
And here’s a review of Gen. Curtis LeMay’s autobiography, in which he explained precisely why massive carpet bombing of North Korea during the Korean War didn’t make them surrender:
LeMay [argues] that bombardment failed because of an “undying Oriental philosophy and fanaticism.” He says, “Human attrition means nothing to such people,” that their lives are so miserable on Earth that they look forward with delight to a death which promises them “everything from tea parties with long-dead grandfathers down to their pick of all the golden little dancing girls in Paradise.”
All this makes it seem like it’s an Eastern Hemisphere thing, which it’s not. People in the Western Hemisphere have also never minded being killed by America, as U.S. soldiers have observed:
Marine major Julian Smith testified that the “racial psychology” of the “poorer class of Nicaraguans” made them “densely ignorant...A state of war to them is a normal condition.” Along the same lines, Colonel Robert Denig observed in his diary, “Life to them is cheap” ... When asked if he ever witnessed American brutality in Haiti, General Ivan Miller replied that “you have to remember that what we consider brutality among people in the United States is different from what they consider brutality.”
Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, Nicaragua, Haiti—none of ’em minded too much. It’s like we have a gift for it, a sixth sense, and it’s been that way since the beginning. Actually, before the beginning: in Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson investigated and found out that his African slaves didn’t feel emotions like white people do:
Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions, which render it doubtful whether heaven has given life to us in mercy or in wrath, are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them.
Other scholars discovered that Africans were less physically sensitive too:
Negroes...are void of sensibility to a surprising degree...what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.
So there you have it: sure, we’ve done some things that would’ve maybe been bad if we’d raped/enslaved/murdered normal people, people like us. But in each case they haven’t minded it. Not a bit.
Lucky us. ◊
JONATHAN SCHWARZ was Senior Writer/Editor at The Intercept. He is co-author of the humor collection Our Kampf.
(This piece was originally published in The American Bystander #1, October 2015.)
