All right, everybody, welcome back to the show, Santa War Radio.
All right, so next guest on the show is Kathleen Barry.
And let's see, it says here she is, Professor Emerita at Penn State University, and is the author of five books.
Her first book, Female Sexual Slavery, launched an international movement against trafficking in human beings.
And this book is called Unmaking War, Remaking Men.
Welcome to the show, Kathleen.
How are you doing?
I'm doing well.
Good to be with you, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
I'm sorry, I didn't have time to read the whole book.
I only just got my hands on it.
But I did have time to take a look at the chapter on military training and how regular young men and women, too, are brought from, I don't know, basically high school and then turned into the kinds of people who will do things that the rest of us would have to be a psychopath to do, like dropping napalm on a village full of people.
And your explanation or your exploration of how that transformation is made, how do you take a regular kid and put him in a situation where, like we saw in the Apache video, where they can just laugh and joke and high-five over the slaughter of innocents?
Yeah, I'm glad you focused on that chapter because I think it's pivotal, really, to the title, to Unmaking War and Remaking Men.
It can't happen without undoing and redoing a whole new military.
The military relies on boys being socialized to understand that their lives are expendable.
That's the preceding chapter.
And that is all set up through the protector role, which makes you the head of the family, and it makes you go enlist when you think your country is in danger and needs you.
Implicit in that is the understanding that soldiers go in knowing that they very well may not come out, a very unusual condition for somebody who's 18, 19, 20 years old with their whole life ahead of them.
And so how do you get soldiers to accept this kind of death wish on them?
And what military training is at base is a brainwashing.
It literally follows all of the conditions of brainwashing.
Well, I think a big part of military recruiting anyway, and I don't know exactly how it is in boot camp other than full metal jacket and stuff, but a big part of the myth of the American military is that, don't worry, you'll never have to be in a fair fight, like on The Simpsons.
All the wars of the future will be fought by robots, and your job will be to build and maintain those robots.
It's going to be a harmless, bloodless thing, at least for our side.
In fact, the recruiters will tell young people anything that they think will get them to enlist.
If somebody goes in and says, can I go into the military and do a humanitarian, some kind of humanitarian mission, absolutely yes.
And by the way, there's this $40,000 benefit that you can get, which hardly ever happens, which almost never happens.
The lying that military recruiters do follows directly from their own training, where they've learned to be remorseless killers, and that's followed off into combat.
Yeah, well, I think especially down in Houston, for some reason, I don't know if the commanders were especially demanding there or what it was, but this has happened all across the country.
You have guys who are military recruiters who commit suicide, not from what they remember of what they had to go through in the Battle of Fallujah, but that they convinced so many impressionable young people that this was the right thing for them to do, and those guys never come home but in a box.
And the guilt that goes with that.
I mean, part of this whole thing is that it's all a bunch of nonsense, is what the government has to convince people in order to make them soldiers.
At some point, they get their head right again.
Yeah, I think you hit it on the mark when you said earlier that they have to turn them into sociopaths or psychopaths.
And I have a couple of chapters on that in the book in terms of how that actually happens.
And you're right.
I think with some of these recruiters, they can't live with themselves.
I opened this book with a story of a drowning that I saw the effects of at the ocean in Bodega Bay near where I live, and how everybody had come together.
Even people who didn't know each other didn't know the person who was drowned.
There's kind of a collective grief.
We have a sense in ourselves of protecting human life.
And not killing other human beings.
That seems to be the province of people who have no morality, such as sociopaths and psychopaths.
And governments.
And governments.
I have a chapter on psychopaths.
And regular people, too, when their incentives are screwed up, right?
Like Kitty Genevieve, who was the famous case who was beaten and stabbed and finally died out in the middle of a giant neighborhood in New York City and all the people decades ago, right?
And all the people heard her, but nobody called the cops.
Right.
Because they were all waiting for somebody else to do it.
And they were all waiting, of course, for the cops to be the one to save her, not themselves.
Because their incentives had been screwed up from doing the right thing to passing the buck.
Yes, exactly.
And when our incentives are not screwed up, what you see is people rushing to help somebody whose life is at risk.
It's almost as if that is a kind of something born in us to do.
So to get to become remorseless killers takes a huge amount of brainwashing and literally wiping their identity out.
That's what all the uniformity of the military training is about, is wiping that identity out so that you don't even care about your own existence.
In combat, you are there only to protect your buddy.
Hopefully, your buddy is there only to protect you.
But you have no sense of yourself.
If you can't have a value for your own life, you're very well set up to not have value for the lives of the villagers, of the people that you're coming into.
And on that point, I think it's really important to note that the military, as we saw in that WikiLeaks collateral murder video, the military in combat do not distinguish between, quote, innocent lives and the enemy or insurgents or whatever the military is calling them that month.
Anybody who is not your buddy, meaning a fellow military person with you, can be at the other end of your gun.
Yeah.
Well, I think it was something I read about the trial of the guys in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam who it became apparent that, like under questioning, that they kind of explained it.
But they were the enemy.
They'd been designated the enemy.
Everybody between here and there is the enemy.
It was a free fire zone.
These were the bad guys, I was told.
And then I killed the bad guys.
And now I'm in trouble for killing the bad guys.
And I'm just kind of a dumb Marine here.
And I don't really, or I forgive as an Army soldier, I don't understand why I'm in trouble, really.
Wasn't I doing what I was supposed to be doing?
Because, of course, all those gooks had all just been conflated into one big enemy.
In the free fire zone, to him, he didn't understand how he was supposed to make the distinction.
They'd beaten the distinction out of him.
Exactly.
One of the things in one of these.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I sat here and talked all the way up until the break on you, Kathleen.
That wasn't right.
But we'll pick this back up on the other side of the break.
It's Kathleen Barry.
The book is Unmaking War, Remaking Men.
And this is Anti-War Radio.
Hi, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our guest is Kathleen Barry.
She wrote this book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men.
She teaches at Penn State University.
And when we were so rudely interrupted by the commercial break, I brought up kind of the racism or the designation of the enemy as non-persons, as I think is very important the way you pointed out, that the sole mission of a soldier in the field is to protect his best friends.
And it doesn't matter where the guys from the American Enterprise Institute decided to place them in any particular circumstance.
Their mission stays the same, to protect each other, come back alive.
And so therefore, they can be put in the position of carrying out absolute atrocities against innocent people in bogus wars.
Because as, actually, I met a Marine who told me he learned about all this in killing school.
That was what it was called.
And it was all about, it was very frank.
This is how we get you to accept killing other people and not have to worry about it later.
Yeah, this is, as we said before, this is the sound of brainwashing that goes on in military training, but it gets bound together by this buddy system.
And we have to understand that this is a very explicit strategy on the part of the U.S. military.
Wipe out the person's identity, make them responsible, make their very manhood responsible for their buddy.
You let your buddy down, you are not a man.
Even if you are a woman in combat, you have that same masculine model in terms of what you have to fulfill.
And therefore, the distinction now in warfare, whether it's Iraq, Afghanistan, or Israel in Lebanon, the distinction now is to not bother with making any distinctions any longer between civilian and insurgents.
And in fact, I have a chapter in this book on making enemies.
When the U.S. went into Iraq, there was not a ready-made enemy there other than Saddam Hussein, who actually, as we know, did not have these weapons of mass destruction.
But on the ground, the soldiers on the ground were not enemies of the United States.
The United States had to create enemies.
And you do that by randomly killing people on the streets, in their cars, in their homes, and you do it with house clearing, which is coming into the person's house in the middle of the night, breaking down the doors and the walls, breaking in.
In front of those men's wives and children, taking, demasculating them.
And yeah, very much the purpose, and that's part of the theme of that chapter.
Are you familiar with that book, The Arab Mind?
Because there was a whole thing where the neocons thought that they had learned that this is how you get Arabs to do what you want.
You just have to humiliate them in front of their wife, and then they'll be helpless after that.
Well, and in fact, that's true with masculinity across the board, because this goes back to how men are socialized to understand that their lives are expendable, that they're supposed to be the protector role, in the protector role, that this is the standard of manhood.
And that as the standard of manhood, if they don't meet it, they are emasculated.
They are not a man.
And so it doesn't matter whether you're going into- That's just human nature, right?
It's the exploitation of this kind of thing that's the problem, right?
Is convincing people that invading Iraq is the same thing as defending America's shores from a Spanish invasion or something.
What I'm trying to show in this book, and I think it's come off successfully, is that masculinity itself is socially and politically constructed to serve those purposes, that it is not indeed natural, that it's constructed to serve the purposes of the military and to serve the purposes of male domination.
If you don't go in the military, at least you're the head of the family and can call those shots.
But I also want to, before we run out of time, point out that this book gets to, the title of Unmaking War and Remaking Men gets to that very optimism that given that we have socialized men in this way and women have been socialized to be complicit in it, that means that there's a way out.
It means that we can do things differently and build a different kind of socialization, but only we are also constructing a different kind of military, because as this stands, our military is far too corrupt and far too inhuman and fraudulent to be reformed as it is.
But a new kind of military that focuses on global peacemaking as opposed to these phony wars of the Bush and Obama administration is possible.
And I lay that out in the book and I just kind of wanted to get that out there because there is some basis for being optimistic.
Down the road it will come, but we see it in process in different places.
Well, go ahead.
So in terms of, well, in fact, when I'm talking about Remaking Men, I think the ones that I'm looking at first and offering as a model are the soldiers who have resisted in war.
There is a moment when empathy will engage for a soldier who will say, what if this was my family?
Ethan McCord said, what if these were my children?
When he came up on the scene after the collateral murder from the helicopter.
Well, then again, Aaron Watata said, I'm not going because I will not lead men into combat in an illegal war and have them commit war crimes.
They're my men, I'm responsible for them.
He was an officer and said, it was his manhood that stood in the way of him committing those war crimes.
Exactly, and that's why I see, and I point to in this book, these kind of men as a model for a masculinity that is not complicit with this war mentality and war machine.
And when you talk with men who have done that- I think Aaron Watata would have fought a war to defend America's shores, right?
He was a military officer and he wanted to be.
Right, but when has America's shores been since Pearl Harbor?
Wow, well, touche.
And Pearl Harbor was a stolen territory at that point anyway, it wasn't even a state then.
Yeah, exactly.
We're doing ongoing war to support the military industrial complex and to have generals and CEOs running this country.
But what we do see in these people is when they discover what these wars are about, they won't do it.
And that refusal, and when you get into talking with them, as I have with some of the soldiers who've resisted, you see the process by which they undo the very socialization and the military training and the brainwashing that's been put up on them.
They undo it themselves.
And in that, there's a whole lot of hope for being able to change this condition.
I think also when we look at it at the macro level of the state and the military, we see examples developing around the world of peacemaking militaries that are there to do exactly what you mentioned a few minutes ago, defend our shores, defend our people, but from a standpoint of human rights and not from a standpoint of needing to brainwash people into doing remorseless killing.
Right.
Well, you know, I think that one thing that is sort of natural about males is our insistence on the rules and the previously agreed upon rules before the thing that happened happened, or whether it's the constitution or the so-called rule of law as they like to believe it works.
And all this stuff is against the rules.
All this is a corruption of what America's supposed to be.
And so it's perfectly possible to be hairy-chested, manly beast of a person and be absolutely opposed to empire building and corruption and the end of any pretense of the rule of law, for example.
You don't have to be, you know, I'm not exactly sure, you know, if I'm arguing with you.
I'm not, I don't know if I really have my head around the whole thing, but you could be a real tough guy and be for not fighting, is what I'm trying to say.
Jesus was a carpenter, not a seamstress, you know?
The problem being that Costa Rica, for example, is a state that has demilitarized, but also has the highest rate of violence against women in the region.
And so we want to see this change in masculinity that feminists have been really demanding and needing for a long time in relation to the violence against us, because simply getting guys to stop fighting is not enough.
They've got to not take it home.
They've got to not do it in the private lives.
All right, well, I'm sorry.
We're all out of time, Kathleen, but everyone, the book is called Unmaking War, Remaking Men.
It's by Kathleen Berry, and she's at Penn State University.
Is there a website people can look at?
Yeah, I'm not at Penn State.
I'm a professor emeritus.
The website is unmakingwar.net.
Okay, great.
Well, thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.
