Prepared to kill
Prepared to kill
October 5, 2007
** **** ** - Killology, Wikipedia article
| Source: August 30, 2006, planetnonviolence.org | Killology: A Science | What exactly is needed to kill someone? | Here is what a 21-year-old American soldier from West Texas, Steven Green, described when he shot and killed a man who refused to stop at an Iraqi checkpoint: | - Actually, it was nothing. Here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill someone, and it's like "okay, let's go get a pizza," he said to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. I mean, I thought killing someone would be an experience that would change my life. And then I did it, and then it was like "okay, and then what." | This soldier was recently charged and indicted for the rape of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi, who was repeatedly raped and then killed, her body set on fire. Her father, mother, and sister were also killed. These barbaric acts occurred on March 12 in a village near Baghdad, Mahmoudiya, and unfortunately, are not the only cases reported in this American occupation war in Iraq. | In fact, the human brain – unless it falls into the category of psychopaths – is programmed not to kill other human beings. Like snakes that bite to death other species but fight among themselves only to knock each other down, humans in the majority of cases refuse to resort to homicide. A demystification of nihilistic Darwinism, which would have humans born and living only to kill each other within the framework of a "natural selection," aiming to make the law of the strongest triumph. | That is why those, institutions and individuals serving them, who survive, live, and profit from the "reign of terror," are constantly trying to find methods to reverse these pacifist tendencies. Military camps, passing through police institutions and even some self-defense clubs, are all continuously searching for more effective new methods | to eliminate this human aversion to killing another human being | . | It is actually about reprogramming the brain so that it automatically reacts in certain situations to kill. | Thus, American soldiers train on targets filled with ketchup to mimic the way a bullet hitting a human head makes it explode and bleed. Marches are organized with training songs like: "kill, kill, kill." Simulations through video games allow those who succeed in their "shots" to earn points. There are hundreds of techniques, according to experts, that allow the human brain to be reconditioned. | These reconditioning processes constitute what is called | killology. | "Once the bullets start flying, most fighters stop thinking using the frontal part of the brain (the part of the brain that makes us human) and start thinking with the middle brain (the primitive part of the brain that is the same as that of an animal," according to retired Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman, a former U.S. Ranger, military science professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the man who coined the term killology. "In conflict situations, this use of the primitive middle brain can be observed where there is a strong resistance to killing someone of one's own species... It is an essential survival mechanism that prevents species from self-destructing during territorial conflicts and mating rituals." | For Grossman, the only way to silence the middle brain is through Pavlovian conditioning. | The need to find new methods to condition to kill became apparent when researchers noticed that the majority of those trained to kill using other mechanisms, refused, secretly, to kill. | During World War II, when American soldiers were in a position to kill enemy combatants, only 1 in 5 fired, according to a controversial and sensational study by the army historian, Brigadier General S.L.A. Marshall. It was not due to cowardice, on the contrary, as they carried out very dangerous missions, notably running across battlefields to save their comrades, sometimes placing themselves in situations where they risked their lives by refusing to fire. Thus, at the moment of firing, they could not do it. | Although some researchers have questioned his methodology, others have concluded as he did that "the fear of killing rather than being killed was the most common reason for individual failures on the battlefield." | Grossman, going further back in American history, noted: "The 'Encyclopedia of Civil War Collectors' mentions rifles found after the Battle of Gettysburg, 90% of which were still loaded, and 50% had multiple shots. This means that, given that in this kind of combat, soldiers spent 95% of their time loading their rifles and 5% firing, so many loaded rifles prove that the soldiers spent their time pretending to load them, in order not to be noticed by their comrades." | Psychologists who advise the army and police services in the U.S. have started to pressure for changes to revolutionize training to improve the "killing" rate. Their methods – familiar to those who run military, police, and aggressive self-defense training camps – remain mysterious to the outside world, but they apparently work. | The Pentagon has improved the success rates of shooting. According to some studies, during the Korean War, 55% of U.S. soldiers fired at enemy combatants, in the Vietnam War, the rate had reached 90%. One of the radical changes was to stop training to shoot in the eye of a bull. Today, "apprentice killers" train in simulated situations close to reality and according to methods that would be instantly recognized by Pavlov and B.F. Skinner as behavioral modification techniques. The targets have human shapes that appear suddenly, with faces made of polyurethane fixed on inflatable bodies dressed in uniforms. The one training learns to detect the target and shoot almost instinctively, and is rewarded with points, badges, and days off. Practiced repeatedly, these "killing exercises" build muscle memory and train the brain to kill. | But most apprentice killers have years of moral training reinforcing the commandment "you shall not kill." Eliminating this is one of the challenges of killology. | Some training methods focus on killing using rational justifications such as: "you must eliminate the enemy because he 'threatens the American way of life' or 'is fighting for freedom' or simply 'is trying to kill innocent people.' But the main objective of these numerous programs is to make killing more acceptable – even socially acceptable and desirable. | The use of a...