{"id":191713,"date":"2021-08-16T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2021-08-16T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=191713"},"modified":"2021-08-13T05:54:13","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T04:54:13","slug":"war-herbicides-and-moral-disengagement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/war-herbicides-and-moral-disengagement\/","title":{"rendered":"War, Herbicides and Moral Disengagement"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>And the least secret agent of all . . . Agent Orange!<\/p>\n

On August 10, 1961, the United States, several years before it actually sent troops, started poisoning the forests and crops of Vietnam with herbicides. The purpose: to deprive our declared enemy, the commies of Ho Chi Minh, of food and ground cover that allowed them to trek from North to South. It was called, innocuously, Operation Ranch Hand.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Agent Orange, the most powerful of the herbicides used in Operation Ranch Hand, contained dioxin, one of the most toxic substances on the planet. We dropped 20 million gallons of this and other herbicides on Vietnam, contaminating 7,000 square miles of its forests. Half a century later, we are fully aware of the consequences of this strategic decision, not just for the Vietnamese, the Laotians, the Cambodians, but also for many American troops: hundreds of thousands of deaths and debilitating illnesses, horrific birth defects, unending hell.<\/p>\n

History, in all its moral primness, has relegated our use of Agent Orange to the status of \u201ccontroversial.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much to my amazement, I learned the other day that August 10 is now a day with official status. Numerous international organizations, many of them Vietnamese, have declared it Agent Orange Awareness Day<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Four specially-equipped US Air Force cargo planes spraying a Vietnamese triple canopy forest with dioxin-contaminated Agent Orange during what the Vietnamese called the \u201cAmerican War\u201d (those aren\u2019t benign \u201ccontrails\u201d, they\u2019re toxic \u201cchemtrails\u201d)<\/p><\/div>\n

I say, let\u2019s keep this awareness alive and evolving at least for the next decade, which is how long the United States continued to wage its chemical warfare on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. And they didn\u2019t wage it in ignorant innocence. Top military leaders, whose personal lives, of course, were unaffected by Agent Orange, were fully aware of its toxicity.<\/p>\n

This raises what I choose to call The Question from Hell: How is it possible to make such a decision \u2014 to place short-term military strategy ahead of moral restraint and compassion for civilians? And this leads to a second, larger question: Why are military and political leaders so unwilling or unable to envision the long-term consequences of their decisions, that is to say, the consequences that utterly transcend the significance of the war they\u2019re trying to win? Why are they so indifferent? Why are they so . . . stupid?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A Vietnamese victim of Agent Orange, dramatically demonstrating one of the dermatological expressions of the disease.<\/p><\/div>\n

Pondering these questions was how I spent Agent Orange Awareness Day. Whether the U.S. won or lost the war, stopped or failed to stop the communist dominoes from tipping, the landscape would still be ravaged, the infected would still be dying, newborns would still have shocking birth defects<\/a> (missing limbs, extra limbs, misplaced organs and so much more).<\/p>\n

As the War Legacies Project<\/a> notes on its website, the U.S. was trying to fight an \u201cinvisible enemy\u201d who was hiding in the jungle, living off the land, by \u2014 what\u2019s the big deal? \u2014 killing the jungle itself. As a result: \u201cEver since the war\u2019s ending, the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have been saddled with an invisible enemy of their own.\u201d<\/p>\n

To sum it up as simply as possible, war is insane \u2014 and growing ever more so. The military establishment isn\u2019t just brutal and cruel. It is so advanced in the technology of lethality that its capable of destroying the world. Hasn\u2019t the time come to defund war \u2014 completely! \u2014 and rethink how we deal with conflict?<\/p>\n

Well yes, of course, but we all know this isn\u2019t going to happen. Nonetheless, the creation of Agent Orange Awareness Day could well be a moment of human awakening, a chance for there to be a collective focus on that Question from Hell: Why?<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a starting place, thanks to psychologist Albert Bandura<\/a>, as quoted by Russell P. Johnson in an essay published by the University of Chicago Divinity School. In essence, Bandura has sought an answer to the Question. What gives political leaders the wherewithal to violate basic human values \u2014 established moral standards \u2014 and perpetrate the inhumanity of war?<\/p>\n

He calls the phenomenon of doing so \u201cmoral disengagement\u201d and posits four forms that this behavior takes:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Euphemistic labeling: We may drop bombs and kill dozens or hundreds or thousands of civilians, including children, but the action is described by the lapdog media as, simply, an \u201cairstrike.\u201d We may torture Iraqi detainees but it\u2019s not such a big deal when we call it \u201cenhanced interrogation.\u201d We may poison the jungles of Southeast Asia, but what the heck, there\u2019s Jed Clampett leading the way in \u201cOperation Ranch Hand.\u201d The list of military euphemisms goes on and on and on.<\/li>\n
  2. Advantageous comparison. If the enemy you\u2019re fighting is evil \u2014 and he always is \u2014 the actions you take to defeat him, whatever they are, are ipso facto justified. The alternative is doing nothing, a la Neville Chamberlain, appeasing Hitler. Violent response to evil \u2014 carpet-bombing Hamburg or Tokyo, nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki \u2014 is not simply justifiable but the essence of morally necessity.<\/li>\n
  3. Displaced responsibility. I was just following orders, cries the Buchenwald guard. I did what I was told. As Johnson writes: \u201cDecisions are made and justified without anyone ever having the sense of a moral threshold being crossed.\u201d Indeed, \u201can entire society can rely on displacement of responsibility to shield themselves from moral scrutiny.\u201d A pernicious side effect of this is known as \u201cmoral injury.\u201d Once a soldier is out of the military, the justification for killing someone may completely vanish; the result is a high suicide rate among vets.<\/li>\n
  4. Attribution of blame. They made us do it! \u201cOne\u2019s actions are treated as mere reactions, caused not by one\u2019s own decisions but by the actions of the enemy,\u201d Johnson writes. \u201c. . . If our actions are excessive or barbaric, it is the other side\u2019s fault for driving us to such extremes.\u201d When both sides in the conflict resort to this, which is almost always the case, Bandura calls the result \u201creciprocal escalation.\u201d The war gets increasingly bloody.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Agent Orange Awareness Day, as I noted, was Aug. 10. I think we should spend the rest of the year honoring War and Dehumanization Awareness Day.<\/p>\n

    ______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

    \u00a0Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    On 10 Aug 1961 the U.S. started poisoning the forests and crops of Vietnam with herbicides to deprive the commies of Ho Chi Minh of food and ground cover. Agent Orange Awareness Day was on 10 Aug. I think we should spend the rest of the year honoring War and Dehumanization Awareness Day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":66333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2263,867,2089,1189,1749,112,95,70,2052,1953,481],"class_list":["post-191713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-agent-orange","tag-anglo-america","tag-biowarfare","tag-chemical-weapons","tag-chemical-weapons-attack","tag-pentagon","tag-us-military","tag-usa","tag-vietnam","tag-vietnam-war","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191713\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}