This is an expanded comment I made to Attaturk’s 5/4/09 morning column:

http://firedoglake.com/2009/05/04/they-anticipated-for-once-but-they-didnt-really-care/

Thanks for focusing once again on the natural yet always unholy double standard the U.S. employs internationally. Our leadership will cherry pick “human rights violations” when convenient and even go as far as whip up a little war in their name. Bestowing a secure democracy was the overt public relations objective that began the Iraq War. On the other hand, Siun wrote Sunday about Israel gearing up for more attacks on Gaza. Is it time for even the “change we can believe in” new U.S. administrator to put an ostrich head into the sand?

The issue of torture, its prevalence and apparent seductiveness, is profound and chilling. Morality and ethics in terms of world governments, as well as our own, seem to be circling the bowl. And yet when I write on some websites at times about the desperate need for a “feminine” paradigm shift (meaning the classical yang (masculine) as opposed to yin (feminine) sensibility, competition vs. partnership), I rile up a lot of reverse sexism accusations. But I have to honestly say here, maybe the testosterone factor and the “boys can’t be sissies” testing for males growing up are something to be seriously and courageously addressed. In my generation upon toddlerhood girls had dolls thrust into their hands, boys had toy guns. Don’t you think that alone might begin to establish a foundation for an ultimately dangerous mind set in terms of imagining, romanticizing and being acclimated to violence?

Yes, Sarah Palin is poster girl for the alpha female in terms of “yang” energy. Aggression is a trait of some biological females. Passive aggression in many others, who find a more covert way to assert control. But I do think the patriarchal “power and competition” group-think is destroying the world. I think a “feminine”, or maybe a label more comfortable for men to hear, “humanist” paradigm shift to “partnership and cooperation” is the only hope of saving our world … and we need it soon. I look at Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia and the recovery there. She gives me hope at a time when there is plenty to despair about.

Torture is the “heart of darkness”. Structuring sadism is evil — handing over physical scapegoats to let soldiers in the thrall of the group-think of a crazy-making administration project and inflict their rage and frustration or a just following orders zealousness onto convenient, demonized enemy punching bags. And to prosecute only the direct, late in the line agents of torture for culpability seems unfair, especially when the dysfunctional leadership (at times scapegoating the torturers as independently behaving “bad apples”) set them up. The top administration put them into a recklessly illegal, demoralizing, and psychologically disintegrating situation. On this issue, too, will we have one more accountability coma with the power elite safely exiting as the lower strata picks up the tab – in this case in the way of imprisonment and sanctions?

Was all this torture just clumsy yet elaborate and horrifying frat, secret society bad-boy scenarios gone exponentially amuck? I keep thinking of GW Bush’s wanting to “brand” frat pledges at Yale and to his chagrin being denied the tool of an actual branding iron, having to “settle” for hot coat hangers and cigarettes. (Yeah, thanks, Yale. That was a patriarchal negotiation. "Measured" branding, always a good idea.) Well, post-Yalie Bush certainly got his rocks off later with bigger game in a bigger game.

We, the U.S., are a civilized society that has studies from both Stanford and Yale, celebrated bastions of advanced education collecting "intelligence" re psychology. They have experimented and explained the potential for a “normal” human being to lose moral grounding and empathy from the ramped up manipulation of peer pressure and actions of amoral authority figures. Our military was already an environment that exploited peer pressure and indoctrinated fierce loyalty and obedience to its authorities. Ripe for such vile, secret, inhumane behaviors. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo explores this sad human phenomenon and how easily it can happen.

Thank goodness many citizens are protesting the immorality and illegality of the torture. Though horrifying, too, is a robust group of apologists and even advocates for it. Will we, like the proverbial boiled frogs, become as acclimated to the idea and statistics of it as we are too often to news of killings in wars around the globe, even of our own military? Structured killing with official targets for the kill (enemy soldiers, some more elusive as insurgents now) and the inadvertent targets of the kill, civilian casualties, all ages and both genders, euphemistically swept under the verbal carpet as “collateral damage.” Damage? These are human beings merged with the "non-human" in the word “damage”. That is callously telling right there.

Also, along with the inhumanity of torture being addressed right now, I am concerned about reports of sexual assaults on women in our own military. Another dimension to this ever-expanding heart of darkness. I heard Ann Jones, a humanitarian aid worker and reporter, on Air America’s Ring of Fire last week citing troubling statistics about assaults on women in the military. She asserted that though men tend to bond with each other in the military especially in combat, in her view, they don’t generally emotionally bond with their fellow women. In an article in the Smirking Chimp she calls the U.S. military “a macho club, proud of its long tradition of misogyny, and not about to give it up”. She cites a comment made by the infamous and unrepentant Timothy McVeigh who was a decorated veteran of the first Gulf War. McVeigh contended the military was where he learned to repress his emotions. He described his basic training as "long, exhausting marches" and "sound-offs [that] revolved around killing and mutilating the enemy or violent sex with women." “The two themes easily merge,” Jones noted in the article. She went on:

On March 17, 2009, the Pentagon reported 2,923 cases of sexual assault in the past year in the U.S. military, including a 25% increase in assaults reported by women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, assaults committed by men who serve under the same flag. What’s more, the Pentagon estimated that perhaps 80% of such rapes go unreported.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21056

Considering the vast scope of the torturing; the prevalence of sexual assault within our own military; the psychological wounding of our surviving soldiers and the consequential domestic violence attributed to that; rape as a prevalent and horrifying international tool of war for example in Zimbabwe and the Sudan; with the ascendancy of the Taliban that over the decades has driven women to suicide in order to escape its violently dehumanizing repression; I would venture to say "patriarchal" cultures based on power and control, with a macho spirit of win/lose competitiveness and upper-strata-self-aggrandizement, are not only profoundly inadequate in recognizing and enforcing human rights but too easily capable of violating human rights themselves.

We must explore the nightmare that is our country and our world. We need a "feminine" a/k/a "humanist" paradigm shift to partnership and cooperation. As the Monty Pythoners often quipped, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” It came. And it turned out to be us!