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The Brutalization of the American Soldier
From Labor Action, Vol. X No. 4, 28 January 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the ETOL.
Through normal capitalist nurturing, military training and the experience of combat, unhealthy attitudes were developed in an unpleasantly large number of soldiers in Europe. There is already considerable data available to indicate that: conditions may well be even worse in the Pacific, where the soldier comes in contact with people who are, after all, “only” natives.
Nevertheless, there were also not an inconsiderable number of men who for various reasons did not succumb to these unhealthy pressures. They were the ones who behaved with a decent respect for human dignity, gave clothing, food and blankets to the French, made toys for German children and treated German prisoners as human beings. They were a minority, however.
In battle, prodigies of valor and self-sacrifice were performed, actuated by no other motive than loyalty to one’s buddies. Such loyalty was the closest approximation to a genuine morale which was achieved in the United States Army.
There was one large entire, section of the American Army, moreover, which must be exempted from the criticisms directed against the American forces in Europe. That section was the Negroes.
Negro troops were unquestionably more popular with continental Europeans than the whites were. Let the rabid Negro-haters in the South, who consider the Negro as a sort of semi-human, ponder that for a while ...
The reason is not far to seek: In France and Belgium THERE WAS NO SIGNIFICANT DISCRIMINATION OF ANY TYPE AGAINST THE NEGRO. Naturally enough, the Negro responded with dignity and consideration, tempered by a sympathetic understanding of the European, who was likewise being victimized by the white American soldier. Any feeling against the Negro as a race was generated by white Americans.
Will the anti-social attitudes created in the Army persist?
Unquestionably a residue, great or small, will always remain. Fortunately, however, the institution makes the man. The soldier who complained about the unions and strikers when he was in the Army becomes the loudest protester in his local union against the boss. A similar change takes place in other attitudes in the new environment. Whether that residue increases or decreases depends upon whether capitalism continues to decline, pulling down all moral standards with it, or whether a path can be broken to socialism.
Had the American soldier fought in a revolutionary, a socialist army, even that basic residue of undesirable attitudes would almost cease to exist. Naturally, we do not refer here to the Stalinist Red Army, which passed over Eastern Europe like a plague of locusts, laying waste the country and bringing hatred upon the very sound of the word “socialism." We refer to a Red Army such as existed in Russian under Lenin and Trotsky.
First of all, the soldier would be imbued with a flaming conviction in proletarian internationalism. The enemy enlisted man would be regarded not as a mortal enemy but as a victim of the capitalist system and its war juggernaut. Instead of the terrible shelling and bombing of enemy soldiers and civilians alike, which was a blow, not only “against capitalist civilization of the past, but against socialist civilization of the future” as well, the socialist army would use, as a supplement to arms, the most dangerous weapon of all: the socialist idea.
The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated by our French comrades in a small way during the occupation. Trotskyist circles were formed within the German army who furnished our comrades with arms, official rubber stamps, etc., to pursue the struggle against the common enemy, capitalism. German soldiers on the streets of Paris, who were held up for their weapons, were always told for what purpose their weapons were being taken. Many German soldiers, despite the fact that they knew they would be harshly disciplined for losing their weapons, wished our comrades good luck on parting!
Nationalist hatreds crumble under that attack!
Couple with that a democratic regime in the army, one in which there is no discrepancy between the professed aims of the war and conditions within the army—a condition, of course, which is possible only in the army of a workers’ state. Concretely, this would mean abolition of present privileges of the officers: separate messes, distinctive uniforms, exclusive clubs, pay differentials, the courts-martial system, orderlies, separate toilets, the use of the appellation “Sir,” the salute, etc.
The result would be a revolutionary élan, a standard of behavior, which was totally absent in the American Army but whose presence in the Red Army of Lenin and Trotsky’s time permitted it, despite a terrible war-weariness created during the imperialist war and a bad lack of arms and materiel, to achieve brilliant military successes. The Red Army men of those days, armed with a socialist program, came as liberators. They were hailed by the masses of the people, not reviled.
But even when a revolutionary army is waging it, war is, by its essence, a brutalizing process.
Marx’s great collaborator, Engels, with that serene, olympian understanding of the evolution of society which he possessed, once spoke of all life prior to socialism as pre-history. From the point of view of the individual, the human personality in our time develops largely unplanned, at the caprice of economic, political and social forces. Capitalist war, which accentuates all the debased aspects of modern life, cannot but contaminate the average human type.
With the advent of socialism, which means, in turn, the abolition of war, the human personality will develop in planned, unending harmonies such as are almost impossible even to conceive of now.
Only then, as Trotsky once magnificently put it, will we be able, without experiencing a certain embarrassment, to feel free to speak such words as truth, kindness, disinterested friendship, self-sacrifice and love.
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