Generation kill

Since the American campaign to win Afghan hearts and minds isn’t going so well, a few enterprising soldiers decided to take a few scalps instead. Or more accurately, they took bones, skulls and fingers to keep as trophies from the Afghan civilians they killed, by their own admission, for ‘sport’.

And of course, being true children of the digital age, they took photos posing with the corpses of their victims, much as a hunter would do with a prize buck he has brought down on a weekend shooting trip — although the possibility of these pictures making it onto Facebook is slim at best.

You would have thought they would know better by now, given the massive scandal and outrage caused by the Abu Ghraib photos. Not only did the photos expose the institutionalised abuse sanctioned by the US military and government, it did more to turn Iraqis and the Muslim world against American policy than any al Qaeda videotape.

Not that the taking of such grisly prizes is limited to the Iraqi or Afghan theatres — the ears of Viet Cong dead were a favourite trophy during the Vietnam war, with American GIs wearing necklaces of ears as keepsakes from the battlefield. Go back further and the same pattern of behaviour can be found in the Pacific theatre of World War Two.

Let’s now rewind even further to the birth of America during what is probably the most successful genocide of modern times, the so-called Indian wars. Anyone with a passing familiarity with this period would likely comment on the propensity of the natives, disparagingly called ‘redskins’ to take the scalps of captured or killed white settlers, and certainly history supports the fact that taking the occasional scalp was part and parcel of inter-tribal native warfare.

But it took the white settlers to make a business out of it. As far back as 1703, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was offering $60 for each native scalp. And in 1756, Pennsylvania Governor Morris, in his declaration of war against the local native tribes, offered “130 Pieces of Eight (a type of coin), for the scalp of every male Indian enemy, above the Age of Twelve Years,” and “50 Pieces of Eight for the Scalp of Every Indian Woman, produced as evidence of their being killed.” The difficulty in telling a female scalp from a male one led to mass violence against anyone of native blood.

Fast forward a few centuries and the redskins, nips and gooks have been replaced by ragheads, ‘hadjis’ and ‘Talibs’. Some may claim that the soldiers acted in violation of their orders, that their actions cannot be taken as a true depiction of the behaviour expected from a US soldier. Still others may argue that all is fair in war, and that armies throughout history have done all this and far worse. But these soldiers belong to the armed forces of a nation that claims to hold the moral high ground, a claim it never ceases to harangue the rest of the world with.

Perhaps a clue lies in the name of one of the culprits: Corporal Jeremy Morlock. If memory serves me right, the Morlocks were the sub-human cannibalistic villains of the HG Wells classic the Time Machine. In the far future, they emerge nightly from their underground lairs to feed on the docile, and much more ‘human’ Elloi, who are unable to defend themselves. In light of the past, perhaps the future has already come to pass?

Published in The Express Tribune, October 1^st, 2010.

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