Libya is refreshing our memories about the nature of Civil Wars and the question of how a leader can convince his military to fire on and kill a country’s own citizens (“unalienable right to life, etc”).
Lincoln only won 38% of the vote in 1860 and had less than universal support to engage the Confederacy – there were riots in New York City opposing the draft. Lincoln had the moral high ground, but is that enough to get your military to start killing people who oppose your rule?
One approach is to dehumanize the enemy – that works best if you can exploit ethnic or religious differences. Another approach is to make the soldiers more scared of their officers than the “enemy” – if you don’t shoot them, we’ll shoot you in the back. That’s not usually an effective strategy.
I remember having a discussion with someone about the US Civil War – this person was a Southerner and his rationalization was “the South was just defending itself – the South didn’t attack the Northern States….”
Which brings us to Gettysburg, which last time I checked was in Pennsylvania. People will fight much more virulently to defend their homeland. While a general might be reluctant to use force to squelch a rebellion, when the opposing army crosses your border and is trying to seize your land, then it becomes easier to massacre Pickett and his men foolishly charging running across an open field.
Reports persist that Qaddafi is trying to use black Africans to fight his war, suggesting that his Army is reluctant to fire on other Libyans. Some of the ineffectiveness of his troops might be deliberate – “Oops, I missed”… But if the rebels did start to attack Sirte – especially if they did things like looting the civilians, then you create the dynamic where soldiers can rationalize killing their fellow citizens.
Just as an aside, I’m alarmed by the growth of military style first person shooter video games (Call of Duty, etc). In Doom, which sort of made the genre popular (based partly on the earlier Wolfenstein 3D), most of the enemies were non-human monsters (controlled by the omnipresent Nazis, of course).
It’s not a big secret that similar “games” are used to train the military. It’s a way to teach tactics and technology skills without the cost of training and the risk of accidents using real equipment – but with repetition it also psychologically breaks down the barrier of not killing – the soldiers aren’t actually killing another human once they are in the real battlefield, they’re playing a video game in their head.
I suspect we’ll find out eventually that Jared Loughner played FPS shooting games. Being able to have situational awareness and the ability to quickly identify and choose among multiple targets and shoot them with lethal wounds is not something a random gun owner could do – it’s a practiced skill.
