Читать книгу The Cosmic Ocean - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 11

The article’s second misconception is not taking into account how intimate the violence is. In his book On Killing, Grossman says most of the people who survived the London bombings in World War II have less psychological trauma (because the violence was less personal and intimate) than those who were beaten and tortured in Nazi concentration camps:

Those in concentration camps had to face aggression and death on a highly personal, face-to-face basis. Nazi Germany placed a remarkable concentration of aggressive psychopaths in charge of these camps … [Journalist and historian Gwynne] Dyer tells us that concentration camps were staffed, whenever possible, with “both male and female thugs and sadists.” Unlike the victims of aerial bombing, the victims of these camps had to look their sadistic killers in the face and know that another human being denied their humanity and hated them enough to personally slaughter them, their families, and their race as though they were nothing more than animals.

During strategic bombing the pilots and bombardiers were protected by distance and could deny to themselves that they were attempting to kill any specific individual. In the same way, civilian bombing victims were protected by distance, and they could deny that anyone was personally trying to kill them … But in the death camps it was starkly, horribly personal. Victims of this horror had to look the darkest, most loathsome depths of human hatred in the eye. There was no room for denial, and the only escape was more madness.6

The article I quoted earlier seems to underestimate the harm caused by trauma, because it does not take into account more intimate forms of trauma such as being beaten, raped, and tortured. The article says, “A recent study of war veterans, for instance, not only demonstrated that roughly 7 percent of soldiers who were deployed developed PTSD, but that 83 percent showed exemplary mental health in the face of potentially traumatic combat situations.”

However, the article does not mention that most veterans of modern war have never been in combat, and that the violence soldiers experience in war can vary widely. As I explain later in this book, if a group of soldiers were forced to commit extremely intimate violence, such as massacring children they know at close range, the rate of trauma among the soldiers would be much higher than 7 percent.