Good to see the Army do the right thing by Green Beret Charles Martland. Spreading core American values like not raping children is well within the mission of the US Special Forces.
I say "core American values" rather than "universal human values" because, while you'd think this was the sort of thing people would just understand, Afghanistan proves that it isn't quite.
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That is a good distinction. We are pressed to declare them universal, ostensibly to make them seem more solid and more important. Yet I wonder if the motivation is actually more to undercut American exceptionalism, by pretending that we aren't very special and we don't have anything not known by every other culture.
It was one of the real lessons of living in China, for me. I just assumed -- Southerner that I was -- that it was a simple fact of human nature that if there was heavy lifting to be done, and a choice to be had in who did that lifting, men would do it. Men would, naturally, volunteer to carry a lady's burden. Of course men would stand up on the bus and give their seat to a lady, especially if she were heavily pregnant. And naturally, only just a simple fact of human nature...
I was disabused of all that quickly enough out East, I can tell you that.
I read some Marine's comment on Afghanistan: "The problem with Afganistan is the the Afghanis".
Pretty much true, from what I can see.
Well, that in the fact that it's a landlocked country in Central Asia that has nothing anybody wants enough to ship it out except opium.
"I say "core American values" rather than "universal human values" because, while you'd think this was the sort of thing people would just understand, Afghanistan proves that it isn't quite."
To be fair, in that case, didn't the abuse come to the attention of the Green Berets because the mother of the abused child came to the US forces for protection? She obviously didn't think it was "just part of the culture." Likewise, I've heard that one of the few qualities the Taliban had/have that the locals actually liked was that they discouraged this sort of behavior.
I'm not so sure if it's that "not raping children" isn't a universal value, but rather, that abuse of power is a universal human failing.
"Yet I wonder if the motivation is actually more to undercut American exceptionalism, by pretending that we aren't very special and we don't have anything not known by every other culture."
I'm inclined to agree more with the first assertion -- that we declare them universal in an effort to give them moral weight outside just our own culture. Without the notion that there are fundamentals of human moral behavior that intrinsically apply to all humans due to their very nature, any moral appeal to another person to moderate their behavior is just special pleading to be exempt from the law of the jungle.
To be fair, in that case, didn't the abuse come to the attention of the Green Berets because the mother of the abused child came to the US forces for protection? She obviously didn't think it was "just part of the culture."
I can see how she would be more inclined than other members of the culture to endorse the value. I wonder what happened to them, after the Army came down so hard on our soldier for stepping up to protect them.
The apparently casual dismissal of this sort of abuse by those in power struck me as incredibly short-sighted in light of the reconstruction effort. The Taliban seeming to be the only opposition to abuse of office by the official government seemed to be their only real "positive" selling point to the average Afghan; to my understanding, not many subscribed to their extreme religious interpretation. Failing to undercut that appeal seems to me a lost opportunity.
This case reminds me of Gen. Napier, a British governor in India. I think you've all heard the story, but here's Wikipedia's version:
A story for which Napier is often noted involved Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities. This was the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. As first recounted by his brother William, he replied:
"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs."
To be fair, in that case, didn't the abuse come to the attention of the Green Berets because the mother of the abused child came to the US forces for protection? She obviously didn't think it was "just part of the culture."
Yeah, there isn't just one set of values within a culture. My values are very, very different than my highly progressive co-workers, who occasionally seem insane to me, as I'm sure I do to them from time to time. We share some values, of course, but I've known a number of foreigners I think I shared more values with.
The apparently casual dismissal of this sort of abuse by those in power struck me as incredibly short-sighted in light of the reconstruction effort.
A fair point. The reason Afghans were so willing to endorse shariah law was that you can't change it -- 'man made' law is supposed to be invalid compared with the will of Allah. So you can't, for example, impose new taxes. Corrupt Afghan officers of the state were always doing that.
It's a solvable problem, if and only if you realize what you're dealing with. It's not that they really wanted unchangeable laws. It's that they really wanted a restraint on the powerful's ability to change the law to their advantage. That's what I want out of the Constitution, for example.
One question I've had about that dismissal is, was it a result of listening to anthropologists and sociologists? I know there were advisors from those fields working with the military, and anthropologists don't believe they should influence the cultures they are studying any more than necessary to study them. Maybe there was no influence, but it's an odd coincidence.
I believe it is more likely that it was a risk-averse chain of command, Tom. Those who are more concerned with how Washington will perceive any controversy coming out of their AORs than doing what is right.
Risk averse in the sense of telling the shooters at Benghazi to Stand Down. And let the Americans die. It's easy that way, especially if those orders are also reinforced from the commander in chief of the military. Civilian control is great. Even for the military careerists. It's a way to create bureaucracies so that people don't suffer the consequences of their responsibility or obeying orders.
Men would, naturally, volunteer to carry a lady's burden. Of course men would stand up on the bus and give their seat to a lady, especially if she were heavily pregnant. And naturally, only just a simple fact of human nature...
You also thought that a hotel receptionist was insulting you by lying to you cheerily about some aspect or another, which I replied to at the time by saying that she was trying not to worry you which was the polite thing in that culture to do, even if it meant lying to your direct question. That is of course, a direct insult to a Southern gentleman, because it implies that they can't handle the truth or that their question is idiotic. To the Chinese though, formality requires that they laugh off things that might be problems, which is important in a culture which can descend into a blood bath if somebody becomes hysterical or angry in a crowd. Too many people stuck too close to other humans, with poisonous auras and emotional connections. Even in the US, things like that happen. Californians and people in certain East Coast cities, also like to divert around problems and issues, rather than confront it frankly, face to face, human to human, without dissembling or avoiding the issue. Some of it is due to the fear of being reported to human resource management. The other part is that certain cultures don't like to argue or fight.
Cultural shock is always funny. But Japan is much closer to Grim's standard of conduct than China. China used to have some of those noblesse oblige beliefs, up until Mao at least. Dictators and crazy megalomaniacs tend to change a society for the worst.
But generally all Asian cultures that focus on tradition and families, dislike helping strangers. It's a resource limitation thing. Japan is the closest to the 1945 values in America for that region, however, except this time with modern smart phones and tech. Samoa might be similar, due to their close relationship with US custom and law. Super heroes and helping strangers is becoming much more popular in certain Japanese cultural areas. After WWII, orphans and kids on the street were just left to die or starve, because they had no family left. They diverged in cultural ethos.
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