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UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN:
How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics,
Our Soldiers and Ourselves
AWARD
“Best Books 2010” Award-Winning Finalist in the Social Change category sponsored by USA Book News
Available now
SYNOPSIS
One day at a beach Kathleen Barry witnessed an accidental death. Seeing how empathy drew together the bystanders – strangers until that moment – in shared human consciousness, she asked: 'Why do we value human lives in everyday moments but accept the killing in war as inevitable?'
In Unmaking War, Remaking Men, Kathleen Barry explores soldiers' experiences through a politics of empathy. By revealing how men’s lives are made expendable for combat, she shows how military training drives them to kill without thinking and without remorse, only to suffer both trauma and loss of their own souls. She turns to her politics of empathy to shed new light on the experiences of those who are invaded and occupied and shows how resistance rises among them.
And what of the state leaders and the generals who make war? In 2001, a fateful year for the world, George W. Bush became President of the US; Ariel Sharon became Prime Minister of Israel; and Osama bin Laden became the de facto world terrorist leader. Analyzing their leadership and failure of empathy, Unmaking War, Remaking Men reveals a common psychopathology of those driven to ongoing war, first making enemies, then labeling them as terrorists or infidels.
Kathleen Barry asks: ‘What would it take to unmake war?’ She scrutinizes the demilitarized state of Costa Rica and compares its claims of peace with its high rate of violence against women. She then turns to the urgent problem of how might men remake themselves by unmaking masculinity. She offers models for a new masculinity drawing on the experiences of men who have resisted war and have in turn transformed their lives into a new kind of humanity; into a place where the value of being human counts.
Book Club Discussion Questions (PDF, 84KB)
Unmaking War, Remaking Men - Index (PDF, 52KB)
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War has been an institution of humanity since its creation, but does it always have to be? Unmaking War, Remaking Men discusses the future of war and how Kathleen Barry feels that in the future, war will become less and less of an option as diplomatic measures become more and more advanced. Stating that human life shouldn't be considered expendable, Unmaking War, Remaking Men is a thoughtful read with plenty to think about, highly recommended.
—Midwest Book Review (as posted on Amazon.com / 5-Star review)
Kathleen Barry's latest book, Unmaking War, Remaking Men, brings a welcome feminist perspective to war and peace.... Barry's empathy interrogates the fault lines at which particular constructions of gender hurt us all, from the rape and murder of female GIs, to the lives lost across decades of middle eastern wars, to the trauma of returned service men who have been trained out of their humanity, yet still seek to cling to it. Unmaking War, Remaking Men reminds us that this is what the best feminism should do: keep listening, keep talking on the uphill walk.
—Overland Blog (Full Review)
Unmaking War, Remaking Men is a fascinating work by US feminist activist and sociologist Kathleen Barry, which explores traditional constructs of masculinity, and the role they play in military training.... a highly researched, thought-provoking book that doesn't shy away from hard topics and raises a lot of interesting points worth considering if we wish to part of a world that promotes peace.
—Aduki Independent Press (Full Review )
In a world where Arabs are often being demonized, it is soothing to read a book by such a fine Western intellectual with so much empathy who offers us a unique perspective on how we could untangle the knots of an explosive situation. A must for anyone trying to find solutions to war. —Evelyne Accad, Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East
“With the courageous vision, scrupulous scholarship, and heartfelt writing that has illumined her books on female sexual slavery, Kathleen Barry here focuses her laser-like intelligence on violence, militarism, and core masculinity. Unmaking War, Remaking Men makes the connections that could save us all. Ignore this book at your peril.”
—Robin Morgan
“How can we end war if we don’t understand the makings of war? Kathleen Barry's Unmaking War, Remaking Men is a remarkable blend of history, current war-making and soul-searching that unravels the very structures of war. Her fascinating questions--ranging from "Why don't the Geneva Conventions protect the rights of combatants?" to "Why are women in the peaceful nation of Costa Rica subjected to outrageous levels of masculine violence?"--lead to her analysis that the unmaking of war requires the rehumanization of men. Read it, get energized and join us in Barry’s ultimate challenge: replacing the paradigm of war with a paradigm of shared human consciousness based on empathy.”
—Medea Benjamin, cofounder, CODEPINK and Global Exchange
“Empathy. Yes, empathy is such a strong concept, and such a strong civic value. Kathleen Barry shows in her book how empathy threatens those who promote the militarization of masculinity while simultaneously providing an antidote. She has done deep thinking—thinking that all of us will be made smarter by!”
—Cynthia Enloe, Globalization & Militarism
“In an era of perpetual war, Kathleen Barry asks the important questions: how do we learn and teach violence, and what does killing do both to us and our society? A provocative, impassioned and necessary exploration of a topic too often cloaked by euphemisms and evasions.”
—Jeff Sparrow, Killing: Misadventures in Violence
CONTENTS
Chapter 1 The Value of Human Life
Chapter 2 Making Men Expendable
Chapter 3 Remorseless Killers: Military Training
Chapter 4 First Kill: The Soldier’s Loss of Soul
Chapter 5 Preventive Killing
Chapter 6 Grunts: From Soldier to Sociopath
Chapter 7 Psychopathic Leadership Versus the Politics of Empathy
Chapter 8 Making Enemies – Humiliating Men
Chapter 9 Ongoing War
Chapter 10 Colluding in Preparatory War, Lebanon 2006
Chapter 11 "No One Understands!"
Chapter 12 Unmaking War
Chapter 13 Remaking Men, Reknowing Ourselves
ENDNOTES
INDEX
Unmaking War, Remaking Men Press Release - (PDF, 115KB)
http://www.kathleenbarry.net/books.htm
I had not planned to write a book on masculinity and war. But following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 with daily reports for a month of "loss of innocent lives," that term haunted me. "If we agree that it is wrong to kill civilians in war, then there must be others who can be killed." I knew, of course, the answer to the question that followed, "Who are they?"
Men in combat! In my research I found that even the Geneva Conventions exclude all of those "engaged in hostilities" from the protection of their right to live as guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In fact, I discovered, the Geneva Conventions violate the universal, inalienable guarantee of human rights to everyone. In international law, that guarantee cannot be segmented to one class or another, available at one time (in peace) and suspended at another time (in hostilities). Of course, it is also perfectly obvious that if soldiers in combat were legally granted the human right that will be again available to them once they leave combat, there could be no war – at least legally.
My feminist work on violence against women began in 1968 and 1969 as I joined with other feminists to initiate "STOP RAPE" campaigns. That work led me in 1979 to write Female Sexual Slavery which launched a global movement against trafficking in women. From decades of activism, I followed that book with another in 1995 on global, sexual exploitation of women, The Prostitution of Sexuality. And here I was in 2006 writing empathetically about men in combat?
I persisted and soon realized that deep questions and issues lie buried in masculinity that hold keys to violence.
Male expendability for war begins with childhood socialization through which boys learn that they may be expected to fight and die for their country, that they may not live past 19 or 23 if they go to war. And if they do not go to war when it is expected of them, they may suffer the ridicule of not being a real man, just as boys who do not fight on the playground at school are bullied for being sissies or wusses. I began to listen to men talk about going to war and reading soldiers' accounts of how they got into combat "because I was embarrassed not to," Tim O'Brien said in The Things They Carried.
Being a protector is the heart of the masculinity of war and of male superiority. Violence and aggression come with men learning that they are protectors of women, children, and their country or their people. "How else would they protect us?" is the logic of the masculine/military paradigm of war. That same paradigm expects women's complicity with the heart of violence. Women are supposed to expect men to be our protectors, those same men who turn their violence against women and against men who are not as "manly" as they are and then against civilians and combatants alike in war zones.
While it is true that some women are ending up in combat, sometimes fighting alongside male soldiers, not only does the U.S. not officially assign women to combat, but the model to which those in combat must adapt is masculine to the point that they are reduced to being grunts.
In Unmaking War, Remaking Men, I define that violence as blinding macho – the force that is turned on women in their homes, in wife and partner abuse. That is the same violence that the military trains to turn soldiers into remorseless killers. And more. With the increase of women in war zones, that violence is turned against female soldiers, one in three of whom experience sexual harassment or assault, while the incidence of wife abuse in military families is significantly larger than in the general population.
Military training and combat push soldiers beyond their own humanity. Remorseless killing, many soldiers tell us, means a loss of their own soul. The harm to them from severe dehumanization by the military sets the stage for post traumatic stress disorder. Seriously under-diagnosed, it is estimated that one in eight U.S. combat soldiers in Iraq suffers from PTSD.
In Unmaking War, Remaking Men, I developed a feminist human rights paradigm that confronts the power of masculinity as it places the dignity of all human beings and their rights above all else. It is built upon our own shared human consciousness, that collective reaction toward saving a life at risk, which is hardwired in us. I ask: "How in the madness of war do so many human beings throughout the world – who share an unconditional love of life, who are connected to each other through the life force that urges us away from death to spontaneously want to save another's life and to protect one's own – come to accept war as inevitable?"
Our work toward unmaking war and remaking men is already in progress. Women have gone a long way in throwing off the male protector role and more slowly men's roles are changing. But war intensifies violence, not only in the countries that are invaded, but in aggressor states, particularly the United States where the mentality of war enables violence all around us.
Nevertheless, the most powerful models I have found of men remaking themselves are in our war resisters, those in combat who individually stand up to the entire U.S. military and The White House and refuse to kill, to destroy peoples homes and their lives, and who are willing to suffer the painful consequences of their actions.
October 26, 2010
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2010summer/cafe2/article/119
kathleen barry’s
UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN
reviewed by
GARY OLSON
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Gary Olson chairs the Political Science Department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA.
MASCULINITY, MILITARISM AND EMPATHY
Knowing something of feminist-human rights activist and sociologist Kathleen Barry’s ground-breaking work on female sexual slavery and related topics, I hoped to unconditionally recommend her latest book Unmaking War, Remaking Men (Santa Clara, CA: Rising Phoenix, 2010). And because I’ve recently been studying the politics of empathy, I was also favorably predisposed by the book’s intriguing subtitle, “How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves.”
I do intend to make this book required reading in two of my courses, including a seminar on the politics of identity which has a gender component. However, as will become clear below, my only hesitation for not totally embracing Barry’s thesis derives from questions I have about the political lessons she draws from her research. But more on that later.
In recent years the gendered dimension of U.S. imperialism has received increasing attention and this book is a welcome addition. Certainly the dominant organizations supporting the empire are gendered and it behooves us to incorporate an understanding of the masculinization of these institutional subcultures into our analysis. Indeed, as Robert Jensen has noted, there is a close overlap between how men are socialized and the mission of the U.S. military’s killing machine: “Dominance and conquest through aggression and violence, in the service of deepening and extending elite control over the resources and markets of the world.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Blood Politics, depicts this perverse construction of masculinity, coupled with warfare, as “mutually reinforcing enterprises.”
In a small but telling example of this phenomenon, political scientist Cynthia Enloe wonders about the male soldiers who remained silent about the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. “Did any of the American men involved in the interrogations keep silent because they were afraid of being labeled ‘soft’ or ‘weak,’ thereby jeopardizing their status as ‘manly men’?” And Francis Shor, a preeminent historian of U.S. imperialism, reminds us that “For hypermasculine warriors, compassion and caring become signs of feminine weakness, marking someone as a wimp or wuss.”
This foreshadows how Barry answers the vexing question that prompted her to write this book, namely, “Why do wars persist in the face of our human urge to save and protect human life?” Her response is that “War will not be unmade without remaking masculinity.” In fact, the author’s answer to virtually all questions surrounding war is the same: masculinity of the violent, aggressive and militaristic form. The term she coins for this phenomenon is core masculinity. Here she’s careful to specify that this means core socialization and not violence as an essential biological trait in men. Barry argues that early on men are set up to be the protectors of women, children, tribe and state. Violence and aggression follow from this role. Her argument is more nuanced than I can do justice to here, but she asserts that only by undoing core masculinity, eliminating blinding macho and violent standards of manhood can we begin “remaking men from the ground up, from the personal to the political.”
For me the most compelling parts of the book are those in which she explains how masculinity requires that men’s lives be expendable; how the military’s intensive brainwashing reinforces and exploits earlier socialization of boys and men; and the dynamics of the process she labels “From Soldier to Psychopath.” The result is a soldier who kills without remorse, acts without conscience or regret -- and then is praised for it. The personal trauma and “loss of one’s soul” that often follows in the wake of this behaviour receive careful and sensitive treatment. This heart-rendering recital is driven home by anecdotes collected from firsthand accounts and interviews with soldiers. If empathy is putting oneself in another’s shoes, the indissoluble combination of core masculinity with brainwashing, degradation and stripping away any sense of self aims to foreclose this response.
Further, there is general agreement in the literature that sociopathy is defined as the lack of empathy. Barry contends that by replacing empathy with desensitized callousness, the military is creating sociopathic characteristics, that the military itself is a sociopathogenic institution. That is, the task of the military is to “normalize amorality for soldiers . . . the same amorality found in sociopaths.” Here I was reminded of an interview with former combat marine Chris White (not included in this book) who recalled his recruiter explaining the purpose of the initial twelve-week indoctrination as removing any “undesirable traits, such as anti-individuality for the sake of a team work ethic, and, most importantly, the ability and even desire to kill other human beings.”
WHY SOLDIERS FIGHT
The debauched spirit reflecting an absence of remorse appears in this refrain from grunts on the ground in Vietnam:
Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for I am the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the valley.
She quotes one Marine who recalls that shooting to kill “becomes muscle memory, you don’t think about it. You just do it.” Soldiers have “the remorse driven out of them” and the military counts on insensitivity to fill the void, allowing more killing without a second thought. Another Marine tells Barry that “shooting someone was like watching a moving target, hitting it, and watching it fall. It wasn’t real.”
To reshape human groups into effective killing machines the military uses male bonding and attendant fears of being ostracized. It would be unmanly, cowardly behavior not to proceed, even toward one’s own likely death. Even in retrospect, after feeling a modicum of remorse at “taking someone out” the soldier’s mantra remains “I was only there to defend the person next to me,” even as they return to the killing fields.
Barry understands that one of the consequences is that “support for your buddy and unit is as far as sympathy for others is allowed to go” (emphasis added). Anyone who threatens a buddy’s safety is “the enemy,” a potential enemy, and someone without a life at all. In putting forward this “fighting for each other” argument, Barry’s position is compatible with research suggesting that soldiers fight because those in their unit are depending on them.
Historian S.L.A. Marshall’s study Men Against Fire in 1942 concluded: “I hold it to be of the simplest truths of war that the one thing which enables an infantry soldier to keep going with his weapon is the near presence or the presumed presence of a comrade . . . He is sustained by his fellows primarily and by his weapons secondarily.” This conclusion apparently holds true for recent wars.
A military study of American soldiers from Iraq concluded that the primary motive was “fighting for my buddies.” One soldier’s answer was typical as he responded, “That person means more to you than anybody. You will die if he dies. That is why I think that we protect each other in any situation.” And this view wasn’t limited to the “grunts.” Just prior to the start of the Gulf War in January, 1991, one Marine Corps lieutenant colonel remarked, “Just remember that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting just for each other, just for each other.” Journalist Sebastian Unger, after five months of observing U.S. troops in eastern Afghanistan, concluded that “The guys were not fighting for flag and country. They maybe joined for those sorts of reasons, but once they were there, they were fighting for each other.”
Patriotism, fear of jail if drafted, lack of economic opportunities, job training, naiveté, or boredom might explain a recruit’s enlistment and undoubtedly there are individual exceptions, but topping the list for actually engaging in combat is the social connection of not wanting to let down one’s comrades. This unit cohesion bleeds into self-preservation because remaining alive means keeping fellow soldiers alive. Of course, while the soldier is fighting on behalf of joint survival, the larger context of the mission means he or she is a resource expended on behalf of state-sanctioned killing.
In Vietnam, Prof. James McPherson found that Army psychologists became intensely concerned because the largely draftees not only didn’t want to be there but “didn’t understand in many cases, why they were there.” But the pressing problem for the military was that because fresh replacements arrived individually, the indispensable bonding with other members of the unit was the issue.
In terms of how to unmake war and remake men, Barry wisely advises that we adopt an attitude of ‘critical empathy.’ This will allow us to see through the lies and disinformation suffusing these matters. That is, we need to employ the potent combination of emotion and intelligence. In that spirit and because I felt Barry was selective in applying the cognitive dimension of critical empathy, I’ll raise a few questions about her analysis.
First, the Pentagon might well prefer to rely on robotic warfare, a variation on empathy-devoid androids. “Closing with the enemy” already occurs with some frequency as “cubicle warriors” in suburban Las Vegas dispense death from 7,500 miles away. This wholesale substitution for “boots on the ground” is projected to occur sometime between 2020 and 2035. This doesn’t mean these changes won’t be masculinized or that recruiting posters will soon read “we’re looking for a few good androids.” But it has been suggested that because the combat warrior ethic has been inseparable from the military’s historic emphasis on face-to-face killing, change in military doctrine might strongly influence future generations of military masculine culture.
Second, military indoctrination is complementary, albeit in more intense form to the subtle and arguably more comprehensive indoctrination of the civilian population under neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism’s pathological numbing of our empathic disposition is what Shor terms “the hectored heart,” and those “imperial mental enclosures often work to deter most U.S. citizens from expressing empathy toward those brutalized by U.S. imperial policies.”
As products of this empathy-deficient cultural programming, a certain preconditioning may soften up and facilitate some aspects of military training. However, as a tool of the state, the military is less concerned with what a soldier thinks or believes about “the system” because the objective is absolute compliance in service to a specific mission. Empire requires a “trained to kill” culture or the system would break down. Recall that the definition of Marine Corps discipline is “instant willingness and obedience to follow others” -- all orders -- and to follow them absolutely.
For instance, the respected Zogby polling organization found in 2006 that 72% of American troops in Iraq believed the U.S. should exit the country within one year. No matter, as long as they follow orders in the field of combat, this is a non-issue.
Finally, it’s unarguable that the American empire currently requires this particular version of gender construction. In that sense, Barry’s book sheds needed light on the intersection between masculinity and empire. But as Shor argues in his comprehensive and accessible account of recent approaches to understanding U.S. imperialism, this endemic masculinism is only one constituent element deployed on behalf of creating, expanding, and defending political-military control of the globe. Therefore, in trying to understand war, it’s not helpful to claim, as Barry does, that U.S. presidents have repeatedly led the country into “unnecessary wars” to test and prove their machismo, their virility. In her treatment of psychopathic leadership, Barry specifically identifies machismo as the primary shared pathology of “leaders,” from George W. Bush and Ariel Sharon to Bin Laden and Dick Cheney. But not brutal war-mongers like Golda Meier, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher? And what of our rogues’ gallery of militarism enablers including Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Madeleine Albright, Condoleeza Rice and Hillary Clinton? If it’s socialized and not essential, it’s not confined to men.
Perhaps it’s the lack of opportunity for women rather than core masculinity? Women now make up 20 percent of new recruits for the U.S. military, 14 percent of the active-duty force, 17 percent of the reserves and some 16 percent of senior officers. Women in the military have bitterly complained about the heretofore “military exclusion” rule because the lack of combat experience slows down their promotion through the ranks. Valorizing these behaviours for women will facilitate career advancement and based on reports requested by Congress that rule is now being reconsidered. Here I’m reminded of political scientist Michael Parenti’s observation (I’m paraphrasing) that it’s not what’s between one’s loins but what’s between one’s ears that matters. U.S. imperialist wars require empathy anesthetizing socializing agents that we generally associate with traditional masculinity -- whether the soldiers are male or female. I wish Barry had done more to address these questions and I expect she’ll do so in the future.
At still other points she cites masculine revenge and irrational masculine thinking as the key factors behind U.S. interventions around the globe. I would argue that making core masculinity the stand-alone, virtually monocausal explanation for U.S. (and all) war making tends to weaken an otherwise sterling contribution. And to argue that all this violence is the result of a culture of socialized masculinity is more of a tautology than an answer. Don’t we need to understand whose interests are being advanced by this culture? Exactly who is reinforcing it? Yes, in some important aspects the military is an end in itself but I felt that Barry failed to address its primary role as servant to the ruling interests and their capitalist state. In fact, unless I missed them, Barry never mentions capitalism or imperialism, the critical political-economic context. Here I reference Parenti’s definition of imperialism: “The process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear military and financial power upon another country in order to expropriate the land, capital, natural resources, commerce, and markets of that country.” Unquestionably “core masculinity” complements the overriding motive of protecting and advancing the interests of transnational capital. However, I didn’t detect any appreciation of the very real geopolitical and economic motives behind U.S. global behavior. There’s not a single reference to pillaging of natural resources like oil and gas, military Keynesianism, exploitation of workers, the reasons for 750+ U.S. military bases around the world and related factors. I offer these few objections only to suggest that while socialized masculinity facilitates war-making, in and of itself it can’t explain the basis for U.S. imperialism.
Also by Gary Olson:
Rifkin and Singer
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