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War has always been an essential ingredient in the development of the human race. As a result of the battles fought in ancient times, up until modern warfare, millions of innocent lives have ended as a result of war crimes committed. In the article, “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” Herbert C. Kelman and V.Lee Hamilton shows examples of moral decisions taken by people involved with war-related murders. This article details one of the worse atrocities committed during the Vietnam War in 1968 by the U.S. military: the My Lai Massacre. Through this incident, the question that really calls for psychological analysis is why so many people are willing to formulate , participate in, and condone policies that call for the mass killings of defenseless civilians such as the atrocities committed during the My Lai massacre. What influences these soldiers by applying different psychological theories that have been developed on human behavior. The 1986 during the Vietnam war, the slaughter at My Lai Massacre “is an instance of a class of violent acts that can be described as sanctioned massacres (Kelman, 1973): acts of indiscriminate, ruthless, and often systematic mass violence, carried out by military or paramilitary personnel while engaged in officially …show more content…
The soldiers at My Lai were in an environment conducive to obeying orders. They have been trained to follow the orders of their commanders; respect for authority is weighed heavily upon. It is hard for them to disobey because they have been integrated into the social structure of the military and when in the middle of a war they would have nowhere to turn if they choose to disobey the orders of their commanders. The consequences of disobedience for them could be sent to death. A classic example of the power of authoritative factors is provided by Stanley Milgram’s
Laws exist to protect life and property; however, they are only as effective as the forces that uphold them. War is a void that exists beyond the grasps of any law enforcing agency and It exemplifies humankind's most desperate situation. It is an ethical wilderness exempt from civilized practices. In all respects, war is a primitive extension of man. Caputo describes the ethical wilderness of Vietnam as a place "lacking restraints, sanctioned to kill, confronted by a hostile country and a relentless enemy, we sank into a brutish state." Without boundaries, there is only a biological moral c...
Comparative Analysis The power of blind obedience taints individuals’ ability to clearly distinguish between right and wrong in terms of obedience, or disobedience, to an unjust superior. In the article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak discusses the unwarranted murder of innocent individuals due to vague orders that did not survive with certainty. Szegedy-Maszak utilizes the tactics of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, respectively, to attempt to justify the soldiers’ heinous actions (Szegedy-Maszak 76-77). In addition, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple distinguishes between blind disobedience and blind obedience to authority and stating that neither is superior;
Kelman, Herbert C., Hamilton, V. Lee. “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience”. Writing & Reading for ACP Composition. Ed. Thomas E. Leahey and Christine R. Farris. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 266-277. Print.
Estlund, David. "On Following Orders in an Unjust War*." Journal of Political Philosophy 15.2 (2007): 213-234.
the guards began mistreating the prisoners, not physically, but emotionally and psychologically, taking advantage of the power and authority appointed to them by the experimenter (Zimbardo 109). Crimes of obedience and mistreatment to other human beings are not only found in Milgrim’s and Zimbardo’s experiments. In 1968, U.S. troops massacred over 500 villagers in My Lai. The incident is described by social psychologist Herbert C. Kelman and sociologist V. Lee Hamilton in the article “The My Lai Massacre: a Crime of Obedience.” Lt. William Calley, charged with 102 killings, claims to have followed orders from his superiors, only accomplishing his duty, which is also a theme throughout the movie, A Few Good Men. After presented with a request from William Santiago, a marine on his base, to be transferred, Jessup refuses. The film depicts, through Colonel Jessup 's authority, the refusal to obey a reasonable request as well as the pride one possesses when fulfilling his duty
During war, this became apparent with the countless war crimes committed by soldiers; they were trained to not have any apprehension in regards to killing the Vietnamese, because they were “gooks” and of lesser form than a human. These violent events have scarred and traumatized some soldiers for the rest of their lives. Some soldiers have developed mental illnesses, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and depression. Some veterans will always live their lives damaged and in fear. Some have already taken their own lives because the burden of knowing and reliving what they went through during the Vietnam War was too much to bear.
In Gwynne Dyer’s article “Anybody’s Son Will Do”, the conversion of civilians to killers is being explained in stages. This articles focuses more on male psychology and malleable people. The author’s belief is that people can be easily brainwashed if they are put in constant stress. To support this idea, the author gives examples of military training around the world which psychologically destroys individual values and loyalties and rebuilds them to make combat troops that will do exactly what has been ordered and defend his groups to the death.
The want to believe and trust in the individual officers may have lessened focus on My Lai, and instead on the higher level officers. Many claimed the incident a result of miscommunication between higher officers and their soldiers, making it a single accident, not a repeatable offense. People have generally forgotten the incident with time, as it has faded into the background of the Vietnam war. Many characterize the Vietnam war as a tactical lapse of judgement, not a humanitarian disaster as shown in the My Lai Massacre. This change in recognition has led to a lack of resulting legislation or political action from these events (Gray, Truda, and Martin 104). Surprisingly, the tragic killings of around 400 unarmed vietnamese civilians have gone somewhat unnoticed overtime in the political landscape due to changes in the political agenda and excuses which diminish the importance of the
Kelman and Hamilton analyzed the My Lai massacre by studying the social process of obedience, a similar analysis can also be created when analyzing the reason why the United States tortures. The social process of obedience consist of three parts: authorization, routinization and dehumanization. Due to there higher ranked officials of the C.I.A. wanting to use torture to attain information is the reason for the use of torture by the United States. The want of the use of torture by higher ranked officials is then followed by the social process of obedience, meaning authorization, routinization and dehumanization. If it were not for other officials being obedient to the orders of following through with torture
On March 16, 1968, there was a massacre of around 300-400 innocent noncombatant people mainly old men, women, and children in My Lai located in the Quang Ngai region of Vietnam. My Lai was a small village of only around 700 total people. (p.3) Those responsible for this horrific act were all members Charley Company, which is a part of the United States’ military. Their mission was clear and they followed through. The mission was to “search and destroy” and “Sanitize” My Lai. (Olson, Roberts, p.8-9) Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker ordered My Lai to be "leveled"(p.19)
In the pursuit of safety, acceptance, and the public good, many atrocities have been committed in places such as Abu Ghraib and My Lai, where simple, generally harmless people became the wiling torturers and murderers of innocent people. Many claim to have just been following orders, which illustrates a disturbing trend in both the modern military and modern societies as a whole; when forced into an obedient mindset, many normal and everyday people can become tools of destruction and sorrow, uncaringly inflicting pain and death upon the innocent.
On March 16th of 1968 American Lieutenant Colonel Barker ordered his troops to storm the small Vietnamese village of My Lai and shoot at any threatening individuals who may put the American soldiers at risk of being under hostile fire. However, upon arrival, the village was abundant with peaceful civilians going about their daily business—not armed enemies. Nevertheless, the orders of Lieutenant Barker were fulfilled, resulting in the brutal massacre of over 500 unarmed Vietnamese citizens. Using various concepts of social psychology, we can retrospectively examine the events and circumstances that led up to the tragedy of the My Lai massacre.
More specifically, the movie A Few Good Men depicts the results of blindly obeying orders. Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist, also explores obedience to authority in his essay “ The Perils of Obedience”. On the other hand, Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst and philosopher, focused on disobedience to authority in his essay “ Disobedience as a Psychological and Moral Problem.” Milgram wrote about how people were shockingly obedient to authority when they thought they were harming someone else while Fromm dissected both: why people are so prone to obey and how disobedience from authoritative figures can bring beneficial changes for society. Obeying commands, even when they go against our morals, is human nature; Disobeying commands, however, is challenging to do no matter what the situation is.
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
The paranoia and fear of death never left them. The My Lai Massacre occurred in 1968, when the village of My Lai was completely destroyed, although it did not contain a single enemy troop. Over a hundred villagers were slaughtered. It became clearer to Americans how soldiers were losing control, and how there was no easy way to win this war.