PORTLAND,
Ore. (AP) - The woman who died after falling 150 feet from a
tree-sitting platform while protesting the Eagle Creek timber sale has
been identified as Beth O'Brien, 22, of Portland.
She had
unhooked herself from one platform and was trying to reach another by a
rope ladder when she fell Friday night, Clackamas County Sheriff's
spokeswoman Angela Blanchard said.
In a sad twist, the timber
sale had been canceled three days earlier. The cancelation was
announced on the U.S. Senate floor by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., on
Tuesday.
"This is so senseless and so incredibly sad, and I
just want to urge the young people in the strongest possible terms to
come down from those trees immediately," Wyden said Saturday.
Local rescue crews struggled up snow-clogged dirt roads to reach the
tree-sitters' camp in the Mount Hood National Forest after fellow
activists called 9-1-1 on a cell phone at about 7 p.m., Blanchard said.
The caller said the woman was unconscious but still breathing,
Blanchard said. But by the time rescue crews arrived at about 9:30 p.m.,
she was dead.
"We had problems getting up to that area
because there was snow on the ground, slushy snow on the ground, and we
couldn't get the four-wheel drive trucks up there," Blanchard said.
Sarah Wald of Cascadia Forest Alliance, which organized the protests,
said Saturday afternoon that they were preparing to take down the tree
sits when O'Brien fell.
"We were awaiting a legally binding
contract canceling the sales," she said Saturday afternoon at a somber
backyard press conference in southeast Portland.
Wald said protesters remained in the trees Saturday evening.
Ivan Maluski, a longtime Eagle Creek protester, said four people take
turns living year-round in tree platforms in the area where the
protester fell. He said they were days away from leaving the site after a
three-year vigil.
Wald was vague about Cascadia's immediate future plans in the Eagle Creek sale.
"We are a community in mourning right now,' she said.
Wyden, an opponent of the timber sale, announced Tuesday that the
U.S. Forest Service had canceled the cutting contract after an
independent review determined the deal required significant
modifications to prevent environmental harm.
At issue was the
problem of blowdown, or trees not intended for cutting being felled by
winds on the edge of clear cuts. The Forest Service said tree sitters
were not a factor in deciding to cancel the Eagle Creek sale.
The Forest Service proposed a "mutual cancellation" of the sales with
the timber company, Boring-based Vanport Manufacturing.
The
agency offered to refund roughly $1.3 million in deposits, interest and
other expenses that Vanport incurred. Vanport President Adolf Hertrich
said he would accept, and that appeared to end the contentious timber
harvest.
"As chairman of the Senate subcommittee on forestry I
want to again give my word this sale is over," Wyden said Saturday. "It
is canceled. The sale is not going forward."
At least two
other tree sitters have fallen from perches in the past year in Oregon,
requiring evacuation and medical treatment.
A protester fell
together with his dislodged platform at the Eagle Creek timber sale last
June and was taken by helicopter to a Portland hospital. The
unidentified protester at first refused medical treatment and then ran
away from the hospital without treatment.
In October,
anti-logging protester Tre Arrow tumbled 60 feet from a treetop perch in
the Tillamook State Forest and suffered multiple broken bones.
Vancouver’s Old Apple Tree, whose roots extend through three centuries, has died, the city reported Saturday.
Legend has it
an English officer brought apple seeds with him in from London in his
vest pocket. The seeds were planted in 1826. One turned into a tree that
turned into a legend, before finally succumbing at the venerable age of
196.
“That
is extremely rare, unlike any other apple tree,” said Charles Ray,
Vancouver’s urban forester. “Typically, apple trees are a shorter-lived
tree because they’re constantly producing apples. That wears on a tree
over time.”
Not this one, which has been known as Old Apple Tree for more than a century.
“We
saw a picture of the 1918 flu pandemic,” Ray said. “There were these
ladies standing there, and there was a sign behind them said ‘The Old
Apple Tree.‘ ”
Over
the years, the tree has become a beloved part of the city and its
history, celebrated annually at the Old Apple Tree Festival in October
at Old Apple Tree Park,
located at 112 Columbia Way, directly east of the Interstate 5 Bridge
within the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site. The tree is thought to
be the oldest apple tree in the Northwest.
It
bore fruit that sometimes turned up in pies throughout its long life
before apparently falling victim to a recent hot spell and, well, age.
“We
would get people from all over the region telling us stories about the
Old Apple Tree,” Ray said. “We would give out cuttings every year, and
people would come back and tell us they took a cutting years ago, and
now it’s big.
“We are encouraging people to submit stories and photos to our Letters to Trees program,
which is available on our website. We will share those stories through
our website and social media to celebrate the history of the tree.”
There
had been trouble signs in the old tree in recent years. A significant
spiral crack had been expanding in the tree’s trunk, which led to some
dry rot and decay.
The
Vancouver Old Apple Tree Research Team has been planning for the next
step, and nurturing suckers growing up from the tree’s root system.
“Knowing
this day would come, we started planning for it,” Ray said. “We’ve been
caring for those root suckers where they were, especially the strategic
ones, knowing at some point they could be the new Old Apple Tree
because they are from the same root stock.”
Which means, really, the Old Apple Tree hasn’t died, but lives on.
Abolishing
police unions should be part of the broader fight to defund,
demilitarize, and ultimately dismantle the U.S. police force.
When
Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department killed 46-year-old
George Floyd in cold blood last week, he showed the world exactly what
kind of man he is. Chauvin has been cited multiple times for using excessive forceon the job; he has been involved in at least two other police shootings, including that of Ira Latrell Toles,
who is Black, in 2008. Chauvin has repeatedly abused his power,
privilege, and authority to menace and terrorize—and he’s now been shown
killing a human being on camera. Even so, he remains free to cower in
his house and order delivery while demonstrators protest outside. And
thanks to the tangled auspices of union affiliation, he’s also someone
who technically counts as my “union brother.”
Today just 12 percent
of the American workforce is unionized, and labor laws bar a vast swath
of workers (particularly those who are classified as independent
contractors or who are undocumented) from basic labor protections. But
police are a high-density union profession—which creates no small amount
of distress to labor activists in a moment like this. True, the 2018 Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision on public-sector union organizing had some cop unions nervous
about their membership rolls, but police forces remain heavily
unionized throughout the country. Police unions represent hundreds of
thousands of members in state, federal, and local jurisdictions. (The
Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest cop union, has more than
340,000 members.)
And
most of these union members are independent from any other labor
organizations—which means, in turn, that they’re at best marginally
involved with the most pressing mission of today’s labor movement, which
concentrates on organizing many of the same low-wage, service-sector
communities of color who are disproportionately abused and harassed by
police. It wouldn’t make any sort of strategic sense for
police-affiliated unions to try and make nice with the rest of the
movement. So that leaves one obvious, if tricky, option: abolishing
police unions as part of the broader fight to defund, demilitarize, and ultimately dismantle
the U.S. police force as it currently exists. Labor leaders should
seize upon this crucial moment to fully embrace this aim—and some already have.
However,
it’s not exactly a simple or straightforward proposition. The
International Union of Police Associations, which represents over 100,000
law enforcement employees as well as emergency medical personnel, is
officially affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and Congress
of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the
United States. Its membership comprises 55 national and international
unions, and it counts 12 million active and retired members. But if the
federation wants to prove that it’s seriously committed to racial
justice and true worker solidarity, the AFL-CIO must permanently
disaffiliate from the IUPA and sever its ties with any and all other
police associations.
There is already precedent for such a move. The AFL-CIO has disaffiliated from other unions in the recent past, most notably
the Teamsters, the Service Employees International Union, and most
recently, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, whose leaders
criticized
the federation for failing to throw its considerable weight behind
progressive health care and immigration policy. Given the ongoing
epidemic of racist police violence against the Black community and other
communities of color in the U.S., there is no better reason—and no
better time—to take a stand. It’s already been a long time coming.
After
all, the partnership between the police unions and the federation is
hardly shatterproof. The IUPA only chartered with the AFL-CIO in 1979;
since then, the cops’ union has expanded into affiliations with law
enforcement and corrections officers in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. And much like the AFL-CIO-affiliated National Border Patrol
Council, which has overseen its own brand of racist terror, police unions seem to realize they’re not exactly welcome among the unions that have been forced to accept them as peers.
“Legally, unions are responsible for representing their members,” Booker Hodges, a former Minnestota police officer who now works as an assistant commissioner for the state’s Department of Public Safety, wrote
in a 2018 blog post on Police One. “The public seems to support this
premise when it concerns other labor unions, but not those who represent
police officers. Even members of other labor unions, particularly those
who belong to educator unions, don’t seem to support this premise when
it comes to police unions. Many of them have taken to the streets to
protest against police officers, criticized police unions for defending
their members and called for an end of binding arbitration for police
officers.”
It’s also not as though the police unions’ leaders are
taking any pains to show solidarity, or even sympathy, with their fellow
workers. Rather, police unions have a long, wretched history of doing
exactly the opposite: playing on public fears and misconceptions to push
damaging “no angel” narratives about the victims of police violence,
while also howling about the “bravery” and “sacrifice” their employees
make to “protect” fellow citizens.
For example, on its official website, the IUPA linked to a May 27 Police magazine article
that characterized George Floyd’s killing as “the death of a suspect
during an arrest in which a Minneapolis officer put his knee on the back
of the man’s neck to pin him to the ground.” This was a naked attempt
to mislead readers and convince them that Chauvin has to be
categorically innocent. It’s also in keeping with the “thin blue line”
model of deference to the life-and-death authority granted by reflex to
most municipal cops: The law enforcement community—and especially its unions’—first
response, when one of its officers is caught red-handed, is to circle
the wagons, vilify the victim or survivor, and bat away any criticism or
dissent as virtual sedition. If and when reforms are introduced
in the wake of an abuse of police powers, police and their unions
remain in wagon-circling mode, determined to shoot them down. The bottom
line here is all too plain: The police do not want reform; they want
the freedom to operate with impunity.
The
article IUPA boosted also took care to note that, in Minneapolis,
kneeling on a suspect’s neck is apparently considered a “non-deadly
force option” (albeit one that is banned
elsewhere in Minnesota). And in a gruesome twist, Lieutenant Bob Kroll,
the president of the Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, has not
only allowed his membership to continue utilizing these violent,
fear-based training tactics but also has actively encouraged their use.
After Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey banned such tactics in 2019, Kroll pushed back
and went so far as to offer free “warrior-style” classes to the union’s
800 members over the remaining three years of Frey’s term. Now Kroll
and the union have George Floyd’s blood on their hands and are finally
facing some much-needed and long-overdue scrutiny. (Mohamed Noor, a former Minneapolis police officer, was the first Minnesota police officer in decades to be convicted of a fatal on-duty shooting after he killed Justine Ruszczyk, a white woman.* At the time, Kroll drew criticism for throwing said officer, who is Black, under the bus.)
One of the only public statements that Kroll has made following Floyd’s murder has been to correct
the rumor that Chauvin took part in a recent Trump rally. The photos
actually depicted Mike Gallagher, the president of the police union in
Bloomington, Minnesota.
For his part, Chauvin had 18 prior complaints filed with Minneapolis Police Department’s Internal Affairs, while his accomplice Tou Thao was the subject of six complaints
(including one that was still open as of the time of his firing). This
is, among other things, a stiff rebuke to the effort to dismiss systemic
violence as the work of “a few bad apples.” These two apples were, in
fact, already known to be rotten—yet there they were, armed, dangerous,
and interacting daily with the public.
Unfortunately,
union protection plays no small role in keeping cops like Chauvin and
Thao out on the streets. Collective bargaining agreements for police
generally include normal language around wages and benefits but can also
act as an unbreachable firewall
between the cops and those they have injured. Typically, such contracts
are chock full of special protections that are negotiated behind closed
doors. Employment contract provisions also insulate
police from any meaningful accountability for their actions and rig any
processes hearings in their favor; fired cops are able to appeal and
win their jobs back, even after the most egregious offenses. When Daniel
Pantaleo, an NYPD officer who was involved in the 2014 murder of Eric
Garner, was finally fired, the police union immediately appealed for his reinstatement and threatened a work slowdown. Now the Sergeants Benevolent Association’s official Twitter account spends most of its time needling New York City Mayor De Blasio and spouting profanity and pro-Trump propaganda.
Ultimately, police unions protect their own, and the contracts they bargain keep killers, domestic abusers, and white supremacists
in positions of deadly power—or provide them with generous pensions
should they leave. The only solidarity they show is for their fellow
police officers; other workers are mere targets. Their interests, as
well as those of other right-wing oppressors’ unions like those that represent ICE, border patrol, and prison guards,
are diametrically opposed to those of the workers whom the labor
movement was launched to protect. As retired NYPD commander Corey Pegues
wrote in his memoir, Once a Cop, police unions are “a blanket system of covering up police officers.”
Despite their union membership, police have also been no friend to workers, especially during strikes or protests. Their purpose
is to protect property, not people, and labor history is littered with
accounts of police moonlighting as strikebreakers or charging in to
harass or injure striking workers. The first recorded
strike fatalities in U.S. history came at the hands of police, who shot
two New York tailors dead as they tried to disperse. During the Battle of Blair Mountain,
the police fought striking coal miners on the bosses’ behalf. In 1937,
during the Little Steel Strike, Chicago police gunned down 10 striking
steelworkers in what became known as the Memorial Day Massacre. In 1968, days after Dr. Martin Luther King addressed a group of sanitation workers, Memphis cops maced and assaulted the striking workers and their supporters, killing a 16-year-old boy.
As the Industrial Workernoted
on Twitter, current AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was president of
the United Mineworkers of America during the 1989 Pittston Coal Strike,
and he “harshly criticized” the police for engaging in violence
against the striking miners. Trumka’s long career as a union official
has furnished him with decades of object lessons in the lengths to which
the state will go to protect financial power and the interests of
elites; he has also seen firsthand how readily striking or protesting
workers are thrown into the line of fire by the police and military.
During his tenure at the AFL-CIO, Trumka has supported progressive
causes and spoken out against the legacies of racism, within and without
the labor movement. This week, Trumka astutely tweeted
that “racism plays an insidious role in the daily lives of all working
people of color. This is a labor issue because it is a workplace issue.
It is a community issue, and unions are the community.”
In a 2008 speech at a United Steelworkers convention in support of then-candidate Barack Obama, Trumka quoted
conservative philosopher Edmund Burke, saying “all that is necessary
for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.” More than a
decade later, it’s all too clear that evil continues to triumph. Doing
nothing in this context means allowing police unions to continue holding
a comfortable berth within the labor movement, even as they keep
shielding and supporting racists, abusers, and killers. As Trumka has
also said, we can no longer sit still and avoid confronting issues of racial and economic inequality.
It’s imperative to take action now. The AFL-CIO has a chance to atone for its past racial transgressions
by moving toward a more just, equitable, and intersectional labor
movement. Disaffiliating with the IUPA is only a start, but it would be
an important step in the right direction. The decision would draw a line
in the sand and show the federation’s broader membership that union
leaders truly believe that Black lives matter—and that the working class
deserves to feel safe and protected in our own communities. The
Industrial Workers of the World has long barred law enforcement (and prison guards) from its membership rolls; it’s high time for the AFL-CIO to follow its lead.
The
age-old query “Which side are you on?” has rung out at rallies and
picket lines and vigils since Florence Reece put the slogan to paper in
1931. It hung in the air while police were maiming striking coal miners
then, and it remains on the lips of the millions of modern workers
fighting for a fair shake. As we once more raise our voices and ask
ourselves that question, the only acceptable response is crystal-clear:
that we’re on the side of the workers, not their abusers and oppressors.
As Reece once sang, there can be no neutrals here.
* Video compilation - Several Days in May - (2:07 min)
More than 9,000 people have signed a petition calling on the removal of Boston’s Emancipation Memorial.
By
Joseph Guzman | June 16, 2020
The Abraham Lincoln Statue, erected in 1879, by Thomas Ball, is viewed in Park Square in Boston, Massachusetts
Story at a glance
The Emancipation Memorial statue that has stood in Park Square for
more than 100 years shows President Lincoln with one hand raised
standing above a half-clothed freed slave who is kneeling at Lincoln’s
feet with broken chains on his wrists.
“I’ve been watching this man on his knees since I was a kid. It’s
supposed to represent freedom, but instead represents us still beneath
someone else,” the petition reads.
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) has reportedly said he’s open to removing the statue or replacing it.
Thousands
of Americans have signed a petition to remove a statue depicting
President Abraham Lincoln standing over a freed slave in Boston’s Park
Square, as a national movement to remove historical monuments has gained
traction following the death of George Floyd.
The
Emancipation Memorial statue that has stood in Park Square for more than
100 years shows Lincoln with one hand raised standing above a
half-clothed freed slave with broken chains on his wrist who is kneeling
at Lincoln’s feet. The statue's pedestal reads “A race set free and the
country at peace. Lincoln rests from his labors.” The memorial
represents Lincoln freeing African American slaves at the end of the
Civil War.
Dorchester native Tory Bullock started the petition last Thursday, which has gained more than 9,000 signatures as of Tuesday, calling for the statue's removal.
“I’ve
been watching this man on his knees since I was a kid. It’s supposed to
represent freedom, but instead represents us still beneath someone
else,” Bullock wrote in the online petition. “I would always ask myself,
‘if he’s free, why is he still on his knees?’ No kid should have to ask
themselves that question anymore.”
In a Facebook video last week,
Bullock called on Boston Mayor Marty Walsh (D) to remove the statute or
change it somehow to show the black man standing on his own two feet
and clothed. Walsh, who declared
racism a public health crisis in the city Friday, is in favor of
removing the statue and possibly replacing it with something that
recognizes equality, and is willing to engage in talks about its future
in Boston, according to The Boston Globe.
The
statue is a replica of the original Emancipation Memorial, also known
as the Freedman’s Memorial, dedicated in Washington, D.C., in 1876 and
was funded with money donated by former slaves.
The
push to remove the statue of Lincoln comes as historical monuments,
most depicting Confederate figures, across the country have been torn
down or vandalized by protesters, or removed by local governments amid
an uprising against racism following the death of George Floyd at the
hands of Minneapolis police.
A statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded last week in Boston’s North End neighborhood.
Nikole Hannah-Jones "The American Revolution Was Fought To Defend Slavery"
When The New York Times Magazinepublished its 1619 Project in
August, people lined up on the street in New York City to get copies.
Since then, the project—a historical analysis of how slavery shaped
American political, social, and economic institutions—has spawned a
podcast, a high-school curriculum, and an upcoming book. For Nikole
Hannah-Jones, the reporter who conceived of the project, the response
has been deeply gratifying.
“They had not seen this type of demand for a print product of TheNew York Times,
they said, since 2008, when people wanted copies of Obama's historic
presidency edition,” Hannah-Jones told me. “I know when I talk to
people, they have said that they feel like they are understanding the
architecture of their country in a way that they had not.”
U.S.
history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its
great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global
struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the
first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the
consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the
very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of
those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding
documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very
different.
The
reaction to the project was not universally enthusiastic. Several weeks
ago, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who had criticized the 1619
Project’s “cynicism”
in a lecture in November, began quietly circulating a letter objecting
to the project, and some of Hannah-Jones’s work in particular. The
letter acquired four signatories—James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria
Bynum, and James Oakes, all leading scholars in their field. They sent
their letter to three top Times editors and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, on December 4. A version of that letter was published on Friday, along with a detailed rebuttal from Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine.
The letter sent to the Times
says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of
slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism
of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact”
that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the
project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by
ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.
In
the age of social-media invective, a strongly worded letter might not
seem particularly significant. But given the stature of the historians
involved, the letter is a serious challenge to the credibility of the
1619 Project, which has drawn its share not just of admirers but also
critics.
Nevertheless, some historians who declined to sign the
letter wondered whether the letter was intended less to resolve factual
disputes than to discredit laymen who had challenged an interpretation
of American national identity that is cherished by liberals and
conservatives alike.
“I think had any of the scholars who signed the letter contacted me or contacted the Times
with concerns [before sending the letter], we would've taken those
concerns very seriously,” Hannah-Jones said. “And instead there was kind
of a campaign to kind of get people to sign on to a letter that was
attempting really to discredit the entire project without having had a
conversation.”
Underlying each of the disagreements in the letter
is not just a matter of historical fact but a conflict about whether
Americans, from the Founders to the present day, are committed to the
ideals they claim to revere. And while some of the critiques can be
answered with historical fact, others are questions of interpretation
grounded in perspective and experience.
In
fact, the harshness of the Wilentz letter may obscure the extent to
which its authors and the creators of the 1619 Project share a broad
historical vision. Both sides agree, as many of the project’s right-wing
critics do not, that slavery’s legacy still shapes American life—an
argument that is less radical than it may appear at first glance. If you
think anti-black racism still shapes American society, then you are in
agreement with the thrust of the 1619 Project, though not necessarily
with all of its individual arguments.
The clash between the Times authors
and their historian critics represents a fundamental disagreement over
the trajectory of American society. Was America founded as a slavocracy,
and are current racial inequities the natural outgrowth of that? Or was
America conceived in liberty, a nation haltingly redeeming itself
through its founding principles? These are not simple questions to
answer, because the nation’s pro-slavery and anti-slavery tendencies are
so closely intertwined.
The
letter is rooted in a vision of American history as a slow, uncertain
march toward a more perfect union. The 1619 Project, and Hannah-Jones’s
introductory essay in particular, offer a darker vision of the nation,
in which Americans have made less progress than they think, and in which
black people continue to struggle indefinitely for rights they may
never fully realize. Inherent in that vision is a kind of pessimism, not
about black struggle but about the sincerity and viability of white
anti-racism. It is a harsh verdict, and one of the reasons the 1619
Project has provoked pointed criticism alongside praise.
Americans
need to believe that, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, the arc of
history bends toward justice. And they are rarely kind to those who
question whether it does.
Most Americans still learn very little about the lives of the enslaved, or how the struggle over slavery shaped a young nation. Last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center , a Liberal 'charity' which does not offer legal services and is far from poverty with over a billion dollars in funds, found that few American high-school students know that slavery was the
cause of the Civil War, that the US Constitution protected slavery without
explicitly mentioning it, or that ending slavery required a
constitutional amendment.
“The
biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the
deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as
‘progress,’ as the story of a people and a nation that always sought
the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the
broadening of pursuits of happiness for all,” the Yale historian David
Blight wrote in the introduction to the report. “While there are many
real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and
ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is
also the broad, untidy underside.”
In conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, the Times
has produced educational materials based on the 1619 Project for
students—one of the reasons Wilentz told me he and his colleagues wrote
the letter. But the materials are intended to enhance traditional
curricula, not replace them. “I think that there is a misunderstanding
that this curriculum is meant to replace all of U.S. history,”
Silverstein told me. “It's being used as supplementary material for
teaching American history." Given the state of American education on
slavery, some kind of adjustment is sorely needed.
Published
400 years after the first Africans were brought to in Virginia, the
project asked readers to consider “what it would mean to regard 1619 as
our nation’s birth year.” The special issue of the Times Magazine included essays from the Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who argued that sprawl in Atlanta is a consequence of segregation and white flight; the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, who posited that American countermajoritarianism was shaped by pro-slavery politicians seeking to preserve the peculiar institution; and the journalist Linda Villarosa, who traced racist stereotypes
about higher pain tolerance in black people from the 18th century to
the present day. The articles that drew the most attention and
criticism, though, were Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay chronicling black Americans’ struggle to “make democracy real” and the sociologist Matthew Desmond’s essay linking the crueler aspects of American capitalism to the labor practices that arose under slavery.
The letter’s signatories recognize the problem the Times
aimed to remedy, Wilentz told me. “Each of us, all of us, think that
the idea of the 1619 Project is fantastic. I mean, it's just urgently
needed. The idea of bringing to light not only scholarship but all sorts
of things that have to do with the centrality of slavery and of racism
to American history is a wonderful idea,” he said. In a subsequent
interview, he said, “Far from an attempt to discredit the 1619 Project,
our letter is intended to help it.”
The
letter disputes a passage in Hannah-Jones’s introductory essay, which
lauds the contributions of black people to making America a full
democracy and says that “one of the primary reasons the colonists
decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they
wanted to protect the institution of slavery” as abolitionist sentiment
began rising in Britain.
This argument is explosive. From
abolition to the civil-rights movement, activists have reached back to
the rhetoric and documents of the founding era to present their claims
to equal citizenship as consonant with the American tradition. The
Wilentz letter contends that the 1619 Project’s argument concedes too
much to slavery’s defenders, likening it to South Carolina Senator John
C. Calhoun’s assertion that “there is not a word of truth” in the
Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase that “all men are created
equal.” Where Wilentz and his colleagues see the rising anti-slavery
movement in the colonies and its influence on the Revolution as a
radical break from millennia in which human slavery was accepted around
the world, Hannah-Jones’ essay outlines how the ideology of white
supremacy that sustained slavery still endures today.
“To
teach children that the American Revolution was fought in part to
secure slavery would be giving a fundamental misunderstanding not only
of what the American Revolution was all about but what America stood for
and has stood for since the Founding,” Wilentz told me. Anti-slavery
ideology was a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” he
said, and “there was more anti-slavery activity in the colonies than in
Britain.”
Hannah-Jones
hasn’t budged from her conviction that slavery helped fuel the
Revolution. “I do still back up that claim,” she told me last
week—before Silverstein’s rebuttal was published—although she says she
phrased it too strongly in her essay, in a way that might mislead
readers into thinking that support for slavery was universal. “I think
someone reading that would assume that this was the case: all 13
colonies and most people involved. And I accept that criticism, for
sure.” She said that as the 1619 Project is expanded into a history
curriculum and published in book form, the text will be changed to make
sure claims are properly contextualized.
On
this question, the critics of the 1619 Project are on firm ground.
Although some southern slave owners likely were fighting the British to
preserve slavery, as Silverstein writes in his rebuttal,
the Revolution was kindled in New England, where prewar anti-slavery
sentiment was strongest. Early patriots like James Otis, John Adams, and
Thomas Paine were opposed to slavery, and the Revolution helped fuel
abolitionism in the North.
Historians
who are in neither Wilentz’s camp nor the 1619 Project’s say both have a
point. “I do not agree that the American Revolution was just a
slaveholders' rebellion,” Manisha Sinha, a history professor at the
University of Connecticut and the author of The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition, told me.* “But also understand that the original Constitution did give some ironclad protections to slavery without mentioning it.”
The most radical
thread in the 1619 Project is not its contention that slavery’s legacy
continues to shape American institutions; it’s the authors’ pessimism
that a majority of white people will abandon racism and work with black
Americans toward a more perfect union. Every essay tracing racial
injustice from slavery to the present day speaks to the endurance of
racial caste. And it is this profound pessimism about white America that
many of the 1619 Project’s critics find most galling.
Newt Gingrich called the
1619 Project a “lie,” arguing that “there were several hundred thousand
white Americans who died in the Civil War in order to free the slaves."
In City Journal, the historian Allen Guelzo dismissed the Times Magazine
project as a “conspiracy theory” developed from the “chair of ultimate
cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an
enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such
privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were
once the enslavers.” The conservative pundit Erick Erickson went so far as to accuse the Times
of adopting “the Neo-Confederate world view” that the “South actually
won the Civil War by weaving itself into the fabric of post war society
so it can then discredit the entire American enterprise.” Erickson’s
bizarre sleight of hand turns the 1619 Project’s criticism of ongoing
racial injustice into a brief for white supremacy.
World Socialist Web Site booklet
The
project’s pessimism has drawn criticism from the left as well as the
right. Hannah-Jones’s contention that “anti-black racism runs in the
very DNA of this country” drew a rebuke from James Oakes, one of the
Wilentz letter’s signatories. In an interview with the World Socialist Web Site,
Oakes said, “The function of those tropes is to deny change over time …
The worst thing about it is that it leads to political paralysis. It’s
always been here. There’s nothing we can do to get out of it. If it’s
the DNA, there’s nothing you can do. What do you do? Alter your DNA?”
These
are objections not to misstatements of historical fact, but to the
argument that anti-black racism is a more intractable problem than most
Americans are genuinely believe in. Chances are, what you think of the 1619 Project depends on whether you believe someone might reasonably come to such a despairing conclusion—whether you agree with it or not.
Wilentz
reached out to a larger group of historians, but ultimately sent a
letter signed by five historians who had publicly criticized the 1619
Project in interviews with the World Socialist Web Site. He
told me that the idea of trying to rally a larger group was
“misconceived,” citing the holiday season and the end of the semester,
among other factors. (A different letter written by Wilentz, calling for
the impeachment of President Donald Trump, quickly amassed hundreds of
signatures last week.) The refusal of other historians to sign on,
despite their misgivings about some claims made by the 1619 Project,
speaks to a divide over whether the letter was focused on correcting
specific factual inaccuracies or aimed at discrediting the project more
broadly.
Sinha
saw an early version of the letter that was circulated among a larger
group of historians. But, despite her disagreement with some of the
assertions in the 1619 Project, she said she wouldn’t have signed it if
she had been asked to. “There are legitimate critiques that one can
engage in discussion with, but for them to just kind of dismiss the
entire project in that manner, I thought, was really unwise,” she said.
“It was a worthy thing to actually shine a light on a subject that the
average person on the street doesn't know much about.”
Although
the letter writers deny that their objections are merely matters of
“interpretation or ‘framing,’” the question of whether black Americans
have fought their freedom struggles “largely alone,” as Hannah-Jones put
it in her essay, is subject to vigorous debate. Viewed through the lens
of major historical events—from anti-slavery Quakers organizing
boycotts of goods produced through slave labor, to abolitionists
springing fugitive slaves from prison, to union workers massing at the
March on Washington—the struggle for black freedom has been an
interracial struggle. Frederick Douglass had William Garrison; W. E. B.
Du Bois had Moorfield Storey; Martin Luther King Jr. had Stanley Levison.
“The
fight for black freedom is a universal fight; it's a fight for
everyone. In the end, it affected the fight for women's
rights—everything. That's the glory of it,” Wilentz told me. “To
minimize that in any way is, I think, bad for understanding the radical
tradition in America.”
But looking back to the long stretches of
night before the light of dawn broke—the centuries of slavery and the
century of Jim Crow that followed—“largely alone” seems more than
defensible. Douglass had Garrison, but the onetime Maryland slave had to
go north to find him. The millions who continued to labor in bondage
until 1865 struggled, survived, and resisted far from the welcoming arms
of northern abolitionists.
“I think one would be very
hard-pressed to look at the factual record from 1619 to the present of
the black freedom movement and come away with any conclusion other than
that most of the time, black people did not have a lot of allies in that
movement,” Hannah-Jones told me. “It is not saying that black people
only fought alone. It is saying that most of the time we did.”
Nell Irvin Painter, a professor emeritus of history at Princeton who was asked to sign the letter, had objected to the 1619 Project’s portrayal
of the arrival of African laborers in 1619 as slaves. The 1619 Project
was not history “as I would write it,” Painter told me. But she still
declined to sign the Wilentz letter.
“I felt that if I signed on
to that, I would be signing on to the white guy's attack of something
that has given a lot of black journalists and writers a chance to speak
up in a really big way. So I support the 1619 Project as kind of a
cultural event,” Painter said. “For Sean and his colleagues, true history is how they
would write it. And I feel like he was asking me to choose sides, and
my side is 1619's side, not his side, in a world in which there are only
those two sides.”
This was a recurrent theme among historians I
spoke with who had seen the letter but declined to sign it. While they
may have agreed with some of the factual objections in the letter or had
other reservations of their own, several told me they thought the
letter was an unnecessary escalation.
“The
tone to me rather suggested a deep-seated concern about the project.
And by that I mean the version of history the project offered. The
deep-seated concern is that placing the enslavement of black people and
white supremacy at the forefront of a project somehow diminishes
American history,” Thavolia Glymph, a history professor at Duke who was
asked to sign the letter, told me.
“Maybe some of their factual
criticisms are correct. But they've set a tone that makes it hard to
deal with that.”
“I don't think they think they're trying to discredit the project,” Painter said. “They think they're trying to fix the project, the way that only they know how.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Historical
interpretations are often contested, and those debates often reflect
the perspective of the participants. To this day, the pro-Confederate
“Lost Cause” intepretation of history shapes the mistaken perception
that slavery was not the catalyst for the Civil War. For decades, a
group of white historians known as the Dunning School, after the
Columbia University historian William Archibald Dunning, portrayed
Reconstruction as a tragic period of, in his words, the “scandalous
misrule of the carpet-baggers and negroes,” brought on by the misguided
enfranchisement of black men. As the historian Eric Foner has written,
the Dunning School and its interpretation of Reconstruction helped
provide moral and historical cover for the Jim Crow system.
In Black Reconstruction in America,
W. E. B. Du Bois challenged the consensus of “white historians” who
“ascribed the faults and failures of Reconstruction to Negro ignorance
and corruption,” and offered what is now considered a more reliable
account of the era as an imperfect but noble effort to build a
multiracial democracy in the South.
To Wilentz, the failures of
earlier scholarship don’t illustrate the danger of a monochromatic group
of historians writing about the American past, but rather the risk that
ideologues can hijack the narrative. “[It was] when the southern
racists took over the historical profession that things changed, and W.
E. B. Du Bois fought a very, very courageous fight against all of that,”
Wilentz told me. The Dunning School, he said, was “not a white point of
view; it’s a southern, racist point of view.”
In the letter,
Wilentz portrays the authors of the 1619 Project as ideologues as well.
He implies—apparently based on a combative but ambiguous exchange
between Hannah-Jones and the writer Wesley Yang on Twitter—that she had
discounted objections raised by “white historians” since publication.
Hannah-Jones
told me she was misinterpreted. “I rely heavily on the scholarship of
historians no matter what race, and I would never discount the work of
any historian because that person is white or any other race,” she told
me. “I did respond to someone who was saying white scholars were afraid,
and I think my point was that history is not objective. And that people
who write history are not simply objective arbiters of facts, and that
white scholars are no more objective than any other scholars, and that
they can object to the framing and we can object to their framing as
well.”
When I asked Wilentz about Hannah-Jones’s clarification, he
was dismissive. “Fact and objectivity are the foundation of both honest
journalism and honest history. And so to dismiss it, to say, ‘No, I'm
not really talking about whites’—well, she did, and then she takes it
back in those tweets and then says it's about the inability of anybody
to write objective history. That's objectionable too,” Wilentz told me.
Both
Du Bois and the Dunning School saw themselves as having reached the
truth by objective means. But as a target of the Dunning School’s
ideology, Du Bois understood the motives and blind spots of Dunning
School scholars far better than they themselves did.
“We shall
never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who
regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race,”
Du Bois wrote, “and who will not deliberately encourage students to
gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a
lie.”
The problem, as Du Bois argued, is that much of American
history has been written by scholars offering ideological claims in
place of rigorous historical analysis. But which claims are ideological,
and which ones are objective, is not always easy to discern.
America’s streets are being patrolled by armed civilians, but could these gun-toting vigilantes really kill?
Andrew Dickens
Andrew Dickens
is an award-winning writer on culture, society, politics, health and
travel for major titles such as the Guardian, the Telegraph, the
Independent, the Daily Mail and Empire.
Whether it’s protests over lockdowns or warding off looters, the
US has rarely seen such overt displays of ballistic power from private
citizens. But, for all their garage military get-ups, could these people
really shoot to kill?
There have been so many
powerful images in the news lately, it’s hard for anything to stand out.
We’ve been emotionally waterboarded by a constant stream of protest,
violence and brutality, hope, hate and humour. Among the most memorable
pictures have been those of heavily-armed private citizens guarding
shops and neighbourhoods during Black Lives Matter protests, or
expressing their disapproval of anti-epidemic measures.
Most of these vigilantes – a term I’ll use here without prejudice – describe themselves as “concerned citizens.”
Many are equipped better than some national armies, with assault-style
rifles and body armour very much the fashion. It’s a sight that is
impressive, intimidating, comforting, worrying, antagonising or
repulsive, depending on your point of view.
But what happens when someone isn’t deterred?
A
protester in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was shot on March 15 as he tried
to bring down a statue of a Spanish conquistador. Police are
investigating whether the shooter, Steven Ray Baca, is connected to the
New Mexico Civil Guard, a well-known local militia.
However,
considering the number of protests, the number of guns on display, the
unrest and the heightened tensions, is one non-fatal shooting an
anomaly? Are these personal arsenals, in reality, nothing more than
posturing or intimidation – an empty threat? In short, are the people
carrying the guns capable of using them to kill another human being?
Training to kill
We’ve
all seen films where the previously passive character empties a Glock
9mm into the bad guy at a crucial moment. It’s almost always heroic,
redemptive even, and gives the impression that, in the right situation,
each and every one of us can pull the trigger. Yet studies have shown
that even in the most hostile of environments, people have been
reluctant to shoot to kill.
”There was a study done after a major American Civil war battle,”
says Colin Berry, former Special Forces sergeant, government
intelligence operative and author of The Deniable Agent: Undercover in Afghanistan. “They
found that most of the muskets of the dead had been loaded several
times over, meaning the individual had followed the drill, aimed but
never fired.
“Armies
around the world picked up on this and military training became all
about desensitising the act of killing. The enemy is routinely referred
to as ‘the target.’ This stems from training on a range with targets
that are human-shaped. This conditions front line troops into seeing a
target, not a human. It’s effective but far from foolproof.”
Indeed,
US Army historian SLA Marshall’s famous (albeit challenged) study of
World War II soldiers found that only 15-20 percent of combatants were
able to fire their weapons at the enemy – and many of these aimed high
or low. The conclusion Marshall came to was that most humans,
subconsciously at least, find the act of killing abhorrent, to the point
where some consider it worse than dying.
“In World War I they experienced a similar problem,” says Berry. “Trillions
of rounds were fired by soldiers who can hit a target on the range and
yet the death rate was still a small percentage of what was actually
fired. So how did we lose so many men? Artillery, indirect fire, death
by proxy, gas and machine-gun fire.
“In
World War II you had aircraft joining the ranks with mass bombings, but
still there was the problem of highly trained and motivated service
personnel not killing when aiming down the sights. Vietnam was the same
and bizarrely painted a better picture, with jungle being lopped down by
automatic fire many feet above the enemies’ heads.”
It
should be noted that most soldiers in these wars were conscripts or
volunteers. They weren’t professional soldiers who had chosen a career
that might involve having to shoot someone whose eyes they can see. That
said, many who do choose that career path will not understand the
reality of conflict and require training.
“In modern armies, we recognise these issues,” says Berry. “Killing isn’t for everyone. Even those who act like Rambo often fail in the heat of battle.”
According to Lt Col Pete Kilner, a retired US Army officer who studied
the experiences of soldiers in war, much of the training involved in
preparing soldiers for combat is centred around repetition and priming
them to react to situations in an effective manner.
“An old saying is, ‘Skill plus will equals kill,’” he says. “First,
the military trains soldiers to be able to use their weapons expertly.
This creates ‘muscle memory’ and gives soldiers great pride in their
ability to operate their weapon. Then, groups of soldiers are trained on
‘battle drills,‘ which are immediate group responses to a stimulus.
“In
the US Army, the most-trained battle drill is Battle Drill 1A: Squad
React to Contact. The squad, a group of eight to 10 soldiers who spend
countless hours together, practices responding as a group to making
contact with an enemy. Battle drills create ‘social muscle memory’ that
includes skills – how and where to move, and when to shoot – and also t
responsibility to do their duty for their squad.”
That’s
the skill element and the will is equally as important. Excuse the
crude analogy, but we all know how to jump off a cliff, but how many of
us would be willing to do it?
“The military trains soldiers to love their country and all the good value it stands for,” says Kilner. “It
develops strong bonds of loyalty among soldiers and within their units.
Most soldiers develop such a strong sense of patriotism, duty, and
loyalty that they are very willing to kill and to risk being killed.”
Even a sheep can kill
So,
what about those armed civilians? Unless they’re ex-military, few will
have gone through such specialised and intensive conditioning. This, you
would think, would greatly reduce their ability to fire on someone. And
yet, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks
shootings, at least 15,292 people were fatally wounded by gunfire in the
US last year, excluding suicides.
This isn’t to link those
citizens on patrol with these statistics. While there have been notable
‘vigilante’ killings, such as the murder of unarmed jogger Ahmaud Arbery
in February, they are clearly not contributing to the majority of those
15,000 deaths. But a lot of civilians are managing to pull the trigger
and that’s because the ability to kill at close quarters is about more
than training, it’s also about who’s holding the gun.
“In UK special forces selection we have what is called the ‘aptitude test,’” says Berry. “It
covers a multitude of capabilities but one is the ability to aim at a
human and kill them. Just because you join the services doesn’t mean
you want to kill and we know it. That’s the military: full of sheep,
sheepdogs and wolves. Society is the same.
“Sheep
are normal healthy individuals who wouldn’t contemplate killing anyone
but are essential to society or a collective. Wolves are psychopathic
individuals who would kill anything and anyone and need to be isolated
or removed. Unfortunately, they’re good at hiding themselves. Sheepdogs
understand that to protect the sheep, they must control the numbers of
wolves. Thankfully the sheep in society outnumber the wolves and
sheepdogs.”
Considering
its popularity as an online slur, it will come as a great shock to many
people that they are, in all probability, sheep. However, this doesn’t
necessarily mean that we need to be psychopathic or professionally
programmed to kill. Indeed, that movie scenario of the previously placid
character firing a fatal shot at the villain rings true with basic
human psychology – if we have the right stimuli.
Nick Davies is a leading psychotherapist and hypnotherapist who deals with trauma, including PTSD in both civilians and soldiers who have killed. He says that certain situations will allow almost anyone to take a life.
“We have a survival instinct that's hardwired into our brain,” he says. “But
also we protect others, especially close members of our family because
the bigger the family unit, the safer we are, the more resources we can
get, etc. So in order to kill another human being, we need to feel our
own safety is threatened or the safety of, say, our kids.
“I
say this to the most peaceful mothers. If somebody was going to kill
your children, I guarantee you would find that killer instinct.”
Kilner agrees.
“It's easy, even natural, to use force to protect yourself or someone you love,” he says. “When
an Iraqi insurgent was shooting at me, I was shocked by my visceral
desire to kill him. Once we captured him, I no longer felt the desire to
kill him. When it's him or you who's going to die, you desperately want
it to be him.”
In the case of Steven Ray Baca, video footage
shows him being attacked with a skateboard by the protester he shot. No
matter who instigated the tussle - which is still unclear - Baca could
easily have believed his life to be in danger.
Fight or freeze?
Many
of these vigilantes, who range from Average Joe to militia, have been
seen in areas where looting and rioting have taken place. Others have
appeared because of online rumours that their patch of the USA will be
targeted by ‘Antifa’ (these rumours have nearly always been unfounded
but aren't surprising, given the fertile environment for
misinformation).
Here, they aren’t necessarily
defending themselves or their friends and family; they’re defending
property. Some of these properties are domestic or municipal, such as
homes, parks, squares or, in Baca's case, a statue; many are businesses,
both small and large.
It seems reasonable that
someone protecting their home or their own business – and therefore
their livelihood – is going to fight hard to save that property,
possibly to the point where they might use potentially lethal force. But
some vigilantes are lining roofs and car parks of entire shopping
malls, forming a quasi-military defence of Target and Walmart stores.
Surely taking a life to help shareholders is very different.
“It depends on what's happened in their past,” says Davies. “For
instance, if somebody had things taken from them as a child - if they
were very poor and people stole their possessions - that can follow them
through life. There's a learned behaviour that I need to protect my
possessions, my property, otherwise I feel vulnerable. Also, it can be
if you feel overtly threatened by somebody and they're a lot bigger,
stronger than you. You've got a weapon and you think this is my only way
out.”
Or they can be one of those wolves.
“When
you get characters like [Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer
who killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nearly nine minutes]
who use violence excessively, it's because of a massive sense of fear,
more than likely from previous trauma. They were bullied at school, went
through humiliation, beatings, maybe from their parents. Things like
that. They get such trauma that they develop this external character
which helps in terms of doing bad things. So a childhood of trauma can
provoke this wilder, irrational side that can be quite nasty and
malicious.”
So, we have different types of people, conditioning
and situations – the various blends of which leaves us with three
possible outcomes from these vigilante patrols, putting aside the option
of them going home. The first, and undoubtedly the most desirable, is
that the sight of people with rifles slung over their shoulders
dissuades anyone from attacking either them or whatever they’re trying
to protect.
This could also discourage peaceful
protesters or people who just want to buy a new toaster and don’t want
to become ‘collateral damage,’ but even this seems preferable to the
alternatives.
The second potential result is that
these mini arsenals don’t deter assailants and that those holding the
guns aren’t able to pull the trigger – at least not while pointing at a
human being. In addition to our innate reluctance to kill, Davies points
to another reason why this is likely.
“The freeze response,” he says. “Responses
to a threat include fight, flight, freeze and appease. But the
predominant one is freeze. This might keep you alive but the
consequences can be PTSD or trauma – nightmares about, ‘Why didn't I
protect myself? Why didn't I do something?’”
If
you’ve ever seen a frightened (real) sheep, freezing is one of their
natural responses. In this case, we have a heavily-armed sheep in danger
of losing a deadly weapon, possibly to a wolf who is capable of using
it. Or perhaps a frightened sheep firing wildly in a built-up,
heavily-populated urban area. Which leads us onto consequence number
three: someone shoots someone, possibly fatally. It leaves you scarred
What
happens then isn’t just about legal processes and arguments or the
tragedy of a life lost. It’s also about the effect on the person who
pulled the trigger. How does taking a life affect someone? If we go back
to the original comparison of a soldier in war, Kilner believes that
there are three situational variables that influence the psychological
after-effects.
“The first is the killer's psychological distance from the attacker they kill,” he says. “That
distance is partly geographic – it's more traumatic to kill someone at
close range, probably because they’re more obviously a fellow human
being. It's also social-psychological. How similar is that person to me?
It's easier to dehumanise an enemy who is ‘different’ in, for example,
appearance, religion, language.
“The
second factor is the killer's perception of the immediate threat that
the attacker poses. The greater the immediate threat, the lesser the
after-effects. Is he aiming at us? Is he even armed? Or is he simply
walking around at the moment? The third variable is the justness of the
killer's cause or mission. How confident is he that the war is just? In
the case of police officers, at least they know that their mission is
just, even if their behaviour isn't always right.”
If
a soldier who kills can help deal with their actions by framing them
within the context of war, or a police officer by believing in a larger
cause, it’s more complicated with civilians (Steven Ray Baca, by the
way, is the son of a former sheriff). Davies says that convicts he
treats, even those who have turned their lives around, still have
nightmares about what they've done in the past because with age,
usually, comes the ability to reflect and rationalise what we’ve done.
“If
you’re not trained for it, there's going to be anxiety or trauma, even
if it's in self-defence, because it's really difficult for most human
beings to harm another human being,” he says. “In a situation
where you've murdered somebody it's very likely that you're going to
suffer trauma and PTSD. We find that they’ll have recurring nightmares,
they lie awake at night thinking about the situation happening again. We
can treat it using therapies to remove memories, but talking therapies
like counseling and CBT won't touch it - it’s Olympic level.”
Coping with the consequences
We can ask someone who has killed how it affects them. Someone who has had
to kill. Berry, in his time serving in the military and as an
intelligence operative, has done just that. He believes that training or
no training, no normal person could remain unaffected, and has a method
for dealing with the consequences of his actions.
“In my personal experience the act was always by instinct, reacting to a direct threat or stopping a threat from being present,” he says. “The
reaction after the event will come in many ways: laughter, exhaustion
or tears. All are a by-product of increases in adrenaline levels. That
all deals with the immediate. Thereafter it’s the legacy. If you're a
‘normal’ person, regardless of training or background, you will rerun
the event a thousand times. This often manifests itself as PTSD. I don’t
believe anyone has immunity to this but it comes at differing levels.
Some can be treated, others result in suicide.
“I
always play events back to myself. The first question I ask myself is,
‘Did I need to kill?’ Normally a resounding yes, as it was a necessity
to save lives, mine or others. First tick. ‘Was there any way of
avoiding the situation?’ Normally no, as it was part of a pre-planned
mission or I was attacked. Second tick. My last sanity check is, ‘Did
they deserve to die?’ I try to answer this question rather than leaving
it to stew, looking at a couple of things: did I kill an enemy whose
sole intent at that time was to kill me, or was in the act of planning
to kill me, my comrades or civilians. If it’s a yes, then they had met
my criteria. But it’s not always that easy.”
The
answer to our question then: maybe. Not that definitive, I realise, but
the combination of personality type, human behaviour and situation
means that when we see those images of armed civilians lining the
streets, we don’t know which of them would be able to aim and shoot.
Under the right circumstances, it could be all of them; and the more
tense or hostile the environment, the more likely those circumstances
become.
The one thing we can say with absolute
certainty is, assuming they’re not a psychopathic ‘wolf,’ if they do
pull that trigger, their lives will never be the same again. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The
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