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You know, maybe more of a kind of theoretical, or heady point, I would make here, but I'm gonna make it anyways and then just kind of give you free reign to tear it apart, since it's been on my mind for a little bit, and you seem like you know what you're talking about.
So, desensitization isn't an explicit course, but it's obviously it's still a factor in the training, right? To be able to be trained how to fight, you have to become used to fighting, pretty simple idea, you train for what you do, you do what you train for. Not necessarily desensitization to murder, mind you, just desensitization to shooting your gun and hitting human sized targets, you know. What happens afterwards is entirely circumstantial. But enough of me shitposting at you, in any case, you already broached that whole deal, and I don't know what the military service entails in terms of conflict de-escalation or whatever.
No, what I really wanted to talk about was passive desensitization through language, through framing. It's pretty common, and easily lambasted media literacy 101 type shit, to look at police headlines and kind of tear them down. A bullet left the officer's gun and struck the suspect, right, rather than, oh, this policeman shot someone, type shit. One uses passive language for the officer, it was just a kind of cosmic event that happened, and the other one uses more active language. Partially as a result of a 24 hour instantaneous news headline news cycle, and partially because reporters are just easily willing to swallow and regurgitate whatever authoritative information they come across, these events are framed in such a way, and are framed, usually, devoid of external context. Events are described with passive language framing them. Events happened, that was it.
Now this is partially because there's a pretense of objectivity, right, you just give the viewers the authoritative information, and what they decide to do with it is up to them. But this pretense is kind of problematic, because, you know, we're not actually critically analyzing any of what's been presented, it's just a random event that happened, and then we push on and kind of uncritically assimilate it into whatever superstructure it is that we've evolved in order to deal with this very quickly. And which frame of mind strikes you as the one people are more likely to evolve in a contextually devoid vacuum? The one that's simple, where they just say "oh, yeah, the officer shot that guy because that guy was bad"? Or the more complicated and emotionally burdening one, where they say "oh, because of the litany of factors that lead everyone to this moment through the long arm of history, that guy got shot by the officer, that kind of sucks and is a tragedy."? So, without any real framing of the issue, with just presenting "objective" information, we can kind of just passively trust the reader to arrive at certain conclusions. If not all the time, right, then we can at least trust the majority of our headline-only stooges to arrive at those conclusions, which is realistically all we wanted to do anyways.
So, that's a point I would also make for the military, right? We don't actually have to charge, or frame things in certain ways, we don't have to actively attempt to desensitize people to whatever they're doing. And actually, it would be worse if we did, because then we would be focusing on it much more, and kind of playing our hand to what's happening here. I dunno about how you feel about the WMDs in iraq, for instance, or the vietnam war, or what have you. Instead of looking at these wars and kind of thinking about them from the top down, though, the viewpoint is forced into that of a pure tool, you are just presented the information, and then you're trained to respond, and the reasoning you're doing internal to the process isn't expounded upon. Sink or swim. People just are expected to evolve whatever opinions and viewpoints will help them to be more functional in the field, because they're presented information that is just kind of, right in front of them, matter of fact, and it's harder to think long term when you're kind of swamped in a constant state of emergency or danger or, to put it more charitably, when you're constantly processing information that's right in front of you.
I've even heard stories, pretty commonly, where people get into the service, and then retroactively come to conclusions that "oh this kind of sucks I don't think we're doing anything good here", and then they still continue to go along with it, because like, of course they do, what else are they supposed to do? They get dishonorably discharged, that's gonna blow for any career prospects, you have to be immoral to do it, and you're abandoning your squad. Are they supposed to pretend to be insane? There's not really any backing out, there. You know, and that's especially going to be the case when the only people who ever know shit about the military are the people who are in the military, you know, the people who are more likely to have evolved opinions that are functional to what it is that they're currently doing.
Also a relative sidenote, but something that stands out to me is the use of acryonyms in the military. It's like, fetishistic, almost. Theoretically, right, this makes it faster to refer to things in emergency situations, but then, people would just use codes for whatever they're doing in those situations anyways, right? So I would think that the only thing it would really serve to do would be to save printer ink. More importantly, though, I think maybe it serves to obfuscate and isolate the military world from the civilian world, even more than it already is. Even to the point where you can start calling things UFOs, and then switch to UAPs, because they're lockheed-martin in-camera phenomena from fighter jets, right, pretty obviously, and then mainstream media is like "guys, we have aliens. They admitted we have UFOs." basically regardless of whatever you're doing. Just because the previously internal, somewhat unprocessed information is public, and then the public can process it however they choose, basically. I dunno, shit just strikes me as weird.
In my experience we got desensitized on ops and during our 'free time' when the leading NCO would pull us aside and we'd watch videos of whichever enemy we were engaged against committing various war crimes on civilians and military members. Some stuff is in the public venue via sites like live leak (RIP) and others were very much in-house either as personal footage from their operations or footage from helmet cams usually used to review how the operation went and what everyone did correctly or incorrectly so we can improve for next time.
In regards to passive desensitization I wouldn't say it's overly explicit in the way you're presenting so much as the humour. The humour we engage in is abhorrently dark and, to those that have survived perilous situations, be it in the military or in civilian life, extremely hilarious. However the level of dark humour, I would say, is what, out of everything, inadvertently promotes desensitization via language as well as passively teaching the troops a positive coping mechanism. The passive influence of language as you describe doesn't really start to have an effect until several months into the deployment and by that time it's likely everyone has already been ordered onto body detail and is thusly heavily desensitized by that point. (Body detail is easily one of the most negative aspects of military service and not really something anyone applying thinks about before they're in the field and they're ordered to deal with the remains, regardless of state. And I would say the desensitization peaks when observing the sheer number of civilian dead compared to enemy dead, especially in COIN operations (counter insurgency), these are the operations that current forces deal with and out of all the operations have the highest likelihood of doing permanent psychological damage, likely on par with shell shock from ww2. I would posit that many people begin to not only keep the fact the enemy is human at a distance but the civilians as well. Because if you don't you will break from the amount of dead you see, especially the number of kids.
Now I do want to clarify that not everyone handles this well and everyone has different breaking points. Some people I saw break before the end of basic training quitting or, as two people from my own platoon chose, jumping from the top of the tallest building on the base or slipping a link (remove a 5.56 round from the belt of the training LMG's) and go to a blue rocket with their service rifle and end their service prematurely. Others would last for years, offering to go out again and again, but I think, for those that have seen the most operations and, from my POV, were the most mentally tough, even they either chose to rotate out or were forced (by the chain of command) to rotate out of deployed duty after about ten years (usually becoming an instructor at this point given their wealth of experience).
I think it's also important to note that no one I've met in the army sees themselves as a 'good' person. I think this objectivity of the self helps keep people grounded for a while. A lot of people in the army don't 'hate' the enemy, they just see them as another individual with a job that's counter to theirs. We could easily drink with or break bread with the people we kill, it's all just a matter of circumstance and who lives is decided by the amount of training and luck the 'victor' has.
I think the military mindset is completely inappropriate for a police officer to have and would go so far as to say former military should only be SWAT or similar specialized officer team. I think, from my experience discussing these topics between military, police and firefighters that it should be a requirement for police officers to have a precinct councilour or psychiatrist in order to be able to have officers that engage in combat to keep themselves from dehumanizing people they don't know which would make it easier to take life but also make it easier to break mentally.
In regards to media presentation of the facts, I agree with you that they don't need to be like this, I think they should be taking an objective view entirely from both the officer and the potential criminals standpoint until a verdict has been reached by the courts. We don't live in judge dredd and humans are completely fallible so I think automatically assuming everyone that dies (especially given some precincts proclivity for covering up the crimes of officers) is a criminal is counterproductive to the general public' view on the matter as well as their ability to feel safe in their own country. While there is still violence these days, we are in one of the least violent times in human history and I think it's important that the news reflect that, if not in content then at least in context. For the police presenting reports to the media, for sure they take a more objective view from the officers standpoint, especially these days, where the blue mafia is almost as bad as the green mafia (I wouldn't say actual mafia more a reference to the influence of brass to have the officers or members essentially take a 'fraternity over all else' stance; although there is some organized problematic groups in both services). I feel that the media a lot of the time will jump to frame the individual the officer shot to be 'as bad as possible' in order to gain clicks, but this has become an issue as they keep presenting everyone that this happens to as 'the worst of the worst' without presenting any real nuance for what 'bad' or 'good' really is and people that take the news at face value seem to be parting ways with their education and accepting the world as a 'black' or 'white' world and not the 'grey' that it actually is.
You are correct in regards to the not intentionally desensitizing people aspect. Desensitization of the individual in service comes over time, regardless, and going out of your way to desensitize people in combat roles will inevitably end up with a German SS situation, where 'orders over humanity' reigns and improper conduct is swept under the rug because 'the enemy isn't human'. That's an oversimplification and a particularly over-the-top example but the only military I can think of that had anything resembling desensitization training was the SS in the 40's. The WMD bullshit about Iraq has permanently destroyed my trust of mainstream media. The fact journalists that were reporting on it got fired and blacklisted from the industry had me suspicious initially but when I did learn that all the lives we wasted in the end were literally over nothing more than the eurodollar market and oil company profits it marred my belief in the system. It further infuriated me that all investigations into the corporate landlord taking out a multi billion dollar insurance contract just before 9/11 just added more suspicion to anything I see now days, regardless of source. I only take peer reviewed research reports at face value these days and even then I wait until the report has been replicated at least three times by different and wholly unrelated parties before I trust it because even the academic industry has been tainted by constant fraud, willingly overlooked by various institutions in order to have their "prestigious" name on more popular papers.
Yes. Very much so. I would say most people that join, myself included, thought a good idea to serve the country was to join the army as an NCO, assuming the systems in place were not necessarily as problematic as some of the people in place. I learned some pretty rough lessons, as did hundreds if not thousands of others, and by a few years in we had all accepted that what we are doing is simply a job and if we don't do it someone else will. There is an underlying ethos of 'warrior culture' that kind of gets ingrained in everyone over time, but it's not necessarily one which everyone would admit to. I don't know if anyone seriously see's themselves as warriors, as much as paid killers, and I think this line of philosophy is what inevitably leads people to go to a higher paying position in a ~~mercenary~~ private security company. (A key chant we end up memorizing even before basic is complete "what makes the grass grow?" BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD) Most people I know that want a job with a guaranteed pension sign 25+ year contracts. However of the people I know in the military a vast majority of them do not renew their contracts. The first contract, depending on trade, is 3-5 years (unless you went for a specialist trade and had the government pay for your education then you're likely doing a minimum of ten years plus) the second contract depends on your performance but most people are offered the option between 12-25 year contracts with an increasing amount of days off per year (and significant pay boos) as you increase your rank.
On the note of acronyms I don't see it so much as fetishistic as much as necessary. The considerable amount of information you are required to learn, even as a simple combat arms trade, is easily on par if not surpassing what I did for my double major. For people that don't have a particularly sharp mind they need easy ways to remember the information and acronyms make things vastly easier for remembering various plans, ways of cleaning, rules for various situations, etc. Additionally, you can write all the acronyms down in your pad and just have those as your reference for what you need to do instead of listing out each word and using a ton of paper. Additionally if you get killed or captured and someone gets a hold of your notepad they'll have a hard time figuring out what all the acronyms are, especially since new ones are made every day, especially for plans of attack and various forms of engagement.
Specifically to note the UFO/UAP situation, they did that so that they wouldn't be associated with the mentally unwell within the UFO community
Interesting, you gave me a lot more than I was anticipating. I've had a couple friends in the military, and even in high school, it was pretty common for them to be watching liveleak videos and shit like that. I guess, yeah, it would make more sense as something that's kind of like, that's kind of something that people promulgate themselves, just sort of internally. People are a little bit fucked up, huh? I've also heard from them that it's pretty common that someone offs themselves in basic almost every time, or you get attempted suicides, I think one of them was talking about some guy that tried to snap his neck with something heavy thrown out of a window, might've been a forklift, or something to that effect, can't quite recall. I'd be interested to know whether or not that's an abnormal amount of suicide, or if that's just kind of the expected rates for what I would assume to be a heavily male subset in an environment where there's easy access to firearms and a bunch of other potential ways to kill yourself.
Also I gotta ask, and I'm sure I could find this out via google, but do they still use quicklime for body detail, or do they have some sort of other chemical disincorporation that they've moved to? Pretty grim stuff, in any case. I don't envy that, not a big fan of mindlessly digging a bunch of holes. Makes sense that most people wouldn't be prepared for it, I'd imagine the smell is also pretty bad, in combination with the sight of it. People don't really think about it much, but while you can close your eyes, or avoid trying to look directly at something, you can't really shut off your sense of smell in the same way.
I dunno, it's interesting because on one hand, the humor is used to inoculate you to traumatic shit, right, but on the other hand, it's also a kind of like, if only aesthetically, comedically, the humor presents a kind of functional ideology to people. It's going to propagate because of the environment, because it makes the job easier, and then the job is selecting for people who will naturally not be disgusted by the humor, who will find it funny, and, you know, the cycle feeds back into itself. Same shit as why rich people litter their house with self-help books, so they can get rid of their wealth guilt.
Also yeah, the whole like, it's just a job, is also kind of concerning. Basically everyone I know that got in, got in just for the free college alone, which, you know, also having healthcare and a steady job right out of high school is nice, if you can swing it. I've never really encountered anyone, outside of old people, that kind of view the military as being something that they have a kind of moral calling to. If they do, that's sort of a thing that comes as like an "also, I think it's a good thing", rather than their primary motivation. It's not necessarily a bad thing, right, I would expect it to be a job, but it's just kind of weird, mostly. It's like an extreme disillusionment. I dunno whether or not it's a good thing, to be able to morally recognize and then square away that, oh, this isn't a great thing, right, we can dispel the illusion that we're morally righteous and are fighting a "good war", but at the same time, it's just replaced with nihilism, and the effects end up working out to be the same. Such is our postmodern condition, I suppose.
Also, yeah the acronyms make sense, when you consider the amount of information, sort of a self-contained mnemonic. It's self-referential, isolated, standalone, compared to calling, like, a cigarette a "cowboy killer" or something, which might rely more on external information. It's a good point. I'm sure they have some sort of evidence based thing related to how they train it, but I do kind of wonder like, just a general thing, about the lingo, the jargon, of a bunch of different fields. Like how science uses latin all the time, or how engineering disciplines can call something a flange, programming calls shit bits and bytes, or folders and documents and desktops, since it's all digitized bureaucracy. It's fascinating because the things kind of evolve into whatever is functional for the field, but it's also entirely and completely arbitrary, and things end up carrying a lot of baggage.
So I dunno. We moved from a kind of, and this was true of broad culture at the time, I suppose (maybe, I might just be an dumb zoomer idiot though), but we moved from a kind of culture where things were named relatively arbitrarily, right, nicknamed, or just named after whoever the designer was. Oh, that's the jerry-can, oh, they have shell-shock, stuff like that. Now we have PFCs and PTSD. We went from picture boxes, to televisions, to TVs. I dunno, maybe that's just a result of a kind of rapid systematization of things, everything needs formal codes that you can write down and file. Maybe a side effect of digitization, more than post-war. Maybe as a result of having so much information to digest, right, for the troops, but also it might be having so much information to digest even for the people actively working with it. Oh, we need a clever new word for this new thingamabob! uhhh, uhh, I dunno, maybe we just give it a kind of protracted, proper name, and then we just shorten it to an acronym. Easier than trying to give it a "clever", natural name, that's maybe going to rely on external reference or information to get across. We can just say the full name once or twice, and then have a self-referential piece of information we can refer to now, very easily.
Edit: also about the UAPs, I find it really funny that they tried to distance themselves from it by changing acronyms, right, but then everyone still basically did the same shit they did with UFOs to it, and just treated it exactly like a UFO. Word substitution. Strikes me as a very funny, especially military kind of decision to make about it. I don't know why, but it does.
Also here's a video for levity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMhhMx-yDQU