Monday, September 12, 2005
(11:08 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
A Good Point
Alphonse van Worden makes a good point:Given the disproprotionate non-whiteness of the US military, it cannot be an accident that every one of the soliders involved in the sadistic torture and murder at Abu Ghraib was white.When I was substitute teaching, I was always more worried about my truck when I was parked at the nearly all-white Bradley-Bourbonnais Community High School than when I was parked at the predominantly minority Kankakee High School. I had the feeling that minority students would primarily have economic motives for breaking into a vehicle, and that they probably wouldn't bother with my tiny CD wallet and factory stereo. With white kids, though, they'll just vandalize your car because they're bored nihilists -- a cheap thrill, something to brag about on their Xanga. (At BBCHS, "that kind of kid" asked me, more than once, what kind of car I drove, where it was parked, etc.)
Did the commanders know something? What did they depend on? Did they learn something from the refusal of all but the white soldiers to participate in the massacre at Mai Lai?
Why did this racial homogeneity of torture-murderers generate no public discussion?
