The topic of obedience to authority has come under recent debate after a disgraceful scandal at the American prison, Abu Ghraib. Many people have looked back at two experiments that were performed in the mid-twentieth century, while others are pointing their fingers towards a different possibility—the evil and immoral grounds of US Military Training. The debate over the morality of the human species can be answered in very simple terms; it is not human nature to harbor evil thoughts, but any human is capable, and will be willing to commit unspeakable atrocities against mankind when in the interest of personal gain.
History has taught society a very significant amount about obedience. Society has seen many wars; it has seen many dictators, tyrants, and terrorists; it has seen many inhumane acts of slavery, murder, and discrimination; it has seen all conceivable evil of mankind, and yet much of the population still believes the fault for this lies only on the person in charge.
No one can justifiably deny the claim that there are evil individuals in the world, but there aren’t enough, by any means, to cause the destruction mankind has seen for millennia. In a June, 2004 article by John Spritzler, entitled Abu Ghraib: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is NOT us, the author places 100% of the blame on the high-ranking officials of the US Military and government, while strongly protesting the innocence of the individuals who have carried out the act. Towards the beginning of his argument, Spritzler walks the reader through a thought experiment in which writes the long, fallacious argument quoted as following:
Imagine that Lynndie England and the other MPs at Abu Ghraib (apparently mainly working class people from places like West Virginia) had first been sent to a very different kind of boot camp from the one they actually went to. Imagine they spent 6 weeks hearing credible authority figures explain the absolute truth about the aims and past deeds of U.S. foreign policy, with all the gory details about overthrowing elected governments and subjugating and killing innocent people to keep rich people in power. And then imagine that they were told the unvarnished truth about their mission in Iraq. Their job would be to subjugate the people of Iraq so that rich people in America could control them and Iraq's resources. One of their duties would be to humiliate and terrify innocent Iraqis for this purpose, in a prison once used by Saddam Hussein for the same purpose. The information they would help extract from the prisoners would be used to subjugate the Iraqi people for the benefit of the same rich Americans who also subjugate ordinary Americans in places like the coal mines of West Virginia. (Democracy).
What the author may have overlooked while writing that passage is the fact that the theoretical boot camp he described—the one teaching soldiers of unfounded government conspiracy and the subjugation of innocent people everywhere (emphasis on subjugate, it seemed to be an important verb in the author’s passage)—was the fact that he disproved his very own claim. Had the author argued that the military did disclose the “unvarnished truth about their mission in Iraq,” he would have supported his claim that they were strictly following orders. This could counter the comment Spritzler cited by President George W. Bush as saying that the military has a “few bad apples,” and in turn make President Bush the “bad apple.” His argument, however, is stating that individuals have no moral judgment of their own; they simply trust the morality of their superiors.
Spritzler may be correct in the assertion that the orders for inhumane and disgusting treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib came from a higher chain of command than publicized, but that argument provides no better judgment of mankind—it would simply create a political hostility towards President Bush. Even if the subordinates were ordered to carry out the disgusting actions that recently became public, there is no proof to show they had any moral superiority over the men and women above them that told them to do it. The phrase “actions speak louder than words” can be seen as a perfect judge of character in this case. Spritzler asks the question “How could soldiers like Pfc. Lynndie England and her fellow MPs, all defended by friends, neighbors and family members back home as good and decent individuals, have done such things, even under orders?” (Democracy). The simple answer for that question is that it doesn’t matter what people at home said or what orders were given. The only thing that matters is the fact that the individuals committed the unspeakable acts that they were accused of.
The best summation of the human species can be seen in The Genocidal Killer in the Mirror by Crispin Sartwell when he says “We—and by this I mean you and I—are deeply evil. I would like to believe that I am too good, too smart, too decent to hop on the genocide bandwagon. But I know better. It’s obvious, and it’s a familiar point, that average Germans, average Hutus, average Americans have been mobilized for genocide.” Sartwell addresses the thoughts that everyone has—the thought that we are better than those that history teaches us to be absolute evil. The truth is, we are all deeply evil, the question is just “how deep?” For some, it takes a life-threatening situation to get them to harm another individual, while for others, a mere command is enough to do the trick.
Though the two authors are trying to convey arguments that are polar opposites, the two articles are essentially correlated in the sense that The Genocidal Killer along with common historical knowledge can completely disprove the arguments in Abu Ghraib: We Have Met the Enemy and He is NOT Us. As Sartwell said in his article “, Hitler didn’t kill 6 million Jews, or King Leopold 10 million Africans.” The same can be held true for President Bush. The point is not that Hitler, Leopold, or even Bush possibly is innocent—rather they are not the only guilty party.