Inventing atrocities and false confessions

James Robbins:

In January 1944, The New York Times Magazine published an essay by Arthur Koestler entitled “On Disbelieving Atrocities.” It conveyed his frustration at trying to communicate what he and others had seen taking place in Nazi-dominated Europe. The events that came to be known as the Holocaust were not unknown by this time, but they were not widely accepted as true. “I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same,” he wrote. “They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.”

Koestler blamed human psychology, an entrenched unwillingness to accept that something so heinous could be real. But he was also up against the legacy of the First World War. Three decades earlier, atrocity stories had been commonplace, and were generally believed. But postwar investigations found that the stories were either exaggerations or inventions, fanned by government propaganda offices to mobilize the population, and in the case of the British, to bring the United States into the conflict. The debunking of the notion of the “bloodthirsty Hun” supported the argument then prevalent that the U.S. had been tricked into the war, and reinforced isolationist sentiments. So when accounts of the depredations of the Nazi regime began to filter out of occupied Europe, the response was underwhelming. Even late in the war, while most people believed there was some truth behind the stories, few grasped the scope of the tragedy then underway. This all changed when the camps were liberated. Incredulity and dismissiveness were replaced with outrage and shame. It turned out that sometimes atrocities are real. Invented atrocities usually demonize the enemy. That makes sense – it is normal in war to think that the bad guys are capable of anything. We are fortunate in the war on terrorism in being faced with an enemy we don’t have to stigmatize. Al Qaeda’s principle war-fighting method involves killing noncombatants en masse, and they further make the case for us by videotaping their acts of torture and brutality and posting them on the web. You don’t need a master propagandist to spin evil out of beheading helpless hostages.

But what to make of the recent spate of Americans claiming that they themselves participated in atrocities? Sure, one can easily conceive of soldiers bragging about killings they didn’t actually commit, told to shock or inspire a type of admiration, that of the tough guy, the steely-eyed killer. But those tales are told in the context of warfare, of taking down the bad guys. What I mean are those who falsify their personal participation in what would be considered atrocities, people who contrive evil acts to blemish themselves and their comrades, their service, and their country. Not as false braggadocio but faux confession.

There has been a spate of these people in this war. Jesse MacBeth claimed to be an Army Ranger, admitted to having executed children while interrogating their parents, shot down rock-throwing protesters, and slaughtered hundreds of worshippers in a mosque. None of that was true. Former Marine Jimmy Massey says he either killed children and civilians personally, witnessed the killings, or heard about them, depending on which story he is telling at the moment. Korean War Veteran Edward Lee Daily came forward in the 1990s claiming to be present at the killings at No Gun Ri, as well as being a lieutenant, a POW, and wounded by shrapnel, all lies. These men are spiritual descendants of the troops interviewed in Mark Lane’s 1970 shocker Conversations with Americans, the book that spurred the “Winter Solider” investigations that brought John Kerry to prominence. It contained a number of confessions by Vietnam veterans who had participated in a variety of gruesome activities, vividly portrayed. The problem was, the confessions were false, and the book was a sham. But it ushered in this new kind of invented atrocity story, aimed not at the enemy but at the United States.

The latest entrant is Scott Thomas Beauchamp, whose war stories have been featured in the New Republic....

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He goes on to analyze why people would make such claims up. While he several good points I think the reason they do it is tied to a false sense if virtuousness on the left that makes any act in pursuit of their objective OK even if it is untrue. For the left the "fake but accurate" meme is in service of what they believe to be a "larger truth." For them the larger truth is that those who support war and who fight war are evil or made evil by the experience. For them anything done to stop the war is permissible, even if it means being a traitor to the truth.