The Ideology of American Prisoners of War

June 16th, 2008 Posted in Ideology

A classical interaction setting of guards and prisoners. The formal rules and the place (barracks, walls, wire fence, moat and so on) are imposed by the prison administration. The sequence of action unfolds upon this base. If everyone accepts the frame the system operates placidly.

Not likely, a number of POW books and movies assure us. The on-going war continues and the prisoners drag their feet and challenge and discomfit the guards-enemy as much as they can and dare. Most audaciously, the prisoners try to escape and return to active duty. All this is serious business. Violent injury and death are in the offering for guards and prisoners both. Only the most active are up to it. Most do their time and try to come out alive and as psychologically whole as possible.

An international treaty adhered to by most nation-states sets an overarching convention governing behavior in war. The treatment of POWs is part of this legal code. The person has dropped or surrendered his weapon. He is no longer an offensive threat. He is defenseless and though he may be retained in custody he is to be treated in a humane and civilized fashion. It is a peculiar protected status in a world at war. Locked in a prison camp one is safe but escaped one again becomes fair game. The code does not permit torture. The code does not permit the unwilling giving of any but the most simple identity information by prisoner to guard.

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Terrorist organizations and bands, revolutionary armies, kinship and religious militias, criminal groups, rogue states do not recognize nor abide by the war convention norms.

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The long-running Cold War had hot interludes. The Vietnamese War is currently part of the U.S. presidential campaign because one of the candidates was on active military duty there and was captured and spent a number of years as POW under trying circumstances. It is part of his biographical narrative.

The North Vietnamese regime at the time broke the War convention on prisoners of war in at least two ways. (1) It illegally tortured American prisoners. (2) It attempted to indoctrinate prisoners or convince them to broadcast propaganda to a world audience. These two actions are related. Each man was tortured until he gave in and made the false confession.

Under these conditions the informal organization of the prisoner group was an important element in the resistance of its members. They offered emotional and practical support to each other though their means of communication were extremely limited, and they set their own counter-norms of correct behavior.

The jailers used rewards like better food, improved living conditions, hope for early release home in a classic carrot and stick system of conversion. To the minor extent they were successful they split the American group but also strengthened it by offering the example of shame in giving in. The response of the Americans in rejecting, hating, disdaining the non-conforming other in their midst paradoxically reinforced the rule itself by example. You can test the emotional strength of a rule by your response when you witness its breaking.

At the time the now senator felt that the few non-conformists had somehow slipped out from under the American ideology, that they did not have the basic belief of conventional religion and patriotism that could carry them through the cruel prisoner treatment they encountered.

But looking back he was proposing a very narrow elite ideology (as did General Eisenhower in World War II) which in its statement excluded a large portion of the American experience. The American ideology, the American personality needed a much larger tent even then and certainly today. Seeing this clearly and realizing this as a society sets the more inclusive unity and solidarity in which we all participate. It has been there all along though sometimes the man blowing the horn calling it out has been off key.