Authority is what drives humans to make decisions, whether they agree with them or not. The article, “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience,” by Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton gives psychological insight in to the process which military personnel go through before committing war crimes sanctioned by an authority. People in war go through distinct processes: Authorization, Routinization, and Dehumanization before committing their crime under authority. Consequently, the article, “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, exemplifies the three steps into a single event, the torturing at the Abu Ghraib prison, and how military guards went through the processes because they were commanded to…show more content… Routinization is the action of fulfilling a command without thinking of what it means and committing it in an almost mechanical manner without thinking. In My Lai, the soldiers murdered villagers as if it were a battle field, carrying out the order without thinking of its repercussions. They did not fully understand the consequences in the massacre. They were just carrying out an order (Kelman 140). Their lack of conscience in the situation would land them in court for war crimes. In the Abu Ghraib prison, the guards were told they were softening the prisoners up so that they would talk when interrogated. This was said to entice the soldiers and go against what they morally believe is correct (Szegedy-Maszak 77). They would punish and humiliate their prisoners in cruel and odd ways, only because they didn’t realize the issues with what they were doing. This, inadvertently landed them in court as well on the same charges as the My Lai soldiers. In A Few Good Men, Dawson fulfilled the command from his officer without thinking of the consequences that could come with the code red. Dawson and Downey were told to carry out a code red and train the soldier to be more like a marine. They thought they were just carrying out an order and nothing could go wrong. Tying someone up and roughing them up is a common form of hazing, which most people carry out in a uniform manner. Dawson felt, originally, that he should not do any form of a code red…show more content… Dehumanization is characterized by depriving a human of basic human traits and seeing them as what bad they are. In order for the killings at My Lai to be sanctioned, the soldiers had to view the village people as non-human souls. In My Lai, the soldiers viewed every single villager as Viet Cong extremists, when in reality a vast majority of the villagers were noncombatants (Kelman 141). The soldiers viewed everyone as their enemy since only a few Viet Cong inhabited the village. This made it tough to judge who the real enemies were, creating dehumanization in the soldiers and seeing everyone as their enemy. In Szegedy-Maszak’s article on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, she draws focus on the aspect of how the soldiers tortured and treated the inmates with their own dehumanization. The soldiers would give derogatory nicknames to the type of people around them in Vietnam and in Iraq. The soldiers belittle the prisoners to make them look and feel small and proceed to cover their heads in hoods to disrupt any human connection they had with anyone (Szegedy-Maszak 77). Colonel Nathan R. Jessup in A Few Good Men started the dehumanization process on the marine. Jessup called him weak and a disgrace of a marine because of his lack of skills and dedication. The leading officers would always push the marine around and tell him how terrible he was. This started to influence Dawson and Downey in a way that they began to see him as a shame to
