I grew up in a time when it was acceptable to use physical violence against children at school. In Scotland at the time teachers, predominately male, used a thick piece of leather known as the tawse, and amongst school pupils as the strap. This was inflicted on children who had to stretch out their hands, crossed over each other, so that a teacher could use the tawse as a kind of whip. If you were unlucky the teacher’s aim would sometimes result in your wrist being the target rather than the palm of your hand.
Years later after leaving school, during my time in the British army, I was posted to a camp in Germany that had previously been an officers’ training school for the Waffen-SS and was now used by the US 10th Special Forces Group. They wore the green beret that was immortalised by John Wayne in the movie of the same name. At the time the Vietnam War was in progress and I can remember some of the US soldiers sharing with me gruesome pictures of atrocities that had taken place in Vietnam.
After leaving the army, I returned to Scotland where for a short time I worked with my cousin who had a haulage business which was involved in the transportation of sheep and cattle. I remember delivering truckloads of animals to abattoirs for slaughter and being shocked at the way the slaughter men deliberately inflicted injuries for fun on the animals prior to them being killed.
In the early nineties I moved to the Middle East where I was exposed to the way that different nationalities were treated by employers. I remember seeing my company HR policies for the first time with all the jobs in the company separated out by nationality with different levels of pay according to an individual’s nationality. At the lowest level were the Nepalese.
One day, a bus load of Nepalese employees who had issues about being housed almost two hours away from their place of work refused to get off the bus to start their 12-hour shift. They had repeatedly failed to get a hearing to share their issues with management and resorted to this protest to get their grievances across. For several hours they were confined on the bus in the sweltering heat with no AC whilst management extracted information about who was behind the protest. Once identified these individuals were summarily dealt with and shipped back to Nepal without their end of service benefits.
More recently, I again have been involved with the US military and received stories about first hand experiences of what took place in Iraq and Afghanistan. For example, troops from the US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, deployed to Afghanistan in 2007, on their first mission shot at basically anything that moved and were responsible for calling in air strikes believed to have killed close to 200 civilians in multiple incidents. An article in the Marine Corps Times described the MarSOC troops as “cowboys” who brought shame on the corps.
It seems that after more than 50 years man’s inhumanity continues to be part of our DNA.
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