Base Commander of CFB Trenton charged with murdering two women, raping two others

Interestingly, if you google "serial killer profession", the two professions that jump out (and for which some evidence is provided as to frequency) are the medial profession, and truck drivers.

The culture of the military, which dehumanizes the individual into unquestioned subservience, systemically cultivates and magnifies what already exists in the broader society. When military officials speak of looking after people within the organization, which they often do when questions of how individuals are treated internally surface, what they really mean is the priority of ensuring compliance and discipline among the ranks, and the importance of ensuring all policies affecting personnel are devised to ensure that the best interests of the system are paramount. It is an overwhelming patriarchal structure, one where an individual has no opinion that could be offered without asking permission first, where only thoughts that relay how wonderfully effective everything is are allowed to be voiced. A typically abusive personal relationship is but a microcosm of what exists on a much larger scale within such an institution. Some individuals naturally gravitate towards it as best representing their beliefs, and excel while doing so, others discover the reality afterward and either leave or continue to exist, while others attempt to subvert the harmful effects upon individuals.

Angella wrote:

Having been through basic training (twice - once in the ranks and once as an officer), I think it's even more subtle than that, Michelle.  That's why it's so hard to see when you're still in the middle of it.  Take a step back, and it jumps out at you (or at least it did for me).

Agree with this notation, but IMV, it also becomes more blatent once your in the middle of it, and desensitized.

ETA:  Good words Slumberjack.....

Maysie wrote:

well, remind, i need to be honest. This is a hot button topic for me, so my rhetoric may be a tad over the top. And I do NOT have faith in the police system. 

But I know that when charges like this are compiled against a white man who is, shall we say, in a significant position of authority, in a profession that is regarded as very high on the "good man doing good work" scale (mainstream standards of course), then it takes a lot to bring charges in the first place.

And yes, of course he's innocent until bla bla. But he's a white guy. He'll be fine. The police and the "justice" system do far worse to far more people who have done nothing or very little. With no media attention.

Great honesty maysie! ;)

Oh now I remember what I had been going to say before I got distracted.....

I love over-the-top rhetoric, in today's world of careful speech it soothes the soul.......

Hmm so did I. And the articles did point out a prevalence of medical professions "Some people with a pathological interest in the power of life and death tend to be attracted to medical professions."

(Wikipedia).

But they left out truck drivers.

PraetorianFour wrote:

Michelle wrote:

That could be.  Either way, the point stands, that the military is a breeding ground for violence against women.

I'm trying to decide if I agree with this or not.  There is a big "don't be such a girl" culture that's common enough.  I remember once tiltingmy head when I over heard a female coworker of mine telling a guy to stop crying like a girl.

Michelle do you think the military is more of a breeding ground for violence against woman than say rap music or video games like grand Theft Auto where you pay sex workers then either rob or kill them after?  There is a big distinction in the "group behavior" of different groups in the military from the grunts to officers and from combat soldiers and support soldiers.

It's interesting what Snert pointed out regarding Truckers and people in the medical profession.

Listening to rap music and/or playing video games only takes up a small percentage of our lives. Being in the military is a full time occupation "we are working hard to chip away all individuality and humanity". Big difference.

I think that the militaries Bomb Villages on the Other Side of the World video game is the  worst of all worlds.  The bad news is that the military understands that making their weapons systems similar to video games gives them a large pool of people to draw on who are already acclimatized to murdering on screen.  Sitting in Arizona and bombing a wedding party in Pakistan is just like playing Grand Theft Auto.  I wonder what new version they will be playing next week.  Many people are betting on Iran as the next edition but Yemen is clearly in the running.  

Stargazer wrote:

Listening to rap music and/or playing video games only takes up a small percentage of our lives.

I disagree Stargazer. Kids, teenagers and adults today can spend a lot of time on video games. It's common for kids to get home from school hop on the Xbox etc.. and stay on their until bed time. World of Warcraft, Everquest [So addictive it picked up the name crack-quest]. It may be a small part of your world but I'd say a lot of people "live eat and breath" video games. I also find some use stuff like rap music [or any kind of music] to identify who they are.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

I think that the militaries bomb Villages on the Other Side of the World video game is the worst of all worlds. The bad news is that the military understands that making their weapons systems similar to video games gives them a large pool of people to draw on who are already acclimatized to murdering on screen.  Sitting in Arizona and bombing a wedding party in Pakistan is just like playing Grand Theft Auto.  I wonder what new version they will be playing next week.  Many people are betting on Iran as the next edition but Yemen is clearly in the running.

I've read a book that went on to point out how some kids going on shooting rampages at schools [never touching a firearm before] have better accuracy than police officers and the author believed it was from first-person shooter games.

The video game I'm playing currently had a very disturbing scene. You're an undercover soldier who infultrates a Russian gang. You and the russian gang casually stroll through a russian airport graphically murdering unarmed men and women. You don't have to shoot anyone, you can pass the level without following a shot but I've read that all of the gamers during the testing of the game shot into the crowd. Both my wife and I found it disturbing. Called No russian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_surrounding_Call_of_Duty:_Mod...

Video games are getting scarry.

Quote:

They may not be taught how to do it, but they're taught to adopt the attitude that it's necessary and good to be done.  They all go through basic training, where they're taught that being a wimp or girly is bad.

When I was in basic training we had a female Master Corporal who'd gleefully ask us recruits, "What's the spirit of the bayonet?" to which we were supposed to holler, "To kill!"

I felt like saying, "I dunno, I'm still working on the spirit of the ironing board," but I didn't bother.  I received enough heat for constantly being an individual as it was.

In general, the women were way more gung ho than the males, especially among the instructors.

Quote:

I think that's often the case in a lot of situations where you have a group of men who are prepared to all give each other permission to behave badly - it doesn't just happen in the military.

I guess what is special about the military is the special training in extreme violence coupled with a methodical desensitization to violence.

My dad was in the military until he was injured in maneuvers in the UK during WWII, then he became a military archivist and author. Eventually he returned to Canada, and in the 1950s raised a family, and my mother also took a full time job as a statistican for the Dominion Bureau of Statistics. Dad's close friends, all military men, would try to get away with all kinds of shitty comments in the early days, until me mudder made it clear they had to behave themselves or get the hell out of her house. They got the message.   (Jack Granatstein was a close personal friend of my dad's, worked together on a few books, along with Courtney C. J. Bond, another Ottawa author. Some Ottawa bigwigs also filled our living room, and they were well-behaved or they didn't get served drinks). None of that military macho crap was tolerated at our place.

I don't think it is just the military either. I get the impression the feminist gains that have been made are in jeopardy over the place. Overall I don't think that much progress has been made since the seventies.

My memories of my father and his squadron mates correspond to those of Boom Boom and Tommy Paine. While they weren't cutting-edge social theorists, they were respectful and even a little awkward around women. Perhaps the difference was that as veterans of WWII, they were part of a mass enlistment, rather than the cherry-picked volunteer army we have today. In those days the armed forces were perhaps more reflective of general social trends, where today many recruits will be at the edges of those trends.

If you want armed forces that truly reflect society's values, some form of draft may be necessary. Of course, professional soldiers hate the draft and all the rebelliousness, indiscipline and fragging that creates.

Yes, there is an egalitarian democratic quality to a draft.

Guys, just a reminder that this is in the feminism forum and about a very decorated military guy that did some heinous shit and the last female post was about coverups of rape in the military.  Perhaps, one of you could open a thread somewhere else.  Just sayin'.

RevolutionPlease wrote:

Guys, just a reminder that this is in the feminism forum and about a very decorated military guy that did some heinous shit and the last female post was about coverups of rape in the military.  Perhaps, one of you could open a thread somewhere else.  Just sayin'.

Well, there has been a quite extensive discussion of military culture in very general terms, so it seems fair to me for a few of us who are old enough to have known a structurally different one to make that point.

Both my parents and most of my aunts and uncles served in WWII. Some of the most interesting independent women I've ever known, a few of them still alive in their nineties, joined the RCAF in 1939, tasted independence during their years stationed in the UK, came home to take up offers of university education, and became trail-blazers for other women in a variety of careers.Just about everyone I've described in this paragraph was originally a farm kid who'd come of age during the Depression and known pretty tough times before the war.

The wider culture was different in many ways, as others have said, although the war years definitely helped to disrupt class and gender and race barriers in some progressive ways for some people. I knew these people. I suppose many of them (not all) were trained to kill, were at least willing to kill or willing to approve the killing. But once they were home, they just didn't fit the cultural profile that I've seen described above, and I wonder how true that is even now, with a very different kind of armed forces.

If anything, our armed forces might have regressed in class terms, the gap between an elite officer corps and working-class kids who join up for an education and a living much greater than it was in wartime. Williams certainly sounds like a guy with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, and then beyond that he could just be psychopathic. Analysing him and analysing, say, a Clayton Matchee seem to me to require two quite different kinds of analysis.

My uncle, who barely if ever talked (if you got 10 words out of him in a row, you should have gotten a medal) came back from Dunkirk as a dispatch rider. He came home and my mother and her parents and siblings sat around him as he would not stop talking, even when eating or drinking he kept babbling about what he saw (Ive heard it, it was not nice). There came a knock on the door and there were 2 MPs there, telling them they were there to take my uncle to a rest camp in Scotland. They said all the dispatch riders were going and he was there for 3 months before returning to the war (with the Desert Rats in Africa)

My mother joined the RAF and was a extremely independant woman who took no shit from anyone. Woe betid any man from the legion that made a demeaning remark. He never did so again. She had a better war record than did my father

kropotkin1951 wrote:

PTSD affected many returning WWII vets but its nice that some posters families missed that experience. My favourite Uncle drank himself to death after serving in italy on the front lines for months. He was not alone.  My grandfather came back from the Great War with PTSD or shellshocked and died within a decade.  None of the women from his generation will even mention his name so there is a cloud over what he actually did to them when he returned.

My parents didn't talk about those broken colleagues and my Mom like others refused to have a bunch of drunk SOB's in her house either but nobody thought to give them mental health services to overcome the deep psychological wounds fighting a war caused in many.

That was very moving to read, kropotkin. One of my uncles died in WWI, smothered in the mud at Passchendaele. I've always thought that was why my father joined up instantly in 1939, although by then he was old enough that he could have ducked that.

It's worth remembering that many many of the returning WWI vets had been politically radicalized. They had seen real hell, and yet they came back to a Canada that hadn't reformed much at all. The Winnipeg General Strike was probably the most dramatic expression of that anger, the On-to-Ottawa Trek as well, but the anger seethed away, maybe not so much here as in, eg, Germany, but it was class anger.

PraetorianFour wrote:

Jingles wrote:

I hear tell the Taliban had a rather swift way of dealing with people like the Colonel.

Considering the Taliban's views on woman as humans they would swiftly promote the Colonel to General.

Which faction of the Taliban do you mean and from what region of the area?

Are you talking about individual Taliban fighters or do you have access to the philosophical and religious believes that are considered dogma by the Taliban leadership?  This is the propaganda that justifies our troops occupation of this foreign country and it feeds the culture of violence.

The idea that anyone including someone fighting in the Taliban would be agreement with what this serial rapist and murderer did is disgusting.

Most resistance movements have had very strict rules of engagement that if breached resulted in immediate execution by your former comrades in arms so he would be likely be dealt with swiftly.

Good catch remind.

Meh, should be cool to disacknowledge acronyms like that.