The Snipers are the Lucky Ones

In his most recent hauntingly gorgeous article, journalist Chris Hedges describes the kind of trauma that afflicts the perpetrators of violence as they bury, deny, rationalize, and eventually face the truth of what they have done.

He describes in graphic detail the experience of a sniper blowing someone's head off—in this case, tan Israeli sniper murdering the peace worker Ayşenur Eygi. The sniper is the last person to see her alive and the first to see her dead, in intimate close-up detail through the rifle’s high- powered scope. That is the image that feeds his guilt, that seeps into his nightmares, try as he might to outrun it with rationalization or escape it into addiction.

Here is a picture of Ayşenur Eygi when she was alive.

What happens to the individual perpetrators of violence happens also to peoples and nations. The same maladies—mental illness, addiction, anxiety, despair, suicide, domestic abuse—overtake them. But on the level of a nation, those who suffer these conditions are not necessarily the ones who perpetrate the violence. Instead the consequences permeate the entire body politic.

The source of the suffering is not easily visible. Imagine if the sniper never had to see the face of the human being he was to kill. Imagine he merely fed a data file into an AI assassination drone. Imagine it wasn't even one person who did that, but the act was diffused through a whole chain of command. Maybe hundreds of anonymous people wrote the targeting software. Maybe that software was originally built for some other purpose. Those who build the killing machine may not know it is a killing machine.

The modern imperial state is a killing machine. It is not only a killing machine. Civilization, in all of its expressions, is many things, some exquisitely beautiful. But it is also a killing machine.

Few of its participants have the visceral experience of pulling a trigger and watching a living human head explode into pink mist. There will be no face to haunt their nightmares (our nightmares) or to convert their (our… my) anxiety into nightmares in the first place.

In a way, the snipers are the lucky ones. The conscience has a throughline to recognize the source of its anguish. But those who are mere citizens, workers, servants of a killing nation know not what they do.

I am not trying here to establish their guilt—my guilt—for the murder done in their name. Nor am I trying to absolve them—me—of guilt. I am merely illuminating a consequence: a nation that wages war, that builds weapons to arm killers, who tortures prisoners and grinds villages to dust, will experience among its population high levels of the same conditions that afflict the retired sniper. No amount of social spending, drug interdiction, public education, or surveillance can stop it.

For such a nation, the healing path, the path of redemption, is much the same as it is for the sniper. Hedges describes it like this:

But that will mean a life of contrition. It will mean making your crime public. It will mean begging, on your knees, for forgiveness. It will mean forgiving yourself. This is very hard. It will mean orientating every aspect of your life to nurturing life rather than extinguishing it. This will be your only hope for salvation. If you do not take it, you are damned.

What does this mean on the level of a nation? The nation must face the truth of what it has done. It must discard its justifications, rationalizations, and false histories. It must gaze with grief and horror at its works, and resolve to be as strong an agent of peace and healing as it had been of war and destruction. That last step follows inevitably from the first. That is the key—honesty. A nation must be honest with itself about its history and its present.

What of the part about begging for forgiveness? It doesn’t mean assuming personal guilt for the crimes of one’s ancestors, or apologizing to the descendants of their victims. Most of us have never pulled the trigger of a sniper rifle or tied a noose around a person’s neck. A vast, impersonal, totalizing system mediates our participation in the killing. Maybe you deposit your paycheck at a bank that uses that money to fulfill its capital requirements so that it can expand its loan portfolio, which then gets securitized and sold to an instititutional investor, which uses the profit to invest in a fund that capitalizes a logistics firm that coordinates weapons manufacturing supply chains… and so on for another fifty steps that end with a child whimpering next to her dead parents in the rubble of their apartment.

My friends, we are deeply enmeshed in the machinery of murder. It is also the machinery of degradation and ecocide and the liquidation of culture and health and the human spirit. Few of us can attach our discomfort to a single act. How then are we to follow Chris Hedges’ formula for salvation?

The key is to understand that personal culpability is irrelevant. When I look at the picture of Ayşenur Eygi I feel very, very sorry. That feeling doesn’t depend on my complicity in the crime, nor would my non-complicity assuage it. It doesn’t matter if her death is my fault, or whether I am in the wrong or in the right. How petty such arguments are in the face of the extinguishing of her precious life. I feel sorry regardless, because I know that the sniper who shot her was human, and I am human. Therefore, that sniper could have been me, had I been born into his family, his nation, his circumstances.

Therefore, each one of us it fit to apologize for any act.

An apology that comes fully from this knowledge, felt in the moment, is a plea for forgiveness. These days, apology has degenerated into an act of submissiveness. “Say you’re sorry!” says the parent. “I’m sorry,” mumbles the child, who through this mini-ritual of abasement is now off the hook for whatever trouble he has caused.

Just as true apology is not submissiveness, forgiveness is not an act of indulgence. It is an act of humility. It recognizes: the perpetrator could have been me. Self-forgiveness is the same, inverted: the perpetrator could have been anyone. That is why self-forgiveness induces forgiveness of others.

Forgiveness is not denial of what happened. It is not forgetting and it doesn’t get anyone “off the hook.” What is the real plea behind begging for forgiveness? It is, “Please see me. Please see that the crime is not my deepest nature. Please know me as someone who has turned from extinguishing life to nurturing it. I need you to see that in me, so that it may be true.” When you forgive someone, you no longer hate them. The image of your hatred dissolves and you see the human being beneath it, the person who could be. Most of us need help to uncover the true human being within ourselves. That is what we seek when we beg forgiveness.

The acts of contrition and redress and making amends that follow forgiveness demonstrate the truth that forgiveness sees.

I’m not sure exactly what it looks like for a nation to seek forgiveness. I’m not sure it is necessary, and it certainly is not sufficient, for its leader to sink to his knees. But the precursor to seeking forgiveness must be exactly what Chris Hedges prescribes: “making your crime public.” In other words, it requires disclosure, the release of all the nation’s shameful secrets into official reality. Then the nation can apologize to the world—and on behalf of the world, for this is what human beings have done. Then the nation can come alive again. And as the obscuring veils of lies and secrets fall, the beauty and goodness and greatness of the nation comes into its long-awaited fulfillment.