So...it's been a busy couple of weeks. Here in the US, there have been protests over police shootings of unarmed black men, and then...the torture report. Weirdly, I have also just finished reading The Heart of Everything That Is, a biography of the great Sioux chief Red Cloud. All this stuff is combining in disturbing ways, and at the center of my thinking is: who are we that study how to wield weapons?
To go somewhat chronologically, let's start with the book. In the course of telling the story, the authors lay out, in graphic detail, the brutality of Sioux warriors. In the Sioux worldview, a man (or woman) who was not physically intact in death would be similarly maimed in the next world. Sioux warriors rarely left a dead enemy intact, whether members of rival Native American bands or later, white soldiers and settlers (men, women and children). The authors note, while citing grisly catalogs of atrocities (some committed while their victims were still alive) that the Sioux were no different from other warrior bands. Not surprisingly, US soldiers, towards the end of the war against the Sioux, while not sharing this worldview, inflicted similar atrocities in kind. Torturing and maiming enemies was a commonplace thing among the Sioux and other warrior groups, even the warriors of the US government.
Tellingly, the Sioux looked upon agricultural bands of Native Americans as being weak. They had a point of course, seeing as how the peaceful bands were herded off, and killed off, as America expanded west. At least the Sioux fought back, even though the end result was the same.
Next, the grand jury refused to indict the officer in the killing of Eric Garner, after a similarly convened panel did the same in the case of Michael Brown. The blowback I was seeing on FB by some of my more righty "Friends" was that if a cop felt the need to take you down, it must be because YOU MUST BE DOING SOMETHING WRONG. I know, from some of my actual friends' experiences that you can be stopped, and held, by the police in this town for walking down the street on a Friday night, or sitting on a park bench in the middle of the day. Or for joining a legal (as in permits and everything) protest march. (That last one was me - punched in the chest by a cop who wanted to prevent me from joining an antiwar rally years ago. I give her credit for some restraint - it was enough of a punch to convince me she meant business but not enough to knock me down. On the other hand, if I had been a less-sturdy person, I would have been on the pavement, and she had no way of knowing which sort of person I was.)
The news of the torture report provoked a similar reaction from my righty FB Friends: they were terrorists, right? So they got what they deserved, right? Anything to "keep us safe," right? Except that some of those detainees were no more guilty than some of my friends, or me; i.e., they were in the wrong place while being the wrong shade, or simply going about their business. And, as has been shown time and time again, torture does not result in good intelligence. Torture is just torture. At least the Sioux had a cosmological reason for what they did. As much as I have kept some righty FB Friends because I think it's a good idea to see other points of view, I "unfriended" one (so far) for the perfect ignorance of his reaction ("torture is too good for the enemies of the US" - type thinking), and more could follow.
And, because of my experience in budo, I know a lot of people involved in, or retired from, law enforcement or the military. Not all of them are righties, though some of them are; and that has gotten me thinking: all of us who do traditional budo on some level are buying into some aspect of what it means to be a warrior of some sort. But what does that mean?
For some people, the codes of Chivalry or Bushido figure large. Those ideals (laid out here in a previous post) are not entirely similar, but did share certain ethics, such as caring respect for the weak; but we know that the ideals were just that. There are just as many stories of unchecked power and the harm it caused by marauding knights and samurai as there are stories of dignity and compassion.
And no matter how much philosophical veneer we put on our practice, we are all of us learning techniques that can maim or kill people. Last night, during the Daito practice, the students were practicing what in fencing we would have referred to as a "stop hit." The attacker throws a punch (with or without a knife) and the defender evades it. The defender then responds with a punch to the attacker's upper chest. Towards the end of the practice, the teacher pointed out that the target they were practicing was not the actual target. The real technique was to punch, and crush, the attacker's windpipe and kill him. While the timing was difficult, the technique itself was fairly simple. This technique was defensive (after all, the attacker was attacking), but I suspect that somewhere in that practice there are techniques for taking down someone when there are orders to do so. I know, in my practice, there certainly are.
My teacher used to say that swordsmanship was the study of philosophy. I suppose it is worthwhile to remember that philosophy is not a bunch of proverbs (or worse, Facebook aphorisms), but a series of questions and arguments. And no real answers.
The book:
The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend
by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin
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