No Guilt, No Shame: Discerning Signs of Post-Conflict Moral Injury in Atmospheres of Political Impunity

Abstract

Social scientists in the United States have published extensively on the concept of moral injury among soldiers in the past decade. Contemporary research gestures principally to expressions of guilt or shame as the primary mechanisms by which one can discern moral injury in a soldier. Guilt and shame are understood to be the emotional responses to the a soldier's realization that they have taken life (or witnessed the taking of life) especially in an atrocity; such feelings tend to be amplified in the face of hostility to recent military missions (and, implicitly, military actors) on the part of the American populace. Scholars of moral injury point to the U.S. war in Vietnam, and to some extent those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as conflicts which left veterans with a sense of "all-encompassing absurdity and moral inversion." What happens to our understanding of how to recognize moral injury, this article asks, if we expand our investigation of moral injury beyond the framework of an increasingly anti-war United States populace, and consider wars that are civil in nature as opposed to waged on foreign grounds? Focusing on non-US geopolitical sites where cultures of impunity have taken root post-conflict, this article finds that guilt and shame suddenly become considerably less productive tools by which to identify the moral cost of war to combatants. Recuperating an original formulation of moral injury suggested by Robert Jay Lifton in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and interpreting it alongside a close-reading of documentary cinema featuring perpetrators of atrocities in Indonesia, Cambodia and Lebanon, this article proposes that we broaden our criteria for perceiving moral injury beyond the filters of guilt and shame if we hope to arrive at a more universal understanding of the phenomenon.

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“…Mounting evidence suggests that moral injury may serve as an underlying mechanism for the relationship between post-traumatic stress and suicidal outcomes. Citing Lifton (1973), Ragin (2020) noted that "Scholars of moral injury point to the U.S. war in Vietnam, and to some extent those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as conflicts which left veterans with a sense of 'all-encompassing absurdity and moral inversion'" (p. 146).…”