The Ghost Of Abu Ghraib Analysis

War changes its participants forever, no matter their role they have, a damage has and will be done. All the participants of a war are to blame for the aftermath. Although the experiences of a character from a fictional novel such as Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and a real-life American soldier giving a testimony in Rory Kennedy’s “The ghosts of Abu Ghraib” documentary, seem incomparable, they are not. When side by side their similarities become more evident, as they both share similar themes. The personality of an individual depends on the society that has educated him/her. When the factors that define society disappear, the outcome of this can often be predicted. As seen in both the characters of the novel Lord of the Flies and

While being there soldiers faced the same changes in personality as the characters in the book, they unconsciously began to act upon their most animalistic and savage instincts. There was also a lack of defined rules for the soldiers actions towards the detainees, which lead them to enforce excessive violence. A couple of the soldiers that served at Abu Ghraib and gave their opinions at the documentary had a mutual opinion about their actions, and the way they made them feel. These soldiers stated that when they were given orders, they would follow them without hesitation, and if the orders were unclear they would figure out a way to have them make sense; they felt as if something inside them had been turned off, because they would act as robots. Well, what had been 'turned off ' in a sense was the capacity to feel empathy for the detainees, and instead of seeing the Iraqi people as what they were, people, they instead would view them as the enemy. Many thousands of Iraqis were tortured and many of them also died, on the hands of American soldiers. Soldiers that when taken away from society 's view and unwritten rules, and exposed to crude violence against other humans decided to unconsciously alter their personalities and adapt to their environment rather than change the erroneous behaviors that were being