With the current condemnation of the incontinent U.S. soldiers and the dead Taliban I was wondering: when did it become unacceptable to mistreat the body of your enemy? Achilles dragged Hector’s body around Troy, but I don’t know if that was considered bad form or not.
Achilles was a douche. I don’t know if there is a concrete answer or a year you can point at. The simple answer would be for as long as humans were human enough to have burial rituals. Which is also as long as other humans were doing it to piss of the other side
I figure it’s bad if you did something to an enemy body you wouldn’t want them to do to your body. Sometimes that’s the point, though, I guess.
War has been around since forever, and it’s a nasty business. My guess would be the treatment of bodies started to change around the time people started taking photographs of them.
And using Achilles and Hector is a particularly bad example. IIRC Hector begged Achilles to treat his body with respect after he killed him and Achilles refused. It was very clear that Achilles was doing something that was against taboos at the time.
It’s a very good example. I just wasn’t sure what it was a good example of. (long history of condemnation of corpse desecration vs. short)
Yea, Achilles treatment of Hector’s corpse was meant to be seen as indicating he was nuts with grief. Even the Gods ask him to knock it off. So that takes you back to something like 800 B.C.
I wouldn’t be suprised if there are earlier references to the same taboo, but none springs to mind.
As recently as two centuries ago, we were still gibbetting or quartering executed criminals (which I suppose are a kind of enemy) - especially those convicted of heinous crimes - and I would argue that a similar mentality is at play whether it’s this, or enemy corpses in war.
“Treating the body of a fallen enemy with respect” can mean different things in different cultures - for headhunters, cutting the head of and treating it to display as trophy would be respect; dito for those few Native American tribes who collected scalps or the earlier men who ate the hearts of brave enemies (human or bears) to ingest their courage.
Leaving the body of an enemy lying around without taking a trophy in those cultures would indicate that he was not worthy to be consumed, a puny weakling.
Also, burial customs vary - in the Kundun movie, you see where they bury a body by cutting it up and feeding it the birds (so nothing is wasted). Some Native American cultures put the bodies on high wooden stilts for wind, weather and birds, because rotting in the earth would be terrible. Other cultures would feel that burial by fire is terrible, but Indians for example practise it.
Another part from Greek myth that condems it even more is the story of Antigone - Creon forbidding the burial of an enemy declared traitor is considered against not only human laws, but against the laws of the Gods themselves. It’s just that everybody else is afraid to do what’s right. When Antigone goes out, the Gods help her by calling up a sandstorm both to hide her from sight of the guards, and to fill her watering can so she can sprinkle earth onto the body, fulfilling the minimum requirement.
Allegedly Val the Impaler didn’t have a problem with it.
The answer of course varies from place to place. 150 years ago the NZ Maori were taking great delight decapitating the son of an enemy chief, cooking the corpse and then forcing the father to serve the corpse to the enemy generals at a feast* while wearing his son’s severed head as a necklace*. That sort of utter disrespect for the bodies of the enemy’s family was seen as a sign of high status, and not only wasn’t condemned but praised. The more disgusting things a soldier could do to the corpse in front of the family the more *mana *he accrued.
It is probable that similar things were happening in other Polynesian societies up into the twentieth century. When we look at some of the Melanesian societies in New Guinea, desecration of corpses as part of payback is continuing to this very day.
So for the answer to when the practice of desecrating corpses became taboo: 100 years ago at the very earliest, but in reality it isn’t taboo right now for at least some groups.
I doubt that was more than coincidental. For millennia generals and kings went to great lengths to have themselves portrayed sitting upon piles of the corpses of their enemies, to parade captured enemies through the streets prior to their execution and so forth. If photography had existed 2, 000 years ago they would have been paying to have themselves photographed sitting on top of the corpses of enemy soldiers.
I’d say attitude were very different. Treating the body of a fallen enemy (at least a high status prisoner) as a “common criminal” would definitely have been frowned upon.
But in this as most things there has always been a great deal of double standards and hypocrisy down the years.
US Marines were commonly taking Japanese skulls in WWII. It was socially aceptable as evidenced in THIS photo from LIFE magazine. Several were mailed to the White House but they were refused.
This thread reminded me of Indian scalping. It was another thing that some Native Americans did that white folk added to their long list of grievances.
Up until the recent century bodies were stripped on the battlefield. I think there’s a famous painting of dead Napoleonic troops stripped and nude on the battlefield. Everything got reused uniforms, boots, hats etc. IIRC it was a painting or perhaps a poem? My memory is foggy.
If you’ve read Band of Brothers there’s one character that was known to have massacred some Germans right after D Day invasion. Major Winters wouldn’t let him escort German prisoners to the rear because of what might happen. It was better to let someone else escort prisoners.
War is bloody and dirty. Emotions run high. Your best friends die around you and suddenly the killing gets very personal. People do things they’d never normally do.
They need to find a way to keep cameras away from battlefields. Who ever filmed those guys peeing was incredibly stupid.
That photograph isn’t evidence of anything at all. It doesn’t even have a source or a caption.
Here you go FWIW.
That’s a legend, not historical fact.
As an act, it was considered to be an ultimate insult because Hector’s body was still subjected to physical suffering even when dead.
Achilles would never imagine to cause humiliation by excreting on a dead body. This act was not taboo, it was and it still is unthinkable in civilized societies who instill a sense of some basic value to a human being, even a dead body.
Taboos are acts that humans may have some innate preference to do, but are prohibited by society. Excreting on a dead body is not a human drive, it’s a human preference to declare superiority over the life, identity and religion of the dead individual in the worst way possible.
I don’t know if this directly addresses your question, but the US soldiers in Afghanistan are there at the invite of the current Afghan government to keep order and stabilize the country. Pretty much anyone they kill are presumably Afghans – perhaps serving an outlaw faction or whatever. But they’re likely countrymen of the Afghan government.
Having those foreign solders kill those people is their job, but having foreign soldiers pissing on your dead countrymen is not and pretty freaking objectionable. I can’t believe for a moment this is some new squishiness from modern times. For the most part these people aren’t dead because they’re enemies of the US, but because they’re enemies of the Afghan goverment, but they are likely Afghan nationals.
It’s not the nicest thing to do, but if those guys had just been shooting at me and maybe taken a friend of mine or two, pissing on their corpses is much better than the classic raping, pillaging, and burning.
It’s wrong because it’s unprofessional. Modern, first-world soldiers are supposed so do their jobs, but they aren’t supposed to take it personally, and they certainly aren’t supposed to enjoy it. It’s unchivalrous, ungentlemanly and just all-around tacky.