Abu Ghraib required both cultural monsters and institutional dehumanization

Evidence

However, the existence of the Muslim monsters documented in this study only partially explains Abu Ghraib. The United States of America has a long history of brutality and violence toward its enemies. One only needs to look at the annals of American Indian history, or at slavery, to know this. This is a violent country that has done, and continues to do, very bad things. Add to this the policies established under Bush and Rumsfeld, a military culture that counts on the dehumanization of the enemy in order to be successful, and the popularity of books like Ralph Patai’s The Arab Mind, a “study” of “the Arab” and their sexual neuroses that had widespread readership among US policymakers, military brass, and soldiers during the early 2000s. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 751

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the article ‘On Sacrifice’ theme — American settler violence against Indians and slavery as antecedent infrastructure for later atrocity. Also echoes the reader’s own framing of monster-as-projection.
• ADDENDUM: Grafting & Growth or the immodesty article could be extended — but the real link is to the sacrifice piece: how state violence culture plus a mythology of the dehumanized enemy enables atrocity.