The author attempts to track down the truth of a weird story of a man who remotely killed a goat. He covers some pretty strange stuff but never seems to get to the point. I have not seen the movie and probably never will.

library book read 7/27/2023 ( )

This was waiting for me in NY. I've a feeling anything else he's written will follow shortly. ( )

I'm sure anybody who has read my entries here knows that I read a John Ronson book every few months as a non-fiction palatte-cleanser, and that they all essentially have the same main review: funny, wanders a bit, no thesis, but overall interesting.

To that I would add only that if one is not familiar with the clown-shoes dumb-fuckery of Army Intelligence and the Agency, one will probably get much more amusement out of this. But this material has often been covered in more serious form elsewhere, and while the humor does add and make things go down a bit more smoothly, the only real surprise to me was the intenionality of using goats as targets of cruelty; apparently killing other things was too tough for soldiers, but goats are just not a problem. ( )

The film of The Men Who Stare at Goats was a diverting comedy based on the cartoonishness of the ideas espoused by characters played by George Clooney and Jeff Bridges. The book is a very different matter, because it is not fictionalised, the people discussed are real, and the more sobering consequences of their ideas are spelled out by Jon Ronson in what turns out to be a pretty serious manner.

The real tragedy in the book is that the ideas lampooned in the film were a genuine response by Jim Channon to the trauma he experienced in Vietnam, to find more non-violent ways of conducting wars, based on New Age ideas. Channon published his ideas as a manual for the New Earth Brigade, and they received about the amount of attention that you would expect from the Army of the time.

Rather than sink without trace however, Channon's non-violent ideas were adopted and twisted by others to become something unrecognisable from his original intent. Ronson shows the link between seemingly fanciful New Age theory such as using music to change behaviour to the torture deployed at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Ronson makes a convincing argument that the repellent activities of people like Lynddie England were ordered by higher-ups applying a version of Channon's ideas.

Similarly, Ronson recounts experiences at Waco with the Branch Davidians that suggest similar torture methods were attempted there.

All in all this a sad book because Channon was clearly trying to achieve something quite different from what his successors have ended up doing with his ideas. While the start of the book seems comical, along the lines of the film, by the end Ronson has made you take this very seriously. For all that, however, you are never quite sure how much of this to believe. As Ronson says, the best way to discount these events is to make them seem funny; the film has succeeded in making Ronson's book seem more of a joke than maybe he wanted. ( )

Alltsedan 1970-talet har den amerikanska armén utbildat en hemlig grupp soldater i paranormala förmågor. De tränar sig i osynlighet (!), att tindra med ögonen för att göra fienden förvirrad, konsten att förflytta medvetandet utanför kroppen, men också mer "normala" närstridstekniker. Verksamheten låg nere från mitten av 1990-talet men nu under 2000-talets Krig mot terrorismen har de blivit reaktiverade. Och nu är det krig på riktigt, vilket leder hela vägen till den psykiska tortyren av fångarna i Abu Ghraib och Guantanamo.
I sitt underhållande reportage Män som stirrar på getter lyckas Jon Ronson förena skarpsynthet och samhällskritik med en humor som sträcker sig långt över vad man trodde var möjligt.