Comfort women

Posted on May 20, 2013 by kathiemm

By guest author Dot Walsh

Comfort women peace rally

Peace rally with “comfort women” and friends at Japanese embassy in Korea. Photo by Andrea LeBlanc; used with permission.

Comfort women were women and girls forced into prostitution by the Japanese government during World War II.  The name “comfort women” was taken from a Japanese word meaning prostitute.

In reality these women were sex slaves for the military. The recruitment was not voluntary but often involved kidnapping from countries taken over by the Japanese army.

A recent article in the New York Times highlighted a speech given by Mr. Hashimoto, the mayor of Osaka, who maintained that “comfort women” served a useful purpose: “When soldiers are risking their lives by running through storms of bullets, and you want to give these emotionally charged soldiers a rest somewhere, it’s clear that you need a comfort women system.”

In 2007 Andrea LeBlanc and I joined Japanese peacemakers in Korea on a journey modeled after the Peace Abbey’s Stonewalk. The intention of the Japanese was to apologize for the atrocities committed against the Korean people including the tragedy of the “comfort women.”

During the journey we visited a home for the aging “comfort women,” many of whom had never been able to marry or have a normal life because of the stigma of what had happened to them. We were invited to stay overnight and to meet with the women who lived there.  On the property is a museum with graphic pictures of the events that brought them to this place. Many of the survivors bear emotional scars and have never healed.

The following day we pulled the stone to the front door of the Japanese embassy where a vigil is held every week. For Andrea and me, it was an honor to be in the company of these women whose gentle spirits and commitment to speaking truth to power was inspiring.

During the occupation as many as 200,000 or more women (estimated numbers) were confined as sex slaves.

Dot Walsh, longtime peace activist

Posted in Armed conflict, Reconciliation and healing, Stories of engagement | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

When to call it a weapon of mass destruction (WMD)?

Posted on May 16, 2013 by kathiemm

In its Criminal Complaint against accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the FBI charged him with “unlawfully using and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (namely, an improvised explosive device).” That is, the FBI labeled the pressure cooker device that killed two people and injured more than 200 others a WMD.

Boston Marathon bombing site

Boston Marathon bombing site. Photo by Aaron Tang used under CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Glen Greenwald, in the Guardian, wrote a powerful essay entitled “Why is Boston ‘terrorism’ but not Aurora, Sandy Hook, Tucson and Columbine?” Reminder:

  • In Aurora, 12 people were killed and 58 others wounded with multiple weapons, including a semiautomatic rifle.
  • In Sandy Hook, 20 school children and six adults were murdered with a semiautomatic assault rifle.
  • In Tuscon, six people were killed and 14 (including Gabrielle Giffords) were wounded by a semiautomatic pistol.
  • In Columbine, 12 students and one teacher were killed and 24 others were injured by several weapons, including a semiautomatic pistol.

So, here’s another question: When can a weapon or weapon system be called a weapon of mass destruction? Choose one or more of the following answers:

  1. When it falls into the category of nuclear, biological, or chemical (NBC) weapons.
  2. When its sale and use does not profit the weapons industry.
  3. When it can result in as many fatalities over time as nuclear weapons systems.
  4. When it serves the purposes of the military-industrial-corporate media complex.

Let’s consider these possibilities in relation to the Tsarnaev brothers’ pressure cooker devices.

  1. The most common definition of WMD has been NBC weapons. Pressure cooker bombs do not fall into this category.
  2. The pressure cooker bomb does not profit the weapons industry, although semiautomatic weapons do.
  3. Since World War II, pressure cooker bombs have accounted for a miniscule  portion of fatalities. In contrast, as reported (opens in PDF) by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, “small arms” have killed as many people as all other weapons combined.
  4. You decide: in what ways can frequent use of the term “weapons of mass destruction” play into the hands of the military-industrial corporate media complex that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned our country to beware?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Posted in Understanding violence, Weaponry | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Violence in your backyard: Poverty in America

Posted on May 13, 2013 by kathiemm

Recent posts have linked poverty to violence in Greece and Africa. But poverty means violence here in America, too, and the forces that breed poverty and violence can reach into every home if they are ignored.Homeless campsite

A few examples of the link between poverty and violence in the United States:

  • Gun deaths are higher in states with higher levels of poverty and lower incomes
  • Poverty is a major contributor to domestic violence (opens in pdf)
  • Deaths due to poverty-related factors are as common as deaths due to heart attacks, strokes, and lung cancer
  • On average, in Camden, NJ, the poorest city in America, someone was shot every 33 hours in 2012.

We can afford to do better.

The U.S. is the richest country in the world, has the largest number of billionaires in the world, and has the highest gross national product.

It also ranks first (opens in pdf) in defense expenditures and military weapons expenditures.  Indeed, the military budget is so large, the Pentagon had a surplus of $105 billion at the end of FY2012.

A small portion of this money could reduce the violence of poverty—and the costs of that violence– dramatically.

UNICEF has shown that nations can lift children out of poverty and nations around the world are doing just that.

The U.S., however, is lagging in this effort.  We have the second highest rate of child poverty among developed nations. This is indefensible.

For more faces of poverty, check out these photos.

Poverty is violence.  It costs money. It costs lives. We must do better. To address violence, we must address poverty.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Posted in Understanding violence | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Creating young martyrs: What leads young people to resort to violence?

Posted on May 9, 2013 by patdaniel

By guest author Alice LoCicero

The accused Boston Marathon bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, grew up in my home town of Cambridge and went to the high school my kids attended. They look like kids my children would have gone to school with, and their friends and family describe them in ways that make them seem normal and good. How could young folks we might easily have known and loved act intentionally to create carnage, terror, and radical disruption of lives and psyches? As President Obama asked: What would lead them “to resort to violence?”Creating Young Martyrs

Dr. Samuel (Justin) Sinclair and I set out to answer an eerily similar question when we researched kids at risk of recruitment to the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist organization (now defeated) in Sri Lanka, research we wrote about in our 2008 book Creating young martyrs: Conditions that make dying in a terrorist attack seem like a good idea. Our findings help explain this apparent contradiction.

What we learned, both from reviewing others’ research and combing through our own findings, is that many kids who engage in terrorist actions, or who aspire to do so, think that their actions are going to bring attention to the grievances of their people, which they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as legitimate, and to begin to address a highly asymmetrical distribution of power, a distribution that disadvantages the group they identify with. The ultimate goal then, the “end” that, for them, justifies the means, is to help their peoples’ cause. Aware that they will die in the attack, or soon thereafter, they see their action as dutiful or, in western terms, altruistic.

I realize that this idea, that young people committing actions that result in killing, maiming, and disruption, do so with altruistic intent, is highly counter-intuitive, but it comes to my attention over and over again in our own and others’ data and the words of family members of kids engaged in terrorism. In the award-winning documentary film “My Daughter the Terrorist,” where filmmaker Morten Daae and director Beate Arnestad follow two Tamil girls trained to be Black Tigers, prepared to blow themselves up in a terrorist action, the mother of one of the girls speaks about her daughter, saying “She was different. She dreamt of becoming a nun.”

Alice Locicero is Past President and Co-Founder of the Society of Terrorism Research, as well as Chair of Social Sciences at Endicott College. She is a certified Clinical Psychologist, and has been a faculty member at the Center for Multicultural Training and Boston Medical Center, as well as at Suffolk University. In earlier roles, LoCicero served as Senior Psychologist working with families at Children’s Hospital, Boston, and as Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School. A member of the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Disaster Responders, she provides mental health services to family members of victims of terrorism and other man-made and natural disasters. She traveled to Sri Lanka in May and June of 2007 to learn about conditions that make terrorism an appealing idea to some youths.

(This post was originally published in the ABC-CLIO blog.)

Posted in Book reviews, Children and war, Movie reviews, Terrorism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments