Exposé! Exposé! Exposé! Speaking truth (bitingly) to power

by Kathie MM

Just about everybody loves a good movie–a movie that makes them laugh or cry or feel inspired or want to become engaged. This week, Engaging Peace will feature three short (about 5-6 minutes!) films that “tell it like it is” quietly, movingly, engagingly.

These three films, starting with “Block this caller!” (we’ve all wanted to do that now and then, right?) were created by award-winning filmmaker, director, actor Jonny Lewis to to convey his message regarding “the horror and stupidity of war.” Jonny has won 7 awards as a filmmaker for his antiwar comedy shorts, which were screened at the 2018 Veterans for Peace national convention. He was recently honored as a role model for peace by the US Peace Memorial Foundation, which publishes the U.S. Peace Registry.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Michael D. Knox and Alice LoCicero for introducing me to Jonny Lewis’s work.



Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “I’m with those guys. They got it right: Just say No to the war mongers, and we’ll all sleep better.”

And another request from KMM: Please send comments on the videos, and tell us, What will help you sleep better?

NUCLEAR WAR AND ME: Annihilation Inscribed Across Time and Place, Part 3

by Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.

War Legacies

I have never forgotten the anniversary days for the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945). Years later, images remain in my mind. Rising, unfolding mushroom cloud.  As I a kid, and now as an adult, I try to grasp the bizarre meaning of events! A mushroom cloud.  

I became hyper-religious, reading the Father Peyton Catholic Bible sold to us by a door-to-door priest salesperson. He convinced my mother to “donate” $20.00.  The words and pictures were fascinating. I even read the Catholic Newspapers, with their list of forbidden movies. I would go to the darkened Church, sit in silence and awe at the statues of saints and Blessed Virgin Mary.  Clusters of candles were burning in red votive jars. There was mystery about it all, but I could not understand! Should I become a priest?  Annihilation!

Movies of Nuclear Catastrophes

In the 1950s there was an omnipresent fear of nuclear war. Scores of protests and anti-war organizations emerged. One of these organizations was Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), founded by Alex Red Mountain with the help of many others (e.g., Anne Anderson).  I later served as the President of PsySR, 2005-2007. Destiny!

In 1959, the movie, On the Beach, brought tears and sobs to me and others as a group of survivors from a deadly nuclear attack gathered on a beach in Melbourne, Australia, awaiting a nuclear dust cloud.  Couples and families took suicidal pills to escape the horrible consequences of surviving. The movie was a poignant reminder of horrors of a nuclear war.  I was 19 years old at the time, a college student, confused and still afraid. 

Another nuclear war left an impression on me: Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This 1964 movie was supposed to be a dark satire of Soviet Union and USA nuclear threats.

How could anyone forget the last scene? A mis-communication resulting in the image of an rabid American soldier shouting as he rode a hydrogen bomb from orders for a first strike on the USSR. The President of the USA and his staff tried to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. They failed!  (see Wikipedia, 2018, 11:00AM)

Like many others, I remember vividly where I was during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October, 1962.  The confrontation between President John F. Kennedy and USSR Premier Nikita Khrushchev! We watched and waited. No desks to hide under! We learned it was the closest we had come to nuclear war.  Both countries continued to build more powerful nuclear weapons. Annihilation!

Nuclear-War Risks Continue

I continue to have memories of total destruction and death of hundreds of thousands of human beings. I visited Nagasaki. I could not escape the guilt. I was alive, but death was inscribed in the name and place.

I still recall crouching beneath school desks as sirens blared. Classmates, giggles, and fear and trembling!  Victims in Japan below saw a circling plane; it was their last sight!  The legacy of horror of remains!

History is the story of survival!  We recall and remember! Until the time lessons are learned, we remain, as Bishop Tutu of South Africa poignantly stated, we remain, “Prisoners of hope.”

Rambo and the Dalai Lama:The Compulsion to Win and Its Threat to Human Survival

Product Details

by Gordon Fellman

This book builds from the proposition that until now most encounters have been organized so that the point of them is to overcome the other. This is true for the most part of relations between men and women, parents and children, whites and non-whites, leaders and publics, rich and poor, labor and management, athletic teams, business firms, advanced societies and developing societies, straight and gay, tall and short, well and ill, and so on.

I call this assumption that one must strive to overcome or submit to being overcome, the basis of the adversary paradigm. It also applies to humans’ relations to nature which, like people, has been constructed as an enemy to be overcome.

The ultimate expression of the adversary tendency is murder, and that collectively is war. War has usually been fought with the maximum technology available. The use of atomic bombs in 1945 suddenly and drastically cast adversarialism in a new light. For the first time in the history of warfare, it became possible, indeed likely, that in using maximum technology in all-out confrontation, overcoming the other would necessarily also mean overcoming the self; i.e., homicide became inextricable from suicide.

The threat of massive destruction by nuclear devices was complemented by another form of technological assault, the industrial degradation of the environment to the point of numerous deaths and severely damaged systems of land, water, and air needed for survival. The human tendency toward adversarialism has become incarnated in objective processes which neither created nor defined adversarialism but rather came to represent it in stark, terrifying ways.

Historically, alongside the adversary paradigm and in secondary relation to it is the mutuality paradigm, based on the mutuality assumption that the other can be a friend, a colleague, an ally. Religious notions of community and love flow from this paradigm, even if they are ordinarily undercut by the adversary organization and practices of organized religion.

Political systems idealize mutuality in official documents like constitutions and in politicians’ rhetoric but contradict it in their behavior. The same is true in most if not all other institutions such as education and the family.

My claim is that in order to survive adversarial forms of onslaught, including the ethnic and religious strife which appears to be replacing the one over-arching conflict of the Cold War, mutuality will need to become the primary governing paradigm in human affairs and in humans’ relations with the environment, inverting the historic and continuing condition where adversarialism is primary and mutuality, secondary.

My analysis attempts to provide a useful vocabulary for what I see as fundamental crises, indeed survival issues, on our planet today. It is a contemporary version of the timeless contrast between competition and cooperation. I find that in the speaking and teaching I do on this topic, people pick up the words and concepts I use and employ them immediately, and most effectively.

The central innovation of my presentation is my analysis of adversarialism and mutuality as coming in both normative and compulsive or pathological forms. By the adversary compulsion, I mean something beyond ordinary competition in sport, business, or any other social context. I mean an addiction, a drivenness that subordinates other considerations to a passion, indeed an obsession, with “winning.” It is this compulsion that, for example, defines the destructiveness of political systems that forsake the political possibility of resolving real societal problems, in favor of destroying the other candidate, the other party, the other program, no matter what it may be.

I also identify a mutuality compulsion. Including in mutuality the ideas of empathy, recognition of the full humanness of the other, caring, nurturing, support, and love, I see mutuality that denies adversary inclinations as compulsive, just as I see adversarialism that denies mutuality inclinations as compulsive. Based on denial of essential parts of the self, each form of compulsion works against the possible reconciliation of humans and nature to each other in ways that can enhance human survival and well-being.

The book goes on to deconstruct both compulsions.

I claim that people tend to project upon others qualities they have been taught they can not and must not face in themselves. Hence the other becomes the repository of the selfish, dirty, violent, lustful, failed, immoral parts of oneself that one denies, and as well, the nobler, communal, loving, caring parts of the self that extend beyond immediate friend and family relations and which most people feel are beyond their capacity to realize. In both cases one assumes that one ought not or can not achieve what is implied in one’s desires.

Survival requires what I call reappropriation of the full range of qualities that the self is. In a chapter called “Reappropriation of the Self,” I offer an analysis of the extent and nature of what can be reappropriated.

I also claim that a more fully mutualistic society is already at hand, but in minor form that is difficult to recognize until it is identified. Most people are familiar with mutuality in some contexts but so far fail to see their proliferation, their connections, and the possibility of a freer organization of society based on mutuality as its premise rather than adversarialism. In three chapters on “Seeds of Mutuality,” I examine old seeds in old institutions, new seeds in old institutions, and new seeds in new institutions.

The book nears its end with an analysis of what I see as the major alternative to the destructiveness of the endless adversary relations with which we are currently saddled: globalism — recognition of the globe as the primary unit of loyalty.

I see a global culture already emerging in outline form in political values, language, economy, music, religion, and more. My goal is to analyze and to move beyond analysis in offering hope in the form of visions of mutuality and actions to help bring it about.

Believing that films speak to and reveal major concerns and phenomenological definitions of character, issues, and tendencies in a society, I illustrate many major points by way of interpretations of major motion pictures including High Noon, The Godfather, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, Rambo, Silence of the Lambs, and Strangers in Good Company.

This use of films is in the tradition of Erik Erikson’s work on the films Wild Strawberries and The Childhood of Maxim Gorky and is an alternative to the more conventional analysis of literature in such contexts. Some popular music lyrics are used to illustrate points about adversarialism and mutuality in popular culture beyond film. Numerous contemporary issues and events, such as reproductive rights, criminal justice, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, also are examine closely to elucidate and extend the analysis.

 

 

 

 

Promoting the Joker? The media and gun violence

by Sarah Mensch

In my series for engaging peace, I have explored the possibility that the media, particularly films, can provide models for gun violence that may lead to copycat crimes.

For today’s post, I analyzed The Dark Knight, a popular hero film approximately 2½ hours long; it features 43 different guns wielded and shot by police officers, members of the mafia, and several different trademark Batman villains. Batman himself never holds a gun except to disarm someone else. Batman’s archenemy and the film’s main villain, the Joker, holds a gun in eight different scenes, shoots a total of 20 times, and kills three people onscreen and six offscreen.

My last Engaging Peace article discussed the need to revise the media rhetoric on gun violence to avoid sensationalizing the shooters. The Dark Knight (2008) brings my point home. The Dark Knight was voted the movie with the best Halloween costumes the year of its release. Batman and the Joker were the two most popular men’s costumes, with Joker costume sales far outnumbering Batman sales. Even today, nine years after the film’s release, DC Comics has more Joker than Batman Dark Knight merchandise available on their website.

James Holmes plotted and executed a shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, sequel to The Dark Knight in Aurora, CO, on July 20, 2012. He shot 71 people. When Holmes entered the theater, he said something along the lines of “I am the Joker.” Like the Joker, Holmes had dyed his hair a shocking color and like the Joker, Holmes seemed dedicated to creating an air of chaos to promote his own notoriety.

At the time of the shooting, Holmes was a PhD candidate studying Neuroscience at the University of Colorado. Three years after the shooting, photos were released of Holmes’ apartment. Among the booby traps, bomb setups, and a gallon of gasoline was something particularly interesting: a Batman mask. .

Why did Holmes choose to emulate the Joker instead of Batman?

Could it be that the news media add to the potential for copycatting crimes portrayed in the motion picture media by devoting significantly more attention to perpetrators and evil-doers than victims?

Perhaps if media coverage of gun violence tragedies shifted its focus so that it was the victims and the people who helped the victims whose actions were  memorable,  troubled people like James Holmes might choose to become like Batman, instead of the Joker.

P.S. from KMM: Did you watch the media trailer at the beginning of this post?  If so, what was your emotional reaction to it?  excitement? anxiety? horror? disgust?  Other? Do you remember the actions of one character more than another?

Bibliography:

Frosch, D., & Johnson, K. (2012, July 20). Gunman Kills 12 in Colorado, Reviving Gun   Debate. The New York Times. Retrieved April 6, 2017, from             http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/shooting-at-colorado-theater-showing-     batman-movie.html

Sarah Mensch, Research Assistant, Graphic Designer, is a psychology major at Boston University. She is thrilled to be working on a Directed Study focusing on the effect of the media on gun violence under the supervision of Dr. Malley Morrison. When Sarah graduates, she aims to go on to graduate school to earn an MSW and become a therapist. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys pursuing her minor in Deaf Studies, photography, and exploring Boston