A teacher at the March for Our Lives in Portland, Oregon, protests the idea of arming teachers with guns. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Sarahmirk
by Kathie MM
What you really need to do is promote quality education—including supporting, appreciating, rewarding, and protecting the teacher and student activists who embody democratic principles. As neo-fascism and anti-intellectualism and the distrust of education and educated people they promote engulf our shaky democracy, give thanks for the students and teachers who have the courage to speak out on behalf of nonviolence and quality public education . We need good role models right now.
Enemies of freedom and justice have always worked to prevent and curtail education for any perceived threats–click here and here for examples– to their desire to dominate and control. “Keep them in their place,” is the eternal message, “or they will threaten our way of life”—a way of life that keeps all too many people downtrodden and feeling powerless.
Right now there is a huge conflict going on in this country—between the tiny but powerful and very greedy plutocracy exercising increasing control over the lives of the non-elite and the forces of resistance, the promoters of democracy, the broadest category of dreamers .
If you really, truly, honestly want a functioning democracy, support the students marching for our lives and support the teachers speaking out on behalf of public education and nonviolence. Find the causes and undertake the actions that make you feel you are doing your share to make the country better for all. And please tell us about them.
If you’ve got power and you want to get people to invade some country and be prepared to kill the human beings there and risk their own lives, how do you get them to do it?
You try, by all means, usually with propaganda and the support of the corporate media, to promote people’s moral disengagement.
What is moral disengagement? It’s a set of cognitive processes, ways of thinking, that allow otherwise decent people to tolerate, or support, or participate directly in inhumane and even deadly behavior, without ruffling their feelings of moral integrity. Successful power mongers excel at mind games that get their followers morally disengaged.
Table 1 shows some well-studied forms of moral disengagement and provides examples from the war-promoting rhetoric of the second Iraq war, particularly, the second invasion of Fallujah. Here they are: pseudomoral justification (like claiming that invading Fallujah will “bring freedom & opportunity to the Iraqi people”), euphemistic labeling (calling the destruction of Fallujah a “liberation”), advantageous comparison (better to destroy one cancerous city than lose the whole country), denial of responsibility (“Our hand was forced”; disregarding consequences (portraying death and destruction by American troops in Iraq and elsewhere as heroic) ; blaming the victim and dehumanizing the other (the Iraqi resistance forces are “Satan”).
In the last decade, I recruited an international research team of more than 100 investigators to help me study moral disengagement, its predictors, correlates, and outcomes in diverse adult samples from the United States and 43 other countries around the world.
Here are a few selected examples of our findings.
Scores on self-report rating scale measures of moral disengagement were negatively correlated with scores on compassion, forgivingness, and endorsement of human rights;
in addition, those moral disengagement scores were positively correlated with reports of childhood maltreatment, including abuse and emotional neglect, authoritarianism, anger, and hostility.
When we analyzed arguments made by people in their own words in response to an open-ended question as to whether one country ever has a right to invade another:
an overwhelming majority of the responses showing tolerance of one country’s right to invade another—particularly in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia– provided “pseudo-moral” justifications—like eliminating terrorists, or bringing peace and democracy
pseudo-assistance arguments, like rescuing people from evil dictators in other lands, were a particularly popular form of pseudo-moral justifications
Lots of people around the world said invasion was a right if done as an act of punishment for a previous invasion or wrongdoing; thus they justify invasion by denying any responsibility on the part of the attacker and attributing blame to the recipient of their vengefulness.
In several countries, respondents who had been in military service, as compared to their nonmilitary counterparts, gave significantly more responses deferring responsibility onto the international community. That is, if an organization like the UN or NATO says some groups are behaving badly, then, it is argued, invading that group’s country is legitimate. If not God, then at least the Coalition of the Willing can be on your side, or you’re only following orders.
In the UK/ANGLO and middle east countries military respondents also argued that self-defense or preemptive strikes were acceptable justifications for invading other countries.
In conclusion, if you’re curious about the extent to which the arms industry and other war profiteers manipulate the national rhetoric to promote moral disengagement, don’t focus just on media statements concerning North Korea, China, Syria, and Russia, examine also the verbal attacks on the young American students seeking sane gun policies. Don’t just follow the money; follow the power. You’ll find them in the same bed, plotting war.
Note from KMM: Here is a timely reminder to honor our mother. Please do it every day.
By René Wadlow
International Mother Earth Day on 22 April each year was established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2009. Its aim is to promote living in harmony with Nature and to achieve a just balance among the economic, social and environmental needs of present and future generations. The concept of living in harmony with Nature was seen by the U.N. delegates as a way “to improve the ethical basis of the relationship between humankind and our planet.”
The term “Mother Earth” is an expression used in different cultures to symbolize the inseparable bonds between humans and Nature. Pachamama is the term used in the Andean cultures of South America. The Earth and the ecosystem is our home. We need to care for it as a mother is supposed to care for her children and the children to show love and gratitude in return. However, we know from all the folk tales of the evil stepmother as well as the records of psychoanalytic sessions that mother-children relations are not always relations of love, care and gratitude. Thus to really live in harmony with Nature requires deep shifts in values and attitudes, not just “sustainable development” projects.
The United Nations began its focus on ecological issues with the preparations for the 1972 Conference in Stockholm and has continued with the tfollowed by the Rio plus 20 conference 20 years later. However the concept of living in harmony with Nature is relatively new as a U.N. political concept. Yet it is likely to be increasingly a theme for both governmental policy making and individual action.
As Rodney Collin wrote in a letter,
“It is extraordinary how the key-word of harmony occurs everywhere now, comes intuitively to everyone’s lips when they wish to express what they hope for. But I feel that we have hardly yet begun to study its real meaning. Harmony is not an emotion, an effect. It is a whole elaborate science, which for some reason has only been fully developed in the realm of sound. Science, psychology and even religion are barely touching it as yet.” (1)
Resolutions in the U.N. General Assembly can give a sense of direction. They indicate that certain ideas and concepts are ready to be discussed at the level of governments. However, a resolution is not yet a program of action or even a detailed framework for discussion. “Living in harmony with Nature” is at that stage on the world agenda. Since the start of the yearly observation of Mother Earth Day in 2010, there have been useful projects proposed around a yearly theme. The 2018 theme is to reduce pollution from plastics. The exponential growth of plastics is now a real threat by injuring marine life, littering beaches and landfills and clogging waste systems. There is a need to reduce the single use of plastic objects by reusing and recycling plastic objects.
However reducing pollution from plastic objects, while useful, is not yet living in harmony with Nature. There is still efforts to be made to spell out the ethical base and the necessary shifts in attitudes and actions.
NOTES:
1) His letters have been assembled after his death by his wife into a book:
Rodney Collin. The Theory of Conscious Harmony (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1958)
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René Wadlow is a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Task Force on the Middle East, president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of World Citizens, and editor of Transnational Perspectives. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 23 Apr 2018.
The recent triumph of anti-democratic Republican Party politics was made possible with the criminal complicity of the Democratic Party, the mainstream news media, and the rise to political power of Christian fundamentalism.
In the hotly contested 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court halted the counting of votes, and then appointed George W. Bush the winner, in what was nothing less than a judicial coup d’état.
The Cheney-Bush Administration then launched a lie-based war against Iraq and Afghanistan, the cost of which now exceeds two trillion dollars, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the Middle East, and widespread Muslim hatred of America. In 2008, the Cheney-Bush Administration climaxed its reign of deficit spending and global terror with a domestic economic meltdown which saw American citizens suffer the greatest recession since the Depression of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, America’s homegrown economic apartheid becomes more extreme with every passing week; the Pentagon budget blooms to finance more wars; fifty percent of university teachers are slave-wage adjuncts; more than fifty million Americans are deprived of healthcare; and the planet careens toward nuclear war and ecological apocalypse.
Hence we might conclude that Immanuel Kant implicitly points to a national motto that ought to read: “Treat all people always as ends in themselves, rather than merely as means” to personal gain.
Hence also – as Voltaire, Rousseau, David Hume, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman, Dorothy Day, Helen Keller, I. F. Stone, Buckminster Fuller, John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Maya Angelou, Dot Walsh, Kurt Vonnegut, Lewis and Meg Randa, Howard Zinn and John Lennon would applaud – we should revise America’s Pledge of Allegiance to read:
“I pledge allegiance to the planet, and to all the people and creatures on her; one ecosystem, universally sacred, with nourishment and beauty for all.”
