Give peace a chance: Don’t believe the war profiteers, Part 4

Detail from Vereshchagin’s painting The Apotheosis of War (1871) came to be admired as one of the earliest artistic expressions of pacifism – Public Domain

by Roy Eidelson

There are many others, but what I’ve described are ten important examples of the mind games that war profiteers have used and will use to pursue their aims. Because these appeals often have the ring of truth even though they’re as flimsy as a conman’s promises, combating them can be daunting. But we shouldn’t be discouraged. Scientific research on the psychology of persuasion offers a guide to how we can hold firm against the war machine’s self-serving propaganda.

One key is what psychologists call “attitude inoculation.” The basic idea comes from the familiar public health approach used to prevent contracting and spreading a dangerous virus. Consider the flu vaccine. When you get a flu shot, you’re receiving a modest dose of the actual influenza virus. Your body responds by building up antibodies, which will prove essential in fighting off the full-blown virus if it later attacks as you go about your daily life. A flu shot doesn’t always work, but it improves your odds of staying healthy. That’s why we’re encouraged to get one each year before the flu season begins.

Consider, then, that the war profiteers’ mind games are similarly like a virus, one that can “infect” us with false and destructive beliefs. Here too, inoculation is the best defense. Having been warned that this “virus” is heading our way—spread by the enormous megaphones of the military-industrial complex—we can become vigilant and prepare ourselves for the onslaught by learning to recognize these mind games and by building and practicing counterarguments to them.

For example, contrary to the claims of warmongers, the use of military force often makes us more vulnerable, not less: by multiplying our enemies, placing our soldiers in harm’s way, and distracting us from other pressing needs. Likewise, military action can be a profound injustice in its own right—because it kills, maims, and displaces untold numbers of innocent people, with many becoming refugees, and because it drains resources from critical domestic programs. So too, distrust of a potential adversary is hardly sufficient grounds for military assault, especially when opportunities for diplomacy and negotiation are prematurely pushed aside. And when it comes to superiority, unilateral aggression certainly doesn’t represent the best of our values, and it often diminishes our image and influence in the world beyond our borders. Finally, there’s a proud history of non-violent civil resistance, with successes large and small, and it shows us that the people—educated, organized and mobilized—are far from helpless against even unbridled and abusive power.

Counterarguments of this sort—and there are many—are the “antibodies” that we need when we’re faced with all-out mind game assaults from the war machine and its supporters. Just as importantly, once we’ve inoculated ourselves against them, we’re able to become “first responders” by actively participating in the crucial discussions and debates that are necessary to persuade others that it would be worth their while to try looking at the world differently from the way the war profiteers want us all to see it. In these conversations, it’s especially important for us to emphasize why representatives of the war machine want us to cling to certain beliefs, and how they are the ones who benefit when we do. In general, when we encourage skepticism and critical thinking in this way, it makes us less susceptible to misinformation from those looking to take advantage of us for their own selfish purposes.

I’ll conclude by briefly quoting two very different people. First, returning to West Point, there’s this from a cadet who graduated over a hundred years ago: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” That was retired General Dwight Eisenhower, shortly after being elected President in 1952. And second, the late anti-war activist Father Daniel Berrigan reportedly gave the shortest high school graduation speech ever in New York City. All he said was this: “Know where you stand, and stand there.” Let’s do that together. Thank you.

More articles by:Roy Eidelson

Roy Eidelson, PhD, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, and the author of POLITICAL MIND GAMES: How the 1% Manipulate Our Understanding of What’s Happening, What’s Right, and What’s Possible. Roy’s website is www.royeidelson.com and he is on Twitter at @royeidelson.

Lewis Randa: Inspiring a socialist alternative

 

Stone memorial to civilians killed in war. Courtesy of the Peace Abbey.

by Kathie MM

In a chart in a recent post entitled 100 Living Peace and Justice Leaders, the characteristics attributed to peace and justice leaders and models included:

nonviolence,

inspiration,

tolerating struggle,

empathy & compassion,

integrity,

courage,

and a purpose-driven life.

In honor of Valentine’s Day, 2018, I want to honor one man who exemplifies all those characteristics: Lewis Randa, founder of the Life Experience School  and the Peace Abbey

Here are brief examples of each of those characteristics in Lewis’s life:

Nonviolence: Lewis explains, “Martin Luther King said, ‘If you haven’t found something worth dying for you’re not fit to live.’ Nonviolence is something I’d be willing to die for. I don’t torture myself over whether I’ve done a good job or bad job.” (verdict:superb job)

 Inspiration: From the founding of The Life Experience School for special needs children and young adults in 1972 (his alternative service as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War) to his current nonviolent resistance to any governmental move to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Lewis has inspired multitudes.

Tolerating struggle: The nonviolent civil resistance in which Lewis has engaged his entire life has consistently demanded tolerating struggle; add to that his engagement in the stone walk— the project involving hauling a one-ton granite stone memorializing civilians 500 miles in the US, many miles in Ireland, and then later, under the able leadership of Dot Walsh, substantial distances in Japan and Korea.

Empathy & compassion: Because of  empathy and compassion for all living creatures,  Lewis is a vegetarian—as is the rest of his family — and a proponent of animal rights   (You just have to read Emily the cow’s story!)

Courage: Being a conscientious objector in wartime, promoting conscientious objection to war, advocating for interfaith harmony in a nation that is increasingly intolerant of non-Christian faiths,  and his willingness to speak out for peace and peacemakers to a government embroiled in violence testifies to his courage.

To learn more about a purpose-driven life, just watch this inspiring video,  and add meaning to your own life by joining Lewis’s peace-seeking letter-writing campaign to Chairman Kim Jung-un.

 

The Sustaining Fires of Standing Rock: A Movement Grows

Beyond NoDAPL March on Washington, DC. Woman in red jacket speaking about her experiences as a water protector at Standing Rock. 8 December 2016. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Rob87438.

by Roy J. Eidelson

 Over the past year, a remote area of North Dakota has been the improbable and prophetic site of a struggle with profound ramifications for us all. The confrontation has pitted the Water Protectors — the Standing Rock Sioux, other Native American tribes, and their allies — against the oil profiteers of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. The source of conflict is completion of the $3.8 billion, thousand-mile Dakota Access Pipeline — the Black Snake — that Energy Transfer Partners has built to carry fracked oil from North Dakota to Illinois.

The current planned route for the pipeline takes it beneath the Missouri River treacherously close to the Standing Rock and other Sioux reservations. A serious leak will threaten the water supply of these tribes and millions of people who live further downstream. Meanwhile, pipeline construction has already caused irreparable harm to Native American ancestral burial grounds and sacred sites.

The Water Protectors

 Beginning last April, Water Protectors from across the country — indigenous and non-indigenous alike — began to gather in the thousands at the Oceti Sakowin Camp, established just north of the Standing Rock reservation. Around the camp’s sacred fires, they shared and honored the rituals, stories, and principles of community fundamental to the traditional values of the Lakota tribes: prayer, respect, compassion, honesty, generosity, humility, and wisdom.

At the same time, the Water Protectors sought to block construction of the final section of pipeline. Their non-violent acts of civil resistance were met with attack dogs, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, percussion grenades, water cannons, aerial surveillance, and hundreds of arrests by militarized law-enforcement personnel. The standoff ended a few weeks ago when the Governor of North Dakota, citing safety concerns, issued an emergency evacuation order. Shortly thereafter, authorities forcibly shut down and razed the camp.

Assaults like those that took place at Standing Rock are really nothing new for our nation’s Native peoples. Their history of removal, dispossession, degradation, attempted forced assimilation, and betrayal at the hands of White America runs as long and as deep as the Missouri River itself. Spanning centuries, these experiences form a chronicle of unresolved grief and historical trauma, which Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart has described as “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over one’s lifetime and from generation to generation following loss of lives, land, and vital aspects of culture.”

The consequences of these brutal colonization practices are visible too in a range of cold, hard statistics. Today Native Americans have a median household income barely two-thirds that of the general population, and their poverty rate is nearly twice as large. They’re half as likely to have a college degree, and their life expectancy is six years shorter. They also suffer from higher rates of alcoholism, drug abuse, incarceration, depression, and PTSD, as well as suicide among their youth.

The survival of Native Americans, their diverse communities, and their rich cultures — despite hardship and oppression, and against such long odds — is a powerful testament to their extraordinary resilience. This abiding strength deserves greater recognition than it receives; like historical trauma, it too is transmitted across lives and generations. Shared narratives, traditional practices, spiritual teachings, the prayerful appreciation of time and place, and respect for the interconnectness of all things serve as crucial protective factors for indigenous tribes and their members.

The Oil Profiteers

 Compared to the Water Protectors who converged at Standing Rock, corporate oil profiteers are a very different breed. But they too have their sacred places: anywhere fossil fuels can be extracted from the ground at a handsome profit. They have rituals too: board meetings where successful ventures are celebrated and forays for new plunder are devised. And, of course, they have their own cherished stories: about the day they first struck it rich; or the time they duped a community into believing that fracking is risk-free; or the shrewd business deal that bankrupted their competition.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this contrast in cultural values. After all, consider the company profile for Energy Transfer Partners. Among its top institutional owners is Goldman Sachs, once famously described as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Donald Trump — “I don’t believe in climate change” — was himself a high-profile investor until conflict-of-interest controversies during his presidential campaign reportedly forced him to sell his holdings. Former Texas Governor Rick Perry was on the company’s board of directors until earlier this year. Perry’s response to the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico — ruled “gross negligence” and “willful misconduct” by a federal judge — is memorable in its own right: “There are going to be things that occur that are acts of God that cannot be prevented.”

And above all there’s Kelcy Warren, the multi-billionaire CEO of Energy Transfer Partners. His business philosophy is dog-eat-dog survival of the fittest, as he once explained this way: “Like Mother Nature, the energy industry purges itself now and then. …I don’t wish any negatives on my friends, but the most wealth I’ve ever made is during the dark times.” So where was Warren while the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies were braving “dark times” during a bitter North Dakota winter in makeshift huts and tipis? He was probably more than comfortable in his 23,000 square-foot home on ten acres in Texas, with six bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, and “a chip-and-putt green, a pole-vault pit, a four-lane bowling alley, and a 200-seat theater.”

A Movement Grows

 Energy Transfer Partners boasts that the nearly completed pipeline utilizes state-of-the-art safety measures. But comparable pledges have preceded other environmental disasters in the past. The Water Protectors also recognize that these assurances are essentially meaningless for another reason: any construction that encourages continued reliance on fossil fuels is inherently dangerous and potentially calamitous for the Earth and future generations. The world’s leading scientists long ago reached an overwhelming consensus that climate change and global warming are the result of human activity — especially the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas — and that among the adverse consequences are more destructive floods, hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires.

The oil profiteers know this too, but they have hundreds of billions of dollars in annual profits at stake, and large shareholders who vigilantly watch the bottom-line. So greed overwhelms conscience and they resort to false-alarm mind games as part of a massive misinformation campaign, insisting that warnings of planetary peril are vastly overblown. Favorite appeals in their propaganda arsenal include disingenuous denials that climate change exists; bogus claims that scientists disagree about the facts; unfounded assertions that there’s no crisis because we’re capable of adapting to change; and deceitful efforts to portray environmentalists as radical extremists.

Three days after last November’s election, CEO Kelcy Warren was confident about the prospects for the Dakota Access Pipeline: “They will not stop our project. That’s naïve. They’re not stopping our project.” Such arrogance seems to come naturally to someone who’s grown accustomed to relying on friends in high places and his personal wealth — he gave over $100,000 to Trump’s campaign — to achieve self-aggrandizing goals. The words of Dave Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux, communicate humility instead: “We have no power…the only thing that we have is support from around the world.”

But this support and solidarity shouldn’t be underestimated. Regardless of the pipeline’s final disposition in the federal courts, Energy Transfer Partners and its cronies have unleashed a counterforce that may well exceed their comprehension and control. While digging for dollars they’ve awakened a movement that combines a long-overdue commitment to addressing the trampled rights of Native Americans with a reinvigorated call for climate justice and environmental action. Today the ranks of the Water Protectors present at Standing Rock have been thinned. But as spring soon arrives on the North Dakota plains, countless more of us are embracing their powerful message of reverence and resistance.

********

Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.

Nonviolence: The powerful antidote to youth recruitment to gangs, terrorists, and the US Military

bYoung people protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. File is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen.

by Alice LoCicero

Terrorists, gangs, and the US military recruit youth and train them to be violent. Each time a young person is recruited to violence, one or more adults benefit, but the youth and their families pay the price.[1]

The US military, for example, recruits in high schools—typically high schools serving poor families. The myth perpetrated is that the youth have no other options—or that this is their best option.

However, even the distant benefits that may accrue after the youth have put themselves in harm’s way with one or more deployments to one of the current wars, the rosy picture presented by recruiters is often not fulfilled. About 21% of those discharged from the military in recent years did not receive honorable discharges[2], leaving them at risk of not getting all of the veterans’ benefits expected.[3]

Many communities and organizations work against youth being recruited to violence.[4] While these organizations hold a moral high ground in their respect and advocacy for youth, they lack the power and financial resources of the US military. That power and those resources enhance recruitment through formal advertising and informal infiltration of schools, video games, and community events– including family and sports events.[5]

Perhaps the most powerful antidote to recruitment to violence is not resisting recruitment, but instead welcoming recruitment to non-violence. This became clear to me recently during several days at the Standing Rock encampment.

Hearing young people speak about their experiences there, I reflected on the power of nonviolence in a variety of 20th and 21st century movements: The US civil rights and anti-war movements, the nonviolent civil disobedience by Gandhi and his followers, and now the nonviolent actions at Standing Rock.

To fully understand this alternative, one must realize that nonviolence is not simply the absence of violence, which might seem to be associated with weakness. Rather nonviolence is a positive approach, requiring strength, training, and discipline based on a positive philosophy of resistance to injustice and insistence on change.

What would it be like if non-Native communities in the US followed the lead of the Water Protectors at Standing Rock?

 What if there were groups recruiting youth to set things right with society through active non-violence? Surely there are youth all over this country who are well-aware of the injustices in their own communities. What if there were elders from those communities who were prepared to lead resistance groups?

Let’s start a discussion about this.

References

[1] LoCicero, A. (2010) The hidden economics of youth violence. The New Renaissance.

[2] http://www.scpr.org/news/2015/09/29/54696/minor-infractions-in-uniform-keep-thousands-of-vet/

[3] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Releases/News-Release-View/Article/1039945/dod-announces-new-outreach-efforts-to-veterans-regarding-discharges-and-militar (The Department of Defense has recently recognized that some of the veterans who received less than honorable discharges had behavioral infractions associated with PTSD, and has proactively reached out to those veterans and others to inform them of the possibility of review of status.)

[4] For example, the American Friends Service Committee and the National Network Opposing the Militarization of Youth.

[5] LoCicero, A. (2016) Resisting Recruitment, Unpublished presentation to the American Psychological Assocation.