Kerala: The graveyard of all war propaganda, Part III

WWII A Nazi propaganda poster. In English: “Marxism is the guardian angel of capitalism.” his file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Dontworryifixedit.

by Ian Hansen, PhD

Pointless War #3: The War on “Bourgeois” Liberty and Democracy

Finally, consider liberty-protecting electoral democracy.  Over in these “Western” parts we adore liberty-protecting electoral democracy, of course.  But other world players have considered it so evil that Der Fuhrers, Dear Leaders, Big Brothers, Generalissimos, Chairmans and Commandantes have all felt obliged to smash and destroy it with totalitarian enslavement, sometimes garnished with genocide.  Though their methods may have seemed harsh, these figures imagined they were merely breaking the eggs necessary to make beautiful, radiant omelets, like, say a thousand-year Reich of Righteousness from the fascist/Nazi side, or True Democracy from the totalitarian communist side (“democracy” embodied in obsequious groveling obedience to The Party).  In the totalitarian view, legally-protected liberty and the electoral-parliamentary forms of democracy were the eggs that had to be smashed in order to prevent them from poisoning people’s minds away from these utopian projects.  Totalitarians feared that “Western”-style individual liberty and electoral parliamentary democracy would turn the precious volk into capitalists, selfish individualists, bourgeois liberals and rejectors of civilization and sublimity.

But Kerala defies both forms of totalitarian genocidal expectations by being a liberty-protecting, parliamentary democratic kind of place where communism flourishes politically and religion flourishes culturally.  Kerala has hammer and sickle flags flying all over.  It also bills itself as “God’s own country,” with ordinary people praying, God-believing and religious service-attending as far as the eye can see.  So liberty-protecting electoral democracy in Kerala did not destroy either communism or religion there, as totalitarian genocidals might have imagined it would.

And, for that matter, declining to destroy communism and religion did not lead to the implosion of liberty and democracy in Kerala, as anti-communists and anti-religionists might have imagined it would. If anything, bourgeois “Western” electoral parliamentary democracy and individual liberty have grown stronger in Kerala over the years.  And they’ve been growing in a fertile soil that combines regularly-elected communism with indigenous or indigenized Indian religions.

In another article, “Reconsidering Communism, Religion and Liberty-Protecting Democracy Through the Lens of Kerala” I present detailed empirical evidence that Kerala is a delightfully free and peaceful communism-inclined state, a delightfully free and peaceful religion-inclined culture, and a delightfully free and peaceful liberty-protecting democratic political entity.  I nevertheless argue that in none of these particulars is Kerala an “exception that proves the rule,” at least not in the usual sense of the phrase.  Kerala is not, in other words, a bright spot for X (X being communism, or religion, or liberty-protecting democracy) that just throws into sharper relief how repulsively evil X usually is by nature.

When avoiding post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacies and other failures to account for confounds, the relevant empirical data points in a surprising direction.  The data suggests that communism, religion and liberty-protecting electoral democracy are all somewhat salutary to peace and freedom and thus are compatible with each other in their most basic, stripped down, core value-grounded forms.  Want to spend another half hour wading through my prose so you can see that data?  Read the article here, and don’t forget to click the links.

Syria: Between a rock and a hard place

By guest author, Michael Corgan

Does the ongoing Syrian civil war have echoes of the Spanish civil war of nearly 80 years ago?

Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria.
Unnamed grave with teddy bear for fallen children in Syria. Photo by Bernd Schwabe used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

If the conflict were only between the Syrian government and rebel forces (as was true in opposing Franco), then it would be easy for liberal or humanitarian interventionists to oppose what Assad has done to his people and support the rebellion. Indeed, many have already done so.

During the Spanish civil war, as far as outsiders were concerned, there were communists versus Nazis, and a choice was unappealing on those grounds. In Syria today, outsiders of equally unsavory character and practices are intervening for their own purposes, and that makes choosing sides problematic.

Hezbollah supports Assad and Al Qaeda has an increasing role in shaping rebel efforts. How can one aid either side without aiding those Shia and Sunni extremist militant groups so fond of terrorists tactics, and so responsible, in Syria as elsewhere, for the deaths of many innocent Muslims?

As far as outside interests go, you also have the U.S. trying to assert some role in the area versus Russia, which is loath to abandon a long-time client state and lose its only overseas base.

The biggest problem is for the neighboring outsiders. Turkey can probably handle the huge influx of refugees from the fighting, but Jordan is strained and poor fractured Lebanon could fall apart as enlivened Shia-Sunni fighting spills into its land.

There seems to be no workable ending in sight. Nor even a less deadly one. The best that the watching world can do now is to take care of the refugees whose numbers continually swell.

Advantageous comparison (Moral disengagement, part 4)

Advantageous comparison is another form of moral disengagement described byUp and down arrows psychologist Albert Bandura. This mechanism is a way of trying to make one behavior look good by comparing it with a more frightful alternative.

For example, during the Vietnam War, massive destruction of the Vietnamese countryside by means of Agent Orange was portrayed as being a lot better for the Vietnamese people than being enslaved by the Communists.

One of the most familiar forms of advantageous comparison used to justify war and torture is “sacrificing a few to save thousands.” Undoubtedly, many people still believe that the dropping of atomic bombs on citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved thousands of American lives—an assumption with no real support.

Advantageous comparison became integral to “24,” a popular American television show. The program routinely justified the use of torture as essential to avoiding the greater disasters that could (ostensibly) hurt the innocent if torture had not been used.

The TV series was particularly popular among conservatives, many of whom apparently accepted the program’s message that not only is torture necessary to safeguard “national security” but also that it works.

This belief in the justifiability of a practice banned in international law flies in the face of warnings by experts on torture, including senior military and FBI officials.  These and other experts criticized “24” for misrepresenting the effectiveness of torture and contributing to the misbelief that torture is justifiable.

Kathie-Malley Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Note: This post was adapted from my previously published article in Peace Psychology (a publication of the American Psychological Association), Spring, 2009.