The U.S. government’s assault on children

We’ve heard considerable rhetoric recently about the vileness of subjecting children to poison gas–and vile it is. So are other means by which children are maimed and murdered, and the government of the United States is complicit in vile acts against the world’s children.

For example, being burned to death–as happened to thousands of children in the World War II firebombing of cities in Japan and Germany–is ghastly, whether it kills or scars for life.

Being born with birth defects related to Agent Orange, or being killed or maimed by unexploded ordinance (a continuing scourge for children in Vietnam) is a legacy of U.S. government intervention.

An article in the Independent reports, “Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.”

According to a 2012 Children’s Defense Fund report [opens as pdf], “In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years.” Any government that does not fight the gun lobby is complicit.

There is an international chemical weapons convention to which our government has alluded in trying to make its case for bombing Syria.

There is also a convention that prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines, which the U.S. has failed to ratify. How does a government that has authorized widespread “collateral damage” have the moral authority to unilaterally punish other violators of international conventions?

Let us hope and pray that the current administration listens to the millions of American voices calling for a nonviolent alternative to raining terror on children and other innocent civilians in yet another Middle Eastern country.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Psychoanalyzing human aggression and war

Uncle Sam poster, Psychoanalysts have had a long interest in war and other forms of human aggression. For example, the “father” of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1915), horrified by the outbreak of World War I, argued that the violence was convincing evidence that “A belligerent state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual.”

Decades later, appalled by violence in the United States (which he identified as “the most violent of industrial societies”), psychoanalyst James Gilligan placed considerable blame on people’s moralistic motivation to punish others. In his view, rigid and hierarchical social structures produce shame in the downtrodden, and those victims strive to replace shame with pride. He cites German resurgence in the post-World War I era as an example of how punishment and shame can generate appalling violence.

More recently, an Israeli scholar, Niza Yanay, offers another psychoanalytic analysis of the psychological foundations of violence. In The Ideology of Hatred: The Psychic Power of Discourse, she explores the unconscious forces and conflicts that underlie political hatred, which she views as an ideology of power and control.

Disillusioned, like Freud, with governing groups, Yanay comments “Sovereign states and groups are usually motivated to construct a humane face and a just image for themselves” (p. 99). She goes on to suggest that hatred helps aggressors maintain their image of goodness by turning the victims into objects of blame deserving hatred.

What do you think of these psychoanalytic perspectives? Do you think governments seek a monopoly on violence and will commit acts of aggression that would be declared illegal when done by individuals? And do they try to present a “humane face” while using propaganda to promote hatred?

Kathie Malley-Morrison and Majed Ashy

An earlier version of this two-part review was recently published in the American
Psychological Association journal, PsycCRITIQUES, August 2013.

Then came Hitler (Quaker reflections, Part 2)

A continuing series by guest author Jean Gerard

I was raised in the early 20th century by a conservative middle class family.  My father educated himself and became a teacher of geology and geography in a large high school in Pittsburgh.

Unemployed during Great Depression
Store vacancies & unemployment during Great Depression. Photo by Dorothea Lange, in public domain.

Dependent upon coal and steel, Pittsburgh suffered from strikes, pollution, and racial and class tensions among social groups– the very rich, middle class professionals, and many immigrant poor.

Children observed or experienced discrimination every day:  the Italian boy who couldn’t speak or read English; the Jewish girl with the violin and the heavy accent; the eight Catholic kids who moved in next door. “I don’t know what you see in those people!” my older sister used to say.

Thousands of “working stiffs” were slaving for next to nothing in the mines and mills, under a system that, in spite of temporary reforms here and there, would persist and eventually destroy the very idea of “liberty and justice for all” to which I swore allegiance every morning.

During the Great Depression, teachers were lucky to keep their jobs. Consequently, every Saturday my father bought large sacks of groceries and gave them away to sad-faced, lost men slouching on sidewalks.

By the time Franklin Roosevelt  came on the scene, my family was split by the politics of middle-class prejudice. I came to see how changes of the New Deal improved the lives of some of my friends even while they enraged others.

Then came Hitler, screeching over radio static from Germany. His ovens turned his country (and the land of my ancestors) into a living hell. By the mid-1930s he had almost made a Communist out of me – but not quite.

I sympathized, but didn’t join any political party because I was too confused and individualistic to join anything. It never crossed my mind that I had the same instinctive fear of consequences that had kept Hitler’s people voiceless–and now again has brought most of us Americans to a state of voluntary amnesia.

I was a political coward. I refused to take responsibility for fear of risking my safety.  I remained an observer with a guilty conscience.