Here’s the facts, ma’am. Just the facts, sir. The crushingly vivid facts are available, but you don’t see them on the corporate media. Those media serve the military-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex benefits from death and destruction. You don’t. Nobody does in the long run.
Please watch the trailer again and again and ask yourself, “Can I really do nothing? Can I turn a blind eye on the carnage my government is perpetrating in my name, in the phony names of peace and democracy? Can America be great while allowing a few powerful interests to profit from the murder of innocent men, women, and children elsewhere?” There is absolutely no moral justification for what is being done.
Watch the trailer. Find and watch the whole film. Forward the links. Search for the voices of peace. Fight despair. Identify and support the voices of peace. Vote for the advocates of peace, the opponents of war. You can do it and sleep better at night.
And if you need more facts, read Andrew Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East. Facing the facts is a bitter pill to swallow but if we don’t all take our medicine, the murderous epidemic being spread by the people in power who control our country and its resources will envelop everyone.
Protest at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK), Terminal 4, in New York City, against Donald Trump’s executive order signed in January 2017 banning citizens of seven countries from traveling to the United States (the executive order is also known as “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States”). January 28, 2017. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Rhododendrites.
Note from Kathie: Wherever possible, we attempt on this blog to provide psychological perspectives on violence and nonviolence. Today, we share this slightly condensed Open Letter from Canadian Psychologists regarding Donald Trump’s travel ban.
“We as Canadian professors of psychology and practitioners condemn the executive order signed on January 27, 2017, to ban people from specific countries from entering the U.S. We also condemn the right wing rhetoric, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and xenophobic actions that are dominating political discourse in the U.S. and some European countries.
[We] believe that the following principles have been well-established:
1. When people feel secure and accepted in their society, they will tend to be open, tolerant and inclusive with respect to others. Conversely, when people are discriminated against, they are likely to respond with negative attitudes and hostility towards those who undermine their right. Rejection breeds rejection; acceptance breeds acceptance.
2. When individuals of different cultural backgrounds have opportunities to interact with each other on a level playing field, such equal status contacts usually lead to greater mutual understanding and acceptance. Creating barriers between groups and individuals reinforces ignorance, and leads to mistrust and hostility.
3. When individuals have opportunities to endorse many social identities, and to be accepted in many social groups, they usually have greater levels of personal and social wellbeing. Individuals who are denied acceptance within many social groups usually suffer poorer personal and collective well-being.
In addition to supporting these three principles, we note the following:
A. Global humanitarian crises do not happen overnight. Such chaos begins in small steps, which may appear benign, somewhat acceptable and even justifiable under given conditions. The world witnessed too many humanitarian crises during the last century.
Not speaking out against such events right at the outset contributed to the escalation of evil and its dire consequences. The current immigration ban applied to seven predominantly Muslim countries (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, and Yemen) may not be felt by majority of Canadians. However, it can contribute to the escalation of the unfair treatment of a wide range of groups.
B. Studies show that blatant “us vs. them” categorizations contribute to prejudice, discrimination, group polarization and intergroup antipathy. We argue that it is in no one’s interest to narrow the membership of “us” (e.g., Canadian, American, or European) and to widen the membership of “them” (e.g., Muslim, Mexican, members of the LGBT, feminist, and refugee communities). Such polarization leads to fear, rejection, and discrimination, with the negative consequences noted in the three principles described above.”
Signed: John Berry, Ph.D., Queen’s University; Gira Bhatt, Ph.D., Kwantlen Polytechnic University; Yvonne Bohr, Ph.D., C.Psych. York University; Richard Bourhis, Ph.D. Université du Québec à Montréal; Keith S. Dobson, Ph.D., R. Psych., University of Calgary; Janel Gauthier, Ph.D., Université Laval; Jeanne M. LeBlanc, Ph.D., ABPP, R. Psych.; Kimberly Noels, PhD. University of Alberta; Saba Safdar, Ph.D., University of Guelph; Marta Young, Ph.D., University of Ottawa; Jeanne M. LeBlanc, Ph.D., ABPP, R. Psych.
Vandalized cast of Rodin’s Thinker, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. In the public domain. Author: Daderot. July 2008.
by Kathie MM
Trying to make sense out of human behavior, figuring out what makes people tick, is not just a concern of psychologists and social scientists. It seems to be a pretty widespread human desire. Moreover, given mankind’s long history of inhumanity to fellow humans, and the risks of such behaviors pretty much destroying all of us in this nuclear age, understanding that propensity to inhumane behavior becomes crucially important.
One way of understanding the differences between people who seem to endorse and promote inhumane behavior and people who risk personal safety to help rescue others from violence and cruelty is provided by theories of moral disengagement and engagement, often discussed on this blog—e.g., here, and here, and here .
In this brief new series on moral disengagement and engagement, I offer examples of major types of moral disengagement and contrasting examples of the corollary forms of moral engagement, using excerpts from speeches of two well-known contemporary politicians. My goal is not to get you to label one speaker as a monster and one as a model of perfection, but to consider the potential implications of the different ways of thinking they are promoting.
Examples of morally disengaged versus morally engaged ways of thinking and arguing
Moral disengagement: Pseudomoral justifications: “When Iran, when they circle our beautiful destroyers with their little boats, and they make gestures at our people that they shouldn’t be allowed to make, they will be shot out of the water.”
Moral engagement: Principled moral reasoning: [One] of my favorite passages of scripture is, ‘in as much as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ Matthew 25:40…. The passage teaches about God in each of us, that we are bound to each other and called to act. Not to sit, not to wait, but to act—all of us together.
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Moral disengagement: Euphemistic language: “The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families.”
Moral engagement: Realistic language/ Telling it like it is: Arizona’s SB 1070 [immigration law] is a stupid law — it is stupid, it is racist, it is unconstitutional and it should be struck down…Let’s say it loud and clear to the Republicans: If you truly want to do something about immigration, then get out of the way, get on the right side of history and let us pass comprehensive immigration reform.”
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Moral disengagement: Misrepresenting, minimizing, or denying the consequences of one’s violence: “I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me… I would bomb the sh**t out of them.”
Moral engagement: Addressing consequences: The system is rigged….Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.
Pretend you are a neutral observer in another country listening to this rhetoric in English. What are your thoughts about the different ways listeners might be influenced by these arguments?
Professor Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong, at Tu Du Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital is pictured with a group of handicapped children, most of them victims of Agent Orange. Author: Alexis Duclos. In the public domain.
5 – Vietnam was America’s ally in World War Two. After Japan’s defeat, Vietnam persistently sought American friendship. Vietnam was, briefly, an independent and united country with a newly written constitution and plans for democratic elections. If post-war America was paranoid about Chinese communist expansion into Southeast Asia, no better ally could be had than the Vietnamese, who had fought the Chinese for two thousand years. Yet, shortly after Japan’s surrender, President Truman helped the French do to the Vietnamese what the Nazis had just done to them.
6 – Note the moral contradiction in saying that German, Italian, and Japanese imperialism is not OK, but that British, French, and American imperialism is just fine. Most American citizens remain oblivious to the ethical absurdity of presidents saying for decades that we have to support dictatorships to make the world safe for democracy.
7 – The Eisenhower Administration, in direct violation of the Constitution, promoted the insertion of “In God We Trust” on America’s coins. The Eisenhower Administration walked out of the Geneva Peace Conference of 1954 after the Vietnamese won their eight-year war against the French; then the U.S. undermined the 1956 Vietnamese democratic election guaranteed by the Conference, installing in a mostly Buddhist “South Vietnam,” an American financed Catholic puppet dictator who immediately began killing and imprisoning those Vietnamese who fought the eight-year war of independence – 1946 to 1954 – against the French.
8 – The Eisenhower Administration overthrew social democracy in Iran in 1953, supporting a subsequent, 26-year dictatorship that profoundly contributed to Middle Eastern hatred of America. Eisenhower’s CIA did same in Guatemala in 1954.
9 – Nelson Mandela spent 26 years in a South African prison thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency’s informing the South African apartheid government of Mandela’s whereabouts, leading to his arrest and imprisonment.
10 – After the assassination of President Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had a full two months to respond favorably to a South Vietnamese call for peace and the withdrawal of America’s military. Instead of making peace possible, Lyndon Johnson did what President Kennedy never did: he launched a full scale war, during which, in violation of international law, and constituting an indisputable war crime, America sprayed 20 million tons of Agent Orange across the Vietnamese landscape, and dropped more bombs on Vietnam than all the bombs dropped everywhere in World War Two.
Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.
