Tag: suicide

BEWARE THE “CIDES” OF JULY ©

Posted on by kathiemm

by Anthony J. Marsella, July 4, 2017

 Shakespeare’s oft quoted lines from Julius Caesar are well known. They are used often in conversations to remind us of the perils lurking among auspicious and inauspicious dates and places: “Beware the Ides of March.”

The lines are notable for the 15th day of Caesar’s death at the hands of those he trusted, even as he alienated their friendship. And who can forget the immortal lines: “Et tu, Brutus!” These the final mournful gasp of knowing in one’s final moments, a friend’s betrayal.

“Ides” refers to the fifteenth day of March, May, July, or October. The “Fifteenth” day was considered a day to pay off all financial debts owed.  Perhaps, however, it was also a day for personal debts of gratitude and appreciation to be repaid, lest we forget obligations to those who cared for us.  The “Thirteenth” day was used for similar purposes for the other months. “Ides” is much more complex. For my purposes, however, it is a poignant departure place for writing about “Cides,” the “Act of Killing.” 

“Cides” (Root: “Cidium” refers to the act of killing), is a term joined with many nouns to describe the intentional, deliberate, extermination by killing, murder, and slaying. The tragedy is so many things are subject to killing. “Aye, that the rub!”

I began to think of the many “Cides” following various words; in the process, I became aware of how many terms there are preceding “Cide,” and what this means for us as we use the terms each day. Too, often perhaps, we use the terms without thought or their implication.

I decided to create a graphic display to call attention to the collection of terms, rather than writing a long prose article. It is coincidental, perhaps, I prepared this article on July 4, 2017, Independence Day, the USA celebration of its founding. Coincidence! How many have died for independence?  How many have died because of the USA’s existence?

Chart 1 displays some terms associated with “Cides.” It is, in some ways, a lexicon of killing. “Killing, murder, death,” they have become commonplace across the world.  Have we become habituated to killing?

 CHART 1:

A LEXICON OF “CIDES”

  Is there a method in this piece? “Yes!”  The method is combining iconic literature, words and meanings (i.e., theoretical l lexicography), socio-political commentary, and graphic display.  Is there a purpose in this piece? “Yes!” The purpose is to share an awareness of killing, and its omnipresence in our lives.

“Killing, murder, slaying” is committed by individuals, couples, groups, societies, nations, groups of nations (allies). It is an act done for a thousand reasons, often under the aegis of “justified.” The criminality of the act, the illegality of the act, and the immorality of the act, is too often subject to controversy and debate.  In the end, something has died.

In a recent paper, entitled “Total War: Weaponizing and Exporting USA Popular Culture” (Marsella, A.J. [2017]. Transcend Media Service, March 27, 2017. https://www.transcend.org/…/2017/…total-war-weaponizing–and-exporting-usa-popular-culture-1/ I pointed out how many different ways there are to kill, many of the ways subtle and insidious. But the consequence and the motives are the same (e.g., wealth, power, position, hatred, envy, control).

A 50-year lifetime friend and colleague at the University of Hawaii, Professor Glenn Paige (1929-2017), devoted much of his life to promoting “non-killing.” In his books and talks, Professor Paige illuminated the consequences of killing, and the potential of embracing a ‘non-killing” philosophy and ideology. We spoke often and long. Here’s to you, Glenn! Here is to halting “killing, murder, slaying” everywhere.

Let us make July 4, more than a celebration of independence, let us also make it a day we pledge to stop killing in all its obvious and nuanced forms.

May our nation, on this important day, celebrate the “ideals” of our creation, and vow to halt the “violence, killing, and murder” now prevailing. Regardless of source, motive, or rationale, let us “Beware the “Cides” of July/. “ Let us do so for all days, months, years.

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D.                                                                                                     Emeritus Professor,                                                                                                                         University of Hawaii, Honolulu, Hawaii 96822 ajmarsella@gmail.comtapestry. .

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., a  member of the TRANSCEND Network, is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Hawaii, and past director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center in Honolulu. He is known nationally and internationally as a pioneer figure in the study of culture and psychopathology who challenged the ethnocentrism and racial biases of many assumptions, theories, and practices in psychology and psychiatry. In more recent years, he has been writing and lecturing on peace and social justice. He has published 15 edited books, and more than 250 articles, chapters, book reviews, and popular pieces. He can be reached at marsella@hawaii.edu.

 

 

Inconvenient memories: Veteran’s Day 2014

Posted on by kathiemm

by Guest Author Ross Caputi

cost ofwar
Iraq war protest poster showing Lancet estimate of Iraqis killed, May 28, 2008. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Random McRandomhead.

Most Americans believe Veterans Day is a day of remembrance; in reality, it’s generally a day of forgetting.

On Veterans Day, people applaud as veterans march in parades, wearing their medals and fancy uniforms. People who have never seen or smelt war’s rotting corpses bask in an atmosphere of pride and patriotism, suppressing inconvenient memories of hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq, millions in Vietnam, hundreds of thousands in Korea, and so on throughout our nation’s short and bloody history.

On Veterans Day, we are spared all the unpleasantries that might give us pause about the value or benevolence of our wars. We listen to the bands playing, but ignore the troubles faced by returning veterans. Where is the glory in PTSD, addiction, suicide?

On Veterans Day, we make believe that support for the troops is apolitical. Just like the victims of our wars, the reasons why young Americans have been asked to go to war, and the consequences of those wars are conveniently forgotten and nobody seems to notice.

On Veterans Day, we are called upon to remember America’s wars, sanitized of the harm they brought to countless victims around the world, and abstracted from their historical and political context. We are asked to support our veterans while forgetting the reality of what they participated in. It is a pleasant fairy tale, and I wish I could partake in it. But my experience as a Marine in Iraq has forever changed the way I look at war and the way I feel about being a veteran.

Let’s change the way we celebrate Veterans Day. Let’s make it a day of learning, not forgetting. Let’s be sympathetic to the ways veterans have suffered without ignoring the suffering of civilian victims. Let’s teach and learn about the wars in which our veterans have participated without glossing over the historical and political context in which they occurred. Let’s end the reflexive support for popular mythology, the jingoism, the cheer-leading, and the forgetting. Let’s refuse to encourage the next generation to follow in the footsteps of today’s veterans.

In harm’s way: women in the military

Posted on by kathiemm

We wrote in our last post about rape as a weapon of war—a weapon that is used all too often by servicemen against women serving in their own military. Today we focus more on the effects of military service on women.

Some facts:

Casualties

  • 104 U.S. servicewomen, 33 of them only 18 years old, have been killed in Iraq (as of December 2011). See their faces and learn about them here.
  • Thirty-six servicewomen have been killed in Afghanistan—along with hundreds if not thousands of Afghan women and children (as of August 24, 2012).

Mental illness

Homelessness

Limited access to benefits

Many servicemen and male veterans are also mistreated both while in the service and after discharge; we will consider some of those issues in a later post.

What does it reveal about a country when women are praised as patriots for volunteering for military service, sexually abused while in the service, and then become mentally ill and homeless following that service? What does it reveal about the current situation in our country when many working class women believe the only way they can get enough training and job experience to support themselves and a family is to put themselves in harm’s way?

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

A theft from those who hunger

Posted on by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie Malley-Morrison:  As Congress and the public debate issues regarding the U.S. budget, particularly the growing deficit and the status of the debt ceiling, we again welcome guest contributor John Hess, who writes about the financial and other consequences of war.]

Homeless veteran in Boston
Homeless veteran in Boston. Photo by Matthew Woitunski. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

Both Congress and the American public continue to ignore the warnings from earlier lovers of this country–conservative as well as liberal, military as well as civilian.

In a earlier post, I quoted from the final speech of President Dwight Eisenhower, a conservative Republican, but now I want to include a reminder from his first term: “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.”

Eisenhower’s warning was echoed in the Vietnam War years by Senator J. William Fulbright in his book The Arrogance of Power: “An excessive preoccupation with foreign relations over a long period of time is more than a manifestation of arrogance; it is a drain on the power that gave rise to it, because it diverts a nation from the sources of its strength, which are its domestic life….” (pp. 20-21).

Finally, the late Chalmers Johnson brought that warning up to date in an essay titled “Going Bankrupt,” collected in his final book Dismantling the Empire: “going into 2008, the United States found itself in the anomalous position of being unable to pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment” (p. 135).    The “time of reckoning,” he said, “is fast approaching,” unless we correct three major problems (p. 136):

“First, we are spending insane amounts of money on ‘defense’ projects that bear no relationship to the national security of the United States …. Second, we continue to believe that we can compensate for the accelerating erosion of our manufacturing base and our loss of jobs to foreign countries through massive military expenditures … Third, in our devotion to militarism (despite our limited resources) we are failing to invest in social infrastructures and other requirements for the long-term health of our country” (p. 136).

Saturday, May 21, is Armed Forces Day, a good day to reflect on the fact that perhaps nobody suffers more from our devotion to militarism than former members of the armed forces. Their return from battle is often greeted by a lack of jobs and health care; enduring physical and psychological problems pushing them into drug abuse, homelessness, assault on others, and ever-increasing rates of suicide.

Our returning warriors discover that this is a country that forgot their sacrifices once they returned home.

John Hess, Senior Lecturer in English and American Studies, University of Massachusetts, Boston