Thomas Jefferson – Engaging Peace

TO ENGAGE OR NOT TO ENGAGE – THAT IS THE QUESTION

Posted on January 9, 2019March 9, 2021 by kathiemm

_{San Francisco protesters of the U.S. immigration ban hold signs reading “Imagine All The People” and “People For Peace”. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Author: Pax Ahimsa Gethen}

Part Two: BREAKING THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION

by Stefan Schindler

Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

How do wars start? Politicians lie to journalists, then believe what they read.

Karl Kraus

The battles of the Sixties may someday come to seem merely an early skirmish in a conflict whose dimensions we have yet to grasp.

Mike Marqusee

President Donald Trump makes a telling point when he refers to the mainstream news media as “fake news.” There’s a lot of truth in his accusation, the dimensions of which ought to be honestly explored. Behold: those dimensions have indeed been explored, with awesome authenticity and shocking revelations, by Michael Parenti, Howard Zinn, Gore Vidal, Lewis Lapham, and Noam Chomsky, all of whom ought to have won a Nobel Peace Prize and a Pulitzer Prize for Literature. They have long been denied such recognition. Had their insights been widely discussed in the U.S. “marketplace of ideas,” Nixon, Reagan, Cheney-Bush and Trump would never have risen to the heights of power.

The elephantiastical lies of the Republican Party – for example: American-trained death squads in Central America are “freedom fighters;” Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons; global warming is a “liberal hoax;” mega-tax-breaks for the mega-rich will make everybody happy and secure – such lies too often succeed thanks to a criminally complicit Democratic Party, a mainstream news media owned by a handful of Republican oligarchs, an historically illiterate citizen population who (in Noam Chomsky’s astute observation) “don’t know they don’t know,” and an educational system designed primarily to ignorate, manipulate, stupefy and confuse.

When President Trump slings his accusation of “fake news” at American journalists – usually exempting the Fox News Network owned by right-wing Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, and championed by Newt Gingrich – he only does so in order to lie about his lies.

And why not? It worked for Ronald Reagan, who turned “liberal” into a dirty word, perpetuating the myth of America’s “liberal media.”

That Gingrich and Murdoch succeeded in turning American political discourse into a poisonous swamp is largely the fault of the traditional American mainstream news media, which perpetuates the ignoration that is the primary function of American education.

Thomas Jefferson recognized the problem, noting: “A country cannot long remain ignorant and free.” American citizens have lost more freedoms than they know, thanks to the most unpatriotic act in American history: the post-9/11 Congressional passing of the unread 340 pages of the Cheney-Bush “USA Patriot Act.”

Democracy cannot survive the shredding of civil rights, nor can it long endure sophistry and deception. It might be worthwhile, then, to pause a moment to reflect upon the words truth and trust. In his book On the Meaning of Human Being, Richard Oxenberg notes:

The English word ‘truth’ is related to the Middle English ‘troth,’ whose principal meaning is ‘trust’ (to be-troth someone … is to enter into a relation of trust ….) A truthful account, then, is one that is maximally trustworthy. … That Plato had [such an] understanding of truth is evident from his association of the true and the good. [The true is good – has maximal value – because it is worth our trust.]

To restore truth and trust in American social discourse and electoral politics, it is necessary to oppose the Weapons of Mass Dysfunction – deception, distortion, distraction – employed by the National Security State to bind its citizens with chains of illusion.

Let us give profound thanks that progress toward honesty and enlightenment is now being made. Although fraught with danger, and subject to abuse, the internet has nevertheless become a major instrument for awakening, as evidenced by websites like Common Dreams, Political Animal Magazine, and Engaging Peace.

This is a timely breakthrough in communication, enhancing solidarity among peacemakers and justice-seekers in the present conflict-ridden crucible of history.

John Le Carre provides context:

In our supposed ideological rectitude, we sacrificed our compassion to the great god of indifference. We protected the strong against the weak, and we perfected the art of the public lie. We made enemies of decent reformers and friends of the most disgusting potentates. And we scarcely paused to ask ourselves how much longer we could defend our society by these means and remain a society worth defending.

Having been betrayed by a corrupt political system, we are now in the early stages of America’s third Civil War. The second Civil War was embodied in The Spirit of The Sixties, when the civil rights and anti-war movements – quietly but greatly aided by Harry Belafonte and Marlon Brando – coalesced into an anti-establishment revolution, emphasizing peace, justice, gender rights, Earth Day, holistic health, nuclear disarmament, egalitarian economics, and authentically edifying education.

The Reagan counter-revolution succeeded in crushing that national outburst of activism, hope, and pragmatic idealism. It was aided in doing so by the pseudo-liberal wing of the Democratic Party, embodied in the Trilateral Commission, which in 1975 published The Crisis of Democracy. The crisis? Citizen activism in the body politic, hoping to influence a government supposedly “of, by, and for the people.” Citizen participation in the functioning of democracy was, and still is, considered outrageous by what C. Wright Mills called “the power elite.”

Yet citizen activism was the origin and impetus for the American Revolution; for the anti-slavery “abolitionist” movement; for the women’s-right-to-vote “suffragette” movement; and for the 1960s and 1970s anti-war and civil rights movements. Today, with an echo of Thomas Paine’s “these are the times that try men’s souls,” citizen insistence on a just society remains our only hope for democracy, peace, and ecological sanity.

To engage or not to engage in self-education, global citizenship, and active resistance to the forces of mega-wealth and tyranny – that is the question which every citizen now faces, and upon which the future of our children and grandchildren depends.

Stefan Schindler is the co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection; a Board Member of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey; and author of America’s Indochina Holocaust: The History and Global Matrix of The Vietnam War. His forthcoming book is entitled Buddha’s Political Philosophy.

Seize the day! Creatively maladjust! Pt. 2.

Posted on January 22, 2015January 22, 2015 by kathiemm

By Guest Author Dr. Deborah Belle

Economic inequality is an excellent predictor of just about every physical, emotional, and social ill that social scientists measure. More unequal nations have lower life expectancies, higher infant mortality rates, more homicides, poorer math and literacy scores, more teenage pregnancies and births, more obesity, more mental illness, more drug and alcohol addiction, more incarceration, and less economic mobility than more equal nations.

The United States, the developed world’s most unequal major nation, ranks at or near the bottom on all of these indicators of the quality of our lives. Moreover, this pattern is replicated among the 50 U.S. states. The most equal states consistently outperform the least equal states on a variety of indices of well-being. Nor are the negative effects of economic inequality limited to the poor. Rather, persons of all social classes suffer more in unequal nations or states than their social class peers in places of more equality.

The deadly effects of income inequality appear to be due to the stresses of life in a winner-take-all economy, losses in social cohesion and trust, and the skewing of social policies in favor of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and the middle class. Public spending for education is lower and economic assistance to poor parents is more meager in U.S. states with higher levels of income inequality. Not surprisingly, children in more unequal states show lower levels of educational achievement and high school completion than their peers from more egalitarian states.

Where there is great inequality, the government is often mobilized to repress efforts to reverse that inequality, as we saw in the brutal suppression of the Civil Rights Movement of Dr. King’s time and the Occupy movement in recent years.

Nevertheless, these problems can be solved. As labor leader Richard Trumpka recently said “We are tired of people talking about inequality as if nothing can be done. The answer is simple: Raise the wages of the 90 percent of Americans whose wages today are lower than they were in 1997.” Plus raise the top income tax rate, enact a transaction fee on stock market transactions, and restore laws keeping vast sums of private wealth out of our elections.

Given the stranglehold of the wealthy on our political system, enacting such measures probably will require the kind of social movement that toppled Jim Crow half a century ago. But it can be done.

As Dr. King said, “our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream’; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. …’”

“Through such creative maladjustment,” King concluded, “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.”

Deborah Belle is a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. Her research focuses on the impact of poverty and inequality on individual mental health and family functioning, the ways adults and children make sense of poverty, wealth, and economic inequality, and the stresses that arise at the intersection of paid employment and family life. She is also interested in gender differences in social behavior and teaches courses on social psychology, the psychology of women, and the psychology of families. Her posts are excerpts from a speech given at Boston University January 19, 2015.

Who are the real patriots?

Posted on June 25, 2012June 26, 2012 by kathiemm

How about Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and John Penn, who were among the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence?

Liberty Bell. Photo by Serguey, used under CC Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

What did these patriots say about the ethical principles and human rights that underlay the formation of a new nation?

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.“

For a true patriot, a true conservative, these words provide a mantra or creed to live by. They are an ethical commitment echoed in the final phrase of the Pledge of Allegiance that all Americans are expected to know and honor: “with liberty and justice for all.”

Our early patriots would be ashamed of the hypocrisy of generations of Americans who call themselves conservatives and/or patriots but who have trampled on the rights of others while promoting their own agendas.

Why do I raise these issues now? Because it is almost July 4, the day we celebrate the endorsement by those early patriots of the Declaration of Independence.

We the people of the United States have a great deal of work to do if we are going to honor the task that our forefathers and foremothers set forth: liberty and justice for all.

Our armed forces fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other parts of the world were not sent there by our leaders for patriotic reasons.

Killing and maiming men, women, and children may appear to those leaders to strengthen the position of the U.S. government in the Middle East and elsewhere; however, such acts of war are more likely to endanger than to ensure the life, liberty, and happiness not only of victims of American aggression but also of Americans themselves.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Towards greater moral engagement

Posted on January 6, 2011April 18, 2021 by kathiemm

Moral engagement requires moral agency–active engagement in resisting pressures and justifications for behaving inhumanely, and proactive efforts to engage in and promote humane behavior. Key contributors to moral agency include humanizing the other, and empathizing with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of the other.

Poster: Free Manning — Poster designed by Eric Gulliver, 2011

A noteworthy example of someone who courageously stuck his neck out to protest inhumane behavior is U.S. Army PFC Bradley Manning. We recommend that you read all you can about this serviceman and decide which mechanisms fit him or whoever is the WikiLeaks whistle blower who released the video of the helicopter attack on civilians and the Reuters newsmen.

Moral engagement does not come easy. Manning has been imprisoned and allegedly tortured for his whistle blowing activities. On a lesser scale, humanizing members of a group that is reviled by members of your own group can make you unpopular and put you at risk. Empathizing with people who are despised by your peers can be psychologically painful and socially dangerous.

However, there are also high costs to moral disengagement. Wars are increasingly followed by large numbers of suicides and cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in their former participants—a likely reflection of the “moral injury” experienced by those former participants because of what they did to other human beings. (For more information on moral injury in veterans, see the work of Brett Litz.)

Movement from moral disengagement to engagement is possible. Servicemen who went to Vietnam were well-indoctrinated in morally disengaged reasoning. Yet many became morally engaged in the face of the horrendous inhumanity they witnessed and in which they were ordered to participate. The active anti-war movement that spread within the armed forces helped bring that war to an end.

Today, veterans against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are working tirelessly for an end to those wars. Consider what you can do to support them and engage in peace-promoting activities. For example, read and consider adding your name to the Open Letter of Reconciliation and Responsibility to the Iraqi People by Iraq Veterans Against the War.

If you love democracy and appreciate your freedoms, remember the words of Thomas Jefferson: “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” Remember also how many times yesterday’s “enemies” have become today’s allies. Reconciliation is always possible.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology