Tomorrow’s Wars: A Work In Progress

 

Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License Author= UN Security Council

 

This is the first in a new two-part series by  guest author Dr. Majed Ashy.

Often, the bloody destructive assaults known euphemistically as “armed conflicts”  grow out of the operation of at least three factors. Grievances, real or perceived, need to be present in the relationships of two or more sides. These grievances can be due to historical, social, political, racial, religious, economical, territorial, or other injustices that have not been addressed or are simply denied.

 A common second factor is the occurrence of an event with the power to ignite the conflict—e.g., the killing of an archbishop (impetus to World War I), the shooting down of an airplane with a top official (impetus to the Rwandan genocide).

 A third factor is the presence of leaders who will take advantage of the event in order to escalate the conflict and stimulate destructive emotions through their speeches, propaganda, appeals to deep instincts and fears, and use of historical and current symbols and analogies to whip people up into readiness to commit violence.

Another factor, probably less well recognized, is the rampant experiencing of armed conflict by children and adolescents.  The human brain is in a state of elasticity during the years up through adolescence. Various neurological developmental processes are influenced by environmental events. Stresses due to the trauma of war and violence, experienced and witnessed, have hormonal and other physiological consequences that affect various neuro-developmental processes. In my view, the wars of the past decades contributed to the brutality we witness today, and I believe that the wars of today are the factories that will produce the hate and brutality of the future. Unless we stop them.

 

 Majed Ashy, Ph.D. is an Assistant professor in psychology, Merrimack College and a Research fellow in psychiatry, DBPRP at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

 

Globalization for good (Globalization, Part 2)

Arab Spring collage
Arab Spring collage, from Wikimedia Commons. Used under CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Liberal economists—the ones ballyhooing about the benefits of unfettered capitalism–have gleefully co-opted the term “globalization.” [See Forbes article]. It is this form of globalization–the one of which the multinational corporations and financial institutions are so proud–that has kept multitudes of people in near or literal slavery.

Globalization, however, involves much more than economic profits and losses, ruthless greed and numbing poverty.

Consider, for example, the United Nations. Lots of folks argue that it is an unwieldy bureaucracy failing to fulfill its mission, yet it has globalized the idea of human rights. This  achievement—anathema to the international corporate power structure–helped to change the face of the globe, and helped to free the colonies that survived not just the First but also the Second World War.

Moreover, that process has continued. Global transmission of values such as human rights, democracy, and self-determination has been fostered by globalization of systems of communication, including the social media.

The globalization of forms of quick communication is a double-edged sword, however. It can be used to promote violence as in the Rwandan genocide. It can be used by governments to spy on everyone, as in the case of the National Security Agency (NSA).  But it can also be used to promote nonviolent resistance to vicious dictators, as in much of the Arab Spring movement, and to alert people around the world to horrors being perpetrated far from their homes.

Globalization is like knowledge—it can be used for good or ill. Our goal should be globalization for good.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Systems so perfect

By guest author Mike Corgan

“dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”

Man frightened by specter of national spying.
Image by Carlos Latuff, copyright free. (FRA refers to Swedish wiretapping law).

C.S. Lewis wrote those words for his verse play The Rock, but they could just as well apply to U.S. foreign policy and security affairs. (Witness the current daily National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping bombshells.)

We have always been dazzled by our technological prowess when it comes to security. In the American Revolution, the British had muskets, but we had rifles. The Civil War had aerial observation, repeating rifles, railroads, and steam-powered warships. In World War I, every machine gun on all sides had at least one American patent; in World War II, we had long-range bombers that could deliver the atomic bomb.

Nowadays we can listen to everyone everywhere.

Maybe we should take a lesson from our use of the atomic bomb. It took awhile, but many of us finally realized that this was something awesomely and terribly different. In spite of some impassioned calls to do so, neither the U.S. nor any other nation has used nuclear weapons since World War II ended in 1945. In my Navy days we used to deride “capabilities in search of a mission.”

Perhaps we can learn that our ability to eavesdrop on everyone, like our ability to deploy nuclear weapons, has a serious downside. We ought not to use this “system so perfect” everywhere without clear and agreed-upon restraints. Yes, terrorists do present a serious threat to our society–but so does the breakdown of trust between citizens and government and among those who should be our allies and partners in fighting this scourge.

We have incredibly effective, near-perfect systems, like “smart” weapons, drones, electronic intercept equipment, and so on. We humans need to be good and smart, too.