By Kathleen Malley-Morrison
If you’ve got power and you want to get people to invade some country and be prepared to kill the human beings there and risk their own lives, how do you get them to do it?
You try, by all means, usually with propaganda and the support of the corporate media, to promote people’s moral disengagement.
What is moral disengagement? It’s a set of cognitive processes, ways of thinking, that allow otherwise decent people to tolerate, or support, or participate directly in inhumane and even deadly behavior, without ruffling their feelings of moral integrity. Successful power mongers excel at mind games that get their followers morally disengaged.
Table 1 shows some well-studied forms of moral disengagement and provides examples from the war-promoting rhetoric of the second Iraq war, particularly, the second invasion of Fallujah. Here they are: pseudomoral justification (like claiming that invading Fallujah will “bring freedom & opportunity to the Iraqi people”), euphemistic labeling (calling the destruction of Fallujah a “liberation”), advantageous comparison (better to destroy one cancerous city than lose the whole country), denial of responsibility (“Our hand was forced”; disregarding consequences (portraying death and destruction by American troops in Iraq and elsewhere as heroic) ; blaming the victim and dehumanizing the other (the Iraqi resistance forces are “Satan”).
In the last decade, I recruited an international research team of more than 100 investigators to help me study moral disengagement, its predictors, correlates, and outcomes in diverse adult samples from the United States and 43 other countries around the world.
Here are a few selected examples of our findings.
- Scores on self-report rating scale measures of moral disengagement were negatively correlated with scores on compassion, forgivingness, and endorsement of human rights;
- in addition, those moral disengagement scores were positively correlated with reports of childhood maltreatment, including abuse and emotional neglect, authoritarianism, anger, and hostility.
When we analyzed arguments made by people in their own words in response to an open-ended question as to whether one country ever has a right to invade another:
- an overwhelming majority of the responses showing tolerance of one country’s right to invade another—particularly in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia– provided “pseudo-moral” justifications—like eliminating terrorists, or bringing peace and democracy
- pseudo-assistance arguments, like rescuing people from evil dictators in other lands, were a particularly popular form of pseudo-moral justifications
- Lots of people around the world said invasion was a right if done as an act of punishment for a previous invasion or wrongdoing; thus they justify invasion by denying any responsibility on the part of the attacker and attributing blame to the recipient of their vengefulness.
- In several countries, respondents who had been in military service, as compared to their nonmilitary counterparts, gave significantly more responses deferring responsibility onto the international community. That is, if an organization like the UN or NATO says some groups are behaving badly, then, it is argued, invading that group’s country is legitimate. If not God, then at least the Coalition of the Willing can be on your side, or you’re only following orders.
- In the UK/ANGLO and middle east countries military respondents also argued that self-defense or preemptive strikes were acceptable justifications for invading other countries.
In conclusion, if you’re curious about the extent to which the arms industry and other war profiteers manipulate the national rhetoric to promote moral disengagement, don’t focus just on media statements concerning North Korea, China, Syria, and Russia, examine also the verbal attacks on the young American students seeking sane gun policies. Don’t just follow the money; follow the power. You’ll find them in the same bed, plotting war.