Holocaust – Page 4 – Engaging Peace

Creating a culture of peace (Stories of engagement)

Posted on September 20, 2012September 9, 2012 by kathiemm

[Editor’s note: In recognition of International Day of Peace on September 21, we offer this story of engagement from guest author Dot Walsh, a lifelong peace activist.]

International Peace Day poster — International Day of Peace poster. Used with permission.

Being asked to write something about my life journey on the path of peacemaking is both humbling and challenging.

What I am most sure about is that the journey has always been about people.

When I recall memorable moments in different situations, it is the connection to a human face and story that has most meaning.

Reading of the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust and the devastation as a result of war fueled my belief that there must be different answers to world problems.

The Vietnam War found me married with a small baby who went with me to meetings and marches. It was then I knew that I could only embrace the views of pacifism; there was no good war.

Later in life I was introduced to the prison system in Massachusetts, first as a volunteer in the Norfolk Fellowship program and then employed in several different situations. I saw the connection between the violence of war and the violence of poverty.

Spending time working with the women at Rosie’s Place and the clients at a treatment on demand organization helped me to learn more about the roots of violence.

With Mother Teresa’s visit to Walpole prison in 1988, I found the connection to a place that honored the principles of non-violence. The Peace Abbey in Sherborn, MA, became my new home.

During my years working at the Peace Abbey, its director, Lewis Randa, introduced me to people whose lives of courage were inspiring. Sometimes it was the unknown people in everyday life who planted seeds of peace and went about unnoticed as well as those who were famous.

Each has a place in the transformation of humanity from violence to non-violence.

Since the closing of the Peace Abbey, I have joined with Dr. Mathieu Bermingham and The Center for Peace and Well-Being to continue my quest.

We can have a world that values every act of kindness. We can nurture and educate everyone and create a culture of peace.

Dot Walsh

Evil by any other name

Posted on January 23, 2012January 22, 2012 by kathiemm

Review of Simon Baron-Cohen’s The science of evil: On empathy and the origins of cruelty

In his Acknowledgments, Baron-Cohen begins by saying, “This book isn’t for people with a sensitive disposition” (p. xi). It is a fair warning.

His first chapter is particularly distressing, with descriptions of numerous barbarities. If you need to be persuaded that human beings have provided many examples of man’s inhumanity to man besides those of the Nazi Holocaust, then read it all; otherwise you may prefer to skip some details.

Probably all of us can give examples of human behavior that we view as “evil,” but Baron-Simon suggests that by calling a behavior “evil” we tend to shunt it off into the moral domain rather than recognizing that evil behavior, like other behavior, can be studied scientifically and perhaps thereby become modifiable or preventable.

The key to understanding why people behave cruelly, according to Baron-Cohen, is empathy—and particularly deficits in empathy. To explain how “empathizing mechanisms” work, Baron-Cohen takes readers on a tour of the “empathy circuit” in the brain.

Although he uses scientific language to identify parts of the brain that provide a neurological basis for empathy deficits, his book is not overly technical; it is accessible to the educated lay reader.

Baron-Cohen describes three types of personality disorder associated with deficits in empathy—psychopathic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder. The development of each type of personality disorder is associated with some form of abuse, neglect, or rejection in childhood.

Although Baron-Cohen emphasizes the strong link between childhood maltreatment and empathy deficits, he also suggests that empathy can and should be developed, and concludes with the story of two men, a Palestinian and an Israeli, both of whom lost their sons in the Intifada. Together the two of them tour synagogues and mosques promoting the importance of empathy and raising funds for their charity, The Parents Circle – Families Forum for Israelis and Palestinians.

This is a very readable book despite the frequent references to brain structures and circuitry. The message is crucial: empathy is probably essential to human survival.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology

Warning: Do not behave like our perpetrators

Posted on March 31, 2011March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

[Note from Kathie MM: Today we welcome guest contributor John Hess, who has been an anti-war activist for 40 years, and worked for over 30 years in the construction business. He is currently a full-time faculty member in English and American Studies at UMass Boston, where he is a member of the executive committee for the faculty-staff union.]

I found this video the other day and thought it well worth passing on. It is a fascinating comment on the situation in Palestine/Israel from Dr. Hajo Meyer, a Jewish Holocaust survivor.

Meyer observes that Jews were “the pioneers of interhuman ethics” and that he “wants to wake the world” to speak out against the horrible treatment of the Palestinians by Israel.

One of the enduring strengths of Judaism is its strong moral tradition and it is in this tradition that Meyer urges Israelis “not to behave like our perpetrators” (the Nazis) toward the Palestinians and calls on the world to speak out against this behavior.

Watching the video led me to think about both the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine/Israel today. It seems to me they are in some important ways linked, so I took a long look at a book I haven’t glanced in quite awhile, The Cunning of History by Richard L. Rubenstein.

The Holocaust, Rubenstein said, was “a thoroughly modern exercise in total domination that could only have been carried out by an advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy” (p. 4).

Rubenstein provides a warning that it is well worth heeding today: “One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization” (p. 21).

In his view, “The Holocaust was an expression of some of the most significant political, moral, religious and demographic tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. The Holocaust cannot be divorced from the very same culture of modernity that produced the two world wars and Hitler” (p. 6).

What parallels do you see between the Holocaust and the situation in Palestine–or even other parts of the world?

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

Exonerating or pardoning the victim (Moral engagement, part 9)

Posted on December 16, 2010December 22, 2010 by kathiemm

The form of moral engagement that we call “exonerating or pardoning the victim” is in many ways a logical outgrowth of perspective taking and empathy. If you are able to put yourself in the shoes of another, you become more able to understand the ways in which people who behaved inhumanely may be no more inhumane and evil, and have no more desire to kill and maim, than you.

Failure to pardon can have disastrous effects. After World War I, there was no exonerating or pardoning of any of the people in the Axis powers by the Allies. Instead, the heavy load of reparations, imposed poverty, and humiliation of all Germans–whether they had been directly involved in the war or not–contributed directly to the rise of Hitler and World War II.

After World War II, the victorious powers proved that they, for at least that one generation, had learned the lesson of World War I, and avoided acting on desires for punishment and retaliation, working instead to rebuild Japan and Germany.

Perhaps the highest level of moral engagement can be found in individuals who were themselves victimized but have found the courage to forgive their oppressors; a perfect example of this level and type of moral engagement can be found in Nelson Mandela. In a later post, we will provide a review of the film Invictus, a powerful illustration of Mandela’s forgiveness program, carried out in the context o f preparation for a World Cup rugby match.

The following movie review by our guest blogger, Mimi Maritz, illustrates these themes of exonerating and pardoning in another film.

Review of “Forgiving Dr. Mengele”
This documentary tells the story of Holocaust concentration camp survivor, Eva. Like her twin sister Miriam, Eva was subjected to excruciating and nearly fatal experiments by Dr. Mengele, the notorious prison camp doctor, yet she came to pardon her former oppressors.

Through her search to help Miriam discover which drug Dr. Mengele injected to stunt her kidney growth, Eva met face-to-face with other Nazis involved in the Holocaust. Her search led her to realize that the only way to move forward and live life without regret was by forgiving those who had harmed her and millions of others.

Eva argues that to avoid being victims for the rest of their lives, the survivors of victimization must free themselves from suffering, and that the only way to do this is by accepting the past and forgiving the transgressors.

By forgiving, Eva does not mean forgetting; she is continually spreading her story to all who will listen. When another survivor says to Eva “I am unable to smile deeply from my heart… I do not know how to be happy,” Eva declares that we have the right to live without pain and we do not need permission to start healing our hearts.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology, with Mimi Maritz