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Robert Jay Lifton on How Climate Change Joins Nuclear War in Threatening Human Survival
After advocating against nuclear weapons for decades, the leading American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has recently focused on the global threat posed by climate change. Last year, he wrote a piece in The New York Times comparing the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s to the climate justice movement of today. "People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren," Lifton said. One of the nation’s best-known psychiatrists, Lifton joins us to discuss the parallels between the threats of nuclear weapons and global warming, and the growing public awareness to meet the challenges they pose.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As new evidence emerges over the pivotal role of psychologists in the CIA’s torture program, we’re joined by one of the nation’s best-known psychiatrists, Robert Jay Lifton. For the past five decades, he has written extensively on the psychological dimensions of war, from the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, to doctors who aided Nazi crimes, to nuclear war. In 1967, Robert Jay Lifton won a National Book Award for his work, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. In 1970, he would testify before a Senate committee about the Vietnam War. He warned about the need to help rehumanize returning veterans into society. He said the veteran, quote, "returns as a tainted intruder ... likely to seek continuing outlets for a pattern of violence to which they have become habituated." In 1986, he published the seminal book, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. Last night, Robert Jay Lifton spoke here in New York at the PEN World Voices Festival about another genocide, the Armenian genocide of 1915, and Turkish efforts to rewrite history.
AMY GOODMAN: For decades, Robert Jay Lifton has also been a leading critic of nuclear weapons and more recently has focused on the global threat posed by climate change. Last year, he wrote a piece in The New York Times comparing the nuclear freeze movement of the 1980s to the climate justice movement of today. He wrote, quote, "People came to feel that it was deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to engage in nuclear war, and are coming to an awareness that it is deeply wrong, perhaps evil, to destroy our habitat and create a legacy of suffering for our children and grandchildren," unquote.
Well, today Robert Jay Lifton joins us in our studio to talk about these and other issues.
We welcome you back to Democracy Now!, Dr. Lifton.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Happy to be back with you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s very good to have you with us. The issue of climate change, the issue that you are now focusing on today, a psychiatrist focusing on climate change—why climate change?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Climate change is an all-enveloping issue. Nobody can completely deal with it. It’s everything around us. One can approach it from different perspectives, and because I’ve done so much work on nuclear threat, this seemed to me to be a baseline from which to compare climate change. So in my work on climate change, I bring to bear the psychological approach that I use with nuclear weapons and make comparisons, looking for both parallels and differences. And I’ve been doing that now for the last few years.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And what exactly, Dr. Lifton—what are the parallels that you draw between opposition to nuclear weapons and the climate justice movement today?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: The parallel that’s all-important is that both really involve the destruction of the human habitat. So I call the work "mind and habitat." Habitat is that part of nature which we require to really keep going as a human species, and mind is what we’re given in an evolutionary way. It’s the hope that we have for combating climate change and nuclear threat, as well. They both bring forth apocalyptic images of destroying the entire human habitat and interfering with the future of the human race.
They also have a common origin. It’s not fully appreciated how much the whole climate movement evolved from the anti-nuclear movement. For instance, Greenpeace, civil disobedience at sea, began as an anti-nuclear movement. And some of the early voyages on which later actions were modeled were voyages by people like Earle Reynolds into nuclear test areas. So there’s a relationship in their origins.
Yet they’re very different. They’re not the same, because nuclear weapons involve these things, these devices, that are genocidal in their dimensions, and climate change involves the environment that we live in on a daily basis and that has been created with threat of altering the temperature from the time of industrialization for a few hundred years. They differ in that incremental side to climate change, but they basically resemble each other in the totality of the threat to the human habitat.
AMY GOODMAN: We’ve been covering the divestment movement across the country and really around the world. Last month, Democracy Now! spoke to Talia Rothstein, a sophomore at Harvard College and coordinator of Divest Harvard. She had been participating in a blockade of a main administration hall throughout Harvard Heat Week and explained why the students decided to take action on climate change.
TALIA ROTHSTEIN: Our campaign started a few years ago to try to open up conversation with Harvard about the impact of its investments in the fossil fuel industry. We’ve been repeatedly refused open dialogue of the kind we feel this issue deserves, and ostracized by the Harvard administration. They refuse to engage on this issue. For a few years, we attempted to create a space for dialogue and inevitably had to resort to civil disobedience to put as much public pressure on the Harvard administration as possible.
So, last spring, we blockaded the office of the president, as well, and a student was arrested after a day and a half. A few months ago, we occupied Massachusetts Hall for 24 hours and again received no significant consideration on the issue. And so, this week, called Harvard Heat Week, we’re assembling all the constituents of the movement—students, faculty, alumni, community members—to show the broad base of support, the range of diverse voices that support this movement, and to make sure that the Harvard administration can no longer ignore this issue of climate justice.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Talia Rothstein, who is a sophomore at Harvard College and a coordinator of Divest Harvard, participating in Harvard Heat Week. Now, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, you taught at Harvard Medical School for years, and you went up for this week?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: I did. Close friends of mine are involved in the divestment movement at Harvard, which I think is extremely important—and that was an admirable statement by a student—who have behaved in this whole process very steadily and wisely and strongly. Divestment is a movement that has enormous power, because it contributes an ethical dimension to the whole climate issue. There are a couple of CEOs of fossil fuel groups who are beginning to say, "I don’t want students of the future to look critically upon our corporation because we use fossil fuels." The divestment movement is gathering strength, and it has to be looked at not just in terms of what it denies the fossil fuels corporations—we’re not about to bankrupt them—but rather what it says in connection with mounting a climate movement, which is taking shape. It’s part of what I call the climate swerve, meaning a whole tendency toward increased awareness of truths about climate threat. And the divestment movement is right at the heart of it, very admirably.
AMY GOODMAN: So you’re talking about—you’re changing the moral climate. Just in our headlines today, I’m wondering your response to Bank of America announcing it’s cutting off financing to companies involved in coal mining. The CEO of corporate social responsibility—it says, speaking at an annual shareholders meeting, corporate social responsibility executive Andrew Plepler said the firm will, quote, "reduce our credit exposure, over time, to the coal mining sector globally," the move coming under a new policy that says, quote, "As one of the world’s largest financial institutions, the bank has a responsibility to help mitigate climate change by leveraging our scale and resources to accelerate the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon society."
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: That’s an enormously important event, because it shows that right at the heart of society the corporations, that have been so complicit in increasing the danger from fossil fuels, are recognizing, first, the ethical absurdity of continuing to support fossil fuels, but also a certain commonality. You know, the large American financial institutions will suffer like the rest of us from climate change, because it’s an all-enveloping threat. This reminds me, incidentally—it seems something different, but when I was active in the physicians’ anti-nuclear movement, we met internationally with the Soviet delegation, and late at night somebody would give a toast, either a Russian or an American doctor. It sounded better with a Russian accent, but the toast was always the same. And the toast was: "I drink to you and your health and the health of your leaders and the health of your people, because if you die, we die; if you survive, we survive." So, the pragmatic is converted or combined with the ethical in recognizing that we’re all in this together.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Dr. Lifton, when you were working on nuclear weapons, on opposition to nuclear weapons, you talked about the gap between the actual threat posed by nuclear weapons and the mind’s perception of that threat. Do you see something comparable happening on climate change?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Yes. That’s an important issue for me. Climate change has suffered—the movement against climate change has suffered from a lack of awareness, because it’s surround—it’s our surround. You know, it’s the normality of what we live in, if unaltered, leading us toward catastrophe. Increasingly, there has been a change in awareness. It’s what I call a change from fragmented to formed awareness. That is, instead of just vague images about climate change, we’re now developing a narrative, a recognition of what it is, what causes it, what we might do about it, so that the gap, which we suffered from and still exists, is lessening as we come to a closer awareness of what really confronts us with climate change. That’s the hopeful dimension.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to remarks made by Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He used a snowball as a prop during the—his Senate address in attempt to refute that human beings have anything to do with global warming. This is a clip.
SEN. JAMES INHOFE: We keep hearing that 2014 has been the warmest year on record. I ask the chair, "You know what this is?" It’s a snowball, and that’s just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out, very unseasonal. So, here, Mr. President, catch this. Mm-hmm.
AMY GOODMAN: So there he is. There’s Senator James Inhofe, head of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, throwing a snowball on the Senate floor, saying this disproves global warming.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: When Senator Inhofe brought that snowball into the Senate, he was a figure of ridiculousness. That is, the climate swerve I mentioned, the increased awareness, has, in a way, isolated the direct deniers. It’s true that much of the Republican Party refuses to say overtly that climate change is a real threat, but they’re becoming increasingly weaker in their claim. The denial of climate change is the tip of the iceberg. Senator Inhofe is no longer a threat in terms of what he says. The polls all show that the country is moving toward recognition that climate change is real and that it’s a threat to us. The real danger with climate change is what I call climate normality. There was nuclear normality. We tried to domesticate the weapons. There was the infamous living with nuclear weapons, which came right out of the Kennedy School at Harvard. With climate change, the normality is built into the whole world structure. And the difficulty is breaking through that normality and recognizing how the way we live, in an ordinary routine, threatens the whole human future.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Robert Jay Lifton, leading American psychologist—psychiatrist, author of many books, distinguished professor emeritus of psychiatry and psychology at the City University of New York. He is the recipient of numerous national and international awards and honorary degrees. Among his books, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima, for which he won the National Book Award; The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. When we come back, we’re going to talk about the investigation into the American Psychological Association, the largest association of psychologists in the world, their relationship with torture at Guantánamo, at Abu Ghraib. Stay with us.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: New details have emerged on how the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, aided government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A group of dissident psychologists have just published a 60-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change theAPA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. The report also reveals a behavioral science researcher working for President Bush secretly drafted language that the APA inserted into its ethics policy on interrogations.
AMY GOODMAN: Much of the report is based on hundreds of newly released internal APA emails from 2003 to 2006 that show top officials were in direct communication with the CIA. In 2004, for example, the APA secretly took part in a meeting with officials from the CIA and other intelligence agencies to discuss ethics and national security.
Still with us, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, leading American psychiatrist who has spoken out against the APA’s practices. So, the American Psychological Association has about 150,000 members, the largest association in the world. That’s the APA. The little APAis the American Psychiatric Association, which I assume you’re a part of. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, your thoughts on what the APA did?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: What the APA did—and I read that report—is what I call a scandal within a scandal. That is, I have been much concerned with the behavior of professionals and their ethics, not just in terms of how they conduct their everyday profession—that’s important enough—but their relationship to the world ethically. I became interested in this in working with veterans of the Vietnam War. And in that war, military psychiatrists would be in a position, when examining a soldier who was brought to them with anxiety and a sense of outrage at what was going on—would be in the position of helping that soldier to be strong enough to return to duty, which meant daily atrocities. And I asked myself, how did a psychiatrist find himself in that situation? And it had to do with a military structure of medicine and with the psychiatrist entering into what I called an atrocity-producing situation. In my work with Nazi doctors, it was even, of course, much more extreme, probably the most extreme example of any profession of any country engaging in extremely immoral behavior, engaging directly in killing, because Nazi physicians were in charge of the killing in Auschwitz. And that’s what I studied in that research. But, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: What’s interesting, both Nermeen and I saw you speak last night on a very different issue, on the Armenian genocide, and you talked about the significance of Dr. Josef Mengele dying without acknowledging what he did.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Yes, when Mengele, who was a notorious fanatical Nazi, quite unusual in that way among doctors, was found to be dead in a lake in Argentina, survivors of Auschwitz were upset that there wasn’t the opportunity to bring him to the dock so that he could confront his crimes. It wasn’t so much a desire for revenge as it was for justice. So I mentioned that survivors of holocaust or genocide, or survivors in general, are what can be called collectors of justice. They need a sense of justice for their own healing.
But now, here we have American psychologists. There were psychiatrists involved early also in the enhanced interrogation, which spilled over into torture in American use. Fortunately, American Psychiatric Association had slightly more enlightened leadership, and we had the advantage of doctors’ Hippocratic Oath, which is "do no harm," and there could be developed a resolution prohibiting any physician, any psychiatrist, from being in the interrogation room. The American Psychological Association took an opposite tendency. It’s one thing—and there were a couple of psychologists, who are well known, who helped create the torture and the whole psychological regimen for the torture, crudely and very unscientifically, but with the claim of psychological science. It’s still another level when the professional organization supports torture by meeting with the administration and those people who were looking for some legitimation coming from a professional group for torture. And that’s what the American Psychological Association did.
And that’s all too reminiscent of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. I’m not saying they’re Nazis. We’re not Nazis. We’re still a sufficiently open society to confront this, criticize it and do something about it. But with the Nazis, there was this process of Gleichschaltung, meaning reordering or re-gearing all professional organizations, not destroying them, but breaking them down and reconstructing them to serve the Nazi project. That’s the kind of thing we must and can confront and avoid here.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, last December, psychologist James Mitchell, who was contracted by the CIA while still a member of the American Psychological Association to design its interrogation program, appeared on Fox News to talk about his role in the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. He was interviewed by Megyn Kelly.
MEGYN KELLY: So you—were you the one actually conducting the techniques on Abu Zubaydah, or were you in more of a sort of background role?
JAMES MITCHELL: It depends on when you’re talking about. Initially, I was in a background role. Then, after we shut down and the enhanced interrogations were approved, I was in an administration role.
MEGYN KELLY: OK, so did you personally waterboard him?
JAMES MITCHELL: Yes.
MEGYN KELLY: We’re going to get to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a minute, but sticking with Abu Zubaydah for now, were all of the methods that were cited in the Senate report employed, like nudity, standing sleep deprivation, the attention grab, the insult slap? Were those all used?
JAMES MITCHELL: The ones you mentioned were used.
MEGYN KELLY: The facial grab, the abdominal slap, the kneeling stress position, walling?
JAMES MITCHELL: Walling was used. The others—if they showed up on the list, they were used. We didn’t typically use a lot of those stress positions. We didn’t use any stress positions with Abu Zubaydah, because he had an injury.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was psychologist James Mitchell speaking on Fox News last December. He was the psychologist who was asked by the CIA to design its interrogation program. Could you talk about that, Dr. Lifton? And in particular, in the context of what you called earlier an atrocity-producing situation, what enabled this to occur?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Professionals are as prone to being socialized to the norm of a group, including being socialized to evil, as are any other groups in American society. What that means is that psychologists, in this case—and there are others from other professions—internalize what is considered to be acceptable and appropriate for them in carrying out their profession. So, torture exists. There is the nod from the administration: Go ahead with torture. And psychologists then adapt to that and, in this case, become not just participants in torture, but the creators of the methods of torture.
That’s a shocking clip because it shows him kind of slightly reluctantly admitting that they do all those things. Of course, it’s denied that they’re torture, and that’s absurd. They’re out-and-out torture. But the fact that they’ll come on a network program and describe it as something legitimate is another level of scandal. After all, torture has been conducted, you know, from the time of the beginning of history. It’s always been seen, and especially in recent centuries, as something evil. You can judge a society as to whether it engages in torture. You condemn a society that engages in torture.
In our case, looking at the sequence, one can praise the Obama administration for ending that torture, but one must criticize the Obama administration for blocking any examination or confrontation of our role in torture. You showed an interesting clip about the city of Chicago confronting and at least recognizing that the police had engaged in torture of certain suspects. Well, that doesn’t undo what they did, but it’s a step toward some kind of ethical advance. And for the United States to have engaged in torture on such a widespread dimension, to have legitimated it among professionals like psychologists, for psychologists and others to have created and participated in it, is something that we have to confront, as a nation, to move ahead in something like an ethical way.
AMY GOODMAN: And when you talk about confronting, what exactly do you mean? You’ve just given a psychological, sociological explanation, understanding. For example, James Mitchell, or Mitchell and Jessen, the company of two psychologists that Pentagon funneled money into, not to mention other psychologists who didn’t even work for them, working at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, but should they be brought up on charges?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Of course they should. There are many situations that I can probe psychologically, or psychohistorically, as we say, but have to be approached politically for some kind of resolution, and this is an example of that. A proper confrontation of what we did would mean a real investigation that didn’t stop as we got to the top. Yes, of course, the order for torture being acceptable and advised comes from above, comes from the highest sources in the administration. That has to be uncovered by an investigation, and there has to be a legal context. Whether or not everybody who participated in torture is in some way condemned and put to jail, I don’t know. But at minimum, there must be a confrontation and revelation of what was done, who did it, what the consequences were and how to prevent it in the future.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of this comment by CIA psychologist—former CIA psychologist Kirk Hubbard, who served as the CIA’s chief of operations of the Operational Assessment Division before he joined Mitchell Jessen and Associates? In 2012, Hubbard told the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, quote, "Detainees are not patients nor are they being 'treated' by the psychologists. Therefore the ethical guidelines for clinicians do not apply, in my opinion. Psychologists can play many different roles and should not be forced into a narrow doctor-patient role." Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, your response?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: What you’ve heard, what you just recited, is a rationalization for torture and for destructive behavior on the part of professionals. All professions require some sort of ethical code, as I said before, not just in everyday practice, but in what they do in society. And to weasel out of any such ethical requirement because one is dealing not with patients, but with prisoners—and, of course, that administration didn’t even give them prisoner rights, according to Geneva Conventions—to do that is simply a rationalization for destructive or even evil behavior.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a leading American psychiatrist, author of many books, including Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. We’ll be back with him, talking about a number of issues, including another of his books, Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions—Prosecutors, Judges, Jurors, Wardens, and the American Public in Conflict. Stay with us.
The Socialization of Evil: Robert Jay Lifton on the Death Penalty, the Holocaust & Armenian GenocideFor the past five decades, eminent psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has written extensively on the psychological dimensions of war, from the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima, to doctors who aided Nazi crimes, to nuclear war. In 1967, Lifton won a National Book Award for his work, "Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima." In 1970, he would testify before a Senate committee about the Vietnam War, warning about the need to help rehumanize returning veterans into society. In 1986, he published the seminal book, "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide." In the final part of our interview, Lifton expounds on what he calls "the socialization of evil," from the Holocaust to Vietnam to the death penalty.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, leading American psychiatrist. Among his books, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir and Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions. Dr. Lifton, U.S. prisons are feeling the effect of a global revulsion against the death penalty, the U.S. the only industrialized country in the world to have it. So when European companies cut off the drug supply to be used in the execution cocktail of a prisoner, states have had to put off executions, because they don’t have the proper death cocktail. Utah just passed, as a backup, firing squad, execution by firing squad, and Oklahoma just passed gassing—not clear exactly how that gassing of a prisoner would be done—if they don’t—aren’t able to get their hands on the drugs. Can you talk about this? You have written this book, Who Owns Death?, and you’ve talked to many different people involved in the death chain.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: At issue is the mythology of humane killing—of course, a contradiction in terms. And with each form of killing by the state in carrying through a death penalty, whether it’s hanging, gas chamber, electric chair or the use of chemicals, with each of the shifts from one to the other, there is the claim: This is more humane. But there’s no such thing as humane killing. Each of them brings about suffering, cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited, according to our laws, and one can’t overcome that. It’s another situation where you judge a society, and many wise writers, including, for instance Albert Camus, have focused on judging a whole society in terms of whether it will kill individual people. There’s always also the added idea of human culpability or the inability of human beings to be certain about convictions that lead to the death penalty. So, with human fallibility, there is always the danger, whatever the technical tools, DNA or anything else, there is always the danger—and it has happened—of executing innocent people. If you have the danger of executing innocent people, there must be no execution carried out by a society.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Dr. Lifton, you’ve also talked about, in the context of the research that you’ve done on genocide and war, that you were surprised to find that the socialization of evil is all too easy to accomplish. So could you talk about that in the context of both the death penalty in the U.S. as well as the expanding numbers of prisoners here, the incarceration system?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: It’s as if even right-wing Republicans, when they experience the prison system, sometimes get the urge to reform it. Most of these reform movements haven’t gone very far. I hear there’s a new one that combines right-wing people and the usual people from the left who see the unfairness and cruelty within the prison system. Yes, the prison system has become a norm, and it involves, selectively, enormous numbers of blacks, African Americans, who are imprisoned, and there are various reasons for that, including methods of policing and lack of opportunity in various environments. And that forms a norm that becomes part of the way society runs. Then police departments, politicians, people in everyday life simply adjust to it. You know, adaptation is the great human achievement in evolution. We are the champions of adaptation, so much so that we’ve made the planet our habitat. That’s not true of any other species. But adaptation is also a vulnerability, because sometimes immediate adaptation is contrary to larger necessities and ethical issues in more extensive adaption. And that’s what we’re talking about, a narrow, normalized adaptation to a cruel and unfair prison system.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Jay Lifton, you wrote the book, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. Explain what you mean by "extreme century."
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: You know, there is a group now that wants to say we’re making progress because, if you look statistically, there seem to be fewer wars and relatively fewer people according to population size. That has not been my experience. In studying both Auschwitz and Hiroshima, I found these to be defining events of the 20th century, and although they are very different events, they converge in threatening the human future. One has to do with, of course, the gas chambers in Auschwitz. That was a high technology of the time, and it’s our capacity to destroy ourselves, in this case, with chemicals or other substances. The other, of course, has to do with nuclear threat, and that’s a more immediate danger. Nuclear weapons still, although not thought about much publicly now, certainly when one looks into it, still a looming threat, if anything greater than in recent past. So these are two events that define the 20th century. And when one looks for ways—and, you know, I’d be the first to want to look for human progress, but when one looks for ways of diminishing killing in war, those who make the claim are hard put to explain the 20th century, more people killed in that century than any other century. So, Auschwitz and Hiroshima are defining events of the 20th century.
Still, we can look toward expressions, anti-nuclear expressions, confrontations of the Holocaust and of weapons of mass destruction of any kind, that we mount as sources of hope and as commitments that we continue to make. That has to do—that’s what I mean by being a witness. When I did my research on, say, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, I was looking to be accurate in what I found psychologically. I also saw that research as a form of witness. A witness is someone who opens himself or herself to experience, takes it in, and retells the story, tells the tale, gives it a new narrative. That’s what I saw myself as doing with Hiroshima and with Auschwitz and with other events of the 20th century, also to the Vietnam War and the Vietnam—the antiwar veterans who admirably found meaning in the meaninglessness of their war. So, witness and research become combined. And the other thing I would say about it is—
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean they found meaning in the meaninglessness of the war?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Every soldier who fights a war, and, for that matter, those in the society that is mounting a war, need to have a sense that there is justification for this war, and every politician must explain to his or her people these soldiers of ours did not die in vain. That becomes harder and harder to say in counterinsurgencies like Vietnam with an atrocity-producing situation that is psychologically and militarily created. The antiwar veterans developed the insight that this war was wrong and bad. They confronted this insight, which is painful to do—very painful thing to do for a veteran, because one has killed people and one has seen one’s buddies dying right next to one. That was a brave and hard thing to do. Most veterans’ groups come home often to victory parades or celebration or whatever, and declare the just achievements of the war, the heroic victory for which they’re celebrated. Of course, the Vietnam veterans were not welcomed. They came home individually. But these antiwar veterans came home with no feeling that there was anything like victory or a just cause in relation to their war. They got up in 1971, the Winter Soldier hearings and other such events, described how they had witnessed and been involved in atrocities, and that was the truth about their war. They found meaning in this political and personal opposition to their war, their war which could not be justified. So, that was what I meant by the meaning they found in the meaninglessness of their war.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Dr. Lifton, before we conclude, I’d like to ask you about the Armenian genocide, about which you spoke last night at the PEN festival. You talked about the significance of cultural genocide and the targeting, in genocides, of this kind of intellectuals, writers, artists, and why that’s particularly important. Could you talk about that?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Yes. When Raphael Lemkin, a heroic man, came to the concept of genocide, he included what he called cultural genocide, the destruction of the institutions and ritual elements of a culture which all of us live from. And I talked last night about how intellectuals, professionals of all kinds, are key groups in sustaining these rituals and structures and institutions that we call culture, because we human beings are meaning-hungry creatures, and we don’t take in perceptions nakedly. If you sit across the table from me, I don’t just see you as you are, but I reconstruct you as people I know, I think about, who are doing certain things. We all use this wonderful and dangerous grey matter of our brain in this symbolizing and meaning-constructing process. The intellectuals and professionals are key because they create words and images in not only sustaining but in criticizing culture. And when you seek out intellectuals and professionals to put them to death, as perpetrators of genocide often do, you are making a wound in the whole spiritual side of culture, which is crucial to human life. And that is another source of great human suffering. And that was what much of the panel was about last night.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, the other point that you make is that genocides, in fact, rely on the participation, at one level or another, of the professional classes, intellectuals, etc. Could you explain why?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Yes. When I did my study of Nazi doctors, I was of course very intent on looking at how professional collude in genocide by this egregious example of Nazi doctors. But looking more generally at genocide, I came to see that professionals are crucial to carrying out any form of genocide. They are well educated and capable of doing the nitty-gritty work of genocide. So they often develop the rationale for the genocide, the technology, some of the science. They often create images or poems or songs, which—
AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: —which render the genocide heroic. And in that way, professionals are socialized to evil.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Jay Lifton, we want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to continue this discussion afterwards and post it online. Robert Jay Lifton, a leading American psychiatrist, author of many books. He’s a distinguished professor emeritus of psychiatry and psychology at City University of New York, author ofWitness to an Extreme Century, Who Owns Death? and much more. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. This is Democracy Now!
Headlines:
Dozens of Civilians Killed in Yemen Fighting; Kerry Seeks "Humanitarian Pause"
Dozens of people were killed across Yemen on Wednesday in one of the worst days of fighting so far. The heaviest violence was seen in the southern port city of Aden, where around 40 civilians were killed trying to flee, and in the north, where Houthi sources claim a Saudi Arabian airstrike killed 35 civilians. Speaking during a visit to Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State John Kerry said the situation in Yemen is dire.
Secretary of State John Kerry: "We are deeply concerned about the humanitarian situation that is unfolding in Yemen — shortages of food, shortages of fuel, shortages of medicine. The situation is getting more dire by the day."
Kerry is expected to ask the Saudi Arabian government to agree to a humanitarian pause, saying he’s already received an "indication" the Houthis will sign on. In a joint statement, the International Committee of the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders have criticized the Saudi-led coalition’s attacks on airports, saying they are "obstructing delivery of much needed humanitarian assistance and movement of humanitarian personnel." The groups also say the coalition’s blockade of imports into Yemen "has made the daily lives of Yemenis unbearable."
Mayor Seeks Justice Dept. Probe of Baltimore Police
The mayor of Baltimore has asked the Justice Department to investigate the city’s police force in the aftermath of the death of Freddie Gray. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the review should focus on whether police tactics violate civil rights and constitutional protections.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake: "I’m asking the Department of Justice to investigate if our police department has engaged in a pattern or practice of stops, searches or arrests that violate the Fourth Amendment. I am asking that they investigate what systematic changes, or systemic changes, exist within our — excuse me, challenges exist within our police department that can contribute to excessive force and discriminatory policing. At the end of this process, I will hold those accountable if change is not made."
Justice Department reviews of other police forces nationwide have led to consent decrees that mandate changes. Rawlings-Blake’s request came one day after Attorney General Loretta Lynch visited Baltimore.
Chicago OKs $5.5M Reparations Fund for Police Torture Victims
The Chicago City Council has approved a $5.5 million reparations fund for victims of police torture. Under the reign of Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge from 1972 to 1991, more than 200 people, most of them African-American, were tortured with tactics including electric shocks and suffocation. The reparations package includes free city college tuition for victims and relatives, counseling services, a memorial to victims, inclusion of Burge’s actions in school curriculum, and a formal apology. A city councilmember and Mayor Rahm Emanuel hailed the move.
Unidentified: "Finally, finally, we have begun to acknowledge this horrible wrong. First of all, we finally settled the lawsuits that were brought by the victims, or many of the victims. And now we’ve done something that no other city in the United States has ever done."
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel: "This is another step, but an essential step, in righting a wrong, removing a stain on the reputation of this great city and the people who make up this great city."
A number of torture victims attended Wednesday’s council session. Burge served a short prison sentence for perjury and obstruction of justice before his release last year.
North Dakota Town Evacuated After Oil Train Derails
A North Dakota town was evacuated Wednesday following the derailment of a train carrying crude oil. About 40 residents were force to leave Heimdal as emergency crews responded to the fire. It was at least the sixth accident this year involving so-called "bomb trains" transporting crude oil through North American communities. It comes just days after federal regulators released long-awaited new standards for the trains, which environmentalists have criticized as insufficient.
French Parliament Advances Sweeping Surveillance Law
French lawmakers have advanced a measure that would greatly increase government surveillance while minimizing judicial oversight. The legislation would let intelligence agencies tap phones and computers, install bugs in cars and homes, and monitor anyone associated with surveillance targets. Government agents would also be allowed to sift through bulk data similar to the NSA in the United States. The bill now goes to the French Senate, which is expected to vote in favor.
Co-Pilot in German wings Crash Said to Have Practiced Downing Plane
The German co-pilot accused of deliberately crashing a passenger plane into the French Alps reportedly practiced his suicide mission during a previous flight that same day. French authorities say Andreas Lubitz set the plane’s altitude to 100 feet while the captain had briefly left the cockpit. During the flight’s return leg, it’s believed Lubitz then locked the co-pilot out of the cockpit before crashing the plane intentionally, killing himself and all 149 others on board.
Netanyahu Gains Slim Majority in New Coalition Gov’t
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reached a deal to form a new coalition government just before a deadline was set to expire. The agreement leaves him in control of 61 Parliament seats, a bare majority of just one vote.
Report: Number of Internally Displaced Worldwide Jumps 14%
A new report says the number of internally displaced people worldwide has increased for the third straight year. The Geneva-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Center found a 14 percent increase in those forced to flee their homes inside their own countries. Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council unveiled the findings.
Jan Egeland: "2014, we have documented, was the worst year, certainly in my 35 years as a humanitarian worker. Thirty-eight million people are now the accumulated total of people internally displaced within their countries’ border."
Syria accounted for the most displaced, 7.6 million internally and another four million refugees outside the country.
Leftist NDP Ousts Conservatives in Canadian Province of Alberta
In Canada, the left-leaning New Democratic Party has won a historic victory in the traditionally conservative province of Alberta. Voters elected the NDP to a majority government of 53 seats, up from just four seats. The win ousts the Progressive Conservative party after more than four decades in power. Alberta has long been known as Canada’s most right-wing province. The incoming premier, Rachel Notley, celebrated her victory.
Rachel Notley: "I think we might have made a little bit of history tonight. Friends, I believe that change has finally come to Alberta."
Notley has promised to review oversight of Alberta’s energy sector and the royalty payments of its corporations, which extract oil from the carbon-intensive tar sands. The NDP has also vowed to increase corporate tax rates, raise the minimum wage, and work cooperatively with the province’s indigenous communities. On a national level, the Alberta NDP is also expected to pressure the Canadian government to change its environmental policy, and will drop the province’s lobbying effort for the Keystone XL pipeline.
Bank of America Curbs Financing of Coal Industry After Years of Activist Pressure
The financial giant Bank of America has announced it’s cutting off financing to companies involved in coal mining. Speaking at an annual shareholders meeting, corporate social responsibility executive Andrew Plepler said the firm will "reduce our credit exposure, over time, to the coal mining sector globally." The move comes under a new policy that says: "As one of the world’s largest financial institutions, the bank has a responsibility to help mitigate climate change by leveraging our scale and resources to accelerate the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon society." The change follows years of activism targeting Bank of America for its leading role in funding the coal industry, including the controversial practice of mountaintop removal coal mining. The Rainforest Action Network, which has led the activism campaign, said: "Today’s announcement from Bank of America truly represents a sea change: it acknowledges the responsibility that the financial sector bears for supporting and profiting from the fossil fuel industry and the climate chaos it has caused."
Report: Green Beret Admitted to Burning Body of Slain Unarmed Afghan
An investigation by The Intercept has revealed new details about the case of a U.S. Army Green Beret who confessed during a job interview at the CIA to murdering an unarmed Afghan man and burying him. An Army memo details how in 2011 U.S. Army Major Mathew Golsteyn admitted he "captured and shot and buried a suspected IED bomb maker," then "went back out with two others to cremate the body and dispose of the remains." Army documents obtained by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux show the military investigated the alleged killing and issued a letter of reprimand. After the Army concluded Golsteyn knowingly violated the laws of war, he was stripped of his military awards, but he remains in the military, and no criminal charges have been filed against him.
New York Gov. Cuomo Seeks Wage Increase for Fast-Food Workers
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is seeking to raise the pay of the state’s fast-food workers. Writing in The New York Times, Cuomo says he will ask the state labor commissioner to convene a panel on increasing the fast-food industry’s minimum wage. The panel’s findings are expected in three months. In his article, Cuomo cited New York’s spending of $6,800 in public assistance per fast-food worker, the most in the country. His announcement comes just weeks after thousands of fast-food workers staged a national protest calling for a $15 minimum wage, their largest such action to date.
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"The American Dream: Living to 18" by Amy Goodman
New York City, May 1, 2015: Demonstrators march from Union Square Park to Foley Square in celebration of International Workers’ Day and to demand accountability from law enforcement in recent police brutality cases across the U.S. (Shutterstock)
“What do you hope to accomplish with this protest,” I asked a 13-year-old girl marching in Staten Island, N.Y., last August, protesting the police killing of Eric Garner.
“To live until I’m 18,” the young teen, named Aniya, replied. Could that possibly be the American dream today?
Aniya went on: “You want to get older. You want to experience life. You don’t want to die in a matter of seconds because of cops.” It’s that sentiment that has fueled the Black Lives Matter movement across the country.
Most recently, a week of protest in Baltimore was largely quelled when a remarkable prosecutor announced that six police officers would be charged in the death of Freddie Gray. Marilyn Mosby, the 35-year-old state’s attorney for the city of Baltimore, is the youngest lead prosecutor in any major U.S. city. Just 100 days into office, she made national headlines on Friday, May 1, with the stunning announcement that the officers would face various charges, from assault to second-degree murder.
According to police reports, Baltimore Police Lt. Brian Rice was on bicycle patrol on the morning of April 12 when he made eye contact with Freddie Gray, who then ran. Rice pursued Gray, joined by officers Garrett Miller and Edward Nero. A bystander videotaped Gray screaming in pain as he was dragged into a patrol wagon. Though he asked for medical help repeatedly, none was given. He soon became unresponsive. Other police involved in his arrest and transport did nothing either. His family reported that his spinal cord was 80 percent severed, and his voice box crushed. After a week in a coma, he died.
Gene Ryan, president of Baltimore’s police union, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) Lodge No. 3, said, shockingly, “The images seen on television look and sound much like a lynch mob.” These words are unfathomable, uttered by a white man describing African-Americans protesting the death of another African-American man whose neck was broken while in police custody. Then, at the same press conference, Michael Davey, the FOP attorney spoke up, defending the police for chasing Gray: “If you are in a high-crime area, and you flee from the police unprovoked, the police have the legal ability to pursue you.” So Freddie Gray was arrested for running while black?
The outcry has been consistent and growing, after each high-profile police killing of people of color. Eric Garner’s death by police chokehold on July 17, 2014, went unpunished. The district attorney for Staten Island, Daniel Donovan Jr., declined to press charges against any of the officers. Donovan, a Republican, was rewarded this week, winning a seat in Congress representing Staten Island, replacing Rep. Michael Grimm, who resigned in disgrace after being indicted for multimillion-dollar tax evasion. (Grimm also notoriously physically threatened a reporter on live televisionafter the reporter asked him about the charges. Grimm told the reporter: “I’ll break you in half. Like a boy.”)
Back in Baltimore, many people heaved a sigh of relief after prosecutor Marilyn Mosby announced that she had filed charges against the six police officers. “I come from five generations of law enforcement,” she said. “My father was an officer. My mother was an officer, several of my aunts and uncles. My recently departed and beloved grandfather was one of the founding members of the first black police organization in Massachusetts.”
Marilyn Mosby went on: “To those that are angry, hurt or have their own experiences of injustice at the hands of police officers, I urge you to channel the energy peacefully as we prosecute this case. I have heard your calls for ‘no justice, no peace’; however, your peace is sincerely needed, as I work to deliver justice on behalf of Freddie Gray.”
She closed with what is certainly unique in the annals of prosecutorial oration: “Last, but certainly not least, to the youth of this city, I will seek justice on your behalf. This is your moment. Let’s ensure that we have peaceful and productive rallies that will develop structural and systemic changes for generations to come. You’re at the forefront of this cause. And as young people, our time is now.”
With determination like this, demanding accountability for all, maybe Aniya will get her wish: to celebrate her 18th birthday, and many, many more.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
(c) 2015 Amy Goodman
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