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MONSTERS IN OUR MIDST: DESTROYING THE WORLD FOR YOUR OWN GOOD — AUGUST 6, 1945
Because I have written about these psychological and cultural dynamics at great length, I had thought my capacity for numbed astonishment was close to exhausted. I was wrong.
A few months ago, I noted the conclusion of an Ivan Eland column. After his discussion of how the Downing Street Memo story and its many implications had largely escaped scrutiny by the American media, Eland wrote:
The British memo is only one of many pieces of evidence pointing to deliberate threat inflation by the Bush administration to justify the Iraq War. Deep down, the American public knows that President Bush and his minions were deceitful about the need for the invasion, but they don’t seem to hold him responsible. ...
Less a shaper of public opinion in a market economy with many sources of news, media coverage largely reflects what people want to see, hear and read. People choose media outlets based on their preconceived notions. And they want to see, hear and read about what the imperial president and his celebrity advisors, such as Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, are saying and doing. The U.S. presidency has become so powerful compared to what the nation’s founders had intended that the public has come to expect that the chief executive and his entourage will lie to us for our own good—even on issues as vital to the republic as war and peace.
Eland used a critical phrase in this passage—which I then expanded upon:
The key phrase is this one: “for our own good.” If some readers should ever wonder why I have spent so much time writing about the work of Alice Miller and her invaluable explanation of how the psychological dynamics instilled in earliest childhood shape the adults we become, this is why.
What can explain why so many Americans are so eagerly willing to believe—even in the face of a massive and constantly growing mountain of evidence that these lies are leading only to destruction and death—that “the chief executive and his entourage will lie to us for our own good”? They will believe it for one very simple reason: because that is what they learned in their earliest years of life—when they were infants and small children, and when this message was drilled into them by parents who abused them in countless ways, sometimes by spankings and beatings, sometimes by neglect, and sometimes by failing in other ways to acknowledge the child’s unique value as an individual human being.
The most extreme form of this kind of abuse is represented by someone like James Dobson, but abuse which is identical in principle is practiced in many other ways as well (see this essay, too).
But most significant with regard to Eland’s column is the following. Here is how I described it in one earlier essay, after I had described how the child completely internalizes the abusive parent’s methods of control….
In my essay about Dobson and his advocacy of the abuse and even torture of children, I wrote the following—which contains links to a number of other essays which provide further examples of these same mechanisms:
I have written about James Dobson at some length—but of equal if not greater importance in my view, I have written about the more general psychological dynamics involved. Tragically and dangerously, Dobson is far from being the sole exponent of these profoundly destructive views. In “The Roots of the Monsters They Became: How People Murder Their Own Souls,” I provided a number of links to my series entitled, “The Roots of Horror.” If you consult some of those entries, you will see that these same dynamics underlie many of the more general horrors of our world today—including unnecessary war, the widespread denial of the horrors in Iraq, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, the psychology of many warhawks, in many of the revived debates about Vietnam, and in many of the horrors in the U.S. prison system itself (which system was merely transplanted to Iraq). Still more generally, these dynamics are the root of what I call “The Apocalyptic Crusader Psychology,” of which our current president is a perfect, and perfectly horrifying, embodiment. (Here is still one more essay that I admit is a favorite of mine and that addresses the major themes of my series, “When Life and Happiness Are Not Enough: The Tragedy of the Unborn Self,” and all the related entries will be found here.)
For our purposes here, it is critical that one further facet of these mechanisms be understood: because the young child is essentially helpless and completely dependent on his parental or other authority figure for life itself, he dare not question the “goodness” or the “good intentions” of that person(s). To do so would be unbearably threatening to the child, and doubts on such a profound level could literally kill him. So he must believe that the parent takes whatever actions he does for the child’s good. He must believe this even if the parent deliberately inflicts pain on him using such brutal methods as “hot saucing,” even if the parent beats him without mercy, and even if the parent engages in outright torture. The child must desperately cling to his belief that his parent “means well,” and in this way the idealization of the parent continues.
When he grows up, if these injuries are not surfaced and ultimately healed, the idealization will spread—and it can encompass political leaders (even as lackluster a president as Bush, if the adult is sufficiently frightened), military institutions and the entire military itself, and the adult’s country as a whole. For this child-as-adult, such idealization means that he must believe that—whatever his country does—it does so with “good intentions,” for the well-being of others, and with only the noblest of motives.
It is this insistence on continuing the fantasy at the expense of facts that unleashes horrors on the world. In writing about Mel Gibson and his idealization of his bigoted and rage-filled father, I wrote:
I didn’t see [Diane] Sawyer’s interview, but I heard parts of it replayed on the radio. Gibson did say a bit more about his father, and what he said, and his tone, were very revealing. Just before he said, “Gotta leave it alone, Diane,” Gibson said, several times: “Diane, he’s my father. My father. My father.”
And the way Gibson said it clearly conveyed that his father, his father’s goodness, the fact that his father was worthy of deep admiration, and—above all—his father’s authority were not to be questioned; all of these were immutable facts, absolutes beyond all debate or questioning. It is this mindset, and this refusal to allow even the smallest possibility that his father might be mistaken—even with regard to a supremely significant issue such as the Holocaust—that leads Gibson to temporize in his own statements about whether the Holocaust actually occurred. Whatever else is open to discussion, the worth, the authority and the inherent goodness of his father cannot be broached.
If you read any of the numerous personal histories laid out by Miller, you will conclude that Gibson, like the other helpless victims Miller describes, undoubtedly had a brutal and cruel upbringing, especially in view of his father’s particular beliefs. But Gibson has denied all of this—first to himself, and later to the rest of the world. And even today, when he is a fully independent adult with wealth and power beyond the dreams of almost all of us, he dares not question any of this fable he has told himself about his father, and about his own childhood. It is this first denial that makes all the others possible—as Miller sets forth in compelling detail, it is the denial of the reality of our lives in our earliest years, it is the denial of our own pain, which greatly lessens (or even completely destroys) our ability to empathize with others, and it makes possible denial of countless other facts, and even of events such as the Holocaust, which are documented to an extent which one would think would make such evasion literally impossible.
But the demands of this belief system are unending: after you have denied your authentic self, you will be prepared to believe anything. You will believe that the Holocaust never happened—if your father tells you so; you will believe that Hitler is your country’s savior—if the surrogate father and authority figure leading your nation tells you so; or you will believe that a third-rate dictatorship which can threaten no one must be invaded, and hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis must die—if enough authority figures tell you so.
Whatever else can be questioned, the parent’s authority must never be doubted—regardless of consequences, regardless of the pain and destruction that must follow such denial, regardless even of the countless deaths of innocent victims.
This brings us to what so astonished me during my early morning reading a little while ago. I will have much more to say about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki within the next few days—and more particularly about how those literally world-altering events have been treated by the public and the media. The extent of the misinformation and outright lies, and the self-inflicted moral blindness that still affects almost everyone who writes on this subject, even today, is remarkable. It is also deeply disturbing—because it reveals the horrors that may still lie in our future.
As a preview of the issues I will discuss in more detail, consider the following excerpts from an article at Editor & Publisher:
On Aug. 6, 1945, President Harry S. Truman faced the task of telling the press, and the world, that America’s crusade against fascism had culminated in exploding a revolutionary new weapon of extraordinary destructive power over a Japanese city.
It was vital that this event be understood as a reflection of dominant military power and at the same time consistent with American decency and concern for human life. Everyone involved in preparing the presidential statement sensed that the stakes were high, for this marked the unveiling of both the atomic bomb and the official narrative of Hiroshima.
...
From its very first words, however, the official narrative was built on a half-truth. Hiroshima did contain an important military base, used as a staging area for Southeast Asia. But the bomb had been aimed at the very center of a city of 350,000, a continuation of the American policy of bombing civilian populations in Japan to undermine the morale of the enemy.
There was something else missing: Because the president in his statement failed to mention radiation effects, which officials knew were horrendous, the imagery of just a bigger bomb would prevail in the press. Truman described the new weapon as “revolutionary” but only in regard to the destruction it could cause, failing to mention its most lethal new feature: radiation.
...
It wasn’t until the following morning, Aug. 7, that the government’s press offensive appeared, with the first detailed account of the making of the atomic bomb, and the Hiroshima mission. Nearly every U.S. newspaper carried all or parts of 14 separate press releases distributed by the Pentagon several hours after the president’s announcement. They carried headlines such as: “Atom Bombs Made in 3 Hidden Cities” and “New Age Ushered.”
Many of them written by one man: W.L. Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, “embedded” with the atomic project. General Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, would later reflect, with satisfaction, that “most newspapers published our releases in their entirety. This is one of the few times since government releases have become so common that this has been done.”
I interject here that I have written about the myths surrounding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and about Laurence and his “embedded” reporting, in some detail before.
But here is the passage that caused my jaw to drop, at the end of the article:
On Aug. 7, military officials confirmed that Hiroshima had been devastated: at least 60% of the city wiped off the map. They offered no casualty estimates, emphasizing instead that the obliterated area housed major industrial targets. The Air Force provided the newspapers with an aerial photograph of Hiroshima. Significant targets were identified by name. For anyone paying close attention there was something troubling about this picture. Of the 30 targets, only four were specifically military in nature. “Industrial” sites consisted of three textile mills. (Indeed, a U.S. survey of the damage, not released to the press, found that residential areas bore the brunt of the bomb, with less than 10% of the city’s manufacturing, transportation, and storage facilities damaged.)
On Guam, weaponeer William S. Parsons and Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets calmly answered reporters’ questions, limiting their remarks to what they had observed after the bomb exploded. Asked how he felt about the people down below at the time of detonation, Parsons said that he experienced only relief that the bomb had worked and might be “worth so much in terms of shortening the war.”
Almost without exception newspaper editorials endorsed the use of the bomb against Japan. Many of them sounded the theme of revenge first raised in the Truman announcement. Most of them emphasized that using the bomb was merely the logical culmination of war. “However much we deplore the necessity,” The Washington Post observed, “a struggle to the death commits all combatants to inflicting a maximum amount of destruction on the enemy within the shortest span of time.” The Post added that it was “unreservedly glad that science put this new weapon at our disposal before the end of the war.”
Referring to American leaders, the Chicago Tribune commented: “Being merciless, they were merciful.” A drawing in the same newspaper pictured a dove of peace flying over Japan, an atomic bomb in its beak.
Make that image real to yourself: a dove of peace—with an atomic bomb in its beak. And then make real the image of a parent beating his young child over and over with a belt, and insisting all the time: “I’m doing this because I love you! I’m doing it for your own good!”
Do you see the connection now, and why there are no more important issues in the world than these? Well over 200,000 people were killed by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and almost all of them were, intentionally and by design, innocent civilians. Make no mistake: these were war crimes, if that phrase has any meaning at all.
And yet we tell ourselves, even today, that we were “merciful,” that we did it for our own good (to shorten the war)—and that we did it even for the good of the Japanese.
If the first denial is allowed to continue and is never challenged, you will be prepared to deny anything—and you will believe the most monstrous lie in the world. You will even believe that you will save the world by destroying it.
That is what our president and his most fervent advisors and supporters believe—and that is why we are all in mortal danger.
This entry was posted on Saturday, August 6th, 2005 at 5:48 am and is filed under U.S. Politics, History, Alice Miller, Cultural Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.
