[Peace-discuss] who likes war, who doesn't! This tells it all!

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

A Skeptic About Wars Intended to Stamp Out Evil
            By CHRIS HEDGES
            
            
            
            R. ROBERT JAY LIFTON has spent his life studying
people in extreme situations. He has written about Japanese survivors in
Hiroshima, Vietnam veterans, Nazi doctors and members of terrorist cults.
But he has also spent a lifetime as an activist, involved in the Vietnam
antiwar movement and the antinuclear movement. The two activities,
scholarship and activism, are for him intertwined. All of his work is
infused with the struggle to live the moral life. 
        
        
He and a number of colleagues have organized support in the United States
for some 500 Israeli soldiers who have banded together in an organization
called Courage to Refuse. These soldiers will not serve in the
Israeli-occupied territories, saying they will no longer "dominate, expel,
starve and humiliate an entire people."
            The group Dr. Lifton helped found, Friends of
Courage to Refuse, is made up mostly of American Jews. It has pitted itself
against the powerful array of pro-Israeli groups in the United States, most
of which have what Dr. Lifton calls "an uncritical endorsement of Israel's
aggressive policies against the Palestinians." He and some 230 supporters
across the country have raised $5,000 to take out an ad this week in the
Israeli newspaper Haaretz backing the Israeli resisters. And in this move,
as in other grass-roots campaigns of the past, Dr. Lifton sees the kernel of
a potent opposition "which could have considerable influence beyond its
numbers."
            "When I worked with Vietnam veterans, I found them
to have been placed in atrocity-producing situations," he said. "Soldiers
found themselves in environments where the structure of the conflict led
them to commit atrocities.
            "They were not bad people, not worse than you or me,
but they were terrified. They were frustrated at not being able to find and
destroy the enemy, at having their own men killed. They developed an impulse
to strike back at old men, children, women, laborers in a rice field, under
the illusion that everyone, even those who were not armed, was the enemy.
This can happen when you combat a hostile population, when you fight an
elusive opponent. It is what I see happening in the occupied territories."
            As a psychiatrist, he views such conflicts as
disastrous, not only for individuals but societies. Ordinary men, he said,
"can all too readily be socialized to atrocity."
            "These killing projects are never described as
such," he said. "They are put in terms of the necessity of improving the
world, of political and spiritual renewal. You cannot kill large numbers of
people without a claim to virtue. Our own campaign to rid the world of
terror is expressed this way, as if once we destroy all terrorists we
destroy evil."
            Dr. Lifton, 76, is a distinguished professor
emeritus from the City University of New York. He is now a visiting
professor at Harvard Medical School. He spoke Sunday afternoon at the
Harvard Club in Manhattan, his shock of unruly white hair combed down over
his ears. 
            He is married to the psychologist and writer Betty
Jean Lifton and is the father of two grown children. He grew up in Brooklyn.
He was deeply influenced by his father, a politically progressive
businessman who was a fervent atheist. As a teenager, Dr. Lifton was drawn
to books about contemporary history, and most of his work, he said, has been
concerned with "history and the historical process." 
            He said that the fundamentalist Israelis and
Palestinians, and most avid supporters of "the war on terror" in the United
States, combine to further "the growing impulse toward apocalyptic
violence."
             
            APOCALYPTIC violence is aimed at large-scale
destruction to renew the world spiritually," he said. "You have this on the
Israeli side with these religious groups that were fundamental in shaping
the mind of the assassin of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. You have this
among the Islamist fundamentalist groups like Hamas. But you also have this
here in the United States among those who use the threat of terror to
justify world domination militarily."
            Dr. Lifton said such groups "act in concert," and
"even though they denounce each other they contribute to the growth and
power of their opponents."
            "The mutual violence propels these apocalyptic
groups to the center of their societies," he said, "and those that urge
peaceful methods to solve conflicts are relegated to the fringes. The
interaction of violent groups comes to dominate relations between opposing
societies. Voices of restraint are increasingly excluded."
            It is this drive for wholesale slaughter, made
possible by the tools of modern industrial warfare, that he ultimately says
he is fighting to thwart. And it is why he gives importance to Courage to
Refuse. These groups, he says, are a bulwark that can stop a slide into
self-annihilation.
            "Our own bellicosity is part of our effort to
compensate for the weakness and vulnerability that came out of our defeat in
Vietnam," he said. "We have built an alliance with Israeli leaders who share
our vision. This has become a unifying principle.
            "A war on terror, without limits on time or place,
brings us one step closer to the use of apocalyptic violence. Our
technology, our nuclear weapons, has made all this a lot easier. These
weapons are apocalyptic in essence and bring this vision to the people who
possess them. Islamist terrorists hunger for these weapons, maybe all the
more so because we continue to embrace them."