Both/And Thinking And Terror Management Theory
Matt's initial post and reply to Susan's book seem to be based on an unwillingness to take a big picture stance. He writes:
Call me simple minded, but it looks to me that she is trying to weave in our reactionary cultural response to 9/11 with our militaristic foreign response.
Call me simple-minded, but I do recall that our foreign "response" to the attacks on 9/11, particularly the Iraq War, can only be considered a "response" in light of the fact that there was a full-blown, Goebbels-level amount of propaganda aimed squarely at an American public still shattered by 9/11 in order to get public support for the war. It's true that the Iraq War was planned long before 9/11, but the Bush administration opportunistically pounced on American anxieties to get support for the war. It's the both/and way of looking at things. The Iraq War was the result both of a long term neocon scam and the propaganda blitz after 9/11 to garner support for the war.
It's also true that Faludi's book isn't about the plans to invade Iraq, but about the formation of the anxieties that fed the propaganda effort. There are books about the plans to invade Iraq; I don't see why insisting that all books be on that. The anxieties that made us easy to propagandize to is a pefectly legitimate thesis for a book.
As for Matt's overly high standard of falsifiability, I suspect that he doesn't demand scientific rigor in books that don't give him the same knee-jerk desire to refute them. (I'm not theorizing why he's so eager to grasp at straws on this---I don't know if he's got a beef against feminists that causes him to be unfair, or if he's just a young person trying to shore up credibility by attacking an established public intellectual. Not really relevant why he's grasping, just that he is.) But what's really funny about this is that he made the blase assumption that the set of theories that Faludi (and Ducat) are working off of is in fact non-falsifiable.
In fact, there's a lot of research into the area of how fear of death and how it relates to reactionary political views. It turns out that it is, in fact, a falsifiable theory. Not that Faludi's specific book is a work of science (?!), of course. I'd say it's more a work of cultural criticism and history, and last I checked, history is a legitimate field within which to write a book. But historians and cultural critics write these books, and cognitive scientists, intrigued by certain patterns that crop up, then are able to tweak the ideas in to the holy grail, the falsifiable theory.
One big area where you see ideas like Faludi's and Ducat's being turned into falsifiable scientific inquiry is in the study of terror management theory. Basically, it's the theory that human beings have a lot of tropes and tools to block the fear of death, and they carefully use scientific research to figure out what those are. A standard TMT experiment involves giving people a writing assignment, where half are told to write about something like hanging out at the park and the other half are told to write about their own deaths. And then they measure how the death group compares to the non-death group in terms of attitudes.
The research is demonstrating that reactionary politics are linked strongly with fear of death, with people getting more conservative, more Republican, and even more hostile to abstract art when they consider their own mortality. (Obviously, not all people, but these are averages.) And of this constellation of internal protections against fear of mortality, misogyny is pretty damn high on the list.
Chris at Mixing Memory sent me a really interesting paper by researchers Jamie Goldenberg and Tomi-Ann Roberts about the role of misogyny in terror management theory. Working with the theory that women are marked as the "vulnerable" sex, and therefore that the threat of death will create more belief that women are more creaturely, more physical, more vulnerable and more penetrable (so that men can feel stronger, more impenetrable---Faludi's theory), they set out a series of experiments. They did a number showing various aspects of TMT and misogyny, but one important and relevant aspect for the purposes of this discussion is the need to make women seem more domestic, ethereal, feminine, and vulnerable to make men seem stronger.
In the series of experiments, they showed that reminders of mortality caused women to pay more attention to restricting calories later in the day (i.e., fit into the feminine ideal), overweight women became more self-conscious if reminded of their mortality, and even that women felt more positively about going to tanning booths after being reminded that they're going to die. The researchers were researching the relationship of sexual objectification to terror management, but we can easily see how the constellation of sexist demands on women to be beautiful, vulnerable, less smart than men, and domestic go together and create an entire coping mechanism that is manifested in culture. Obviously, more research needs to be done, but the initial experiments are upholding Faludi and Ducat's theories about how vulnerability is projected onto female bodies so men can feel less vulnerable, and how a huge terror like 9/11 functions as a culture-wide reminder that we're going to die---and present a culture-wide enticement towards more misogyny.
Is Faludi arguing that the uptick in misogyny was the reason for the Iraq War? No, of course not. In fact, most of her book doesn't have much to do with that; she just chronicles the uptick in sexist feeling after 9/11, which is exactly the sort of thing that TMT would predict. But I think you can make the case that gendered anxieties were corralled in support of the war, yes even for the liberal hawks. There's nothing about donning the label "liberal" that prevents a man (or for that matter, a woman, since women are just as in tune with cultural messages that set up women as the objectified sex that we can project our vulnerabilities onto) from having internalized sexism that starts to act up when presented with a death-bearing threat. When women are marked as the vulnerable sex, and rallying to war is marked as a "masculine" behavior, then it's going to be tempting to deny one's own vulnerability by rallying to war and squelching femininity. It's clear to me that a lot of liberal hawks were willing to ignore reams of evidence that this war was a Bad Idea. You don't see that level of ignoring reason and evidence without strong emotional reasons, and I do think there's good, scientific evidence behind the theory that people's anxieties of sex and death are enough to cause them to retreat into a fantasy world and ignore reason (at least temporarily) when confronted with a trauma like 9/11.
Comments (58)
Note: This is actually Matt Zeitlin, I'm just using the TPM Cafe acoount I set up over a year ago. First, I really shouldn't respond to these attacks on my motivations, but if Robert Lifton were to have a book club on Superpower Syndrome, I'd gladly roll in and write a very similar post making much the same points. But let's talk about terror management theory, or more specifically, that paragraph in my last post that seems to have been conveniently forgotten:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that article is talking about terror management theory. I'll be making this argument more in depth in a post later today, but the uptick in sexist feeling that Faludi documents is rather unremarkable analytically, to use her terms, much of the ontogeny can be explained by something rather than the phylogeny.
November 9, 2007 8:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
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sPh
November 9, 2007 9:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is Matt the kid who didn't read Faludi's book?
Two things: first, the military response to 9/11 was the entirely justifiable, if poorly executed, overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and bungled attempt to destroy al Qaeda and bin Laden. You're quite right that the neocons, having salivated over an Iraq invasion for many years, hijacked 9/11 and used it as an excuse to launch their invasion of Iraq.
Next, it's really hard to that women are viewed or see themselves as "more vulnerable" than they were pre-9/11. An increasingly substantial majority of college students are women, and while the population of all American women may be gaining weight as fast as American men, the constellation of admired body types for women has expanded over the last 40 years from the zaftig, helpless Bond women and sprightly Russian gymnasts to include heavily-muscled weightlifters, powerful sprinters, wiry marathoners, thick-thighed soccer players, eye-shaded billiard and poker players, and pant-suited executives.
While it may be true that a more militaristic society is by definition more sexist, there's a disconnect between this "War on Terror" and the assertion that it's created a more sexist society. Not to say there's no sexism today, but its causes pre-date 9/11 by quite a while.
November 9, 2007 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
in light of the fact that there was a full-blown, Goebbels-level amount of propaganda
Godwin's Law! Thanks for playing, here are your parting gifts.
November 9, 2007 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is fascinating to follow these comments to note the many defensive mechanisms on display--much the same as the mechanisms displayed on the cultural level since the Big Bang (I cannot bring myself to utter the standard advertising phrase that plugs Guiliani). The "diversion" from the issue into a discussion of something else--usually a personal attack or an unproductive attack on the form of a comment is certainly the most common. Just as the Big Bang was framed as an attack from Islamofascists who hate us and our way of life--those dirty dogs (insert your own epithets here), and any discussion of our pre-existing foreign policy was eliminated. Higher level thinking is replaced by name-calling every time. This is why most domestic disputes degenerate into name-calling and eventually fisticuffs--because, when you are losing, you go for the sucker punch. It changes the subject and the locus of communication from reason to emotion. And if I can get you on the ropes emotionally, it no longer matters if you have the winning rational argument. I win.
That we are at war with a culture that came to dominance centuries ago through a bloody genocidic reaction to female domination (see Sumeria), and that they project "feminization" onto our culture must be acknowledged as undeniable sex-based undercurrents to current events. That we are responding to the sucker-punch by phallus-waving in a socio-religio-political He-Man's Woman Hater Club (see the Little Rascals and a number of the major religions normative attitudes on female behavior)is part of a long historical tradition. Some men are still coming to grips with the enormous power and mystery of sex and birth, their minimal role and loss of control therein (see Eve)which paints THEM as the weaker, more vulnerable sex (also see the mortality rates of male vs female babies). The transformation from goatherd to god was predicated on the minimization of the female. Same as it ever was.
November 9, 2007 9:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think "fear of death" is a not a useful concept here. Bicycling commuters are very "aware of their mortality" but it does not turn them into reactionaries.
Although perhaps there is something to it: you can be afraid often but not very much. It is part of your everyday experience. The alien, the unknown, the strange -- those you cannot address on a rational plane.
I wonder what the future historian will make of the list of 2569 potential targets for terrorists in the state of Indiana.
So we had a wave of paranoia and a bunch that deftly rode it like master surfers. Was it because their fear was more synchronized with the widespead fear, or because this is what they were always doing for living, even though, out of necessity, the waves they used were smaller?
November 9, 2007 9:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Eh considering the American Government is following Goebbels advice, I think it's appropriate in this case.
November 9, 2007 9:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is she really saying it created a sexist society? The way I read it the act gave people an excuse to retreat to those attitudes or at lease to express them more openly.
Again, like many things 9/11 as excuse.
November 9, 2007 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think Ms. Marcotte's writing is thought-provoking and worth reading. I have directed several young men who I thought needed a bit of a wake-up to her essays here and hers and those of the entire group on Feministing.
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But I find your comment a little rich given Ms. Marcotte's tendency to throw little knife-stabs of the type I quoted above into her posts. And one can always count on a surprised/injured counterattack ("oh that was just a throwaway") when one points them out. Either they belong in the work, in which case one can expect that they will come in for comment, or they don't belong in the work. Deconstuctionalists' work is not immune to structural analysis.
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sPh
November 9, 2007 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
TMT does not "prove" anything other than the fact that people read about other people's opinions and studies, and don't bother to look at the protocol of the theory testing.
As I posted on the other thread, participants in the testing of the theory were chosen by the results of the authoritarian scale and the patriotism scale, they were identified as Americans and they were primed by suggestions of their own mortality. The result is just what could be expected - they advertised their allegiance to their own ingroup.
In subsequent studies, participants identified as liberals advertised their allegiance to their own group as did conservatives. They also identified with their own ingroup when primed with threat of theft and social isolation.
This study does not in any way, shape or form "prove" that humans when reflecting on their own mortality are reactionary or tend towards conservatism, it doesn't prove that when confronted with death threats(because they were not)humans do anything more than tend towards identifying with their ingroup.
There is no empirical evidence to support the claim that when reminded of mortality, humans become reactionary and/or misogynistic - the only evidence provided by Faludi to support her theory is anecdotal and subjective.
Interestingly, those who are threatened with death and must reflect on their own mortaliity, combat soldiers, report that their response is motivated not by hyper-masculinity, but by fear and guilt - fear of death and guilt in possible failure to support the members of the ingroup, which is exactly how the army does motivate them.
November 9, 2007 10:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I have my theories, I just don't think they're relevant. But amusing.
November 9, 2007 10:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Your eagerness to dismiss the feminist's arguments without thinking about them has been duly noted and is, in light of your other posts on this blog, unsurprising.
November 9, 2007 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Awareness of your own mortality on an existentialist level might be a slightly more different thing than plain fear of death. That said, I'll bet you $20 that most of us become intolerant after a hair-raising bike ride.
That said, on your last paragraph, I recommend not making up false dichotomies when you can avoid it. It's quite possible that we both had a natural widespread paranoia that was also exploited by professional fear-mongerers. It's like marketers who use sexual imagery. That sex is sold to you doesn't preclude the possibility that you have inherent sexual desire. In fact, inherent sexual desire is why sexualized marketing is so effective.
November 9, 2007 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'll add that I agree whole-heartedly with Matt Taibbi that the Bush administration's relationship to propaganda resembles the Soviet Union more than Nazi Germany as a rule, but the fear-mongering prior to March 2003 was high level stuff, more Nazi than Stalin. It makes sense, of course. They were trying, like the Nazis, to get people behind a mission of invading other countries, always a heavy load to carry. Most of the time, they're more like the Soviets, interested in squelching internal dissent, thus all the talk about the 5th column and whatnot. Slightly different goals require different propaganda techniques.
November 9, 2007 11:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
More intolerant of what? If I nearly loose my life in a bike ride, I don’t see why I should be less tolerant of a couple of homosexuals butt-fucking in the park. To the contrary I think I would see my previous intolerance of their activity as petty.
November 9, 2007 11:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
"It's also true that Faludi's book isn't about the plans to invade Iraq, but about the formation of the anxieties that fed the propaganda effort." That's a very good point. I may worry that the description of the anxieties ranges a little too far over the map, to the wild west and back. I may suspect, as I've argued, that it can only be seen in context of a division in America, and the anxieties felt after 9/11 that supported war didn't necessarily match the myths and misogyny of the leaders.
So I don't want the usual evils of chauvinism to blend a little too easily into the reptilian brain and then into American culture. Still, it's good motivation for me to read the book. I suspect I'm still going to find a provocative muddle, but rather that than a right-wing or media muddle.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
November 9, 2007 12:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Godwin's Law, when suggested, served the purpose of signaling that an Internet political discussion had ceased to have any connection to reality and should be terminated by rational persons.
Now, when we have a regime in which
1. the theory of the Presidency is that he is all-powerful and subject to no checks and balances (and especially does not have to respond to Congressional subpoenas for hearings,
2. The invasion of a nation that was no threat to America was considered justified.
3. Extraordinary rendition is an accepted practice.
4. The discussion of torture has been reduced from "never acceptable" to "Just how much torture can we get away with." and "Is water-boarding really torture or just simulated drowning?" The Bush administration even uses the Nazi description for the torture procedures it authorizes. They are "alternative procedures", a term used by the Nazi SS.
5. The Republican Party elects its operatives as much by repressing the vote of opponents as by presenting an acceptable reason to vote for Republicans.
6. Habeas corpus has been effectively eliminated.
7. The existing courts were not adequate for convicting people without evidence on mere government accusations, so an entirely new set of courts was established and a JAG officer who was to testify to Congress on how bad those courts are was not allowed by the Pentagon to testify.
8. The idea that an individual had a right to privacy unless the courts applied due process has been scrapped and the Telecom companies who violated the law on the orders of the government are working for immunity for law
9. The Rule of Law is being reduced to the arbitrary rule of a dry drunk and his paranoid side-kick.
10. The mass news media has been reduced to little more than right-wing propaganda (yes, Goebbles type propaganda) surrounded by amusing fillers describing the antics of O.J.Simpson, Lindsay Lohan, Brittany Spears, Paris Hilton and others who are famous for being famous.
and so on. The nearest government models for the behavior of the Bush administration and the Republicans in Congress are found in Argentina under the Generals, Pinochet's Chile, Franco's Spain, Communist China, the USSR, Musollini's Italy, and HItler's Germany. In fact, Rudy Giuliani seems to be trying to win the Presidency by creating a cult of personality like that of Kim Il-sung or Stalin.
It is no longer irrational to have a discussion that compares the workings of our government to that of the Nazi Party. Godwin's Law no longer signals that the discussion has moved away from reality. Instead, reality has moved to the horror story that is the current Republican Party and the Bush administration.
We need to recognize that Godwin's Law has no remaining purpose except as a "gotcha" by right-wingers who want to disrupt discussion of the miserable anti-democratic state of our current government.
Face it. Godwin's Law is just soooo twentieth century.
November 9, 2007 12:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
LT,
You applied Logical fallacy of the excluded middle. It's not either/or, its "Do we have more misogyny, less, or the same amount?" There is actually a continuum to consider rather than having to choose one of two extremes.
November 9, 2007 1:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Piotr,
You said : "I think "fear of death" is a not a useful concept here."
When the manipulated variable in an experiment is a model of "fear of death" and it produces a statistically significant distinction in the outcome variable, that has become an extremely useful concept.
As for the fear of the "master surfers," Bob Altemeyer in his book "The Authoritarians" points out the distinction between right wing followers and those who lead them. Your excellent and very memorable metaphor of the master surfers clearly distinguishes between the followers (waves in the sea) and the leaders (the surfers.) A leader need not ~be~ a wave in order to understand and use the waves.
November 9, 2007 1:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Take, as a group, firefighters. Especially in cities where there is a multigenerational pattern of working in the fire service, while serving the public is indeed a motivation for many, tradition leads them to join a department. I don't think it's any accident that firefighters refer to one another as "members", a term with in-group implications. While firefighters may physically restrain citizens from going back into a burning house to get some family member, it's often a fire command challenge to keep teams from going into a structure of imminent danger of collapse, and there's a team cut off inside.
The two major studies of Army culture are Janowitz's The Professional Soldier and Huntington's The Soldier and the State. They speak of the mutual concern that develops.
You see this sort of behavior among commercial fishing crews, where one after another may go after someone who, by all reasonable standards, is dead.
While the US Coast Guard motto, officially, is Semper paratus, "always prepared", the informal motto, at least in the rescue units is "you have to go out. You don't have to come back." -- Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 9, 2007 1:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
Howard, from basic to the field, they are assigned "battle buddies", they are trained and inculcated that they "never leave a soldier behind" they motivate these people by fear and guilt. That the army does it is not exclusionary of other groups - the police partnering is a case in point. Despite popular wisdom, the army doesn't look for sociopaths who like to kill, they look for normal people in which they can induce fear and guilt that they might die and more importantly others might die if they don't fight.
People may join the army filled with patriotic ferver, but it is fear and guilt that makes them fight. Paul Fussell's memior "War Time" as well as his book "The Children's Crusade" is chock full of anecdotal evidence to support this as are many other memiors and and studies. This is especially true in POW camps where "buddy support" kept them alive - those without it, were far more likely to die.
I'm not making a moral judgement on the army's use of this tactic, just observing that they use it.
November 9, 2007 4:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
How is "never leave a soldier behind", if there is a chance of recovery, a matter of "fear and guilt"? Buddy systems are common in a wide range of systems that have risk, from SCUBA diving to firefighting, to Boy Scout hikes before Scouting was politicized. Before anything else, it's a safety measure, in something as basic as swimming instruction. Buddy systems are common in such things as going into a toxic or oxygen-poor environment, if for no other reason than monitoring one anothers' equipment and mental status.
That military forces don't look for sociopaths is nothing new, certainly well documented in military-related social science work from the forties on. I'd cite Janowitz and Huntington as starting points. Air-to-air combat tactics are designed around pairs, simply because one person can't stay alert to all angles, especially from behind.
I'm honestly not clear how "fear and guilt" keep one fighting. Combat situations are characterized by people trying to kill you. Now, I agree that someone is more likely to fight if they feel part of a unit. Grossman's work "On Killing" certainly brings that out, but also established that the average, nonsociopathic individual is far likelier not to use a weapon if he considers himself isolated than part of a team -- and not firing, on a battlefield, is apt to get one killed.
Now, if you wanted to talk about the operant conditioning mechanisms more recently used in Army training, I would agree they are emphatically intended to keep people from freezing in battle, a very bad thing to do. A lot of things that work tactically are counterintuitive, such as the best way to cope with an ambush is to accelerate into it. There's both anecdotal, and quantitative operations research, data suggesting why that works, such as the intuitive tendency, if one misses with a firearm, is to correct to lengthen you range, not reduce it.
You are correct that support was correlated with survival in POW camps, but how that translates to fear and guilt, I can't hazard a guess.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 9, 2007 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Howard, if you can't feel guilt and fear you're not going to function with a unit. The most common cause of PTSD in combat soldiers who have been wounded is their guilt in leaving their comrades to fight on without them. Any soldier will tell you that the relationships he has with his unit/platoon is indescribible and closer than brothers in combat units especially.
Of course soldiers are trained to fight, of course they're trained to operate without thinking (they want them to do what they're told to do) but I am talking about psychological motivation in making boys stand up with each other and fight. Training in combat operations is not enough, men must be psychologically motivated. The way to psychologically motivate them is to make them feel responsible for the lives of their fellow soldiers and make them feel that the way for them to stay alive is to depend on those very fellow soldiers.
That an average, nonsociopathic individual is far likelier not to kill when by himself is exactly my point. Calling it "operant conditioning mechanisms" just makes it sound better, it doesn't change the motivation.
Why do you think parents use guilt to induce accepted behavior? Because it works, just as fear of isolation does.
How do you think religion works as a behavioral modifier? Fear of going to hell and guilt at what you're doing to go there.
Are there other motivators? Of course, mentioning two as primary isn't exclusionary of any other.
November 9, 2007 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'll agree that there is guilt on leaving a unit. Have you some data indicating that participation is due to fear and guilt?
That sounds like a positive set of feelings. I'm not sure why you are honing in on fear and guilt, which are imprecise. You don't seem to like "operant conditioning", which has a very specific meaning in the way it's tied to military training. It's an objective term; psychological terms are not about "sounding better". It describes a particular cognitive mechanism that is reinforced in a variety of ways, in unit and individual training.
You seem to be dwelling on these as motivators, although you say you aren't excluding others.
That's not a "feeling"; that's a reality in infantry combat. The tactics are designed around teamwork, with different fire team elements in the Army and Marines, but still a very structured set of teams providing supportive fire while the other moves, etc. Even two-man sniper teams are teamed because two different functions need to be performed, complementing one another.
As far as killing, are you familiar with Grossman's work? That's not meant as a putdown if not, but if you are, it gives something of a framework. There are differences between cohesion and aggressiveness. There was a definite trend, in past wars, for cohesive infantry units to fire, but to aim to miss. To get them to kill reflects both organization and conditioning, as well as specific skills.
Also, there is a substantially validated amount of what wasn't called conditioning as the term didn't exist, but that certainly is involved in quite a few martial arts disciplines.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 9, 2007 7:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Am I really saying she said 9/11 created a sexist society? No. I said she said 9/11 created a MORE sexist sexist society.
November 9, 2007 8:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Where did I force a choice between extremes? I just said it's hard to see how the society is more sexist than 40 years ago, or 7 years ago.
November 9, 2007 8:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just who are these "we" you speak of, as in "we are responding to the sucker-punch by phallus-waving in a socio-religio-political He-Man's Woman Hater Club..."
and "we are at war with a culture that came to dominance centuries ago through a bloody genocidic reaction to female domination (see Sumeria), and that they [who's they? "we?" or this alien culture you refer to?] project "feminization" onto our culture must be acknowledged as undeniable sex-based undercurrents to current events."
Frankly, I'm not at war with this culture (you mean Islam?) and neither is anyone I know.
November 9, 2007 8:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'd agree with that, and the post above, and again have to point out that BevD seems to be the only person who read, fully understood, and interpreted the TMT study beyond a superficial level.
All I'd add is that I think the language "induce fear and guilt that they might die and more importantly others might die if they don't fight." is rather loaded, and slanted towards negative terms.
To "instill comradery" would be more neutral and complete definition imo. That includes duty and obligation, but it also includes shared purpose, friendship, etc. I think a fear of dying is pretty innate, and the military hopes duty will override individual fear.
November 10, 2007 2:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Amanda, since you are familiar with Max's blogging habits, you have probably noted that his MO when responding to other authors is to drag the conversation in tangential directions, then take new directions from the tangents.
Vide: The way the conversation lurches down the old dusty trail into one about 50's westerns. Or the attempt to change the topic from Nader to Clinton.
Because this thread is rife with folks speculating on each others' intentions, I'll refrain from more of the same; but I will note that he has, in his trollish way, at least partially succeeded once again here.
November 10, 2007 2:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's a very important point often overlooked.What I've read echos that, that men really don't like to kill, actually kill people, on an emotional level. Most veterans seem to strongly and emotionally dislike killing and many wrestle with conscience.
Many assume that humanity, and particularly men, must like killing because of how much of it has occurred throughout wars, archaeological records of violence, violent ape ancestors, proclivity to torture, hunting, etc.
Men are competitive and physical, and war has an element of competition for safety and dominance, but that's not to equate actual war and killing with aggressive competitiveness and sport. I've yet to meet this mythical "hypermasculine" person who sees children with shrapnel wounds and loves real war.
But anyone, man or woman, will be more jingoistic if told that a war is necessary and justified, without moral dilemmas, and the media sanitized.
November 10, 2007 3:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: The research is demonstrating that reactionary politics are linked strongly with fear of death, with people getting more conservative, more Republican, and even more hostile to abstract art when they consider their own mortality. (Obviously, not all people, but these are averages.) And of this constellation of internal protections against fear of mortality, misogyny is pretty damn high on the list.
Here's a problem I have with this: all kinds of things force us to confront our mortality, from seeing a bad wreck on the highway, to losing a loved one to news of natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Why don't these things turn us into misogynistic rightwing fascists? 9-11 horrified and outraged me to be sure, and Hurricane Katrina shocked and angered me (guess who I was angry at: hint, it was liberals or feminists). But those events were distant to me. My mother's cancer death when I was nine, my father's death when I was in college and my brother's suicide when I was 18-- those deaths were immediate and deep wounds in my life. Yet my response was not to become a reactionary sexist. I'll wager anyone who has had a death in their immediate family would testify the same.
November 10, 2007 5:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you pay taxes-YOU are and so is everyone else you know who is paying taxes.
November 10, 2007 5:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I've been treating PTSD for years, researching and writing about it for the past two years and I have never seen anything that supports your claim about guilt as a "common cause" of PTSD. Can you supply a link to your source? I find that fascinating, if correct.
November 10, 2007 5:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you, Kosmik, for the constructive criticism. It would have been a more neutral observation if I had used that phrase. I was thinking about Paul Fussell's experiential observation about motivation in combat and should have been more careful in how I phrased it. Of course his evidence is anecdotal but it sounds more than reasonable to me that it is true.
It takes something more than training to get boys to jump out of landing craft and since I've read Fussell's book and others, it seems that most often cited is the fear and guilt of letting others down. In my opinion men are not as instinctively or reflexively violent and combative as they are portrayed to be. If men were truly instinctively violent and drawn to warfare, we wouldn't need inducements and drafts to coerce them to fight.
Your comment that it appears to be display seems very much on the mark to me.
November 10, 2007 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't have a link, but Hendin, Haas's study, "Suicide and Guilt as Manifestations of PTSD in Vietnam Combat Veterans" is good.
Another excellent study is "Combat Guilt and Its Relationship to PTSD Symptoms" Henning and Frueh.
I would think that the "American Journal of Psychiatry" would be a good source.
I should not have said it was "a common cause" I should have said it was a common factor.
November 10, 2007 12:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Because the effects are often temporary and vary from person to person. Already conservative people react more strongly to reminders of mortality. It's not automatic, either. It's perfectly possible for a person to teach herself to be open-minded and not have these knee-jerk reactionary tendencies. But the will has to be there first.
November 10, 2007 12:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
You can say all that, but will you say 'impeach'?
If you operate from the premise that what
was said was inaccurate, deceptive, at the
very very best incompetent, what action then
should Congress be taking on our behalf against
this administration? I think it can be summed
up in one word: Impeachment. If you concur,
check out this or other impeachment-related
websites:
http://www.impeachbush.org
November 10, 2007 1:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
You brushed aside operant conditioning when I brought it up last, but I'm going to bring it in. Now, a landing craft is a fairly bad example, because it's unlikely US troops are ever going to have to take landing craft to a defended beach, as in WWII. Depending on the situation, they will take helicopters and jump out or fastrope down.
But go back to your landing craft scenario, assuming it's Omaha Beach on D-Day. If anyone stopped to think about fear and guilt, it would be a complete command failure -- and it would get people in that boat killed. Speed is life. Even in the horrors of that fairly fouled up landing, the people that moved inland quickly had a chance to live -- the people that slowed, or froze, or ducked into cover, died. Current units, when ambushed, accelerate their vehicles into the ambush, firing, because that's the way to survive.
I suggest any of several books by Dan Bolger, either about the National Training Center rotation (I'm blanking on the title) or Death Ground on infantry tactics. Grossman's "On Killing" is relevant on many levels.
Forget the military, and talk to anyone who has had beyond a basic level of training in a martial art. I will, very loosely, call it a conditioned reflex. Combat motivation, when actually engaged, simply is not on the deliberative level you seem to suggest.
Operant conditioning started with the pop-up Trainfire rifle targets, shooting at figures rather than paper targets, but really progressed with the MILES system, a variant on laser tag that brings home, with a sense of immediacy, that you can get wounded or killed if you hesitate.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 10, 2007 7:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
And also highly uncomplimentary to their subject.
Which actually make them relevant, in the sense that they identify what you were doing as an Ad Hominem attack.
I read your blog just about every day, Amanda, and you're way better than this.
November 10, 2007 7:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Case in point: The 2004 GOP Convention set, with its Roman columns, looked like a Leni Riefenstahl directed wet dream.
Yet it was never mentioned by anyone.
November 10, 2007 7:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Howard, honestly, I think you put to much faith in training as a motivator - I have never heard any anecdotal evidence other than the soldier was scared shitless, training in no way prepared him for the real thing and nothing can compare to it or be like it and on the eve of D-Day the jails in England we're filled with deserters, and not everyone jumped out of landing craft - some had to be forced out, just as some had a boot in the ass to make them jump from planes. That's just a fact of real war, Howard, it isn't a reflection on the training or the bravery of the people in the armed services. That's why the army doesn't want sociopaths, psychopaths and other personality disorders and why they try to weed them out - people without empathy or lacking in conscience are not "group" oriented, they are "self" oriented.
Now is training important and crucial to their survival? Of course, I have never, ever said it wasn't, but training isn't motivation. It is designed to give the combat soldier confidence, which is exactly what it should do, but it does not make men fight. The army hopes they make training reflexive, but by its nature reflexiveness isn't motivation it's reaction.
November 10, 2007 8:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bev,
I think you should read Grossman's On Killing, which Howard cited. Grossman shows rather convincingly that conditioning is indeed an effective technique. Grossman notes that in all of the US's wars since WWI, the military has kept records of the number of "non-shooters" in battles - the percentage of soldiers who do not discharge their weapon. As I recall, in WWI the percentage was as high as 90%. In Vietnam and other recent wars, the non-shooter rate has fallen dramatically. Grossman attributes the result to various training innovations, especially the pop-up targets and other more realistic battlefield simulations that Howard mentions. As unromantic as it sounds, part of training is to turn men into fighting machines, who respond automatically and with precision sharp judgment to the rapidly moving action on the battlefield.
My understanding is that much of the training is designed to mimic, to the greatest extent possible, the actual conditions the soldier will confront on the battlefield - urban fighting for example. Fear is no doubt a motivator. But the better prepared the soldier is, so that the things that occur on the battlefield are not shocks or surprises, the more likely that soldier is to respond to fear by falling back on the reactions that have been routinized through training.
One thing that makes people fight better is apparently the realization that one has a better chance of survival if one responds quickly and fights proficiently rather than seeking to avoid fire.
Nevertheless, this all seems to be part of individual training. But surely part of military training is still heavily focussed on fostering teamwork, trust and loyalty - corps spirit. I've seen several interviews with soldiers in Iraq who say that they mainly fight for each other, rather than for strategic or political goals, even military goals. Perhaps "guilt" is not the right word, but a sense of obligation and duty to comrades. Guilt is what one would experience afterward if one failed to perform one's duty, resulting in the death of a comrade.
November 11, 2007 12:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks, and several observations. For many years, I worked principally with officers at higher levels, and it's only been in the past few years that I've really gotten to know some very professional NCOs, and how their role complements the officer role. You mention individual training, and it is the job of the NCO to prepare and motivate individuals; it is the job of the officer to prepare and motivate units.
There has been a very major change, starting with naval aviation during Vietnam and then spreading into the doctrinal changes that began to take effect in the eighties. The navy realized that if you could get a fighter pilot to survive his first five combats, he had a far better chance of surviving from then on. It turned out that the five-victory definition of aces actually had a statistical basis. This manifested itself in the Top Gun program, which did its best to have aircrews (1 or 2 men, depending on aircraft) go through as realistic an experience as could be created, of those first five fights. From this, John Boyd, and other theorists (with very practical experience) started on the path that not only stressed ultra-realistic training, but, through a variety of techniques, worked on thinking and acting faster than one's opponent.
I remember, well before Vietnam, my mother's Army hospital unit going to their more realistic training, with extremely realistic mockups of some horrible injuries. Regular soldiers learned to get over their shock on seeing these, and the lower-level medical personnel moved even faster. I remember some surgeons telling me that from a distance, they even thought it was real, although a close look told them it wasn't -- but in the spirit of the training, they moved just as fast as if it was real. The new Combat Lifesaver course, being given to nonmedical soldiers, is an odd mix of basic first aid and advanced paramedic skills, with the total focus of being able to move wounded out of the line of fire, and not freaking out over the sight of an ugly wound.
At first, the MILES "laser tag" system made things considerably more realistic in that there was no more "no, I shot you first." Then, the doctrine of how to use it began to evolve. If you were "hit", your weapon locked, and you were required to drop where you were. Oh, safety was followed; people weren't allowed to go into heatstroke. But the message was being given, "do this wrong, do this too slow, and you die." Training became harder and harder, because it's much easier to put back sweat than blood. Even psychological casualties were considered a risk of training; there was a very dramatic account of a soldier driving a vehicle at night, not taking precautions, and being "killed" in the middle of a lonely night. He recovered, but the message spread.
I believe it was in Death Ground, when Dan Bolger was describing a light infantry exercise at JRTC (Ft. Polk), when it started coming through, in a way that it had never done before, that mistakes could not just get you killed, but your unit wiped out. Call that training, conditioning, or whatever you chose, but it's a psychic change. It's not a popular point here at TPMcafe, but again and again, I've been told by current soldiers that they do not want to be part of an army with draftees. As one sergeant put it, everybody in his Bradley would be scared when the door swung open and they would jump into battle -- but he'd be confident that the men on either side were as committed as he was, and knew they were there because they chose to be there.
For all the talk of Jessica Lynch, I'm amazed that few people seem to know about Leigh Ann Hester -- the first woman soldier to receive the Silver Star, the third highest decoration for valor, for direct participation in combat. Nurses under fire had received it before, but, bluntly, she got it for leading her unit and killing people.
There's a broader significance in the performance of her Kentucky National Guard MP squad, which took on and defeated an ambush four times their strength. I'm proud that their chain of command let them speak to the press and say whatever they wanted to say, including ways they had not been supported.
I can get a link to the After-Action Report, but the key point was that the unit made no mistakes at all, and had gone beyond the standards. Some rules may sound trivial, but knowing that the spare ammunition is stored in exactly the same place in every vehicle, so she could reach for more without taking her eyes from the action, proved its worth. The squad leader, Timothy Nein, who recently had his Silver Star upgraded to a Distinguished Service Cross, was not willing to have everyone in that squad -- as mixed a group by gender and ethnicity as you could find -- trained to the standard of their job. They were trained to do everyone else's job.
It was lucky for them that they had a medic attached. The week before, when he joined them, Nein found out he had not been trained in the use of the squad-level rocket launcher. He got a very intense cram course -- and used rocket launchers to break up the core of the ambush. In like manner, he gave extra medical training to the unit. One of the three things the unit stressed to the press that not every unit will have a medic, and that not the current 10 percent, but 100 percent, of soldiers need the radically new Combat Lifesaver course.
Nein and Hester did what NCOs do -- train and motivate individuals, and the small unit.
This sort of training does not create automata. A friend of mine trusted her trained instincts to wait as long as possible before machine-gunning a civilian car speeding toward her checkpoint, but ready to fire if it came too close. It stopped in time.
During Desert Storm, an Air Force pilot received one of the highest decorations for not shooting down an aircraft that the radar controller told him to attack -- he relied on his trained instinct to tell him to get in close to verify, and on his trained skills to handle the situation if it was an Iraqi plane. It was a fighter flown by some very lucky Saudis, whose identification electronics had failed.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 11, 2007 9:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right, because columns automatically equate to Leni Riefenstahl and Nazi propaganda. Because they're the only people to have used columns. No respectable use of columns comes to mind, ever. Riiight.
Great fan base you have Marcotte.
November 12, 2007 4:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
I also have to wonder what they are talking about. Are these columns part of the building, in which case their presence is a simple coincidence? Or were they built especially for the covnention? I have to say too that of things that put me in mind of the Third Reich, columns are not in that list at all. Columns make me think of Greece and Rome, and I suspect that is true for most people.
November 12, 2007 5:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: It is no longer irrational to have a discussion that compares the workings of our government to that of the Nazi Party. Godwin's Law no longer signals that the discussion has moved away from reality.
Godwin's Law still applies because Hitler and the Nazis are an evil on such a grand scale that their invocation in a "Government X is just like the Nazis" does shut down rational discorse, and hence should be avoided. There are after all more than a few other illiberal governments that can be used for comparsions (you mention some) instead and these probably should be used if the point being made is that the US government is becoming illiberal. And Perhaps the most useful comparison is still to go back to the transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire due to the stresses of its foreign involvements and the vast social inequality that came into existence at home. The Founders saw Rome as a model for the US, and a precautionary one too.
November 12, 2007 5:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am generally hostile to mindless feminists like you Marcotte, but certainly favor equal rights and opportunities for women.
Deaths of people close to me did not have any effect on my hostility to people like you, near or long term. If any thing the deaths made your silly arguments more insignificant in the scheme of things, and I didn’t have to make any effort to surpass and urge for fascism.
November 12, 2007 8:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mike Godwin himself (yes, there really is a person associated with the Law) pointed out that specific, in-context references to historical events, or even ideology, of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NDSAP) do not invoke the Law. Indeed, there are some quite specific and useful parallels in examining the development of a national security state, of the parallels between the Fuehrerprinzip and Unitary Authority, of security organizations being given unchecked authority for surveillance and torture, etc.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 12, 2007 8:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think the parallels are "useful" at all because mention of Hitler or the Nazis automatically invokes not a rational response but an emotional one. Sure, you can find parallels-- but you can even find parallels between the Nazis and the government of Canada, or between Hitler and the Dalai Lama (governments are governments and humans are humans so of course there are commonalities, indeed many commonalities). But when I hear "Hitler" or "Nazis" I don't think about detailed policy issues, I think about Auschwitz and I think about Europe rent by a war that cost tens of millions of lives. Nothing even remotely like that is going on in or because of the US today. Iraq is a fairly minor war, not even on the scale of Vietnam or Korea let alone WWII (NeoCon delusions of grandeur notwithstanding), and (compared to the Holocaust) the illiberal domestic policies of the Bush administration are utterly trivial, not really worse than what we endured under Nixon and not even as wicked as FDR's internment of the Japanese.
So try to keep things in proper scale and if you want to hold rational discourse leave the 200 meagton emotive warheads in their silos.
November 12, 2007 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Many years ago, I came to the realization that if there were a real encroachment on freedoms in the US, it would be from an authoritarian promise of "security", typically finding scapegoats and constantly asserting a need for more unilateral authority in the name of security. To varying extents, that was a pattern in Italy, Germany and Spain, and in some Latin American countries. Japan isn't really comparable culturally, although it can be interesting to look both at the Meiji rescripts establishing the primacy of the state over the individual, as well as the institutionalization of disobedience.
The policy of physical extermination of the Jews was established in early 1942. I note that the Nazis came from fringe beginnings around 1920, and built power during that time -- and had a coup attempt slapped down. Through parliamentary maneuvering, the Nazis gained control in 1933. As far as the political parallels, those in the thirties are far more relevant to the threat to freedoms we face now, than the multimegaton warheads in the silos.
There is a distinct parallel to the "Leader Principle" that actually precedes Hitler, actually going back to Roman concepts. The Romans had the wisdom, when they gave parades celebrating mission accomplished victories, to have a slave whispering constantly to the victor, "you are mortal." I see a dangerous continuation of the idea of an infallible leader in the signing statements, about the theory of unitary authority, and some interesting parallels between the early Prussian political police and extraordinary rendition.
No, I find the trends in the domestic situation to have significant and unpleasant parallels. Maybe you don't think about parallels in policy, but I do. I repeat: I am not speaking of the actual killings of tens of millions (i.e., not the Holocaust alone), but the constant grabs for power as the Nazis consolidated. Hitler worked a brilliant political trick in changing the military oath to one of personal loyalty to him. We aren't yet seeing that in the military, but look seriously at the constant insertion of political loyalists into jobs, be it in FEMA or Baghdad, for which they are totally unqualified.
Look at the testimony of Richard Carmona, the Surgeon General not reappointed, in part because he would not go along with political operatives insisting he mention GWB three times per page of a speech. The cherry-picking of intelligence is not unique to Bush, but one would hope we learned something from LBJ and McNamara--apparently we did not.
Hindsight is wonderful; I'm sure assorted German parliamentarians wished they had acted differently in the late twenties and early thirties. I only hope that Congress grows some backbone and simply begins a serious policy oversight program. Expansion to Iran remains a possibility, and there is enough senior military dissatisfaction that, ironically, we might have a constitutional crisis over not fighting.
By focusing on Auschwitz, you are missing the Sudetenland, and you are missing Czechoslovakia. Hitler's military went along with bluffs there, and were charmed by his early successes.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
November 12, 2007 12:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Third Reich also wore pants. Notice all the candidates wear pants? Even Hillary. Wingnut Q.E.D.
November 12, 2007 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: Re: Maybe you don't think about parallels in policy, but I do. I repeat: I am not speaking of the actual killings of tens of millions (i.e., not the Holocaust alone), but the constant grabs for power as the Nazis consolidated.
But why invoke the Nazis? The number of governments which have behaved this way is enormous and most of them do not come trailing 200 megaton emotional warheads. One could talk about, say, the Tudor monarchs of England, at least the two Henrys and Elizabeth, or Louis XIV in France. One could go back to the Romans as I suggested. One could cite previous US examples: the Alien and Sedition Acts, Lincoln's actions in the Civil War (Yes, I know he's a hero, but still...), the Japanese internments, or the Red Scare and McCarthyism. When the Nazis are invoked I see an essential cheat being performed, an end run around rational discourse, the discoursive equivalent of a giant "F--- You!", and the invocation of hysteria in place of honest dialog and reflection.
And one other danger I should mention here: We need to be cautious about depending on historical models at all. History does not ever repeat: "Time changes all things and we step not twice in the same river." By insisting too fervently on historical parallels it's very easy to blind oneself to real and important facts that have no precedent. Memory is sometimes a very effective blindfold.
Re: By focusing on Auschwitz, you are missing the Sudetenland, and you are missing Czechoslovakia.
???
Aren't you now in NeoCon territory? They're the ones who obsess over Munich and all that.
But it isn't 1939. And it isn't 1968 or 1914 either. It's 2007. Deal with the here and now, not with ghosts. Look forward, not back. The future is the only thing available for change here.
November 12, 2007 6:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
.
However I do think it is better to discuss fascism rather than Nazism.
.
sPh
November 12, 2007 6:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't consider the Alien and Sedition Acts or Lincoln's actions to be heading toward an open-ended national security state. That was very much a concern with McCarthy, but a still-independent news media, possibly coupled with his reaching too far, put an end to that.
What does neocon theory have to do with the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia? At best, the neocons talk about the Allied response. I'm not referring to that, but to the power plays inside the German government. Hitler was close to military overthrow if the Western Allies had resisted either of those bluffs. His double safeguard was that he had changed the military oath to a personal one rather than one to the country.
No, it isn't 1939, 1968, 1914, or any of a number of other years. It's not 1941, but there probably have been more useful lessons about intelligence warning, and command and control generally, from the analysis of Pearl Harbor than almost any other event.
It's not 1942 and Japan, with its strategic overreach at Midway, or June 1941 with Operation Barbarossa. Fred Ikle has used those, and other examples of mission creep, that could well have been heeded in Somalia or Iraq.
I really don't know how to respond to a serious suggestion to ignore historical parallels, not as rote, but for better understanding. General staff systems, for examples, clearly derive from having assigned military historians to help with what, today, are called After-Action Reports.
You may say the future is the only thing available for change here, but chiseled on the National Archives is "What's Past is Prologue." Neither the past nor the future can be forgotten, as they interact with the present.
November 12, 2007 6:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are lovely columns at the north end of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, facing Grand Army Plaza, which was built to honor the Union victory in the Civil War. Somehow, I have never been able to see the columms and not think of Mussolini.
That out of the way, I couldn't agree more.
November 12, 2007 8:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
In subsequent studies, participants identified as liberals advertised their allegiance to their own group as did conservatives. They also identified with their own ingroup when primed with threat of theft and social isolation.
Interesting. I've been meaning to look into the TMT thing for work; Bev, I wonder if you can point me towards the studies here?
Having said that, if my chiming in when I haven't read the relevant texts isn't going to make anyone cranky, I wonder if these things are exclusive. It sounds as though you are saying that the study was biased in choosing a particular outlook; assuming there is some validity to the results on both sides (which I think I'm entitled to do if the following is correct), it seems to me that reminders of mortality might both elicit group identification that cleaves subjects to their political affiliation, and hence make some of the population identify as more liberal, etc., and at the same time encourage attitudes that are more nationalistic, less sympathetic to social justice demands, etc.
November 12, 2007 9:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Why invoke the Nazis? "
Because, in my opinion, Nazi Germany is the only other recent historical example of the takeover of the entire government and society with the intent and specific plan to establish a totalitarian government that has the intent to totally reform society.
In most cases authoritarian governments have been the result of a takeover of government by a small group of plotters who conduct a coup, and the authoritarian nature of the government was primarily a requirement of simply staying in power. That is not he case with either Hitler or with the movement conservatives. These governments are the direct result of long years of planning to completely restructure government and society in their image.
Even the USSR was not such a planned takeover of an existing government. It was a result of the collapse of the Czar, caused by WW I, and then a takeover that followed the Civil War in which there was no effective government. Only after that did a totalitarian approach take form, in large part as a reaction to the civil war and then to maintain the dictator Stalin in power.
Before the relatively Constitutional takeover of The American government by the Supreme Court and the movement conservatives, there has not been a planned totalitarianism intended to completely change the nature of the nation in the way the Nazis functioned.
Another strong similarity between the Bush administration and Nazi Germany is the strangely weak leader who allowed his subordinates to almost literally run wild with no oversight. Again, this is not the normal course of authoritarian governments. Usually they are more like Saddam Hussein and Franco in that the top leader works very hard to maintain his position and uses authoritarian means to destroy his opponents, both within and outside his government. That's a major distinction between an authoritarian government in which a small group of coup plotters and the movement takeovers represented by Bush and Hitler.
Authoritarian and totalitarian governments are different from each other in degree of repression, and along with that difference, twentieth century authoritarian governments are qualitatively different from all previous authoritarian governments because of the available technology of internal national repression.
Until Bush and Cheney took over the American government (with the connivance of a carefully built right-wing extremist Supreme Court) I would have considered Nazi Germany unique even among authoritarian regimes in the twentieth century. Now I find no other authoritarian regime besides that of the Nazis that as closely matches the Bush administration. Any restriction against comparing the two makes it difficult to show how truly extreme the Bush people and the movement conservatives really are.
November 15, 2007 5:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Example from my town: writing letters to a judge requesting that killing a bicyclist should actually result in some time being served. (The driver was on disability due to extremally poor eyesight which seemed to us rather negligent).
In vain. Vehicular homicide, the perfect crime.
November 15, 2007 5:43 PM | Reply | Permalink