From yesterday’s New York Times: an article about Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and a peace activist.
Dr. Lifton is a co-founder of Friends of Courage to Refuse. Some of his ideas:
“Ordinary men, can all too readily be socialized to atrocity. These killing projects are never described as such. 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.”
“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 — large-scale destruction to renew the world spiritually.”
Chris Hedges, the reporter who interviews Lifton, expresses many similar ideas in his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning.