Perspectives on Teaching About War-Making in 2002 America

War should only be an option of last resort for civilized society. In modern Western society, and perhaps for all contemporary human beings, it is necessary to dehumanize and demonize before going to war. Fear encourages dehumanization, hatred, and the demonization of the potential enemy. One of my goals as an educator is to help students recognize that they have a responsibility as human beings and educated citizens to understand these processes so as not to unthinkingly become a party to war or allow their country to be one. I do

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this in a variety of courses including: War, Peace, and Conflict Resolution; 9/11 and the Psychology of Terrorism; and Hitler, the Holocaust, and Genocide. I tell my students that we are all participant-observers in the human condition that includes the inclination to solve our problems through violence and war rather than understanding and negotiation.

For example, it is extremely difficult to be dispassionate when examining current and recent historical events in the Middle East. There is a plethora of vivid images including:

• Veiled women in Afghanistan

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• Veilless women attending school in Kabul
• Hungry children in Baghdad
• Body doubles of Saddam Hussein
• Palestinians suffering in refugee camps
• Palestinian mothers of suicide bombers offering other sons to their cause
• Israelis being blown up by suicide bombers while at a pizzeria in Jerusalem
• Israelis arresting Palestinian men
• Arafat besieged in Ramallah
• George W. Bush calling for war against Saddam Hussein

These contradictory images evoke strong feelings of sympathy, support or condemnation, empathy or disdain. The choice of images displayed often reflects the values and political preferences of the displayer. Even the apparently neutral ground that teachers and others would like to tread is laden with hidden emotional landmines. As a teacher and editor, I confront these issues on a daily basis in a variety of courses.

In the classroom, often I am quite aware of a powerful student inclination to have only empathy or sympathy for one group of victims at a time. This may have something to do with why you get such intense victimization olympics (an intense competition to prove that your group has suffered more than another group, which then justifies a greater sense of entitlement). Students, like rivals in the Mideast, often treat victimhood as a zero sum game in which concern for one group comes at the cost of the other. In teaching Hitler, the Holocaust, and Genocide for a quarter century, I have had great difficulty getting students to empathize with the suffering of more than one group at a time. It is important to mention that these students are representative of our student body, which means that they are overwhelmingly Christian in religion or background, with only about 10 or 15 per cent being Jewish. There is an occasional Muslim who takes the class. Regardless of religion, students normally resist the genocide part of the course, either ignoring it, or getting very quiet when it is covered. Next semester, I will begin the course with a section on genocide, focusing on powerful images of victims in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Bosnia to see if the students can empathize with these victims as well as with the Jewish victims of Nazi genocide. If this does not work, than I will drop the notion of genocide altogether from this course, and perhaps teach a separate class on that subject.

In terms of the victimization olympics, when this issue comes up, I try to help students see the extent to which groups who feel victimized may also feel entitled to special treatment and revenge. This sense of specialness is part of what motivates different groups to act. I draw the analogy of those Germans who felt victimized by the loss of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, who then felt entitled to become a conqueror nation, lording it over other people whom they dehumanized first through their propaganda and then in reality.

For most people, the dehumanization of the other is a necessary step to inhumanity. To alert students to dehumanization, I take many steps. One of the most effective is to show a 50-minute film called The Faces of the Enemy. In it, Sam Keen shows how societies create cartoon stereotypes of the other who then becomes easier to hate and therefore kill. His prime examples are the Communist depiction of the capitalistic West, the U.S. view of Soviet Russia, the Nazi depiction of Jews, right-wing American perceptions of the Communist threat, and a man (David Rice) who brutally killed a West Coast family of four based on his delusion he was a U.S. soldier killing Communists. Sometimes I mention that Timothy McVeigh, a decorated soldier in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, also had the fantasy of being a soldier serving America when he blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Another way of explaining dehumanization is to teach students how wars and bombing are rationalized. For example, the U.S. leadership personalized the 1991 Gulf War giving the rhetorical illusion it was against Saddam Hussein himself, rather than the soldiers and civilians who were really being bombed and killed. This is one of the reasons why so many Americans felt cheated after the Gulf War: Saddam is still ruling after his troops were routed on the battlefield and Americans felt this Iraqi dictator would be driven from power by his own people. The present President Bush, who has reinstated key members of his father’s administration, is currently trying to drive Hussein from power in the name of fighting terrorism.

Though Sam Keen’s Faces of the Enemy is useful in teaching students how to identify propaganda and other elements of dehumanization, actual war and propaganda video materials are often more helpful. In discussing the early stages of the 1991 Gulf War, I refer to the briefings given by General Norman Schwarzkopf. His delight in showing videos of “smart bombs” and other weap-

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onry turned what he displayed into a technology show of the latest war game equipment. I refer to this phase of the war as the “video game phase” because Schwarzkopf and the other briefers on the war spoke as if it were an oversized video game, ignoring the flesh and blood people being blown to bits by what we call “smart bombs.”

Students, as young people in American culture, are inclined to action rather than caution. Regrettably, they have incredibly little understanding of the unintended consequences of the actions of governments. Some examples of unintended consequences I give are:

• The U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War touched off the Cambodian genocide rather than bringing about victory.
• In the fight against Soviet Communism in Afghanistan, the U.S. provided financial and equipment support for the Islamic fundamentalists, including Osama bin Laden. This was done under the premise that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. After inadvertently helping to strengthen Islamic fundamentalism we discovered that the enemy of our enemy is often our enemy.
• The U.S. stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia from 1990 offended Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists. Bin Laden had offered to save his homeland from Saddam Hussein by raising 10,000 Arab Afghan mujahideen. The narcissistic blow of this rejection was one of a series of events leading to the assaults of 9/11.
• U.S. support for Arab dictatorships results in ordinary Americans being more popular with the people in the street of countries where the governments hate us, such as Iran, than in officially friendly countries like Egypt where we spend billions propping up an unpopular dictatorial government.

When we look at the decision-making process leading to each of these situations, we see a pattern of little concern for the people involved. When Washington will pay serious attention to the populace as well as to the governments, its policies will be more effective and it will face fewer surprises.

Some of the tools I use in helping students to understand issues of dehumanization, demonization, hatred, psychic trauma, violence, and war come from what I have learned as a psychotherapist, trained for ten years in this field after my graduate work in history and political science. The psychological mechanisms of defense, which the layman calls “coping devices,” are most useful, as is an understanding of the processes of grief, healing and mourning. The impulse to war and its repetition are usually associated with incomplete mourning. Vamik Volkan and Robert Jay Lifton are two psychiatrists/scholar activists who have devoted much of their lives to working on these issues. About 20 years ago Lifton left a distinguished professorship at Yale University to open the Center on Violence and Human Survival in the CUNY system. There he brought together people from all fields to further this cause. Included among the many interesting seminars he organized was one with a Scandinavian UN arms inspector who helped many to understand the deviousness of the Iraqi leader and the need to be more realistic in dealing with him. Last year Lifton retired from active participation in the Center to move to Boston with an appointment at Harvard. Charles B. Strozier, the Center’s long time co-director, has decided to reorganize it, focusing on terrorism.

Vamik Volkan grew up on Cypress, where he learned the nature of ethnic hatred of neighbors at firsthand. He has devoted much of his life to lessening such hatreds. At the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia he brings together academics, diplomats, and therapists to analyze, discuss, and write about these conflicts. Most importantly, he takes teams out into the world to confront and lessen the ethnic and national hatreds to avert bloodshed. The titles of several of Volkan’s books I assign reveal some of his ideas, for example, The Need to Have Enemies and Allies: From Clinical Practice to International Relations (1988) and Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (1997). People interested in understanding hatreds and furthering peace should consider reading these books. One of Volkan’s most valuable tools is the notion of “time collapse.” That is, in a type of group flashback, a traumatic historical event is experienced as if it had recently happened. For example, Milosevic of Yugoslavia talked as if the Battle of Kosovo of June 28, 1389, occurred almost yesterday. Another valuable concept Volkan developed is the idea of a chosen trauma, that is, trauma that a society focuses upon in forming its identity. Kosovo, a chosen trauma to Serbs, enabled a dictator like Milosevic to justify the suppression of the 90 percent population in Kosovo that was Muslim in the name of Serbian entitlement due to Serbian suffering.

We live in a society that spews out so

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many fantasies about killing and war on television, in the movies, and in fiction, that students are not aware of the reality. They have the fantasy that people, especially men, kill with ease for the flimsiest of reasons. The reality is that killing is something that most healthy people do not readily do, not even in wartime. In World War II the U.S. military historian General S.L.A. Marshall found that in the European theater of conflict only 15-20 percent of American soldiers actually discharged their weapons in combat. He did not condemn them as cowards, just as good Americans who were more willing to risk being killed than to violate the “Thou shalt not kill” teachings of their parents, teachers, coaches, youth leaders, ministers, priests, and rabbis.

Students have a hard time accepting the reality of these inhibitions. In the second class of the course, War, Peace, and Conflict Resolution, I tell the students that war is about killing, and then ask the question, “Under what circumstances would you kill another human being?” Subsequently, I inquire as to how they think it feels to kill and then what students think the effects of killing would be on them and their society. The idea is to get students to be less unrealistic about killing, violence, and war. My hope is that they will then become much more cautious about war. They then read On Killing (1995) by a soldier-psychologist, Dave Grossman, which helps them to understand the psychological effects of killing and warfare, with special reference to the war in Vietnam.

Teaching about war amidst a War on Terrorism and a prospective war against Iraq creates difficulties and opportunities. Many of my students were traumatized by the events of 9/11 and they have not yet fully recovered from it. They are confused as to just what the War on Terrorism means, beyond fear, long lines at airports, and their inability to take pocketknives and nail clippers when they fly. I tell the students that the security measures at airports are partly for the sake of reassuring the public by closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. The day before yesterday, there was a spontaneous discussion on the efficacy of airport security measures in my senior seminar, 9/11 and the Psychology of Terrorism. The students are coming to see that the War on Terrorism is a strange war in which their president told them to go shop in the mall unafraid as the way to thwart the terrorists. This is an unusual way to fight a war: presidents normally enlist support by asking for sacrifice, not consumption and tax cuts.

As a professor I search for “teachable moments” when events external to the classroom affect the consciousness of the students. For example, when North Korea declares itself to be a nuclear power in violation of specific agreements with the U.S. and other countries, I ask the students why so little consideration was given to war with North Korea as opposed to war with Saddam Hussein. When they had few answers, I asked them to consider the book by David H. Hartmann, The Conservation of Enemies: A Study of Enmity (1982). The idea that we have a choice as to what enemies or potential enemies we can join in enmity literally makes some of their jaws drop.

In the same course, there was a much more prepared and scheduled debate on how to end suicidal terrorism in Israel and the West Bank. My students worked hard, but in the end showed themselves to be extremely limited in their knowledge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I pointed out the extent to which they needed a much more in-depth knowledge of the subject. My dilemma at the time was that I only had a half-hour in which I could cover this incredibly complex issue to help them deepen their knowledge. The method I used was to role-play a man-in-the-street West Bank Palestinian and then an average Israeli. Before beginning, I reminded them that I am both an American and a Jew so that there certainly were limits on how accurately I could portray both Israelis and Arabs.

Let us turn now to the question of war with Iraq. President Bush recently received a “blank check” from our Congress to authorize his pursuing “regime change” in Iraq. The issue of a blank check brings several things to mind. In the summer of 1914, Berlin’s blank check of support to Vienna in its dispute with Serbia was one of the conditions making possible World War I. The war had the unintended consequence of the destruction of both the Austrian and German empires. Another issue is the greater leverage that such a resolution gives President Bush in negotiating with Saddam Hussein, a violent man who seems to only understand force and immediate threats of its use.

I try to get my students to probe the reasons why Bush is so determined to turn the War on Terrorism into a war to remove Saddam Hussein even though the CIA warns that in the short run, this war increases the likelihood that the Iraqi dictator will use his weapons against Americans, our friends, and our interests. Despite the best efforts of the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfield team to connect

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Iraq with Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, these two groups have traditionally been antagonistic. The Baath Party leadership has a socialistic anti-Islamic fundamentalist ideology and the fundamentalists despise this group. One wonders, however, if Bush is driving them together. An Islamic colleague reports that right before operation Desert Storm in 1991, Saddam Hussein added a white stripe reading “Allahu Akba” (God is Almighty) to the Iraqi flag. The professor notes that Hussein is now building what will become, if finished, the largest mosque in the world, ironically in a city (an-Nasiriya) named for the socialist Nasser.

One of my areas of research and publication is the psychobiography of presidents and presidential candidates. In this regard I have studied the Bushes, both father and son. George W. Bush wants to finish the job his father started in 1991. This is for the sake of both vindicating his father and showing that he can do what the old man didn’t get done — removing Saddam Hussein. Elsewhere, I tackled some issues of Bush family dynamics. (with Glen Jeansonne, “George Bush: From Wimp to President,” Joan Offerman-Zuckerberg, ed., Politics and Psychology: Contemporary Psychodynamic Approaches, 1991, pp. 99-116) Here I will just say that I trusted the father’s judgment far more than I do the son’s judgment for reasons of both temperament and experience. Prior to becoming president, the father had seen what could go wrong with military plans from the events of his own life. The plane he proudly flew as a 20-year-old Navy pilot was shot down at the cost of the lives of his crew. He knew enough not to go to war against Iraq without lining up many allies, especially in the Middle East. On the other hand, the son only flew jets in the Texas National Guard, mostly as a way of not being shipped to the war in Vietnam. According to the best George W. Bush biography (Bill Minutaglia, First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty, 1999), “W” enjoyed wearing his flight jacket to impress others on social occasions.

He came to Washington in 2001 spouting the rhetoric of indifference to world environmental concerns, anti-nation-building, and U.S. “go-it-alonism.” America has paid a price in world prestige and support for this rhetoric. I am beginning to have some success in getting students to listen to his speeches and pay attention to his transformation to some concern for world opinion. Personally, I do prefer a minimum of on-the-job training about war by our presidents partly because, as Thucydides said over 2300 years ago, “War is a violent teacher.” What war teaches often leads to more war and violence, both international and domestic.

George Walker Bush, who, while running for president in 1999, said that it “felt funny” not to have the Soviet Union as an enemy, responded to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with the words, “We are at war.” At the time he did not know who was responsible for the attacks. Like many American men, he feels more in role leading and cheerleading the country to war than he did without the Soviet enemy. Declaring war offers a sense of direction and patriotic strength, but it takes us down a dangerous and unknown road, since war is the riskiest of ventures. The pattern of fear engendering dehumanization, hatred, incomplete mourning, and the demonization of the potential enemy encourages future violence and war. It is important that we work with students to help them understand and confront both war and intolerance in our world.

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