Reflections on a Memoir: The Mind of a Moralist

It’s not possible to do justice to the 400-plus pages of Robert Lifton’s memoir titled Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2011, 430 pages) in a short article like this. It is a richly packed account of more than 50 years of scholarship and activism written in his characteristic lucid and fluid prose, providing an excellent overview and summary of the vast body of work that he has created. He gives us glimpses of the many mentors, colleagues, and students with whom he has been involved as well as descriptions of the events he has experienced.

One of the things I find most remarkable about the Robert Lifton who emerges in this memoir is how clear and consistent his moral and political stance has remained throughout his work. In the preface of the book, Lifton expresses simply and elegantly the basis of his moral and political positions.

I’ve been moved by the victimized people I encountered and have spoken out publicly against the forces responsible for their suffering. That identification with survivors of cruel events has in fact been a major source of my social activism. After what I had heard and seen, it became quite natural—indeed urgent—for me to take stands against mind control, nuclear weapons, American war making, and Nazi-like cruelty and genocide (p. xii).

Lifton has remained true to this sensibility throughout. He is affirming the principle that if one witnesses cruelty, violence, and injustice, or evil, as being displayed by an individual or group toward others, there should be a moral imperative to speak out, make public, and bear witness to its existence. As he puts it, “I felt that I had gained special knowledge of the impact of these abuses, which could inform my witness, and I was able to make use of my unusual vantage point to become an advocate for peaceful paths to justice and political decency” (p. xii).

Page 184

One problem with doing this is that it can bring opposition and criticism. Lifton has been the recipient of a good deal of both. For example, being subjected to investigation and harassment, including having his phone tapped by the FBI because of hosting a fundraiser in support of a group of Catholic anti-war activists who had been arrested. Lifton responded to this intrusion with an active effort, which included writing letters of complaint to various senators along with publishing an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

Similarly, when pressured by Turkish inspired criticisms of his published remarks about the Armenian genocide, Lifton, along with Eric Markusen and Roger Smith, published a scholarly article in the Journal of Holocaust and Genocide Studies documenting details of the Armenian genocide as well as the complicity of the United States government and some parts of American academia in supporting the Turkish denials of responsibility.

This incident concerning the Armenian genocide is a good example of the blending of scholarship and activism that has characterized Lifton’s work. In the article, he wrote that when scholars deny genocide in the face of decisive evidence, they foster a “false historical consciousness” and can contribute to future atrocities because “unopposed genocide begets new genocide” (p. 400). He writes, “The impact of the paper astonished us. It was widely reported on in a way that few articles in serious journals are, especially by publications concerned with issues involving academia.” Furthermore, “the article had an electrifying effect on the Armenian community in America, which had felt itself beleaguered by bullying Turkish falsifications that were more or less encouraged by the U.S. State Department policy (to avoid alienating a NATO ally)” (p. 400). The political impact of the article followed from its scholarship.

Another aspect of Lifton’s moral integrity is the manner in which he has remained faithful to his principles and the politics that follow from them despite pressures and temptations to do otherwise. He has had offers to collaborate with those in power. In 1962, he was approached either by the CIA or military intelligence with an offer to aid them by using his knowledge about thought reform and brainwashing techniques: much as, more recently during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, military intelligence and the CIA

Page 185

have employed psychologists to assist them in maximizing the effects of certain “enhanced interrogation” techniques.

Lifton was able to make use of his knowledge of thought reform when he had the opportunity to testify against the CIA in a case involving Dr. Ewen Cameron, a prominent psychiatrist who worked with the CIA in developing methods of mind manipulation. These methods included using sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs to induce psychological breakdown. He was also able to make public the CIA’s role in the death of Frank Olson, which he learned about from his colleague and friend Eric Olsen, Frank’s son. Lifton has also twice belatedly discovered that both his first research project on Chinese Communist thought reform and a later conference he participated in were partially supported by CIA funds.

This steadfast principled moral consistency stands in contrast to so many of the positions taken by other Jewish intellectuals with leftist sensibilities who underwent left to right, or at least rightward, political transformations over the course of their careers, such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Arthur Koestler, and even Irving Howe and David Riesman.

A major thread throughout Lifton’s work has been his engagement with what he names totalism: an all-encompassing system of beliefs involving a passionate attachment to an ideology along with the desire to battle against ideas or people that are seen as not sharing in the belief system. His first focus was on the rigidly dogmatic ideology of Mao’s China and the accompanying fanaticism that led to the uses of brainwashing and thought reform. As he says concerning the centrality of this engagement, “My thought reform study became a leitmotif for all of my work. Everything I’ve done since connects somehow with totalism and mind manipulation, and all too frequently with expressions of apocalypticism” (p. 85).

The four major events that he has studied—Chinese thought reform, the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the Vietnam War, and the behavior of Nazi doctors—follow this leitmotif. For Maoist China and Nazi Germany, the connection with totalism is clear. With Hiroshima and atomic weapons, Lifton sees the totalistic ideology of

Page 186

what he calls “nuclearism,” the worshipful attitude toward the bomb paired with the magical belief that the bomb’s power will save us, as crucial to understanding our relationship to nuclear weapons. In Vietnam the totalistic fanaticism of our cold warrior leadership led us into the “atrocity producing situations” of that war.

Other aspects of totalism that Lifton has examined include religious fundamentalism, in particular Aum Shinrikyo and other religious groups that believe in and wish for the coming of the apocalypse; the role played by Nazi ideology in creating the Holocaust and the perverting of physicians from healing to killing; the totalistic aspects of American policy including the excesses of the McCarthy era; the involvement of the CIA in mind control; the anti-communist fanaticism that fueled our nuclear weapons buildup and pushed as into the disastrous war in Vietnam; and the apocalyptic aspects of America’s “superpower syndrome.” He even remarks on the totalistic aspects that formerly characterized training programs in psychoanalytic institutes with their rigid adherence to dogmatic theoretical constructs.

Opposition to the oppressiveness of totalistic ideology and the harm that can follow from a commitment to it has always informed his thinking about totalism. His concept of proteanism is a description of a way of relating to the world that is in opposition to totalistic fundamentalism.

One of the most commendable aspects of Lifton’s work is that he is not reluctant to criticize reprehensible actions even when the perpetrators are American. So much psychohistorical writing has an unfortunate tendency to focus on the bad behavior and unsavory motivation of others—Nazis, terrorists, fundamentalists, jihadis, etc.—while not addressing our own sins and shortcomings, even when there are clear similarities between the actions and motivations of others who are the focus of one’s inquiry and the actions and motives of one’s own group.

This aspect of Lifton’s work, both the scholarship and the activism, brings to mind the Old Testament prophets who spoke out about the erroneous beliefs and harmful actions of their people in the service of holding them to a higher moral standard.

Page 187

Lifton’s explorations of and conclusions about his subjects of study have consistently been informed by his moral principles. In my opinion, this model for doing psychohistory serves us better than pseudo-objective accounts that assiduously avoid making moral judgments. The critical accounts that often emerge are both courageous and potentially constructive.

Page 188