The Social Psychology of Making Enemies, Propaganda and War

Short Summary

Contrary to common belief, war and the creation of enemies is not coded in our genes.

• The symbolic enemy of primitive-ritualistic warfare, where the enemy in is quite different from the modern notion of an enemy.
• The withholding enemy of the greedy-colonial warfare who is part of the imperialist, capital grabbing culture.
• The worthy enemy, a fighter of heroic wars is a fighter of heroic wars, what Bertolt Brecht calls "the beloved enemy”.
• The enemy of God in a holy war has to be destroyed to ensure the safety of the holy group.
• The threatening enemy in defensive wars that aim to protect one's country or homeland.
• The oppressive, dictatorial enemy opposing liberation or revolutionary wars.

A classic study in the US in the midst of the cold war revealed that young students viewed the Soviets as “the enemy”, not because they posed a physical threat to the US but due to their different ideology and competitive stand as a super power. Most adults over age fifty who have gone through some personal experience with war define “the enemy” in the traditional way, meaning the country with which we are at war.

An enemy image is a representation of the enemy. The double standard dynamic is the most powerful in distorting perceptions of enemy images. This is a process whereby people use a different yardstick to judge the enemy’s actions or to assess enemy motivations than they use for themselves or for allies.

The tendencies to judge the enemy’s actions negatively, to remember mainly negative information and to attribute peaceful acts to situational factors are frequently accompanied by hostile predictions of the enemy’s intentions far exceeding what can be determined by the facts. As most people are likely to perceive an enemy as more dangerous and more hostile than they really are, they are also more likely to expect the enemy to act more aggressively and violently than can be assumed from the available facts. The ability to present and perceive the enemy in such paradoxical ways enables people to justify their attitudes and behavior towards the enemy.

Four of the unwritten rules of enmity are:

1. The enemy of my friend is my enemy
2. The friend of my enemy is my enemy
3. The enemy of my enemy is my friend
4. My enemies are friends with each other

While during the cold war it was the split between the USSR and the US, more recently it has been between the Arab-Muslim world and the US This dynamic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is also responsible for the awkward situations where the US found itself simultaneously supporting two sides of a conflict with arms during the lengthy Iran-Iraqi war in the 1970s and 1980s. During the 1991 and 2002 wars in Iraq the US found itself again in the awkward position of supporting Syria, who was opposing Iraq (the enemy of my enemy is my friend) and at the same time labeling Syria as a terrorist nation due its hostile position towards Israel, the US’ ally (the enemy of my friend is my enemy). During the cold war research has shown that the US’s enemy, at that time, the USSR, was closely associated in people’s minds with terrorism and drug trafficking. As predicted by the statement, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, as soon as he gained enough political and military power in Iran, the late Shah of Iran opposed the Kurdish minority who were fighting for their independence.

Accordingly, one of the primary goals of war propaganda is its creation of enemy images that strip the enemy of their human, domestic and individual characteristics. Analysis of enemy images and war propaganda reveals that there are nine levels to describing or perceiving the enemy. On the other hand in an era when television can show the enemy, their children and families right in our living rooms, it is no longer easy to dehumanize the enemy. To see the enemy as a full person, like us experiencing joy, pain, fear and hope, will change our relationships to our enemies. Far from justifying all of our enemy’s actions, understanding will give us an historical, political and emotional context for our enemy’s actions.

The Social Psychology of Making Enemies, Propaganda and War

Abridged Article

Contrary to common belief, war and the creation of enemies is not coded in our genes. The first humans who could organize and train an army, plan and conduct a war against an enemy, appeared in the Neolithic period, only about 11,000 to 13,000 years ago. Psychological elements predispose us towards propaganda and war. We can act in evil ways and make enemies. By understanding how prejudice and propaganda moves people, enemy making and war might be stopped. The US cartoon character, Pogo, wisely says, “We have met the enemy and it is us”.

Ofer Zur tells us that, since the Neolithic Period, people have fought seven types of warfare, each represented by a specific type of enemy:

1. The symbolic enemy of primitive-ritualistic warfare, where the enemy in is quite different from the modern notion of an enemy.
2. The withholding enemy of the greedy-colonial warfare who is part of the imperialist, capital grabbing culture. The greedy, dominating and colonial enemy in these wars was one who deprived the dominated people of their physical and psychological needs. From the view of the dominant party, the enemy was not to be destroyed but to be exploited, enslaved and used to fulfil the greedy needs of the elite group of people. The enemy in this war is to be exploited, nowadays not necessarily militarily or wholly militarily but economically exploited.
3. The worthy enemy, a fighter of heroic wars is a fighter of heroic wars, what Bertolt Brecht calls “the beloved enemy”.
4. The enemy of God in a holy war has to be destroyed to ensure the safety of the holy group. The Arabs, and many in the US, view the Middle Eastern wars as a holy war between Islam and Christianity. The Cold War too from the US viewpoint had the elements of a holy war against the “atheist communists”, and the recent war on terrorism has an underpinning of holy war on radical Muslim terrorists, both being depicted as the “good guys”, the US and its allies, versus the “bad guys”, anyone who contested the US view of the world.
5. The threatening enemy in defensive wars that aim to protect one’s country or homeland. The US fought in World War I, World War II, Korea and Vietnam to defend an ally, allegedly to “defend the free world”, or to defend itself from Communist or other believed threats. Troops and civilians alike are conditioned to believe that their country’s cause is just, their leaders are blameless, and that God is on their side against the vile and evil enemy “over there”.
6. The oppressive, dictatorial enemy in opposing liberation or revolutionary wars.
7. The recently conceived notion of a war on terrorism, although, beyond agreement that terrorism aims at inducing terror, no one has yet found a commonly agreed definition. After all, warfare generally induces terror. Consequently, terrorism is ften simply “name calling” against any “enemy of the state”. It is the term used by powerful governments when their enemy threaten the dominance of those governments in war albeit with far more primitive weapons. In the war on terrorism there are desperate attempts to identify and destroy the enemy by traditional means of bombing, but traditional warfare tactics are not effective with non-traditional warfare. The Israelis and other military and police forces in Mediterranean countries, the US in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the British Army in Ireland, and others have all learned that you can’t use WMD to fight an enemy “out there” when the enemy is “right here”, within, all around or among us.

Enmity, Enemy Images And Paranoia

Recent dictionary definitions of “enemy” are on the lines of “a hostile force or power”, “a member or unit of such a force”, or “something having destructive effect”. US Federal law defines “enemy” as “the government of any nation with which the US is at war”. More personally, “enemy” can be defined as a person or a group of persons perceived to represent a threat to or hostile towards the perceiver. In the cold war, students we found to see the Soviets as “the enemy” not because they posed any actual threat to the US, but due to their different and competitive ideology as a super power. Most adults over age fifty who have gone through some personal experience with war define “the enemy” in the traditional way, meaning the country with which we are at war. However, most young people in Europe and the US, having not directly experienced war in their adult lives, consistently define “enemy” in terms involving different ideologies, religions, values or competition for world domination.

While enemy traditionally has been defined as some type of perceived or real threat, “enmity” puts more emphasis on mutuality. Hypothetically, nation [A] can be an enemy of nation [B], while nation [B] does not consider [A] its enemy. An enemy image is a representation of the enemy. So, an image of “the enemy” can be accurate or biased, imaginary or real. More often than not, it is both. The role of war propaganda is to propagate a stereotypical bad, evil or demonic image of the enemy. Riitta Wahlstrom defines “enemy image” as “the commonly-held, stereotyped, dehumanized image of the outgroup”:

The enemy image provides a focus for externalization of fears and threats… a lot of undesirable cognitions and emotions are projected on to the enemy.

There is an emphasis on the processes of dehumanization (which legitimizes violence against the enemy), externalization, projection and several cognitive biases.

The pathology of the normal person who is a member of a war-justifying society forms the template from which all the images of the enemy are created.

In publicing enemy images and war, propaganda exploits people’s sense of insecurity, their loyalty and clinks with the group, and their predisposition to paranoia. Seeing the world as divided into us and them, undesirable negative qualities are projected on to the enemy. Social psychologists have documented the importance of the outgroup and enmity in the formation of group identity and group cohesion. These social instincts, or their lack, and the relative strength of one’s sense of self contribute to the individual’s vulnerability to war propaganda and establish an individual’s inclination towards making enemies. Enemies are suitable targets for unacceptable negative feelings or guilt by individuals or groups, as they attempt to rid themselves of these emotions. In the US, some people made Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld, or the military-industrial complex, with some justification, into their enemies. Internal group cohesion and group identity was promoted to counter the aggressive war campaign against international enemies led by these leading politicians.

Young children adopt attitudes, including enemy images, without really understanding them. But, at adolescence, they can think more abstractly and can draw more accurate conclusions from their personal experiences. In this way, children learn about enmity from their surroundings and internalize prejudices and enemy images as part of the process of becoming members of their culture. Thereby, people may use a different yardstick to judge the enemy than they use for themselves or friends and allies. During a conflict this double standard allows each side to regard its own deeds as defensive while denouncing the enemy’s as offensive. The double standard bias leads not only to misconceptions about the enemy and to an exaggerated perception of danger, it may also force the escalation of conflict to a point where mistrust and bad feeling renders negotiation no longer viable, then war may be inevitable.

The enemy’s hostile actions are commonly attributed to natural characteristics, while conciliatory or peaceful actions are attributed to the circumstances. In other words, when the enemy is acting peacefully, the external circumstances force it to. It is not voluntary. Americans, in tests, chose negative motives when bad acts were fictitiously ascribed to the enemy, but positive ones when the same acts were ascribed to the US.

The tendency to judge the enemy’s actions as malign, to remember mainly negative information, and to attribute peaceful acts to the situation rather than free will are frequently accompanied by hostile predictions of the enemy’s intentions far exceeding what the facts support. As people mainly see an enemy as more dangerous and more hostile than they really are, they also mainly expect the enemy to act more aggressively and violently than objective evidence suggests. The enemy will be seen as unwarrantedly hostile when we misread its intentions. The projection of hostile intent onto the enemy, can be provocative, and cause an escalation of the conflict, thereby becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The Mirror Image

A close analysis of the images of the enemy as perceived by opposing parties reveals that they often see each other in a similar light, as Uri Bronfenbrenner showed in the cold war, and which remains true. The mirror image has manifested clearly in the way both sides of the Iraq war of 2002 depicted themselves and the other. The United State’s narrative of the war has been:

Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple an evil dictator and establish democracy and human rights.

Psychology shows that people pay attention to, and recall more negative adjectives and stories about people they consider “the enemy”, than with people they consider friends. Terrorism and the external enemy have preoccupied the attention of Americans. Incredible statements about the USSR and then by Muslims are readily accepted in the US and the West generally because they describe “the enemy”. Evidence suggests this gullibility is shared with the other side. The bias in credibility assessment maintains a person’s inner mental consistency by ignoring, tuning-out, disregarding or denying any information that is inconsistent with their attitudes towards the enemy. It is a process which culminates with hostile and very often wrong predictions of the enemy’s intentions. It mobilizes people through fear and hate to feel justified in going to war and killing the enemy without guilt.

Someone seen as an evil enemy today can be an ally and a trusted friend tomorrow. War propaganda often focuses on historical differences between “us” and “them, the enemy”. Propaganda distorts truth and skews historical actuality with the goal of perpetuating present enmity towards a contemporary enemy. The fascists who effected the putsch in Kiev spread the lie that the Russians invaded the Ukraine when it was the German Nazi armies, The Ukraine being already within the Societ Union. Equally, after 9/11, the Taliban had to be depicted as the world’s most threatening enemy who were also hiding Bin Ladin to spread unreasonable terror worldwide but especially in western homes. There are modern nations, such as Finland, Costa Rica and Switzerland, without enemies and there have been peaceful societies throughout human evolution. But most groups, nations, tribes or countries have an enemy. Each in group often has an out group. Enmity with some other is important to maintain group cohesion and group identity, explaining the prevalence of the idea of the enemy. Even so, no one has shown that groups necessarily require enemies, or that there are no other ways to maintain group cohesion and identity.

The dynamic of enmity is complex and often has significant inconsistencies and paradoxes. Four of the unwritten rules of enmity state that:

1. The enemy of my friend is my enemy
2. The friend of my enemy is my enemy
3. The enemy of my enemy is my friend
4. My enemies are friends with each other.

While during the cold war it was the split between the Soviet Union and the US, more recently it has been that between the Arab-Muslim world and the US. The notion of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is responsible for the embarrassment of the US finding itself simultaneously on both sides of a conflict in its Middle eastern machinations since the 1970s. Thus the US is simultaneously bombing ISIS in Iraq and Syria while supporting ISIS as a weapon against Syria, allegedly a terrorist nation (the enemy of my enemy is my friend--at least to some degree!). Syria is also hostile to Israel, the US’s ally (the enemy of my friend is my enemy). People assume that their enemies are friends with each other. During the cold war the US’s enemy, the USSR, was blamed by Americans for all kinds of terrorism and drug trafficking. Our enemies of the day are therefore typically regarded as allies of each other, and with other threats whether communism, terrorism, or human rights violations in general. Our side don’t do things like that, not because it is true, but because no one propagates the evidence for it that exists, and because no one likes to think that our side is ever beastly!

Ignorance and Dehumanization

The above biases and distorted perceptions are to do with ignorance of the world beyond national borders and the enemy in particular, often fostered deliberately. Twenty-eight percent of US citizens believe that the USSR fought against, and not with, the US in World War II. Ignorance also perpetuates personal attribution of barbaric actions to the enemy. To fight our own kind we have to dehumanize the enemy, to see other human beings as less than human. So, the main goal of war propaganda is to paint an enemy stripped of their human characteristics, to paint them as monstrous!

Broadly there are nine ways of characterising the enemy. Least likely is as being recognizably human, but is possible and even likely in primitive ritualistic and heroic, romanticised warfare. Otherwise, the enemy is depicted as increasingly less human, becoming merely a representation of death, destruction and evil. Caricatures and cartoons in the press, on the Internet and TV depict Bin Ladin, Saddam Hussein or Muslim opponents as a “demonic enemy”. The war on terrorism depicts the enemy as an animal and the US soldier as a hunter. Pictures of American service men and women sexually humiliating prisoners held in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 mocked the pious aim of Muslims of “submitting” to God by putting them in subservient, dehumanizing positions that sub-feminized the enemy before their dominating female guards.

The west also depicts and dehumanizes the enemy on the computer or videogame screen, and through the selling of “shoot-em-up” videogames largely played by children and unsophisticated young men. On the other hand in an era when television can show the enemy, their children and families right in our living rooms, it is not as easy to dehumanize them as it once was. In the summer 2014 assault by the IDF on Gaza, it was the Israelis who came out on TV as the least human by their murdering thousands of largely helpless Gazans in their homes. More and more sophisticated techniques must be developed to continue denying the enemy’s humanity. Although the US has the largest store of war instruments on the planet, domestically they have to protect themselves at airports against the Pimpernel terrorists by checking soft drink bottles, tennis shoes and threatening weapons like nail clippers.

Today it is imperative to seek ways of reducing enmity among groups and discover if nations can exist without enemies. Every war runs the risk of escalating to a nuclear level, so by failing to settle disputes amicably we risk destroying ourselves. We must stop dehumanizing the enemy and view them as human beings whose grievances mau be legitimate. To see the enemy, like us, experiencing joy, pain, fear and hope, will help us to empathize with our enemies, giving us an historical, political and emotional context to understand our enemy’s actions, to recognize the enemies’ needs, hopes and fears, and the catalysts that motivate them. We will be less likely to make hostile predictions, to have selective negative attention, and we will apply fewer double standards in assessing the enemy’s actions.

The central need in doing this is to develop a healthy skepticism about what the media tell us about our supposed enemies, and why anyone should want us to believe the lies they propagate. The answer is the need of the ruling elite to capture absolute power and greed for wealth that anables them to do it. But while true, that is another story. Meanwhile, relatively few US citizens have a passport to travel abroad, and consequently they have a narrow view of the human race. Those who do travel broaden their awareness of the common humanity of all people. Grassroots citizen diplomacy, sister-cities, pen pals and other networking activities between the members of warring groups can drastically reduce enmity by rehumanizing the enemy.

Enmity might once have promoted group cohesion and enhanced group identity, we have moved far from the situation of small bands of wandering humans when this was so. Now there is ample evidence to show that groups can develop cohesion and identity without enemies. The danger in the current US war against terrorism is that it will descend to the level of the terrorist-enemy it fights and by that destroy the very values that the US is fighting to preserve. Fighting the enemy on its own terms can destroy the country itself.

Reference

The un-abridged article can be read at this address:

• http://www.zurinstitute.com/enmity.html

Psychology and Class in War and National Hatred

Social psychology has revealed that even tiny infants distinguish between people close to them with whom they feel comfortable and others, strangers whom they dislike. For two million years of human social evolution, we lived in small groups of about 150 people, and distrusted strange, even though neighbouring groups. So it is that people learn to separate those they like from those who make them feel ill at ease, to separate good people from bad. It is out of such primitive thinking that the structures of enmity grow and can be exploited by unscrupulous leaders whether political or religious. Hesse showed that, by age five, children have the idea of the enemy, someone whom they see as whatever in the culture seems most fearful and threatening—a wild beast, a demon or someone with evil intent. Interestingly, these Hesse’s subjects did not generally see their own nationality as having evil intent.

Now we live in a global village but still have our loyalty to clans and tribes, albeit much bigger and more dangerous ones. Disputes between them can still lead to violence and war but now they can end up as genocide. The nuclear threat has fed off Christian apocalyptic thinking to split the peoples of the world globally into good and evil. Worse, the singular delusion of US exceptionalism as America being God’s own country and Americans as God’s latter day Chosen People, forced their conviction that, they, being good, would be saved in the event of a nuclear holocaust and the evil enemy would perish. The danger of reinforcing infantile thought patterns is clear.

War begins in the mind, with the idea of the enemy.

Broyles W Jr, Why me?-why them? The New York Times, 1986

Yet analysis of the images of the enemy as perceived by opposing parties reveals that they often see each other in a similar light. Uri Bronfenbrenner has coined the term “mirror image” and documents how American and Russian views of each other during the cold war were essentially interchangeable:

Our enemy is a coarse, crooked megalomaniac who aims to kill us.

Tommy White, retired US Air Force Chief of Staff

Both sides felt that:

1. the other was the aggressor
2. the other’s government exploited and deluded its people
3. the majority of the people were essentially good and were not sympathetic to the government’s deceitful leadership
4. the other government should never be trusted—they have hidden, sneaky and secretive ways to go about their plots
5. their policy verges on madness, while ours is, of course, rational and humane.

Examples of the mirror image dynamic are numerous. In a testimony to Bronfenbrenner’s thorough research it is as relevant to the 2002 Iraq-United States war as it was during the cold war. Americans and Iraqis have accused each other’s governments of misleading their people for their own self-interests. The Americans and Arabs have repeatedly exchanged accusations of the other’s attempt to dominate the world, control its oil supply and insatiate greed. The mirror image has manifested clearly in the way both sides of the Iraq war of 2002 depicted themselves and the other: The United State’s narrative of the war has been: “Altruistic Americans risk their lives to topple an evil dictator and establish democracy and human rights.” On the other side the Arab narrative was: “The same Yankees who pay for Israelis to blow up Palestinians are now seizing Iraqi oil fields and maiming Iraqi women and children.” Both, Iraqis and Americans accused each other of violation of human rights, ruthlessness and greed.

During the cold war the United States blamed the Soviet Union for expansionism when they invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union blamed the United States for expansionism when it sent troops to Vietnam, Grenada and to countries in South America. Americans blamed the Soviets for human rights violations of minorities and Jewish dissidents, and the Soviets reminded Americans of their systematic violation of the basic human rights of the poor and African Americans in the United States. Both sides blamed the other for violations of international treaties, for the support of terrorism and for the escalation of the nuclear arms race. The United States blames Iraq for being part of the Axis of Evil, along side Iran and North Korea, and Iraq, and many other countries, consider the United States, Britain and Israel as their own Axis of Evil.

This principle explains how people are more likely to assess the informer and information that represent their view as more credible than the informer who presents an opposing view. This bias in the judgment of sources of information explains the resistance of enemy images to change. Statements by the Iraqis and the United States, or statements by the Soviet Union and the United States against each other, have often been perceived as credible by their respective audiences only because they describe “the enemy”. This principle was also evident within American political culture between political parties, when in conflict over a course of action or the selection of a candidate for office. Research on the credibility of newscasters also confirms that the more consistent the newscaster’s report was with the research subject’s predispositions, the more credible the newscaster was perceived to be.

Americans with negative attitudes towards nations whom they saw as hostile to the United States (eg, North Korea and Iran or, a couple of decades ago, the Soviet Union and Iran) are likely to assume that the relationship between these countries was positive. In other words people are likely to assume that their enemies are friends with each other. During the cold war research has shown that the United States’ enemy, at that time the Soviet Union, was closely associated in people’s minds with terrorism and drug trafficking. Similarly, Saddam Hussein had been associated with Bin Ladin right after 9/11, even though there was no evidence of such relationship.

When the enemy is presenting a conciliatory or peaceful offer, it is met with paranoid suspicion and is suspect for its hidden “real goals”. When Saddam Hussein, for example, finally allowed the UN inspectors to survey the presidential palaces and other locations, it was demanded that he be met with as much suspicion as when he did not allow them to inspect any of the sites. The fact that the inspectors did not find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction did not change the United States’ or the British government’s opinion in regard to Hussein’s dangerousness. Partly as a result of this double standard in attribution, both governments were unfazed by the lack of evidence and went on with their war plans.

One of the most critical elements in fighting our own kind is the ability to dehumanize the enemy, that is, to perceive other human beings as less than human:

The image of the enemy is not only the soldier’s most powerful weapon, it is society’s most powerful weapon. It enables people en masse to participate in acts of violence they would never consider doing as individuals.

Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy

“Moral” or “civilized” human beings do not intentionally and rationally kill other human beings, but they do kill Gooks, Huns, Japs or Niggers. The substitution of labels from Soviet citizens to Reds, Jewish people to Hibbs or rats, American men to Yankees or Arab people to fanatic Muslims serves a simple but profound function: it allows people to kill with a minimal or no sense of guilt. Accordingly, one of the primary goals of war propaganda is its creation of enemy images that strip the enemy of their human, domestic and individual characteristics. In the words of Butler Shaffer:

War, by its very nature, is sociopathic… it dehumanizes people.

John E Mack tells that a school pupil after the war being taught by his teacher about Russians complained angrily, “You’re trying to get us to see them as people”. At this level of dehumanization the enemy is represented not only as inhuman, but also as a lifeless object. In the Iraq war of 1991 the United States depicted the enemy as a small dot-type target on the computer or videogame screen. Dehumanized enemies are often referred to by technical names or the code-numbers of their weaponry rather than by nationality or even real personal names. During the cold war this allowed the United States to fight not the Soviet army but the SS11 (Soviet long range nuclear missile) or the Frog (Soviet short range nuclear missile). An explosion on the TV or computer screen or the elimination of an SS11 by a Minuteman I (United States long range nuclear missile) are not likely to lead to feeling of regret regarding the loss of human lives. The technical names of weaponry as a representation of the enemy shield us from these feelings. George Orwell reflected well when he stated:

Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Doublespeak is the most advanced level of dehumanization. Through Doublespeak, a term coined by George Orwell in his novel 1984, human lives are presented as abstractions. “Collateral damage” is doublespeak for civilian casualties, “servicing the target” is a euphemism for killing. Numerical terms, such as “megadeath”, stand for one million dead people. There is nothing in these terms that evoke any thoughts or feelings in regard to the human lives being destroyed; they elicit neither guilt nor shame. Therefore, killing and the destruction of life can go on. Additional examples of Doublespeak are: “coercive diplomacy” for bombing, “permanent pre-hostility” for peace and “engage the enemy on all sides” for ambushes. Consistent with the effort to mask the destructive power of weaponry, nuclear weapons have often been given pet names, such as “Poseidon” for the United States nuclear submarine, “Peacekeeper” or “Minuteman” for long-range nuclear missiles, and “Honest John” for the surface-to-surface missile. Acronyms are also abstractions. GLCM (pronounced as “glick-em”) stands for “ground launched cruise missile” and SLCM (pronounced “slick-em”) stands for “submarine launched cruise missile”. Possibilities for names of recent wars in Iraq have included euphemisms such as: “Desert Storm”, “Infinite Justice” and “Enduring Freedom”.

There is a substantial, politically influential, and aggressive body of American opinion for which the specter of a great and fearful external enemy, to be exorcised only by vast military preparations and much belligerent posturing, has become a political and psychological necessity.

George F Kennan, former US Ambassador to the USSR

One of the central shifts in the post 9/11 era is the emergent focus on militant Islam and the war on terrorism. The enemy appears to be rigidly defined and split tidily in two. On one side is the American technically superior empire and her supporters, on the other, terrorism, fueled by the energy of low tech, grass roots, religious, militant martyrs. Most terrifying to many is the sickening infectious enmity that is spreading across the planet, dividing nations—especially the United States, creating religious factions, pitting ethnic groups against one another as it demands a decision to line up behind one warring faction or the other. These two groups have become the modern “superpowers” with new war tactics that are truly terrifying. The old tools of war, and the antiquated posturing of the military, could appear almost comical if they were not so sad, if they did not bear such horrifying consequences. The war being waged is killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and there is no end in sight.

When the world was faced with two real superpowers, both seemingly equally powerful, Bronfenbrenner perhaps had no valid means to objectively testing whether one side or the other was making legitimate claims. Now there is only one superpower, the US, faced only by lesser powers, so the rationale for lying by its rulers who know their own absolute strength cannot be justified at all by psychological reasoning except perhaps by their utter insanity! Looking at the world since 1945, the US has had a hand in innumerable instances of wars and interventions, often against minnows. Each time the same fears were propagated, and now the fear of gangs of bandits in countries far off is again being wound up into a threat to the existence of the mightiest power in the world. Well, now it no longer washes. These gangs are not existential threats to anyone except perhaps their immediate neighbours, but certainly not the USA, so we can clearly see that the fears being generated are deliberately induced. Yes, based no doubt on deep psychological fears from the time when life was rather precarious, but not based on anything real today. And if the US is perpetuating these threats and fears unilaterally now, maybe we should ask who was driving the propaganda even in the cold war years. Maybe it was not quite as even as Bronfenbrenner thought.

Individuals may have little to do with the choice of national enemies. Most Americans, for example, know only what has been reported in the mass media about the Soviet Union. We are largely unaware of the forces that operate within our institutions, affecting the thinking of our leaders and ourselves, and which determine how the Soviet Union will be represented to us. Ill-will and a desire for revenge are transmitted from one generation to another, and we are not taught to think critically about how our assigned enemies are selected for us…But the attitude of one people towards another is usually determined by leaders who manipulate the minds of citizens for domestic political reasons which are generally unknown to the public.

1988 John E Mack, MD
The Lancet, 1988

National leaders have become adept at keeping their people focused on the supposed threat of an outside enemy. Yet the “cold war” taught that today we no longer could destroy the enemy on the other side of the wall, the river or the ocean without destroying ourselves. Destroying “the enemy” in the nuclear era inevitably means self-destruction. Even then people kid themselves that their protective myth will guarantee them safety, whether some sort of Star-Wars defensive system or the protection of God whisking away people still alive to heaven for a grandstand seat to watch the fireworks. As for terrorism, it is no different. We cannot eliminate terrorism, we cannot bomb it or any other belief or ideology out of existence. What we are left with is to attempt to increase our effectiveness in persuasion and proving what works in practice. For that we must stop dehumanizing the terrorist enemy and view them as full human beings with some legitimate grievances.

There is no self-awareness or self-responsibility at the highest political level which corresponds to the awareness of personal responsibility with which we are familiar as moral beings in society. So we have to create a new expectation of political self-responsibility—a political morality. Instead of constant blaming of the other side, we need to give new attention to adversaries’ culture and history, to their dreams and their values. We can no longer afford enemies, and nor is the notion of national security any longer useful. The security of each depends on everyone else. Regrettably the most powerful people in the world are the unbelievable rich who control it and therefore us all.

Conflict can become genocidal when powerful groups think that the most efficient means to get what they want is to eliminate those in the way.

Chirot, D and McCauley, C, Why Not Kill Them All?

Until they cease to want more by any means at all, as they have done so far, or they are forcibly removed from the equation, we can never have a world free of war. Greed at the top is the ultimate perpetuator of international enmity.

References:

• Mack, J E, The Enemy System (short version)
• Chirot, D and McCauley, C, Why Not Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder
• Zur, O (1991), The love of hating: The psychology of enmity. History of European Ideas