Despite my Ph.D. and 20 years of practice in clinical psychology, I continue to be astonished by the self-blinding capacity of the right-wing mind. Gabe Bradley’s recent commentary on our ROTC building demonstration last week (“You call this a protest?” ODE Nov. 22) was a sad example, reflecting an apparent appetite for theatrics over substance.
First, the protester with the “big, stupid-looking grin on his face” is an emeritus University psychology professor and Korean War veteran. “This fellow” – Hank Dizney, who smiles easily – is an imperturbably good-natured man of proven intellect and passionate care for his country and his fellow citizen-soldiers who are dying and suffering needlessly in a falsely justified, illegal, recklessly destructive, counter-productive war.
We demonstrators, derided as “lame” for our modest numbers, were not the intended story. Our deliberately small and disciplined group was not staging a theater project. Our purpose was to attract media attention to facts and foreign press photographs of the Iraq War not provided to the American public by the American press. Ordinary Iraqis and uniformed Americans dying daily without justification are the story, not seven people politely arrested for misdemeanor trespassing. If the U.S. media were doing their job, our efforts would be unnecessary.
Our purpose is precisely comparable to the civil rights movement, with a high-stakes moral issue of equal or greater gravity. Bradley needs to learn more about post-World War II American foreign policy, our half-century history of economic manipulation, covert terrorism (the School of the Americas), thinly rationalized military aggression (in Vietnam and Panama), and support of dictators who collude with our multinational corporations. These policies have planted and nourished the seeds of anti-American terrorism. Shrinking our economic dependency on the military-industrial complex and its need for a continuous state of hot or cold war should become an epic and historic struggle of at least equal importance to the civil rights movement (in which I participated during graduate school at Louisiana State University).
Bradley also derided the Vietnam demonstrations as “disgraceful displays.” These displays accelerated the ending of this disastrous war, also falsely justified. In addition to the 58,000 American dead in that debacle, 3.4 million Vietnamese were killed in a war we created and eventually lost with none of the dire domino consequences predicted by its instigators.
We only asked that potential military recruits be told the truth as we know it – a 90 percent likelihood of attack or ambush when serving in Iraq; a peer-reviewed, medical journal-published public health study indicating some 100,000 mostly civilian, mostly coalition-caused Iraqi deaths by August 2004; facts about combat-induced, often lifelong post-traumatic stress disorders; tripled worldwide terrorist incidents following our Iraq invasion; massive war profiteering and corruption ballooning our national debt; and 80 percent of Iraqis who want us out of their country.
We seek not to derogate our uniformed citizens but to spare them from unnecessary trauma, disability and death.
A former Vietnam-era Army psychologist, Jack Dresser is currently a behavioral scientist and regular columnist for the Springfield News.