Unmaking War » empathy

What if mourning on 9/11 included empathy with wars’ victims?

Kathleen Barry — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 21:25:19 +0000

When will Americans regain our collective capacity for empathy? How many Americans honoring the dead of 9/11/2001 do not see the families of the millions of dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Libya? 9/11 does not exist as an attack separate from the US vengeance in response to that attack. It cannot be disconnected from the 1.3 million Iraqi dead from a U.S. war of revenge against a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack against the U.S. Who cares about the one million war widows in Iraq from three decades of war there? Why do they not have an international day of mourning for their losses at the hands of the US? If you have not already, watch “Beyond Belief,” (netflix), the story of two New York widows from the 9/11 attack who began to imagine what life was like for Afghan widows. And then they did something about it. Empathy took them beyond their own suffering.

How Afghans Experience American Occupation and War

Kathleen Barry — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 01:22:42 +0000

This open letter from Afghan youth brings us into the experience of living under American occupation and war http://vcnv.org/open-letter-from-afghan-youth-to-our-world-leaders Just reading it engages our empathy and should re-ignite our struggle against the US wars.

Ebook for Unmaking War, Remaking Men now available

Kathleen Barry — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 06:09:06 +0000

Announcing the ebook editions of UNMAKING WAR, REMAKING MEN: How Empathy Can Reshape Our Politics, Our Soldiers and Ourselves. Now available for Kindle on Amazon and in iBookstore for Ipad. Barnes and Noble Booknook coming soon.

Why I Call Bush a Psychopathic Leader

Kathleen Barry — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 18:57:24 +0000

In my book which is a study of masculinity and war, the politics of empathy shows how we can get inside soldiers’ experiences of combat and understand what killing or wounding another human being does to the soldiers. The damage goes far beyond the clinical diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It destroys the human spirit.

When we look at leaders who send soldiers to kill and be killed, who know their wars will lead to thousands of deaths which in Iraq has mounted to 1.4 million, and yet those leaders order invasions and surges, we see remorseless human beings who are absent of empathy and in Bush’s case who will lie and con us into going along with their plans. Those are the characteristics of psychopaths, the most hardened of criminals. It is not only his authorization of torture and his lies upon which he based his invasion of Iraq that qualify Bush as a war criminal, it is the psychopathic characteristic of his leadership. Until he is charged with war crimes, we all bear the consequences of his remorseless disregard for human life.

Bush “I’m not a racist!” but What Else is His Failure of Empathy

Kathleen Barry — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 03:56:55 +0000

Last week when Oprah Winfrey interviewed GW Bush he raged once again about being called a racist because of how he handled New Orleans after Katrina. Oprah gave him the opportunity to understand the other side, even if possible to put himself in the place of those blacks who had been abandoned by their President and their government. Couldn’t he see how black people could think that he had no concern for them and might be a racist given his failure to respond to their life and death crisis in New Orleans. His answer was immediate and insistent “No!” The issue was not the victims of Katrina, it was him – front and center.

That is the failure of empathy that underscores his Decision Points and his claims of their success. He considers his invasion, war against and occupation of Iraq a success which is only possible if one is devoid of empathy for the 1.4 million dead and their families because of that war. Obama on the other hand fooled many of us, including me, into thinking of him as an empathetic man, a quality that instantly disappeared as soon as the US generals insisted on escalation of the US war in Afghanistan.

Change in the US aggression in the world, it will have to focus at the top where as I show in Unmaking War, Remaking Men, psychopathic leadership reigns. We not only have to make better decisions about who will hold the office of the President, but dramatically change the rule of this country by CEOs of military industries and the Generals who are sustaining ongoing war.

Chilean Miners – Lives Saved, War – Where Killing Is Normal

Kathleen Barry — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 19:55:54 +0000

I stayed up last night glued to the television waiting for the last rescue worker who had been a half mile below ground with the 33 who had been trapped there for 69 days. I felt part of millions all over the world who, with all of Chile, breathed the final sigh of relief and felt tears running down my face when he emerged from that capsule to cheers and chants. We had anxiously waited until the very last miner and all of their rescuers were out of that mine. How can we not be glued to the rescue of human beings! These are moments when we transcend nationality, race and gender. Its as if we make ourselves one with lives we had thought were lost until they responded to earlier rescue efforts. As human beings, except for those sociopaths who put greed above humanity, we value human life above all else.

For the waiting world, our empathy had been engaged for days as we worried and waited and then could feel the joy of waiting relatives not to mention the miners as they emerged. That empathy is automatic in humans. To not feel for a human life at risk, our empathy has to be turned off. That is the function of US government and military propaganda in their effort to get us to believe that killing of civilians and soldiers alike in Iraq and Afghanistan is inevitable, even normal in wartime, and for Americans that assumes massive killing is not taking place on our own soil.

Human empathy may be suppressed. But if we engage our consciousness we can again begin to feel for those whose lives are at risk because of US military, or any other military aggression. That is when our collective intolerance of killing and war could lead us to recalling our leaders, cutting their bonds with military industries and finding our way back to our own humanity.

Why Empathy Requires Equality Among All Human Beings?

Kathleen Barry — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 01:23:30 +0000

The politics of empathy insists on equality. We cannot truly empathize with another unless we put ourselves on equal footing with her or him or them. Empathy has room neither for inferior dependents nor for superior aggressors (for all superiority involves some form of aggression). From placing ourselves, one human being to another, in a position of equality with those of the Muslim and Arab world, lets ask ‘under what conditions would other groups be told to not build a center and a place of worship because it would be offensive to victims?’

Assuming that Ground Zero is hallowed ground for those who lost their lives on 9/11/2001, should not every inch of Iraq be considered sacred ground for those 1.3 million Iraqis killed primarily by the U.S. military. As the United States is primarily a Christian (76%) country with its own Christian terrorists, such as those who murder doctors for providing women with their legal right to abortion, should not Iraq insist on the removal of all Christian churches from its country? Certainly it should demand the removal of the still huge murderous US military presence there. Or in the United States, should we not eliminate all Christian churches on sites where the Christian Ku Klux Klan has burned homes and hung African Americans? Is that too not hallowed ground? Likewise, should we, all Americans, not fear all Christians and condemn them because of the work of the Aryan Nation and the Christian Identity movement. Critical empathy discloses the absurdity of the Mosque controversy as it exposes the falsely assumed superiority the far-right over all other human beings.

How Well-Meaning Americans Are Drawn Into Opposing the Islamic Center

Kathleen Barry — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:20:22 +0000

The extreme-right hate campaigns are aimed at reducing all Arabs and all Muslims to Al Qaeda style terrorists in the minds of Americans. In other words, they are doing the public relations work of the military in promoting fear to sustain our support for ongoing war. But that, I suggest, is not enough to pull into their ranks the vast majority of those 80% of Americans who have opposed the Islamic Community Center. When I hear from people who I know are sensitive and caring and they tell me of their opposition to the Islamic Community Center near Ground Zero, and I know many of them do not support the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have to ask ‘how are they drawn in?”

Selective empathy? How do we break out of it?

Engaging empathy requires consciousness and facts if it is not to turn to selective empathy only for one’s own group – in the case of those fueling the Mosque controversy, that group is primarily white, American and Christian. We begin by asking critical questions, allowing caring and sensitivity to fed by our conscience. Three hundred Muslims were killed in the towers on 9/11. What of their families? As soon as we ask that question, it is clear that this controversy has made empathy selective, confined to one’s own race, nationality and religion – primarily white, Christian Americans. That is the strategy of the right wing fanatics. They use selective empathy to emotionally manipulate well-meaning Americans into fear of all Muslims and Arabs. In what seems like caring, selective empathy is actually the foundation for the racism, hatred of the other that drives extremists into the mainstream. That is what we should fear and must challenge.