Dave Farber
2018-06-20 06:46:32 UTC
Date: June 20, 2018 at 2:58:28 PM GMT+9
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses
As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses
The Stanford prison experiment, which helped us understand the worst atrocities in history for decades, is called out as a 'sham' at a moment when America is separating asylum seekers from their children at the border.
By Emanuel Maiberg
Jun 18 2018
<https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4358a9/as-sadism-surges-on-the-american-border-our-collective-understanding-of-cruelty-collapses>
The Department of Homeland Security is currently committed to a "zero tolerance" immigration policy on the border with Mexico, which so far has separated 2,000asylum-seeking Central American children from their parents.
If you are not fully familiar with the dehumanizing details of this process, I implore you to read this Texas Monthly interview with a volunteer at a charity who is trying to assist the parents and children who are caught in it.
Generally, a family will arrive at the US-Mexican border, and after being repeatedly denied entry via official crossings, will cross on their own. Once on the American side, many families voluntarily seek Border Patrol so they can officially ask for asylum. It is often at this moment, against established United Nations normsabout how asylum seekers should be treated, that parents are prosecuted as criminals and their children are torn away from them.
...the officers say, âIâm going to take your child to get bathed.â Thatâs one we see again and again. âYour child needs to come with me for a bath.â The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, âWhere is my five-year-old?â âWhereâs my seven-year-old?â âThis is a long bath.â And they say, âYou wonât be seeing your child again.â Sometimes mothersâI was talking to one mother, and she said, âDonât take my child away,â and the child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, âCan I at least have five minutes to console her?â They said no. In another case, the father said, âCan I comfort my child? Can I hold him for a few minutes?â The officer said, âYou must let them go, and if you donât let them go, I will write you up for an altercation, which will mean that you are the one that had the additional charges charged against you.â
The first question that came to my mind after reading that was "who could do this?" I understand how president Donald Trump or Attorney General Jeff Sessions could push this policy forward for ideological reasons. I can even imagine how average American citizens could support this policy when the issue of immigration is thrown around as an abstract political football. But I have a hard time imagining the human being who is willing to physically separate a howling, vomiting child from their parent, and to deny them even five minutes of mercy to console one another.
I try to put myself in the shoes of that immigration officer and, though I'm unable to imagine the situation in which I make the same choices, I can, thanks to the Stanford prison experiment, intellectualize the psychological mechanisms that have allowed seemingly average, rank and file officers throughout history to carry out atrocities. Or at least that was true until earlier this month, when the Stanford prison experiment was exposed as being deeply flawed.
The 1971 Stanford prison experiment, named after the university where it was conducted, attempted to explain why people in positions of power, like prison officers, were so often cruel to the people they were in charge ofâprisonersâby randomly assigning those positions to volunteers in a controlled setting on campus. The experiment was abandoned after only six days because the prison guards started psychologically abusing the prisoners so harshly, the professor in charge of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo, feared it was starting to cause real harm. The conclusion of the experiment was that, despite what people might believe about themselves, their behavior can be dictated by the situations they find themselves in: the guards were cruel because they had the power to be cruel, and the prisoners accepted cruelty because they didn't think they had the power to do anything about it.
The Stanford prison experiment resonated with me deeply when I was first taught it in college. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, it helped me understand the individual behaviors that led to some of the worst crimes against humanity in history. As a product of Israeli society, it helped me understand how the people I knew personally and believed to be "good" were capable of committing and/or being complicit in war crimes against Palestinians. I imagine that the Stanford prison experiment became one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time for similar reasons.
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Subject: [Dewayne-Net] As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses
As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses
The Stanford prison experiment, which helped us understand the worst atrocities in history for decades, is called out as a 'sham' at a moment when America is separating asylum seekers from their children at the border.
By Emanuel Maiberg
Jun 18 2018
<https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4358a9/as-sadism-surges-on-the-american-border-our-collective-understanding-of-cruelty-collapses>
The Department of Homeland Security is currently committed to a "zero tolerance" immigration policy on the border with Mexico, which so far has separated 2,000asylum-seeking Central American children from their parents.
If you are not fully familiar with the dehumanizing details of this process, I implore you to read this Texas Monthly interview with a volunteer at a charity who is trying to assist the parents and children who are caught in it.
Generally, a family will arrive at the US-Mexican border, and after being repeatedly denied entry via official crossings, will cross on their own. Once on the American side, many families voluntarily seek Border Patrol so they can officially ask for asylum. It is often at this moment, against established United Nations normsabout how asylum seekers should be treated, that parents are prosecuted as criminals and their children are torn away from them.
...the officers say, âIâm going to take your child to get bathed.â Thatâs one we see again and again. âYour child needs to come with me for a bath.â The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, âWhere is my five-year-old?â âWhereâs my seven-year-old?â âThis is a long bath.â And they say, âYou wonât be seeing your child again.â Sometimes mothersâI was talking to one mother, and she said, âDonât take my child away,â and the child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, âCan I at least have five minutes to console her?â They said no. In another case, the father said, âCan I comfort my child? Can I hold him for a few minutes?â The officer said, âYou must let them go, and if you donât let them go, I will write you up for an altercation, which will mean that you are the one that had the additional charges charged against you.â
The first question that came to my mind after reading that was "who could do this?" I understand how president Donald Trump or Attorney General Jeff Sessions could push this policy forward for ideological reasons. I can even imagine how average American citizens could support this policy when the issue of immigration is thrown around as an abstract political football. But I have a hard time imagining the human being who is willing to physically separate a howling, vomiting child from their parent, and to deny them even five minutes of mercy to console one another.
I try to put myself in the shoes of that immigration officer and, though I'm unable to imagine the situation in which I make the same choices, I can, thanks to the Stanford prison experiment, intellectualize the psychological mechanisms that have allowed seemingly average, rank and file officers throughout history to carry out atrocities. Or at least that was true until earlier this month, when the Stanford prison experiment was exposed as being deeply flawed.
The 1971 Stanford prison experiment, named after the university where it was conducted, attempted to explain why people in positions of power, like prison officers, were so often cruel to the people they were in charge ofâprisonersâby randomly assigning those positions to volunteers in a controlled setting on campus. The experiment was abandoned after only six days because the prison guards started psychologically abusing the prisoners so harshly, the professor in charge of the experiment, Philip Zimbardo, feared it was starting to cause real harm. The conclusion of the experiment was that, despite what people might believe about themselves, their behavior can be dictated by the situations they find themselves in: the guards were cruel because they had the power to be cruel, and the prisoners accepted cruelty because they didn't think they had the power to do anything about it.
The Stanford prison experiment resonated with me deeply when I was first taught it in college. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors, it helped me understand the individual behaviors that led to some of the worst crimes against humanity in history. As a product of Israeli society, it helped me understand how the people I knew personally and believed to be "good" were capable of committing and/or being complicit in war crimes against Palestinians. I imagine that the Stanford prison experiment became one of the most famous psychological experiments of all time for similar reasons.
[snip]
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