As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 20, 2018 at 2:58:28 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] As Sadism Surges on the American Border, Our Collective Understanding of Cruelty Collapses
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> 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.
>
> Here is a section from the Texas Monthly interview that turned my stomach:
>
> ...the officers say, “I’m going to take your child to get bathed.” That’s one we see again and again. “Your child 
> needs to come with me for a bath.” The child goes off, and in a half an hour, twenty minutes, the parent inquires, 
> “Where is my five-year-old?” “Where’s my seven-year-old?” “This is a long bath.” And they say, “You won’t be seeing 
> your child again.” Sometimes mothers—I was talking to one mother, and she said, “Don’t take my child away,” and the 
> child started screaming and vomiting and crying hysterically, and she asked the officers, “Can I at least have five 
> minutes to console her?” They said no. In another case, the father said, “Can I comfort my child? Can I hold him for 
> a few minutes?” The officer said, “You must let them go, and if you don’t 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.”
>
> 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 
> of—prisoners—by 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]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
> Twitter: https://twitter.com/wa8dzp



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