Genocide American Style

The "Contract with America" is a euphemistic label for the genocide that is being perpetrated against the poor. Liberation psychology defines genocide as a process off using any method to destroy people's physical, mental, emotional and spiritual well being. The conservative congress is generating genocide in America today by depriving Americans of the following eight basic needs as defined by liberation psychology:

l. Physical needs

2. Trust and hope

3. Safety, security and competence

4. Power and justice

5. Belonging, respect and love/nonviolence

6. Uniqueness, gender and culture

7. Freedom and self-determination

8. Creativity and spirituality

Four positions are possible as we evaluate our own psychological and moral stance toward the class warfare that is being waged in our society by the U.S. Congress. Where do you stand? Are you a perpetrator, victim, bystander or reformer?

The Perpetrators

The perpetrator has "groupthink," rejecting values, ideas and beliefs that are different from those of his own group. Intolerance of diversity and different perspectives is set up and supported by mass media propaganda that upholds the groupthink. Perpetrators are gradually formed and shaped by an environment and social climate that accepts that it is sometimes necessary to hurt others to get the group needs met. Propaganda and prejudicial teachings slander an outgroup by depicting them in very derogatory terms such as lazy, sleazy, and even criminal. A typical tactic is the use of negative imagery in the media to create and intensify middle-class prejudice and bias against the poor while convincing the public that moral and ethical programs are being proposed. The perpetrator knows that human goodness and kindness will not tolerate the destruction to defenseless poor children without disguising it behind seemingly good ends.

When a political climate emerges that condones genocide there is a built-in manufactured consensus in thinking. The outgroup people (the poor children and their families in our day) are perceived as a liability that can actually be dangerous to our way of life. The message we hear today is that the hoards of lazy poor are going to rob us of our middle class lifestyle. This is the "just-thinking" of the perpetrator that allows the accomplishment of genocide.

The perpetrating radical conservatives want to eliminate the satisfaction of basic needs for 1.2 million poor children, adding to the l5 million children who already live below the poverty line. The richest 1% of people in the United States control over 50% of the wealth. The poorest fifth of the population receives only 4% of the total U.S. income and radical conservatives want to deprive them of even more of their basic needs. The Personal Responsibility Act of l995 is an attempt to get people off welfare. However, the ultimate result will mean that more people will be in poverty, even though they may have a job. Over half the "lazy, unemployed welfare recipients" are children under six years old.

Radical conservatives want to cut Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The total proposed cuts to poor children, poor families and disabled children would amount to two hundred and fifty billion dollars. It is shocking to learn that simultaneously the conservatives want to give a two hundred and forty-five billion dollars tax cut to corporate America. This amounts to an enormous welfare benefit to the wealthy, paid for at the expense of the poor.

The Victims

The victim internalizes labels given to them by the perpetrator and the rest of society. The inner tyrant echoes outer tyrants as victims begin to criticize themselves. This socially shaped self-criticism that is formed in the poor leads to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. The victim becomes compliant and the colluding of the bystander with the perpetrator leads to the disempowerment of the victim. The collective shadow includes our nation's unacknowledged biases and prejudices against members other races, people of a different gender, individuals living in poverty and the stranger. Scapegoating the collective shadow onto the victim causes those members of society who belong to the hated groups to be seen as truly deserving of our scorn and our cruelty.

The unmarried teenage mother is a victim in the radical conservative's manipulation of public sentiment. She has been labeled dangerous to our way of life and has become a focus to justify actions against the poor in this class war. Current propaganda uses fear to create the illusion that teenage motherhood is on the rise. However, the number of teenage mothers has decreased substantially between the years of l960 and l993. In 1992 only 7.6 % of all AFDC mothers were teenagers. The unmarried teenage mother who lives in poverty feels the prejudice against her every time she uses food stamps at the grocery store. She has internalized the collective shadow attitude that she is no good and now she has an individual shadow problem and her inner tyrant scolds her for being poor.

The Bystanders

The psychology of the bystander is denial-the denial of the perpetrator's crimes against the poor, the denial that the poor are living in terrible conditions and that poor children are dying. The bystander finally blames the victim for their terrible life conditions that are in truth manufactured by the community in service of the perpetrators. A false ideal of individualism convinces the bystander that the person living in poverty is poor because of something wrong with that individual's personality, such as laziness, mental illness, low intelligence or a lack of motivation. Research on the causes of poverty reveals that this not the case. Documented causes of poverty include the fact that the minimum wage has not been raised in years as living expenses continue to increase. The replacement of low rent housing with condominiums leaves a shortage of affordable housing and adds to the numbers of homeless. Prejudice against women in the economic domain makes it hard for them to help support their families and therefore many single women with children live at or below the poverty line.

To maintain a coherence of personality, the bystander becomes codependent with the power of the perpetrator. Bystander identity becomes dependent on the narrow identity and constricted vision of the perpetrator who is forced to ignore actual human conditions to maintain their dehumanized viewpoint. The bystander colludes with the perpetrator in criminalizing the poor.

State governments use propaganda to take away the benefits for the poor in their states. In a race to the bottom, they are trying to lower benefits so that their state will not become the destination of a nationwide welfare migration. In fact, 75% of recipients exit AFDC in the first two years of being on welfare. Fifty percent exit during the first year.

The Reformers

A reformer is usually a bystander who stands against the perpetrator to restore basic needs to the victim. The reformer experiences a widening of self-identification. The movement is from a narrow, self-centered false self toward the wider spiritual identification with the core of one's inner self-the inner Buddha or Christ nature. In this process of broadening, a "we" psychology develops. The external life of the reformer moves from identification with his own group toward identification with all of humanity. Diversity is honored. A reformer's drive to help the poorest of the poor comes out of true species identification instead of particular group identification. The inner soul-force enables them endanger their lives as they go against the perpetrators and take action in advocating for and helping others. A moving example of a reformer is Oscar Schindler in the movie "Schindler's List." The development of the soul-force identity in the reformer is experienced simultaneously with a growing feeling that love and truth reside at the center of the universe.

Reformers were most often raised in nurturing, nonpunitive and noncoercive families. The parents expected a lot from them but still affirmed that their child was unconditionally loved. Through demonstration in their own lives these parents taught their children the necessity for empathy, diversity and good deeds.

The reformer group is made up of people from any income level. Even a prior perpetrator, bystander or victim can become a reformer. Reformers realize that perpetrators, victims and bystanders are all ultimately oppressed by a system that refuses to guarantee basic needs to all people.

Reformers are created out of their environment and the context of their lives. They are not lonely genius types who passively sit and meditate on changing the world. Their reforming nature is created and carved by their good works. It is as if a wind stirs the ocean of bystanders and victims and creates a huge wave that is the reformer. Some black writers have described the ocean as the civil rights movement and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as the wave. The bystanders and victims hold up a prophet/reformer who speaks for God and for the people.

Martin Luther King, Jr. showed us a way out of genocidal practices by creating an event like the Poor People's March in which all people could participate. In such an activity cooperation replaces competition and effective action cuts across income levels, cultures and religions, providing a common aim and a feeling of harmony. The divisions caused by perpetrators in pursuit of their selfish goals are mended and prevented by the togetherness and the shared goal of meeting basic needs for all people as defined by liberation psychology. This is the kind of activity that we in our communities can encourage and by that work on a local level to end global genocide. These activities will train more reformers who will have the courage to stand in loving disobedience to the perpetrator who tries to harm the poor. Reformative social creativity will help to bring about reconciliation, repair broken community and ultimately create the Beloved Community.

References

Lifton, R. J. & Markusen, E. (1988). The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat. New York: Basic Books.

Staub, E. (1989) The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Holhut, R. T. How the Conservatives Wage Class Warfare on Americans. (The Written Word, 1995 [joyrand@sover.net.]).

The Twentieth Century Fund, Medicare Reform: A Twentieth Century Fund Guide to the Issues. (New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995 [http://epn.org/tcf/tcmedi.html]).