Abolitionist Prosecution: a tribute to Christian Champagne

ABOLITIONIST PROSECUTION: A TRIBUTE TO CHRISTIAN CHAMPAGNE

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

June 29, 2016

 

                Last night my son-in-law, Christian Champagne, was elected District Attorney of the 3^rd Judicial District of a three-county area in the southwest corner of Colorado.  He defeated a local tribal prosecutor with over 20 years of prosecution experience at state and federal levels, who accused Christian of being soft on crime, 66-34%.

                Christian (and Jill’s and my daughter Katy) moved to Durango in 2005, when Christian took his first job out of law school at a state public defender.  Three years later, Todd Risberg was elected as a reform district attorney (and re-elected to the second of a two-term limit) and appointed Christian to be his first assistant.  On one hand in his trial work, he has earned support that includes family members of victims of child sexual assault by getting convictions and substantial prison sentences for what ICOPA (International Conference on Penal Abolition) co-founder Ruth Morris called “the dangerous few.”  On the other hand, he has taken the lead in establishing options to incarceration such as pre-trial release screening, restorative justice/mediation programs in courts and in schools, drug courts, and youth programs coordinated by La Plata County Youth Services, now directed by Jill’s and my daughter Katy—all of which serve to keep families together and economically integrated into the community.  As I could see among Christian’s ardent supporters, the prevailing sentiment throughout the judicial district is that people do feel both protected and safer thanks to Todd and Christian’s leadership.

                I am always concerned that diversionary program’s like those in Christian’s district will, in Stan Cohen’s words, ultimately “widen the net” of incarceration, as diversion programs grow to include those who otherwise would not have been prosecuted at all, some of whom “fail” and acquire prior records that subject them to special scrutiny, and so become “recidivists.”  In La Plata County (Durango is the county seat), Todd Risberg’s coming to office coincided with jail monitoring by the county criminal justice coordinating committee, which had tried unsuccessfully to block the building of a new county jail.  Katy tells me that the committee abandoned monitoring the jail population several years ago, shifting priorities to community program development because the new jail had become, as it remains, largely empty, with closed cell blocks.

                Christian’s take on prosecution—that community safety including victim support and protection is his paramount responsibility—brings to mind something of a divide among penal abolition, as reflected in ICOPA 16 just held in Quito, Ecuador:

Political activists for abolishing the inherently racist, classist, ageist state structure called the criminal justice system, including prisoners, are central to all of us in ICOPA.  To me, to borrow Karl Marx’s, their voice and collective power is a vital step toward emancipation from human exploitation, at its worst in mass incarceration.  Political structures both reflect and affect how we define and respond to human differences, to conflict, to violence.  To those whose unwavering focus is on political change, on abolishing the state, to work in or with the system is to be co-opted, and in a case like mine personally, a product of white privilege (as it may well be).

From a political point of view, I myself have continually hypothesized that creating so-called diversion programs to keep people out of jail and prison is potentially counter-productive—that such programs expand further feed the incarceration monster.  I am also an empiricist who allows experience to disconfirm my beliefs, as mass decarceration the district attorney’s office has helped achieve under Todd and Christian’s leadership.

Marx saw political emancipation as a step toward human emancipation from exploitation and violence of us all toward others—emancipation from depending on some of us being entitled to punish or exploit others more than they are entitled to punish or exploit us for our social sins—as a historical step from political to transformation of the culture of power over others into power sharing.  I see political and cultural transformation as interdependent, as in Norway, where sustained mass decarceration in the 19^th century followed sustained demilitarization as the Napoleonic War ended and Norway became independent from Denmark, six centuries after Viking colonization had reached its peak.

I think Marx (Chairman Mao in China too, for that matter) was wrong in supposing that political and cultural transformation of oppression and violence are necessarily, historically sequential.  In Norway, for example, low rates of incarceration coincide with democratization of adult-child relations at home and in school (including a ban on corporal punishment by anyone, anywhere).  I postulate that changes in the ways we respond to conflict and violence in any social setting can become well learned and fruitful enough to generalize to any and all of our relations.  So it is that in formally cooperative structures, decision-making can be hierarchical and discipline punitive, while in formally hierarchical organizations, decision-making can be cooperative and discipline restorative.  This is so because in reality there is considerable diversity among us in how we respond to problems we have with each other, although in a political culture as hierarchical and punitive as the US, it is the formally cooperative or democratic structures that are most likely to be corrupted by the drive to establish order of some over others.  Indeed in a political culture where domination and punishment prevail over power-sharing, power corrupts, and in my country, prosecutors are notoriously “tough on crime.”

I am devoted to identifying and celebrating cultural transformation—defiance of political expectations—where I come upon it.  It happens that in US common-law based criminal justice systems, prosecutors occupy the structurally most central, most powerful discretion over whether incarceration grows or declines.  The substantial, continuing mass reduction of incarceration in Colorado’s 3^rd Judicial District demonstrates the potential prosecutors have to transform the entire system of incarceration.  It shows that when prosecutors pursue that vision, their constituents become energized to support them, and to become party to making incarceration unnecessary, as they become safer together.  Lo and behold, the kind of prosecution I call peacemaking works.  Prosecutors take note: I can also make you pretty popular in a community that working together, makes you all become safer and more secure.

From the time I became a student public defender in law school until Christian became one, I never imagined I could feel professionally close to and admiring of a prosecutor’s work, one whose professional relations mirror the relations he and Katy have with their children.  What a wonderful surprise.  May the peacemaking path that Todd, Christian and the staff of the district attorney’s office here in southwest Colorado have taken, and the community support they have received, inspire prosecutors elsewhere to do likewise if they have not, and inspire us of the general public to recognize and appreciate those who have.  In prosecution as in everyday relations, peacemaking works, and where it prevails, we decarcerate…and it works for all of us.  Thank you Christian.  Love and peace, hal

The Sixteenth International Conference on Penal Abolition

THE 16^TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PENAL ABOLITION (ICOPA 16)

Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador, June 16-18, 2016

 

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

 

 

                A major gift I have received at every ICOPA in which I have participated[i] is for local activists to present the rest of us with the primary problems of violence and punishment generally and state violence and incarceration particularly which they face, and seek to transform.

                The most profound knowledge I bring home to the US from ICOPA 16 comes from the testimony of mothers trapped into serving as mules or couriers for drug cartels, alongside testimony from their families, activists and human rights lawyers, as ultimate victims of warriors trained, sponsored and corrupted by US wars on drugs.  The mothers initially agree to carry a drug shipment, most commonly to Europe, out of a desperate need to feed their families.  They represent an ethnic rainbow of those who live in poverty, but are primarily indigenous.  They are forced to continue serving as couriers by cartels who threaten otherwise to kill their families.  As in all wars, women and children are the ultimate victims of drug wars—fought by police, (para-)military forces and judges trained and funded by the School of the Americas and its successors in the US, often in US-based privatized prisons, stirred on by US drug enforcement agents (with some exceptions, as in Bolivia where President Evo Morales expelled them).

                 I came to ICOPA 16 well aware of the racist depictions of Chinese and Latin American immigrants that led heroin, cocaine and marijuana to become the basic targets of US drug enforcement.  I had known in theory that underclass young people of color pay by far the largest price for inherently counterproductive drug wars.  I owe it to the organizers of ICOPA 16 to know for real and personally that once again, as in all patriarchal, militarized worlds, it is the mothers who are enslaved into trafficking and their children whom our US-sponsored drug warriors supply to fill beds in US-built and operated prisons.

                At one of the conference sessions featuring the plight of mothers in prison, on “prison and drug use,” I asked the panelists whether they shared a vision of legalizing heroin, cocaine, and marijuana.  I mentioned several examples: heroin maintenance first introduced in Switzerland in 1994 after methadone “treatment” had failed, cocaine use as when I chewed coca leaves in Bolivia to climb hills without getting winded, or as extracted from the leaves (which are sent to Coca Cola to be blended with caffeine, and still, extract of the kola nut which has never been criminalized) for dental and medical use in the US, or marijuana as now legalized in several US states.  Ecuadoran human rights attorney Ernesto Pazmiño responded that an effort was being made to legalize marijuana possession and growth for personal use.  I had lunch with a family member and an activist from the region who were quite interested in how various West European countries had decriminalized and legalized drug use and possession.

                Throughout the world, the largest single contributor to incarceration is the detention of underclass people of color for drug possession and trafficking.   As drug wars have expanded, in the US as now I see in Latin America, young mothers of color have become those whose incarceration rate has climbed fastest, have become the leading bounty of our drug wars.  It is so obviously, uncontrovertibly the leading product of all our drug wars as to legally constitute the intended, primary product of our drug wars, to constitute the war crime of racially, primarily, targeting innocent underclass children and their de facto enslaved mothers, to fill prison beds in wars where failure to control drugs justifies escalation.  You might well say that this is drug warriors’ primary accomplishment.

                Because drug wars are the single greatest contributor to incarceration, understanding the history of drug wars and the effects of drug use have been a primary interest of mine since I entered criminology.  In our article on “Controlling Drug Use” (Criminal Justice Policy Review 13, no. 1, 21-31, March 2002; pdf available on request), I join Kevin Whiteacre in taking a public health or “peacemaking” approach to drug control, where drug users become one another’s primary source of information on good and ill effects of ways drugs are used, alongside information “authoritative sources” have to offer, where treatment for ill effects is available—all in all, efforts at harm reduction instead of prohibition.  Opiates including heroin, coca(ine) and marijuana and its derivatives are not inherently good or bad. As with all substances we eat, drink and inhale, it is the preparation, amount and administration of these drugs that makes the difference.  Unlike many pharmaceuticals and other things we consume, heroin and marijuana are not even inherently toxic; it is only when they are contaminated for illicit distribution that they may become poisonous—another argument for legalization.

                As a US citizen, a criminologist, and an educator, I feel a special responsibility to offer Latin Americans whatever testimony, consultation or assistance I might in drug cases, in political discussions, and in educational settings, regarding the neo-colonial history, politics and counterproductivity of drug prohibition, and positive ways to prevent and treat adverse effects of drug use as public health policy; just as I have long felt a special obligation to raise awareness in the violence and human destruction of the drug wars we launch and sponsor, which fall most heavily on economically desperate mothers and children of color everywhere.  I am especially grateful to the organizers and Latin American participants at ICOPA 16 for featuring this as the most egregious problem of “criminal justice” they face, for which we of the US are primarily responsible.  The first political step to making peace with drug use is noticing and recognizing the harm done by US-led wars on drugs; the challenge is to change course.  Criminologists are fond of ranking the seriousness of crime and violence.  As far as I’m concerned, the violence done to women in Latin America for drug trafficking, and their children, is as serious as organized violence and crime can get.  Special thanks to ICOPA 16 organizers and participants for making this reality so plain and personal.  Love and peace, hal

               

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[i] I have participated in every prior ICOPA from ICOPA 3 in 1987 to ICOPA 14, missing ICOPA 15 in Ottawa due to family obligations.  I organized ICOPA 5 in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, in 1991, where the conference program was grounded in the healing traditions, and experience particularly of incarceration, of indigenous peoples of North America.

My debt to Richard Quinney

MY DEBT TO RICHARD QUINNEY

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

June 24, 2016

 

                Dragan Milovanovic and Clem Bartollas have asked members of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) to submit their memories of Richard Quinney and his work for a biography they are writing.  They will select quotes from the many contributions they receive to include in Richard’s professional life story.

                I am grateful to Dragan and Clem for the opportunity to reflect on how much Richard Quinney’s friendship, example and insights have given me.  I have sent them much more than the short paragraph they requested; their story of Richard is theirs to tell.  Meanwhile, I wanted to share in its entirety my account of how much Richard has contributed to my life and understanding.  I have just sent this remembrance to Dragan and to Richard, which I want to share in its entirety:

 

                Once my dissertation proposal had been approved and I had started my fieldwork on “Police Patrolmen’s Decisions to Report Offenses,” I started teaching my first of two classes as a visiting assistant professor, “Introduction to Criminal Justice,” at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, winter quarter 1971.  I assigned two texts:  the president’s crime commission report, and Richard Quinney’s newly published The Social Reality of Crime.  Having come out of an ungraded high school, I also announced to the class of 250 that I was giving all A’s because I didn’t believe in grades.  I then went to the curriculum committee to request that my courses, in fairness, be listed as pass/fail.  As a result, I was notified that I would have to leave the U of M at the end of the next academic year.

                And so I was job hunting the spring of 1972 as I finished my dissertation, when the NIMH  doctoral students in sociology invited Richard Quinney (then NIMH director in sociology at NYU), John Kitsuse, and Laud Humphreys to offer a symposium on research in deviance.  As it happened, Richard’s Social Reality of Crime, and Kitsuse and Cicourel’s "A note on the official uses of statistics" (Social Problems 11, Fall 1963: 132-139 had provided theoretical grounding and justification for my study of how police constructed crime statistics (and Laud Humphreys persuaded me to apply to my next job at SUNY-Albany, which he left as I arrived).

                I warmed to Richard immediately, as he warmed to me.  I was to learn from graduate students of his like David Friedrichs and Joe Scimecca that he was this way with all of his students:  mentoring, encouraging them on their own intellectual journeys, and ever stimulating to hear and exchange views with.  He would visit me and my wife (Jill Bystydzienski) in Albany, and after I moved to Indiana in 1976, I would repeatedly visit him and Solveig, first in DeKalb, from which he first took me to visit his homestead in Wisconsin, then in Madison, where I would visit on occasion during the years (1998-2006) that I was commuting to be with Jill at Iowa State in Ames, and he, meanwhile, would stay with Jill and me from time to time in Bloomington, and visit the IU CJ department, including my classes (where once he asked me to play “Mr. Bojangles” as he talked about meaning in folk music).

                As I look back, the time and exchanges of writing I did with Richard after moving to Indiana, beginning in the late seventies, were crucial to my forming an answer to the question my students so often asked me in and out of class:  “Okay, Hal, you’re so critical of the system; what do you want instead?”   The question was most appropriate for the newly created, required criminal justice course I began teaching the spring of 1977—“alternative social control systems.”  Meanwhile, Richard was writing on the implications of Paul Tillich’s Christianity of love, then becoming a practicing Buddhist who now, as a criminologist, sought to spread compassion in the face of violence.  I recall being on the ASC executive board in 1983 when Richard was recommended for the Sutherland Award, that some thought he had stopped being a social scientist; I also recall rising to the defense of his intellectual development; he got the award.

                Richard’s and my conversations helped me address my students’ challenge.  When I returned to Norway (where I had spent the last year of secondary school, 1961-62) in 1986 particularly to spend time with Nils Christie, it was to study Norway, relative to the US, as a “peaceful society.”  As we corresponded, Richard suggested we put out a call at the 1987 ASC meeting for contributions to an edited volume, which he proposed to call Criminology as Peace.  I suggested that “peace” connoted a utopian state of being, while practically speaking, we were taking about an open-ended process of change, and so we agreed to call the book Criminology as Peacemaking.  Richard’s opening chapter invoked Buddhism to call for an end to suffering.  In the concluding chapter, I drew on the contributed chapters to define the paradigm I follow to this day, of studying and trying to practice transformation of violence by peacemaking, rather than fighting crime and criminality.  Richard helped me notice and use the many words we have for peacemaking:  compassion, empathy, love…

                True to himself, Richard has since documented his own journey into the meanings of life.  We see each other less often since I have moved back home to Ohio.  It happens that Richard and I are both close in spirit to Norwegians, in his case to Solveig.  In that culture, years may pass in which you have no contact, but as with mariners of yore, every time we are in touch, as we recently have been on email, I feel as close, as interested, and as deeply appreciative for all he has taught and given me, for his and Solveig’s generosity, as ever.

 

                …and so, Richard, thank you!                                      Love and peace, hal

Trust

TRUST

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

May 21, 2016

 

            My friend Muttaki Kamal recently sent me a draft report of a recent natural social experiment, entitled “breaking norms.”  He took 20 rickshaw rides in his home town, Dhaka, Bangladesh.  On half the rides, he followed the standard practice of bargaining a price before he took the ride.  In 9 of 10 cases the pullers bargained for more than the standard fare.  On the other half, he simply gave the puller a destination, and when they arrived, handed him a large banknote, asking him simply to give back what they thought was right.  In 8 of 10 cases, pullers were at first bewildered; in 7 of 10, they kept only the standard fare (and Muttaki added tips). Muttaki concludes that this offer of trust builds trust, which becomes reciprocated, an illustration of the self-generating process that I call peacemaking.

            It reminds of me the work of “ethnomethodologist” Harold Garfinkel (who steered me from law school to a doctoral program in sociology via criminology, where Erving Goffman became my minor adviser in “phenomenology”), notably of the natural experiments he and his students performed that he reported as “Conception of, and Experiments with, ‘Trust’ as a Condition of Stable Concerted Action” (pp. 187-238 in O.J.Harvey, ed., Motivation and Social Interaction, 1963).  He asked student to disrupt norms, as by asking for clarification of a standard conversational opener, like “What do you mean by ‘doing fine’?”  (or surreptitiously pressing on my dad’s foot under the bridge table when he didn’t like my dad’s bid, in order to demonstrate the existence of “taken-for-granted” norms).

            Muttaki created trust; Hal Garfinkel created distrust to demonstrate trust’s existence.  Garfinkel created the state of mind that underlies conflict and violence.  Muttaki introduced trust by what successful hunters among indigenous people of the American Northwest a potlatch—giving away one’s accumulated power.  So it is as police become involved in the lives of people they police outside the context of law enforcement, letting “citizens” help setting their working agenda, as in Richmond, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio in recent times.  So it was that I found enrichment in the classroom as students’ knowledge and experience helped direct what we studied next, giving away my power to grade substance.  So I found that parties assumed power over the conflicts in mediation over which I helped preside.  Put together, Muttaki Kamal and Harold Garfinkel illustrate the proposition that breach of trust is the fundamental problem of violence, which injections of trust may transform.   Thanks, Muttaki, for showing so clearly and simply what it takes to get peacemaking underway.  Love and peace, hal

Reflections from the New Directions in Critical Criminology Conference

REFLECTIONS FROM NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL CRIMINOLOGY CONFERENCE

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

May 9, 2016

 

Many, many thanks to Lo Presser, Michelle Brown and all the folks from the sociology department at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, for organizing and hosting the first biennial Conference on New Directions in Critical Criminology this past May 6-7.   It was uplifting to spend time with and hear old friends I hadn’t seen in several years, from Tony Platt whom I have known and learned from for over 40 years, to young activists and politically engaged students.  A central part of many of the presentations was defining one’s place in the realm of criminological research and action.  Now, back home, I find myself doing the same, within the realm of the “new directions in critical criminology” that I heard presented in Knoxville.

What I heard and learned about the positions various conference participants assumed in criminology carries me back to the distinction Karl Marx drew between two forms of “emancipation” in his essay “On the Jewish Question”:

All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to man himself. Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person. Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

 

                A good deal of the critical criminology I heard presented was focused on political emancipation, that is, on giving voice and clout to women’s, black and brown pain, fear, and anger, individually and collectively—to resist oppression—in Marx’s terms, for political emancipation.

                Like Marx, I believe that human emancipation entails political emancipation.  Unlike Marx, I believe that human emancipation can follow political emancipation in moments in our personal relations, which with experience can generalize from one personal social context to another.  My primary experience of the phenomenon came in victim-offender mediation, where routinely I found that when “offenders” (including someone who just happened to be picked out for starting a fight) felt safe to lay out what they had done and “anything else you want to say to _______,” and for victims to describe what had happened to them and to ask any questions of _______ they wanted, their conversation morphed into creating their own agreement, often without any prompting from us mediators.  That is the process I call “peacemaking,” transferable, I believe, to any social context, from policing, prosecuting and guarding, to adult-child relations.  In Marx’s terms, it is a moment of political emancipation’s evolution to human emancipation for all involved.

                I have inferred that Norway’s reduction of incarceration from 1960 US levels in 1840, to approximately current, internationally low levels by the end of the century, represents a cultural tipping point that grew from isolated local levels at the peak of the Viking Empire, some 25 generations earlier.  It rested on long-established open, democratic government.  At our stage of global communication, perhaps my own punitive and patriarchal US will reach an overall tipping point in less time.  But in my political culture of demanding “solutions” to our problems of violence and victimization, my commitment to understanding and spreading the experience of transforming conflict into cooperation rests on celebrating and enjoying the moments I am a part of it, knowing that the culture I die in will, on the whole, be about as punitive as it is today, living in hope for human progress toward power-sharing, expecting no solutions.

                I did find that I shared this cultural orientation with some participants, notably with my co-presenter, Denise Bentley, director of Tennessee’s youth courts programs, structurally for example in having among peer judges teens who had been in trouble with the law themselves.  Culturally, I heard it in descriptions of how the judges worked with those charged to help build their lives and relations—to take them out of social isolation.  I heard peacemaking in the stories of how cases emerged and the peer volunteers did and felt about their work.  I am not the first to discover that relations can be authoritarian in formally democratic institutions and groups, and cooperative in formally hierarchical organizations.  That includes whether people hold formal, as in state, or informal, as in private, power over others, or share it instead.  Formally, I prefer power over others to be held publicly rather than privately, because the law gives us access to what state actors do, while records and operation of privatized places remain private.  Whether emancipation is political or cultural, it requires access to the voices and experience of those with less power, so that they may be heard and attended.  I was a state actor for my entire 39-year career.  I held the grading power over students, the power to diminish some over others.  I tell myself that if I could, as I think I did, substantially transform the power of my knowledge in the classroom over “my” students, then cultural transformation of exercises of power over others can begin anywhere.   Love and peace, hal

               

               

Getting to Empathy

GETTING TO EMPATHY

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

April 22, 2016

 

                Survivors of intergenerational ritual abuse and mind control programming that had split them into a bundle called multiple personality disorder (MPD) or dissociative identity disorder (DID), including those whose “parts” have blended into a single sense of self, raised my awareness of the different sides of myself and others I knew in everyday life, what Erving Goffman called different “presentations of self.”  As victims they had survived systematic torture, as their torturers discovered that they had the “gift” of being able to go to “a different place” to endure what their siblings could not, and come back to their core selves keeping secrets about what had been done to them, with memories that could only be unlocked by a torturer who had instructed a part of the victim to “come out” when given a “trigger” by someone who knew the code.  Among survivors I got to know well were those discovered and trained under CIA, later NSA auspices, to perform assassinations, to seduce and collect intelligence as from high political figures, to carry secret information and as drug mules, and in some cases whose fathers had prostituted them as children, as in the military.  And among those survivors healed enough to share what they had suffered, including survivors who met students whom I saw growing stronger in my classes over as many as 17 years until my retirement, I found, as I put it at the time, “some of the most together people I have known”—extraordinarily self-aware, unusually caring and empathic, remarkably capable of giving and receiving trust and open dialogue.  In psychoanalytic terms, their capacity to develop a coherent sense of social identity and belonging had been interrupted by building defenses to wall themselves off from helpless pain and terror, splitting themselves into parts.  Their gift was one of developed intellectual awareness that enabled them to meld the pieces into one self with a consciousness and self-awareness that encouraged me for one to become aware of the many parts of myself and others we recognize, if at all, as internal inconsistencies in how we ourselves get “triggered” to become different “personalities” as circumstances and conversations change in our own daily lives.  All in all, many survivors have a gift of insight into and acceptance of their integrated selves.

In turn what survivors have taught me is awareness and integration of personas I assume (in Erving Goffman’s terms “presentations of self”) with close friends, with my students, and with what are known in the social science trade as “research subjects”—in a community where the imperative for “value neutrality” and “objectivity,” and reticence to contaminate one’s data, runs strong.  Practically speaking, survivors also raised my awareness of how support helps us all to build safer and more trustworthy relations, serves as social medicine for all manner of trauma, including for instance what makes victim-offender mediation work for participants.

                I was reminded of what ra/mc survivors have to teach by the April 23 broadcast of the WHYY/NPR program “Fresh Air,” on “Electrical Currents and an ‘Emotional Awakening’ for One Man with Autism,” John Elder Robison, interviewed with the neurologist, Alberto Pascual-Leone, who unblocked the neural passages that Robison from awareness of the feelings of others toward himself by non-invasive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS; story at http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/04/21/475112703/electric-currents-and-an-emotional-awakening-for-one-man-with-autism).  Robison’s awareness of the feelings that lay behind others’ actions had been blocked.  After TMS to his frontal lobes (Pascual-Leone had used EMS on other parts of the brain to relieve depression in other patients), Robison suddenly became acutely empathic, suddenly noticing “friends’” derision for his autistic behavior, recovering the feeling for music which he had gained temporarily as a sound engineer, being so overwhelmed by emotional drama at the movies and on television that he stopped watching, and summarized:

I was always possessed of strong emotions, what I wasn't possessed of was reaction to situations with other people, and indeed after another stimulation, when I could look in your eyes and feel like I was just reading your thoughts, which was really weird and powerful for me, because that had never ever happened in my life.

Robison now works with other autistic people, particularly youth, and concludes:

…I know that [the EMS treatment has given me] my ability to serve on these autism committees, I think that's the greatest thing I've ever done in my life, and I'm really proud [that] I can do that, and I think this made it possible. So there's pain that I felt from having these emotions come on, but I'm just so proud that I can do this thing that's important to young people and other people with autism and differences. ...

After all this seeing of emotion, though, one thing that I've come away with is the knowledge that I wanted all my life to be able to read these emotions, but of course reading emotions just makes me like everyone else. I think a debt that I could never repay Alvaro and those scientists is that they showed me that my geeky ability to see into machines and see into things, that's my true gift in life too, that nobody else can do that.

 

                Finally, the April 29 episode of the Ted Radio Hour begins with a finding by Magill University Professor of Pain Studies and Canada Research Chair in the Genetics of Pain, Jeffrey Mogil, that the empathy one extends to friends extends to empathy for strangers after playing the video game Rock Band—that is, by playing instruments to accompany video band music.  I notice a similar phenomenon among people who become acquainted as we play music together, as in weekly jams at the local farmers market.

                Ritual abuse/mind control (ra/mc) survivors I have known who have recovered memories of violence done to them by others attribute their recovery to having found safe company and places in which let their defenses down on one hand, and regard having “split” into “multiple personalities” or “dissociative identities” as a life- and sanity-preserving gift, a defense system.  It remains indeterminate whether Robison was born with autism or was traumatized into it by environmental circumstances, it is clear that his sudden gain in empathy brings pain at the awareness of others’ suffering and of their negativity toward himself and others; his courage in counting his newfound capacity for empathy, like ra/mc survivors integration is dissociated experiences of trauma, is a tribute to the value we humans place on awareness of interaction between our own and others’ feelings as we become able to let down our defenses against it.  As with ra/mc survivors, I attribute Robison’s recovery of his capacity to empathize not only to a resonance in the brain created by EMS, but to the faith and trust he has had in the neurologist who administered the treatment and stood by to support Robison in the aftermath.  For ra/mc survivors and for Robison particularly, the connecting one’s own feelings to the feelings of others rests on making it safe to lower one’s defenses against it.  And Mogil’s experimental results indicate that musical harmony can awaken empathy too.  Social and physical harmonic resonance can break down defenses against empathy—connecting with the feelings of others--even in those whose defenses against it are remarkably strong.

                The awakening of empathy is the fundamental mechanism that produces what I call peacemaking in response to human division and conflict in all our relations.  It amounts to creating resonance and harmony in the face of social dissonance.  The integration of split personalities or identities by social support, the effects of EMS on autism, and the power of engagement in musical harmony to make people kinder to strangers all suggest that empathy emerges spontaneously once barriers to it are lowered.  It explains how, as a friend taught me, to learn to “trust the process” through which tension was released and agreement was reached spontaneously in mediation I conducted, once offenders felt safe enough to acknowledge what they had done and why, and victims to express their fear, anger, pain and loss they had suffered.  It explains how police-citizen relations improve in places like Richmond, California, and Cincinnati, Ohio, once police chiefs establish ways for police and those they police to get to know each other in many ways in community activities outside the context of law enforcement.  It explains the process of resolving international conflict which Roger Fisher and others describe as Getting to Yes!  Empathy emerges in our relations once we make it safe to emerge, in many ways we are only beginning to discover.  The trick to making peace is to lower our defenses against it.  And as with Elder Robison, once the defenses are down, peacemaking happens.  Love and peace, hal

               

               

               

               

               

               

 

 

 

Military involvement in Syria: Vietnam revisited?

MILITARY DEPLOYMENT IN SYRIA: VIETNAM REVISITED?

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com

April 26, 2016

 

                President Obama has just ordered 250 military advisers to Syria.  It carries me back to how the US became enmeshed in our Vietnam War.  I looked up a timeline at http://mahargpress.com/wounded/additional-material/timeline-of-vietnamconflict/ .  Military aid to the French, thence to the South Vietnamese, began in 1950 under President Truman.  President Eisenhower sent military advisers in 1956 to fight the Viet Cong.  One of President Kennedy’s first acts in office was to send 100 Special Forces to aid the South Vietnamese army.  By the time I did my summer stint as the legal intern in East Asian affairs in the State Department in 1967, President Johnson had increased the US combat deployment more than 450,000 combat forces.

                On NPR, as on “On Point,” and elsewhere, I hear some voices opposing or questioning Obama’s latest extension of our military commitment in Iraq and Syria, not to mention Afghanistan.  The US has an extensive history of sending in overt and covert (as with the CIA in covert operations in Vietnam beginning in 1954) “military advisers,” and hardware.  Some military exploits were short-lived.  Vietnam stands out as lasting from 1950, until its collapse in 1975.  It took only four years from the first deployment of military advisers until combat deployment was fully underway.

                There is something to the saying that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat.  I wish we were taking note of where “limited” deployment of US military advisers has so recently taken us, enough for the history of our deployment in Vietnam not repeat itself.

                It is ironic to me that a Democratic president who entered office vowing to get us out of the region has been sucked into fulfilling the prophecy that senior Republicans who wrote the declaration of the Project for a New American Century, that an attack like the downing of the twin towers of the World Trade Center would solidify US political will to everlasting warfare against a global “terrorist” enemy.  President Eisenhower warned of the growth of the military-industrial complex in his 1960 farewell address.  As far as I can see, no president, regardless of political affiliation or belief, has contained the military since, especially a president like Obama who comes to office with little experience in foreign affairs.  A double irony is that Hillary Clinton is the one candidate with the experience to be able to bend if not break the US military habit, if only she can learn as she has from the mass incarceration she helped her husband escalate when Bill Clinton took office.  More broadly, I wish more of us in the US looked at where escalation of involvement like President Obama’s now in Syria has taken us, that this time we might change course.  Love and peace, hal