Welcome back!

If you were notified about this blog (I'm sure you forgot about it in the meantime!) then you are already registered as a user, so join in! Personally, I'm back after wearing myself out working to elect Obama. Not that I thought he was great, but once he clinched the nomination it was clear that it was either bumbling mediocrity or outright fascism. The bonus was electing the first African-American as President. Not the be-all and end-all but a great perk to be part of history, especially having been born in the cradle of the modern civil rights era.

The purpose of this blog is to comment on peace issues and innovative ideas for peace -- and not just me! All comments from registered users are welcome. I get a lot of notices from listserves, so they may be inspired by those occasionally, but personally I will try to keep it to lesser-known items. 

Here's an interesting sample: today Floyd Rudmin says:

I have for more than 10 years, been wondering how to initiate a sub-discipline on the psychology of history, something I have called "cognitive history".  That is, our historical beliefs are often mythic, filled with errors of omission, what you call "forbidden memories" and errors of commission, as well as other errors.  I came into this after discovering US 1930s war plans for the invasion and conquest of Canada.  The plans themselves were declassified in 1974, and anyone can buy them from the US National Archives.  When I would mention these, or show them to people, they would get very emotional, even angry, saying that this is impossible. The fact of having the actual copies of the plans in hand did not change the unreality of the historical facts.

I did a study of several thousand historians, trying to see what predicted disbelief in the war plans, and the strongest predictors were a) that Canadian-US alliance in WWI and in WWII precluded the possibility that they could have planned hostilities in the inter-war period.  I related this to the Fundamental Error of Attribution applied to nations as personalities.  That is, the USA has a consistent personality, and it would have been too inconsistent to have inter-war plans for hostility. 

I have one online paper about this, written several years ago for CounterPunch:

http://www.humiliationstudies.org/documents/RudminAmericanMilitarism.pdf

I have come to conclude that history is more like religion, in that beliefs are grounded on socially constructed and propagated beliefs and only very lightly on facts. But these beliefs become very active in individual psychology, influencing emotions, behaviors, and other beliefs.  

What is important about the psychology of historical beliefs is the very high degree to which mythic history motivates war.  It is much more wide spread than just the Israeli mythic history.

One of the bizarre aspects of US military celebrations is the relentless replay of WWII, especially D-Day as "the turning point in the war".  Factually, the turning point was the Battle of Stalingrad in winter 1943. After that, Germany cannot win WWII.  After the Battle of Kursk in summer 1943, the USSR cannot lose. The British and Americans had been postponing D-Day since 1942, and when they finally did invade in June 1944, it was largely to prevent the USSR from occupying all of Western Europe. Anyway, it is very important for Americans that they remember some aspects of WWII. The psychological question is, "Why?"  But the Korean War, had its 50 year anniversay from 2000-2003, and there was almost perfectly no national acts of remembrance for that war.  No sequence of movies. No new memorials.  No plane loads of old veterans flying to Korea. Again, "Why?"