June 8, 1972: Kim Phúc, center left, running down a road naked near Trang Bang after a South Vietnamese Air Force napalm attack (Nick Ut / The Associated Press)
Terrified Vietnamese mother running w. her injured child …
Location: Cape Batangan, Vietnam
Date taken: November 1965
This picture shows a Vietnamese woman who seems to be mourning the loss of her child
Five year old Iraqi child, Samar Hassan, in her pajamas covered in the blood of her parents, who were just murdered in front of her eyes by US troops and with a high-power gun now pointed against her head
American Soldier showing a severed Iraqi arm hung in a mosque to terrorize the Iraqi resistance. [Imagine your neighbor’s arm being hung at a church or a temple in your town with an occupying solider gleefully and proudly posing next to it. – S.]
He added: “If they do want to do it, I will work toward that end. I want to do everything within the bounds of what you’re allowed to do legally. But do I feel it works? Absolutely I feel it works.” From Donald Trump: Torture “absolutely works” — but does it? – CNNPolitics …
Tribalism aids survival. With limited resources available, one bands together with a group of seemingly like individuals and tries to take down the presumed enemy — the competitor for those resources on a local or a global scale.
Donald Trump plays upon this deeply embedded understanding that was honed for a long time through evolutionary means to be in the base of our genetic structures. It’s an “us vs. them” mentality, which is attractive to much of the US citizenry whether involving illegal immigrants, Muslims from certain other countries or any number of others presumed to be “not of us.”
Such an orientation has often been key to maintaining one’s life and the lives of loved ones. Accordingly prairie dogs will kill competitors or die trying to do so and gorillas will gang up and murder another gorilla — usually a young obstreperous male … or they will individually kill babies: When Silverbacks Kill Babies.
Likewise meerkats will raid the den of a competing meerkat group. I saw the latter event take place on film during an episode of Meerkat Manor. They come in a gang when the other group is out feeding. Then some attack and try to kill the den’s single guard while others rush down into the den to find the babies, which they claw and bite to death.
In this sense, humans are not much different from other animals. We’re all prone to this alienating condition, although involving different groups of others in relation to the group with which we specifically identify.
In other words, we might dislike someone of another religion if we are of group “A.” Yet we might hate someone with a different skin color than ours if we’re from group “B.” Group “C” members might have a neo-Nazi orientation and group “D” might hate all of the above other groups and the ones that the other groups hate, too.
In other words, the hated ones become pariahs. They have become “The Other.”
The Other is not like us. Inability or refusal to see similarity, continuity, etc. …
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Personally I never much had an issue with people from other cultural, religious, ethnic or socio-economic groups. It’s probably in large part due to my having been exposed to a wide variety of people from different backgrounds and having a positive experience of them since I was a baby.
Heck, I’ve even been to parties, wonderful ones, wherein I was the only white person present. Indeed, I’ve made jokes about being the token white person present — the one that proves that there is no animosity, nor nonacceptance of diversity.
Tokenism – Wikipedia
Tokenism is the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to be inclusive to members of minority groups, especially by recruiting a small number of people from … The characteristics that make the person of interest a token can be perceived as either a handicap or an advantage, as supported by Václav Linkov.
Anyway, the two boys became best friends over the course of the summer and loved horsing around together in various ways, such as when one of them would yell “peelo fight” and they’d throw pillows at each other across the children’s bedroom while laughing. (I, myself. was happy in the thought that they’d each bring his new perspective home about the so-called “enemy.” They truly loved each other.)
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I also have my sense of “The Other.” I guess that we can’t escape the orientation in entirety, and nor should we.
Donald Trump’s statements at the start of this essay about killing whole families and finding value in torture reminded me of someone else — someone on my “Other” list. He also valued destroying whole families and saw torture as valuable to extract information, although the type of information that he wanted was another sort — scientific information.
Then she was strapped to a bed. Her nipples were covered with tape after which the newborn boy was laid next to her body and his behavior for several days of being unfed was recorded.
Under the circumstances, his mother, of course, approved and was told to keep her mouth shut about the murder. (Then the mother was promptly shipped off to her own death via the usual means at that camp since the experiment was done.)
How then would she become with the extraction as opposed to her sister? What is the exact function of the organ removed in terms of overall health, behaviors like gait, mood and speech; physiological markers such as skin color or teeth falling out, etc., etc.?
It was deemed that empirical evidence for the organ’s role in supporting life will show up in the victim as opposed to her totally healthy sister. The variance between the two, roughly alike in every way, would serve, it was surmised, as proof of the removed organ’s exact operation. How chilling!
Imagine ones being the subject of this experiment … or being her sister watching each removal take place. It’s sheer madness on Earth, which is unrivaled perhaps except in extreme fantasies about Hell’s fury.
The President of the USA simply needs to give up dangerous, immoral notions and statements that can only lead to ever deepening tragedy and further horrific conflicts between us and the presumed “Other.” These all-out conflicts simply need to end.
Without a doubt, they, without termination, include backlash in retaliation on USA soil, further children screaming in terror, further other lives traumatized and destroyed, landscapes ruined and more tax dollars sucked into a military to conduct slaughter as the USA continues to have agendas in the Middle East and elsewhere located. This travesty undeniably needs to stop … and stop as soon as possible!.
Sally Dugman is a freelance writer.
