know but for "the new york times" to describe him as >> and now on booktv, robert jay lifton talks about his life and his work on subjects such as the nazis. the dropping of the atomic bomb on hiroshima, the communist revolution in china and the vietnam war. this is about an hour and a ha half. >> okay. we can begin. i'm bruce shapiro, executive director of the dark center for journalism and trauma here at the columbia school of journalism. welcome, on behalf of both the center and columbia. the center is an ideal lab, resource center, networking mechanism for journalists as

well as clinicians and scholars and others concerned with news coverage of violence around the world. everything from street crime and family violence up to work line -- were crying and human rights. i'll talk more about the dart center in a few minutes. we are here tonight though for a conversation and a celebration, a conversation with robert jay lifton, psychiatrist, public and election, historian, activist and a celebration of his wonderful and beautiful new memoir, "witness to an extreme century." this event is cosponsored by the dart center, but also by the nation magazine. and i would like to bring up victor, the editor emeritus of the nation, a friend and mentor to many people in this room, to give a welcome on behalf of a

nation and say whatever he wants to say. >> hi. what i want to say is, you know, the nation has had thousands of contributors over the years, and there are only a handful to whom one looks to, to put the whole world in perspective and for moral guidance. and you're lucky this evening to have robert jay lifton here. it seems to me, but i also, i will tell you why i think you are lucky but i also want to give you a warning, and just take a minute or so. it seems to me you're lucky because he has as a psycho the a psycho historian, a unique perspective on history, because he deals with great subjects, and you know if you look at these books here, i haven't inspected all of them, but it's among his subjects are do not

see doctors and medical killings, the nuclear threat, the psychology of genocide, the survivors of hiroshima, capital punishment, these are huge subjects that hang over all of us, and everybody out there. so, my warning is that the robert jay lifton to me is the ultimate geographer of moral responsibility, and it is impossible to listen to him talk without getting a sense of your own the moral dimensions of what you do. and those of you who are students here, it seems to me that you can listen to him without understanding that your job is not merely to report on the moral responsibility of others, but to behave in a

morally responsibly way yourselves. so it's an honor, a pleasure to be part of this. and bob, i can't wait to hear you, so thanks. >> i'm just going to say, first of all, 90, victor. i'm going to say a few more words of introduction both about robert, but also about this evening. first, some housekeeping. first of all, as you can see, this event is being videotaped for eventful broadcasts i c-span. it is also being audiotaped by the journalism school and will be posted on the dart center's website, web doctrine for.org. because we are doing this for c-span i have to important messages. first of all, after a bit of a conversation we will do q&a and when we do, please line up at the two microphones here. if you're physically challenged,

we also have a wireless, portable mic, but the issue thing for the rest of us is to use these two microphones here. also, if you have a cell phone, please make double sure to turn it to silent or off, or some other state in which it won't bother anybody else in the room. if you are a tweeter, there is a twitter hash tag for tonight's event, hash cjdart. there are refreshments in the back. dart center announcement for journalists here. on october 22 and 23rd, we are sponsoring a workshop for journalists uncovering intimate partner violence. teenage relationship violence, family violence. this is funded by the robert wood johnson foundation here at the journalism school.

and if you or a colleague know someone who is interested, by all means, go to www.dartcenter.org and apply for it. the deadline is september 26 your dart center swag, there is some stuff in the back. the our pamphlets. or our stress balls, official dart center stress balls which just arrived today. please take one. there are also, on your chairs, these cards. these are donation cards. if you are interested in supporting the work of the dart center, improving journalists coverage of violence, encouraging a deepening of the craft of reporting on violence, both in the u.s. and around the world, support our work, you can also donate online at www.dartcenter.org. bathrooms, their two restaurants on this floor. halfway down the hall is a

unisex restroom. all the way down the hall is a women's room. if you would like a segregated male restroom you will need to go down to the basement. but the unisex restroom should work fine. and, finally, i want to thank a few people. i want to thank very much my friends and colleagues at the nation cosponsoring this including victor and katrina and peter, put that together. c-span for recording this and putting it on booktv at some point in the not-too-distant future. and the columbia bookstore which is in the back with copies of "witness to an extreme century," which robert jay lifton will be happy to sign later in the evening. and, of course, my wonderful colleagues at the dart center for journalism and trauma who have put this evening together. i don't want to take too much time i do feel i need to make a few words of introduction.

and build on victor's very apt description of robert as the arbiter of a kind of moral universe. it may be interesting question what a journalism organization based at a journalism school is sponsoring a talk of a psychiatrist. i have to say when i read "witness to an extreme century," one of the things i learned was robert, you were briefly a journalist, even though you've violated ethical by violating the tennis team to playing on the testing. >> that was my advocacy. >> the end of a promising career of journalism. but also, and really, because so much of what we chart as journalists in the world today, whether it is war or terrorism, perpetration of violence,

torture, all of these actions, are on during the robert jay lifton was their first. at the dart center i spent a lot of time talking with friends and colleagues, journalists, researchers who have dealt with these issues. and one issue after another you trip over, encounter, face down or in dialogue with the work of robert jay lifton who has enabled us to understand the nature of the survivors encounter with death, the nature of perpetrators moral universe, and how those all, those all interact, both for individuals and for society's, it's work that began in the summer of 1953 as the book tells us when a young man, a young psychiatrist who had been in the air force heard about repatriated u.s.

pows from korea who had been through what the popular press was calling brainwashing, conducted the first study of pows and thought reform that led to a persistent engagement with those issues, and started him as well down the road that led to the first significant studies of hiroshima survivors, of vietnam veterans, of religious cults of nazi doctors that shaped our understanding of the impact of war and atrocity and what happens to individuals and communities and nations that encounter large-scale violence and death, what happens to our social contracts, how we heal, or don't, we're vengeance is in. this is social landscape. we are talking here in new york,

just days after the 10th anniversary of the september 11. robert has now written this memoir, and i can tell you that it is not only richly informative and a great sort of travelogue through this journey, it is also surprising, funny, beautifully written. through it you hear the voices not only, do not only meet his often hero to subjects, people just talk to over the years, his friends, a few of his mentors, ericsson, and even you encountered many of robert streams, which is a fascinating -- roberts dreams, which is an internal autobiography. i'm going to invite robert to talk a little about this book, how it came to be, any thoughts on it and they will have a conversation, he and i come and

then we will invite you to join in and see where we go from there. robert, robert jay lifton. [applause] >> thanks so much. i appreciate both of those introductions. they were more than kind, and i also, both bruce and victor, and i also appreciate the sponsorship by the dart center and the nation. and i'm enormously glad that these two institutions exist. still, one has to do something to extricate one's self from introductions like that. in my case when people ask me how i study these terrible things and ostensibly stay sane while doing it, my answer is, i drop bird cartoons pic and i do actually go straight a little bit.

the book with a few of these cartoons, but the one that seems appropriate now, what i'd like to call my ex essential classic goes this way, i'll pop us, a small enthusiastic young bird looks up and says, all of the sudden i had this wonderful feeling, i am me. and older, more bigger, more jaundiced express bird looks down at him and said you were wrong. on that note, i begin. [laughter] i was looking out of my hotel window and had a glimpse of the hudson river earlier today, and i began to realize how central new york city has been for my existence. i'm a new york lad, if i can say that. i grew up in brooklyn and lived most of my adult life in new york city. travel a lot around the world doing studies, i lived for many decades in new york city.

that's central to my narrative, always came back to new york as well as to cape cod. on that matter of story or narrative, and this is, it's not a tell all memoir. it's an intellectual memoir, but it is quite personal. and the narrative one creates in writing a memoir, always has more coherence than the life one has actually lived. because during that life one is stressed about various forces one had, more than one shares of confusions, one denies no one was doing. in the narrative it take shapes and has kind of a coherent. yet still even though that is re-created, it matters in terms of one's own sequence of one's life. in all this work, there's been

in perfect balance or imbalance between scholarship and activism for me. so i did all the work through interviews, and i gave it an empirical, and, i was talking to human beings and that's a baseline from which everything can skim. but at the same time i didn't stop at those interviews. how could one not take a stab about nazi doctors and genocide, or the vietnam war, or whether hiroshima bombing? so the activism became very important in my life, and it usually said that one has to be one or the other, but i think that they feed each other. i think that scholarship without activism loses its significance, and activism without scholarship may lose its intellectual center. anyhow, that's been an effort all through my work.

the memoir to take shape as with any book only when one comes to a structure. structure is all, and one doesn't think of what later becomes the most obvious of structures, which in my case in this book was to structure the book around for of my major or at least research studies that i thought were most important, chinese thought reform, the hiroshima bombing, the vietnam war and nazi doctors are in making databases for the study, and the memoir, along with other things that happened a long the way. and that became my structure, as i say, in retrospect, completely obvious but not so from quite a long time while one was struggling for it. each of these studies did something palpable to me and i tried to convey that in a memoir. chinese thought reform

reinforced my aversion to total is him, to all or none systems of thought, which claim absolute truth and absolute virtue. i think we are haunted by totally some of many different kinds, all through the world. i think that by the way or not so incidentally, our president would do well if he understood more about the totalism that he faces rather than seeking to reconcile with a point of view that allows of no compromise. so that study, it also, it also took me to the beginnings of an identity of someone who does these things, it was a significant decision for me to stay in hong kong, however uncertain i was of things at the beginning because that set me on a certain path on which i could

begin to see myself as somebody who does these studies. the study of hiroshima was an overwhelming experience. the first study was in the mid '50s, and this study of hiroshima was in 1952 and my wife and i lived there for six months. i interviewed survivors. it's one thing to be told in detail about things that happened in hiroshima. it's another thing to sit down with hiroshima survivors and spend hours hearing of the visual sense of what they went through in connection with the coolest weapon ever devised. and that study and hiroshima absolutely altered my view of the world. i have since, and still, see the world through a lens or prism of hiroshima. and, of course, it led to concerns about nuclear weapons and more broadly the psychology of what i call nuclear risen, the embrace of the weapons almost as deities at times.

something where dependent on, something that keeps the world going, even as absolute entities that we must define ourselves with. also the study of hiroshima took me to the very important realm of the psychology of survivors. and above all, the overall need of survivors to find meaning in near-death encounter if there to have meaning for the rest of their lives. the third study, my work with antiwar veterans, which i did mostly in the early '70s, took me to the whole war peace issue. and above all, to what i came to call an atrocity producing situation, a situation so structured militarily and psychologically that ordinary people, know better or worse than you or me, could enter into

the environment and be capable of committing atrocities. it's the extraordinary power of extreme environments to influence human behavior. it was never more devastating than in connection with the vietnam war. and always since studying vietnam veterans, i've kind of had a dialectic about american warmaking and war in general but on the one hand the vietnam war was very specific and had many specific characteristics, different from other wars. on the other hand, it was a war, and one must, one must seek in relation to war in general as well as its own specificity. and, of course, the vietnam war turns out to have all too much in common with subsequent american warmaking and iraq and afghanistan are again, atrocity producing situations, and the

result that we have seen. in terms of -- but one thing that i would add, the work with the vietnam veterans and war veterans, also was transformative. one could see these veterans undergoing extraordinary change in every hopeful way. not everything about him changed, but they could change not only their attitude about war, but the relationship with other people, with their families, with their girlfriends, in significant ways in a matter of months. well of course, other things stay the same. this was a powerful lesson in human behavior that had to do with work in iraq that i and other so called professionals performed. a fourth study, that have nazi doctors was a real descent into evil, but i discovered, as have others, how easy that dissent

is, unhappily. socialization to evil, nazi doctors hadn't killed anybody until they got to auschwitz or the killing centers of the so-called euthanasia project. and then they killed a lot of people. they were ordinary men who did these things, rather than people we would have preferred them to be with the mark of cain on the foreheads. also of course the whole nazi project, killing to heal and the whole psychology of genocide in which even outside of nazi behavior has in other genocides bad idea of healing a nation through killing those who were seen as dangerous or polluting. well, those four studies became the basis for my memoir, and i was enormously helped by another

nude institution, the new york public library which collects my papers, and which had curated, melanie had organized them in a much more coherent way than i ever could have. so i would find myself and perhaps what is ultimately narcissistic action of immersing myself in my own papers at that wonderful manuscript room in the new york public library, like a month of full-time instead of looking to the great scriptures i was looking through my own notes. [laughter] but it helped me enormously. and as you know, it can be a powerful correct -- corrective to what one thinks is accurate memories of these events. and i tried to be as accurate as i could in depicting them. but i then found myself always coming back to new york, and holding meetings, which have many great deal to me.

and also having a dialect of listening and talking. i talk about this a little bit in my memoir. i've done a lot of listening in order to take in this material and re-create it in some ways, as both a kind of scholar and a witness. but then i did my share. i've done my share of talking over time, and i have enormously valued dialogue with all kinds of people who might describe, not on my mentors, people like erik erikson and david, but also other people from different professions, and specialties. the give-and-take of real conversation, of real dialogue i think is crucial to taking in so much about one's time. these are dark times now in american politics. it's easy to become discouraged, and how can one avoid such feelings at least some of the

time. but i refer you to a wonderful line from a very fine public who said very simply, in a dark time, the eye begins to see. we are capable of seeing, we're capable of acting. and that health is a kind of message, not cosmic resolution, but at least a message of being able to enter into these issues and take a stay and and carry through. that's more than enough perhaps for me to start out with. i welcome now the conversation. [applause] >> thank you, robert. that was a wonderful introduction to the book. and gives you as well a few for the kind of narrative architecture that informs the book. one of the real surprises was

learning that you dictate most of your writings to yourself. for those of us who struggle to put a paragraph together, the idea of the spoken writing process is an interesting one. >> i don't claim that that's the way people should write. but i have done it, and you know, i say that people talk about a hand brain connection and typing on the computer. i had a brain larynx connection somehow. better or worse. and that's the way i have done it. so i can try to see the words before me while speaking them come and work through it. still a laborious process. i don't recommend it for everyone. >> let me begin at eight in the present tense, and then maybe we will go back a little bit. but it's unavoidable, we are talking here, now a few days after the 10th anniversary of

september 11 attacks, over the course of the last decade you considered the meaning of this atrocity on american soil and the wars that followed. you wrote a little bit about what you called superpower syndrome here we are now at a point where perhaps these wars are winding down. and in any event there's been this marking of anything that despite a decade, still feels awfully wrong. where do you think we are? how does your thinking over the years inform your understanding of america's understanding of its own place right now? >> one way to approach that question, which is a very important one, is through what i raised in my remarks about survivor meaning. first of all, i think it's hard to understand the american reaction to 9/11. without understanding the vietnam war.

most of us in this room, when we took some meaning or lesson from the vietnam war, took a very simple one, don't get involved in that kind of or ever again. but there was a powerful nucleus of people who became leaders, political leaders, around george w. bush. they were called the balkans with good reason. they named themselves. which took the opposite meaning that we have to overcome the so-called vietnam syndrome, which is equated with weakness, and project american power on the world. and response to 9/11 was part of that, as was the iraq war which had nothing to do with 9/11 directly. so that's one aspect, but then in response to 9/11 which was a terribly humiliating experience for americans, and one of unwanted vulnerability in direct contrast to the superpower syndrome that we have been

creating, not just during the bush administration, but since world war ii, especially in the bush administration, which is one of the impetus. that was shattered. and then the question is what meaning do we derive from it, and the predominant meaning was disastrous. the so-called war on terror which was totally state in itself, and those without boundaries, and fruitless and counterproductive in every single way. as opposed to a wiser set of meanings which americans are struggling with, and not absolutely without, but maybe still in minorities pashtun minority ways, asks how did this come about, what kind of policies has america been following that might be changed, what kind of attitude has been built in relation to us? in the way this is an opportunity, especially with arab spring, where things are in

a people throughout the middle east and elsewhere throughout the world, and it could strengthen our capacity to derive wiser survivor meanings from 9/11. i think the contest psychologic and historically continues among americans. >> you begin your work at another very polarized black and white time. you begin looking at korean pows, at a time when the world seems divided between, on the one hand, the u.s. that was in the grip of mccarthyism, one kind of black and white thinking, and on the other hand a soviet union dealing with stalinist and its aftermath. and in the middle of this, you begin asking these questions, and you also describe in your book in countering your early mentors, people like ericsson

and grisman. and you talk about these long walks you would take. we were discussing that earlier with these guys. .. it's

about a brilliant and at the same time insistence that we remain rebels and that call it what you will become important and not always easy to sustain. further influence of mentors was just as i say briefly with ericson, i felt is -- he showed how someone could bring psychoanalysis in history. it didn't have to be the clinic or in the office or on the couch and that was an inspiration to me. >> and when you met him he was

studying martin luther and others. >> absolutely. and he was studying 16th century priesthood as he was about to write his book with luther as i was struggling with my work on thought reform and david reesman was an extraordinary intellectual of unlimited facets and extraordinarily kind and impathic man. he taught me to be an intellectual. i came to realize, yes, i was doing studies in hong kong and in japan, but i did that as an american -- as an american intellectual. and else taught me which is evident now the backlash of a very conservative society that we live in, the absence of a

traditional culture has made us more vulnerable perhaps to threats to the culture to changes in people's reactions to the changes as a form of backlash. those were some of the things and then there's, you know -- there's an inchoate relationship relationship between mentor and follower of a particular time or at least a period in which things happen in which one sees one's self as gaining and capacity to have ideas of one's own that might matter. >> what are -- what were the moments when you felt those struggles most vividly? where did they lead you? >> i felt my -- i think all of us have our greatest struggles with our first book and i knew i did exciting work and interviewing people coming out of china, westerners, chinese. the question was, could i put it

together in book form and conversations i had with both ericson and reesman began to convince me that maybe i could and reesman performed the unbelievably generous task of writing page after page of letters. we were walking frequently and seeing each other regularly going on these long walks, fresh pond park in cambridge. but he would still write letters like a 19th century correspondence -- correspondent, and wrote in response to each of my chapters with enthusiasm and with openings where they took him and his associations. and so i could come to the sense and yes, i could write this book and it could even have something to say. these are the days when we were all smoking. this was in the -- late '60s. and i found -- i was never a

heavy smoker but i found myself smoking more and more trying to finish this damn book until i finished it and i could stop smoking all together. [laughter] >> with the surgeon general's report right at that time. so we have our physical involvements in these studies. >> let me ask you a question about the hiroshima book and interviews you talk about as an interviewer, as a listener. we live in a world now in which there are libraries of the holocaust oral histories in which the idea of atrocity testimony is pretty well established. at the time you did that work there were not a lot of people doing that kind of listening, in that kind of depth to people who had been through that extreme an experience. how did you develop an approach that earned the trust of these

survivors -- where did it come from? >> you know, something that seems a profound decision could be something quite less than that. i had been trained in psychiatric interviewing in my psychiatric residency. i had just two years of that before i was drafted, in the doctor draft in the military kicking and screaming. i didn't want to go to the military, but i did. and it seemed to me that if i wanted to understand what people went through in china or in special centers where they were put through a systemic process to change their minds and to change them, that i had to talk to them and i also came to realize that if i would have talked to them, i had have a

systemic approach that i probed everyone in more or less the same way, in a kind of group -- within which i could look for the same sort of things or what i came to called shared themes. and that seemed an appropriate way to go about the study. when you think about search, when you see the word "methodology beware," when you see the word "method" that's very important. what method can evoke what you're trying to get as opposed to making methodology and idol in the marketplace in which you gain your grants through methodology instead of a method that really gets to the heart of things. i think that the interview -- now, when you talk about collections of holocaust studies and other interviews and 9/11

now, these are very valuable and they're useful to have. but in the end, somebody has to write them up and give them a narrative that draws both upon the information of the interviews and one's own sensibility and perspective and one's own witness to this. that's the way i see it. but i think the interview is still an underused method, psychiatrists are moving away from it to the detriment of our field in the exaggerated embarrass of medications. and i don't think that most psychologists realize how extraordinary this -- how extraordinarily this method can serve us as well as journalists and others interested in getting at what people are really experiencing. there's no more beautiful method than talking to people. >> you talk in the book about needing to retool your interview and narrative methods when it

comes years later to your encounters with first class perpetrators, nazi doctors. >> yeah. >> talk a little about that. and this matters a lot to us as journalists since we often divide our open time between victims or survivors and perpetrators especially human rights journalists. talk a little about that. >> before i got to nazi doctors, which was in the late '70s, all the people i interviewed i felt sympathetic to as survivors. vietnam veterans were complicated. i did feel deeply sympathetic to them because i felt as i said in the subtitle, the first subtitle on my book on vietnam burns was "vietnam veterans, neither victims or executioners," it was a warning of the two roles we should never do and they were

thrown into both roles by their shoat so i felt sympathetic to people who had been pressed into thought reform to hiroshima reformers to vietnam veterans with nazi doctors, that was hardly the case. and it was a difficult enterprise to sit down -- for me, to sit down with nazi doctors and i felt all kinds of emotions including rage and a sense of grotesqueness and a sense of being tainted by sitting down with them in certain ways. >> and was that because they were doctors or the evil itself? >> no, it was the evil itself. being a doctor -- and i'm kind of a doctor i strayed so much from the clinic that i call myself a former doctor. it was more the evil than the medical profession. and, yet, eric ericson said to

me, he said when you do this work, you might find you touch the piece of -- a piece of their humani humanity. to sit down with someone is to have a conversation. it was important for me. some friends said i shouldn't do this study because to understand is to excuse. that was useful for me to hear because i then created for myself a kind of double dimension in which i was seeking to understand motivations while holding them responsible for what they did. so, therefore, i was probing psychological and historical forces conducive to evil, not losing sight of the evil and requiring the word for my research. in any case i was helped

enormously by many germans who were a minority of their society but deeply committed to confronting their own recent history. and one way they did that was to help me and they helped me both intellectually and in a profound way emotionally. even during the interviews when i needed an interpreter and support of two or three people who were my colleagues and assistants who became very close and it was a case of the younger person being rather therapeutic to the older one who was really suffering from things i asked nazi doctors to tell me. and then i found myself enraged and miserable in hearing them say them. but all that happened. and i talk about the difficulties of sitting down with them in my memoir. >> one of the challenges -- and, again, being here in a journalism school of many professional colleagues that you

faced and that we faced is this sense of being poisoned a little bit by our immersion in these subjects in the individual perpetrators and also in the lives of victims, the horrible suffering. you describe in the book a bunch of dreams related to this. and i wanted to stick out them and ask you about how you plan to take care of yourself. one you have this dream of the infern chorus toward your end of the work on the nazi doctors clearly you are feeling profoundly tainted. and the other is this funny dream involving vatican grapes. talk about that, the taint -- the sense of taint and then also the remedies. >> let me say a word about the way i use dreams and the way i use them in my memoir.

in addition to some of the meanings that freud gave them too narrowly, i think, dreaming have a prospective dinegligence my view. that's why so many cultures see them as predicting the future. they don't predict the future but they have certain feelings or direction you experience yourself as moving in from the immediate present. and in that sense they are prospective. in the dream of the -- infernal cho chorus, it became a very important dream. there was a chorus, like a barber shop quartet and i was singing in it but it was an infern chorus and i knew in the dream and when i woke up infernal meant hell, death all the things that infernal means and i woke up very upset that i

was talking to these people and felt tainted by it, and it was time i felt strongly to leave that chorus. to stop having the interviews and to go home and have my say about them and what i saw them to be and what to have done. in a way it was a signal that i was ready to wind up the work in the field and go home and do -- and i also, you know, talk about i knew i couldn't clear my desk of those interviews, of them until i wrote the book. the dream about vatican's games, some of my books are a humor, sometimes it's a gallows humans and sometimes it's something else but vatican grapes was a sense of something nice and good and delicious and sensual -- >> and you describe yourself as

antidotes. >> yes. i needed antidotes for myself and i needed ways of expressing antidotes of the destructiveness and evil that i was encountering and so i could make jokes about it, my wife and i would talk about it. and we said what about jewish grapes? [laughter] >> some of the dreams -- well, i would say one needs a certain amount of humor all the way through about the absurdity of what one is encountering and this expresses itself in one's dreams. and it doesn't mean that those elements of humor don't combine with something that one is struggling with quite strong. >> you mentioned your wife, and she is of constant presence in character in this book. this has been a hard year.

you completed the book and she fell ill and died. how does the work of a memoir change as you look at it? >> the memoir was completed just before my wife, bj, became extremely ill, and she died from a very bad kind of pneumonia they couldn't contend with very quickly. she had had some illnesses before then but nothing like that. having -- having the -- so i couldn't have been able to write much or any of the memoir after she died for some time. some does experience a extremely form of grief. and i've been studying grief reactions for decades in my work but didn't fully understand what

that was until i was subjected to that myself. but having the memoir -- and i could, after a while, do the editing and prepare the manuscript for publication was of enormous value to me because it was an assertion of my work, which included bj very centrally in each of those stages as comes through with the memoir. and even in my -- and it helped me to have that task. and even in my dedication of the memoir which includes my children and their children, my grandchildren, i say and to bj, rather than -- and to the spirit of bj, i don't want her to be dead at least until the end of the book where she's so vital a character all through what i did

and what i did in this work, in my sense, couldn't have been possible without that relationship. yes, it's been a very tough year for me, and it's 10 months now and things change and one moves ahead, but not easily. and much remains of the whole struggle. >> you now have a new project, did you want to talk about it a little bit? >> i have just the beginnings -- maybe faint beginnings of a new project which stems from work i've done before in a limited way. it has to do with, generally speaking, or summing it up, how psychologically and historically war begets war. in other words, war begets war because of meanings we give to the previous war. you can take example of world war i and world war ii, the

vietnam war and subsequent wars which i already mentioned. and i'm interested in exploring in more detail and in a more extensive way how this comes about and how we might this vicious cycle of war begetting war. that's the beginning sense of it. and it's always important to have a new project with which one is moving ahead. >> and is this scholarship -- is it activism? is it the two flowing together? how does that work for you? it's not always an easy marriage, scholarship and activism? >> no, it isn't at all. that's right. i say that i tried to have a balance between them but i had lots of conflict along the way, perhaps still do, about how much to do of one and how much the other. well, i know i'm bound to both of them. i tell what was for me is a

moving experience with good friend named mary wright who was the professor of chinese history at yale and she developed a fatal lung cancer. and she called me in to see her and i thought she wanted to talk to me about that process of dying that i studied so much that related to it and i totally underestimated here it was soon after my hiroshima book and i was very active one of antiwar protests. and she'd, look, i know what you're doing as an activist is very important to you and i agree what you're doing but just remember what you did in that hiroshima book probably had more impact on the world than anything you could do in your immediate activism. don't forget that. she was trying to tell me not to

get lost in activism in terms of my effort at scholarship and writing accounts being an intellectual witness to these events. and that made a profound impression on me, not only in terms of her -- in terms of my own effort to make -- to continue a balance between them and her extraordinary generosity in what she did. >> i think this is a good moment to turn to questions from you folks. just line up if you would, there are two mics. one in the middle and one on your left, my right. if you could line up so that c-span and our friends here at a & e can record this for posterity. keep your question brief and focused because there are a bunch of folks who will want to say stuff. yes, sir. >> a few really quick ones. take either which one you want.

one is, is totalism a introduction fragmentation and just -- you can answer either. what is evil and what choice did these nazi doctors have? >> what was the first one? >> well, the first one was about the nature of totalism. is a kind of a fragmentation. >> a reaction poach >> well, you can call it an reaction formation and i wouldn't contest it but i tried to avoid clinical terminology and looking at ideological tendencies and it has to be see collectivelily and individually, i feel, and it's a tendency toward claiming complete truth and complete virtue. and i think it tends to arise --

and this is what i think you are getting at by calling it a reaction formation in response to the fear of change, the fear of change. briefly that's what i would say about totalism. in terms of the nazi doctors the question was -- >> was evil. >> what is evil and what choice do they have? >> and maybe only amplify that. how has your understanding of evil changed through your -- evolve perhaps through your encounter with these folks. >> my understanding has been enormous with what i found and how people can become socialized to evil. there's the holocaust and there's one theory that says the nazis committed a holocaust because they have a unique degree of anti-semitisim. i'm not at all sure that's the case. i think there was as much

anti-semitisim in other places but the capacity to adapt to evil, to be socialized to evil was what i learned. that's related to what hannah called the banality of evil. of course, she understood that it wasn't the evil that was banal, although that's often assumed, it was the people who committed evil who could be banal. and also that when you commit evil over a period of time you change and you're no longer so ordinary. but the general lesson that i learned about evil has to do with the way in which ordinary people can be socialized to evil. and that makes the whole problem of genocide or mass killing more difficult to confront. but i think that truth has to be acknowledged. >> i'm sorry. >> how are you defining evil.

>> we can talk about that afterwards over books and snacks. sir? >> well, how do you explain the post-9/11 dearth of media engagement and coverage of u.s. torture and rendition and drones and, you know, the involvement in afghanistan, which is a civil war, and just increasing, you know, terrorism there? all this, you know, domestic surveillance with the cia which is not supposed to be involved in this? >> i think -- it's not easy to answer that question in a few sentences but i think that where one can feel profoundly and convince others that one's own sense of existence is threatened, one can take and

justify the most extreme measures, that threat to a sense of existence is sometimes called national security, which is, you know, of a misleading term that can be used for many, many things and abused in many different ways. but where one can be convinced that the existence of one's group and of one's self is threatened by a force of some kind, you can do all the things that you describe in terms of the series of post-vietnam american wars and war-making. and the other point i would make is that it much depends upon what i'm calling survivor, what meaning do we give to 9/11? if we polarize the world and see the perpetrators of 9/11 as representing pure evil, then we

must represent pure good. and that division and absolute polarization which certainly the bush administration was prone to make, though, not only the bush administration could lead to any of these extreme actions. >> let me just ask and amplify that, what have you learned not only about the complex ways in which ordinary people can buy history, get roped into these acts but also about the resources for resisting the moral compromise of? >> yes. i should say and i haven't said too much about it. i've indicated, i guess, in talking about antiwar veterans that people whom i've studied can show extraordinary resilience. i was very interested in interviewing a man who didn't

fire at and people can draw upon strengths, strength of restraint from different -- and the man who didn't fire at melie, he drew upon a way i was surprised to hear and not happy to hear his greatest source of strength in restraint was his idealism of the military he loved the military. had put his life together which had been falling apart in joining the military. had decided to make his career and surprised at what he saw in vietnam and melie and that vattism. yes, what happens in our lives, in our childhood in terms of creating some sense of

conscience and ethical principle. and also of knowing about these events. it helps to know that environments can become so extreme that they bring along with them ordinary people because we must find some way of behaving in a group. we are a group animal as human beings. group animals as human beings. and if we become part of a group in some significant way, we're deeply affected by the mores of the group. it's not superficially. it runs powerfully in one's psychi and so all of those things come in to play but knowing something about it is of enormous help. >> sir? >> these are two closely related questions. the first part is, as you were

dealing with especially the vietnam veterans but also the other people you worked with, what was it like to explore the line between interviewing them as research subjects and relating to them in a therapeutic emotion or willingness to help? and moving it forward, i would just say that high level policy briefing that called the war in iraq wrong-headed and democratization of afghanistan as delusional and these are intelligence that administration officials were using these terms. we have over 300 veterans of iraq and afghanistan at columbia right now. how do we compassionately accompany where they deal with that characterization of their experience? >> yes. in terms of my work with antiwar veterans. it was a profound experience to

participate in what we call rap groups and i had written about it before and what you raise in one's own experience. we learn -- those of us -- it was the profession of the shrinks as we were called, the shrinks and the vets. and the shrinks -- there was some hostility towards us at first because the veterans remembered that in vietnam when they went to see somebody because they were overwhelmed by what they were experiencing morally and psychologically, that the task of a psychiatrist or of his assistant or of a chaplain for that matter was to help him to be strong enough to be at duty and frequent atrocities. some psychiatrists really found ways to get around that and really tried to help people. with us in those rap groups we had to give up our stats as

being therapeutic arbiters, our high hats so to speak of being knowledgeable psychiatrists and the process of knowing them. it was both providing some kind of therapeutic current and carefully and not too quickly. and at the same time, joining with them in an antiwar action of exploring what had happened in vietnam with them. and in that way i came to in those rap groups and what i call the atrocity situations and it was a very powerful experience that influenced my sense of being a professional. it's a way of being a professional where you do you have some technical knowledge and that's to be desired. but on the other hand, it's often too distancing a source of what i call psychic numbing and there's a way of getting closer

to people while doing this and still expressing certain kinds of professional knowledge. and, yes, in the veterans administration we were told that -- first the veterans administration was a source of hostility of the veteran -- vietnam veterans resented them. they were part of the problem but eventually they came under much more eplightened leadership in relationship to vietnam veterans and a man i knew at yale, sierra talented man took over a outreach program and really created it and it turned out to be extremely helpful and he had the kindness to say that our rap groups had been kind of a model for that larger program. we couldn't reach very many people but he could reach hundred dollars of thousands of people. so i think with -- i have no great -- i haven't worked directly with present veterans of afghanistan and iraq.

and i deeply feel for them in terms of what they've been through. i think they probably require at least to put it generally some combination of that kind of therapeutic work. their symptoms shouldn't be swallowed in medication entirely. they need to speak out about what they've been through. and they need not only psychologically understanding voices but voices that are committed to combating the destructiveness of what they had been through. i don't mean that everybody has to be as passionately antiwar as i probably am and many people in this room are. but you do have to have some sense of this extraordinary evil that we call war and what it does to human beings and that has to be conveyed for them to be responsive. that's just a very general kind

of observation. >> sir? >> you mentioned you were drafted in the army. how do you feel about the draft relation to the vietnam to the nazi doctors and possibly to our modern society? >> the draft -- the draft in american society and in relation to the vietnam war? >> well, i'm a little torn because i can see an argument for draft. if those who are permitted to do public service instead of only going to war, the difficulty of having a volunteer army as we do now is that it's isolated from the rest of society. and all kinds of things can go on that are cut off from the rest of us. and it inhibits deeper knowledge of what's actually occurring and, therefore, inhibits protest against what i think we would be protesting as we did in vietnam. on the other hand, i'm not happy

about my country or society drafting people for military service. so i think i could be pleased by having a draft that permitted as have other countries in europe some form of public service rather than military service. but service is not a bad thing for young people. i think many crave some such service. >> steve? >> i'm a little intimidated to ask you anything. but i've been interested in what you talk about your moving toward and how war propagates war. in your recounting in the wars there's one i find that -- or i think about that may have set up the present one and that was the grenada war even though it may not have been called that. ronald reagan, when he came out of it says it has made us number 1 again and created, i think, an

illusion and help recreate an illusion across in this country about our power. and part of my question is, i look at a lot of group behavior as product of individual psychology that comes up in the group the same way and maybe 9/11 is also is to me at least more than its actuality, the fracturing of an illusion we had about invulnerability. we've been talked about -- >> invulnerability. >> yes, yes. >> and so sort of two questions about what do you feel about the relationship of individual psychologies that manifest on -- and looking through those same issues on larger group and societal scales and using it in terms of how we then move on to things -- >> let me speak to the very

general and the collective psychology in the kind of work that i did. i think they have to be blended. it was very important for me to interview individual people, that i was seeing them as members of group that was acting on history and acting on both which is usually the case and in that sense i could never reduce the problem to individual psychology alone and yet you had to have the individual interviews to get at those problems in some depth. and the model here then -- or the method is one of trying to in these interviews interrogate collective behavior while doing that through individuals, collect behavior and ideologies. ideologies become extremely important. they tend to be dismissed by americans. we don't -- we like to think that we don't have them. that's something other people

have. but they're crucial to behavior because ideologies are collective expressions of passions of world views or meanings and they provide all of those which has so much to do in determining behavior. and in that sense, in looking at how war begets war or any of these war situations that we've been talking about, one requires both -- and i haven't fully determined in my new project exactly what kind of interviewing i'll do or how i'll go about it, but one requires at least a focus on individual psychology as it feeds and interacts with collective behavior. i also learned from ericson not to be too quick, to clinicalized behavior when it's collective and historical and is outside of

clinical settings because some of the terms we use are in a sense outgrowths of those clinical settings. and there are all kinds of things people can do without being immobilized psychologically. it's unfortunately the, quote, normal or relatively normal people who do us in more often than not. but anyhow, those are some thoughts that i have to your questions. >> todd? >> robert, i want to ask you about invulnerability and vulnerability. one of the prejudices of evil it seems -- the sort of totalist evil is actually based on its inverse namely, the feeling if you don't kill the jews, they'll kill you. if you don't kill the communists, they'll come --

they'll get you. if you don't scour the world of terrorists, they'll -- i mean, it's the -- you know, you're either with us or with the terrorist attitude is predicated actually on a kind of conviction of absolute nakedness that, you know, we are basically helpless. now my question is about what you've learned about how this perverse premise of absolute vulnerability can be dealt with as a political factor. i remember during the '04 election, at some point john kerry said something that was largely treated as a gaffe, meaning an inconvenient admission of truth, namely -- he said something to the effect well, we sort of had to reach the point at which we could see terrorism -- i think he used the

word as a nuisance. i mean, it takes a certain willingness to face the inhe have -- inevidentiblity. you know what i'm asking. >> i know what you've been asking and i've asked the same questions. i would just start with the image that you started with. really, all of human life is vulnerable. >> yeah. >> we face death and we're the animals who know that we die. we're vulnerable from the beginning. and we're vulnerable along the way. we're vulnerable to losses and we're vulnerable to our own demise and our own weakening. so that the claim -- or the quest for invulnerability is a violation of what you might call

psychobiological existence. and totalism is a quest for that invulnerability. and you -- what you mention is kind of a paradox, how if the nazis could feel that the jews were such a threat to them they must have felt very vulnerable standard. there's the quest for invulnerability to deny, suppress, eliminate the basic psychobiological truth of our vulnerability. that's where i think that vulnerability/invulnerability interaction comes in. and really in that sense totalism is one of the great problems of the world because you see it emerging in various places and very much in american political life. and not only in nazi and communist movements where it was extreme and murderous but in

other ways. and when you see it that way -- this is finally what i'll say in connection with your question and comment. when you see it that way, i think one's task -- as i try to say in my book about totalism in my book early is to uncover it and find ways of avoiding it if one can. part of the american tendency including some of our own intelligence agencies was to embrace it instead. we wanted some of that communist magic of, you know -- of controlling human minds. and that is a harmful and dangerous approach to totalism that i think we're still suffering today. and there is an antithetical strand in american life that is

critical of totalism that looks toward democracy as a constant questioning again in the model of camuse the rebel and we're capable of strengthening that as well. >> yes. >> you got a long and distinguished career as an activist. and i'm wondering in this post-9/11 period where we see a plethora of projects and the publication of novels and that kind of thing, how do you or -- maybe you could, you know, enlighten us, how can we get beyond the fatigue? because i know a number of people who lock themselves way this past sunday because they were just like, i've had enough. i can't listen to any more names. i can't listen to any more maudlin speeches. i can't -- you know, i just -- or even you know there's atrocities around the world year after year after year. at one point i know even myself as a sensitive person, i think,

just i go like numb or deaf or something. i guess, you know, you've been at this year after year. how do you keep that energy level of not letting it numb you? >> well, that's a fair and honest question and i don't claim any invulnerability to the very moments of despair and fatigue that you describe. and, you know, one approach is self-serving. that is i've tried to protect myself while doing these studies. i joke about it and say to friends and students don't read this stuff after 9:00 pm, you know, but that signifies that one is aware that one has one's own limitations in all this. and one has to step back at times. it also is useful to recognize there's never going to be a solitary metrodome where we solved these matters but rather it's just a continuing struggle

and we have little victories and we have steps backward and defeats and sometimes they seem to out -- the latter seem to outnumber the former. and it's a continuous process and we try and we recognize our own limitations and do what we can do. it's something continuous rather than an absolute moment of truth in this process. >> okay, thank you. >> last question. >> hi, robert. about war begets war, two major thoughts. two major foci. one is maybe on the decision-makers of war whose political life normally is not long term. it's much too short and they don't think about the long term and sometimes multigenerational or mostly multigenerational aspects of war. so that's from the decision

maker's point of view and their length of life and the other, of course, reminds me of when i spoke in the soviet union to a big room and i said, everyone in this audience -- >> everyone -- >> in the audience. >> is either a son of world war i veteran or a son of world war ii veteran and grandson of world war i or in afghanistan whose father was world war ii veterans or sons of his. this multigenerational legacies of trauma in general and wars in particular really for me of course embraces my thinking about it. i wanted to know about -- >> these are large questions and i'll give brief answers. [laughter] >> but you're right to raise them. and the first thing i would say is that when you talk about

political leaders who get us into the wars, though, they need support to do it, i distinguish between immediate survivors and more historical survivors, the rest of us who didn't experience it directly but still have strong reactions and the politician who belong in the latter group and there's some sort of reaction between the more immediate and the distant survivors in which the more distant survivors take over opinion patterns as much as they can and a heavy influx of political thinking and ideologies and that's why as you said neglect the long-range in favor of a shorter range political plunge that they're taking and combining with a meaning of that previous war. and, you know, i won't go into

detail but on so many levels including the nazi movement, world war ii, followed upon world war i in terms of survivor meaning. and the -- you know, our problem is trying to interrupt this kind of process. you know, one thing i would say -- i'm sure you had this experience, too. in working with antiwar veterans, i discovered that, as kids they sat on their father's knees. their father was a world war ii veteran. it was a glorious war. it became exaggerated with a little help of alcohol and other ways. and the son was primed to wait for his moment when he would have a test not only of his patriotism but of his manhood. and enter his war and that's what they did. and later, of course, they were very bitter and their fathers couldn't understand how they could turn against their own

war. but these are some of the survivor meanings that we have to think about and question. >> since we want to give robert a chance to sell you all and sign for all some books i'm going to take the chair's prerogative and take the last question but i'm sure we can inquire informally, i want to take it back to the extreme century to this book, this wonderful new book. you're there in the new york public library. you're researching your own life in this grand narcissistic exercise, what are some of the big arguments you found yourself having with yourself? and what did you learn -- i know when we write we write in structuring the book. what did you write and what did you learn? >> well, the arguments with myself had to do with what i was

becoming and doing in relationship to these studies. with thought reform i mentioned how i was struggling with being antitotalist which means being anticommunist at a time when anticommunism was so central in society. i can perhaps illustrate that by mention of a conversation i had with irving howe which i do describe in my book. irving howe was an intellectual whom i respected enormously and whose social democrat opinions which i shared. how could he so relatively uncritical of america's cold war behavior despite holding those social democratic views and he said something very interesting to me which i never forgot. he said, look, he said, i experienced in my generation -- he was only a few years older

than i was. but it was a kind of generational difference. maybe i was slow to come into the fray. but he said the great betrayal was the soviet union and, of course, it was for him and so many other so-called new york and american intellectuals. he said anything america does to combat stalinism i'm for. and i thought to myself, for me, the great historical experience hiroshima. yes, i was anticommunist. but, therefore, my psyche, struggle with the whole idea of the world being blown up with nuclear weapons of hiroshima was the model. it has to do with the priorities what one sxflz one does.

i've struggled with nazi dollars and i found myself talking in length in my memoir the bad experience of interviewing these people and what it was like. and my conflict about sitting down with them, should i sit down -- my assistant in one series of interviews felt the same way and i quote him as how far should we go in sitting down with them? and that -- that's another real conflict with myself on that. i didn't -- well, i didn't have much conflict about opposing vietnam and opposing iraq wars. and also the afghanistan war. i think we have to be rather clear -- there was a lot of conflict in the society with the afghanistan war. and one had to make a

distinction, i think, between going after bin laden which was justified and necessary and invading a country to do it. it's not the same thing. of course, they were giving him -- the taliban was giving him some protection but invading a whole country instead of some kind of limited effort what created the mess we're in now in intervening a civil war where we can only leave probably over time leaving matters worse than when we entered there. so sometimes these were problems within myself. sometimes there were struggles with the protesters with the various sides they took. i guess i'd close by saying that the whole effort is a continuous struggle. one is never fully at ease but one does create a certain mode

operandi. thank you, robert linton. thank you for my colleagues at the columbia school of journalism and for the dart center of journalism and trauma. go by robert's book in the back of the room and eat some food and enjoy the rest of the evening and the conversation will continue. thank you. oh, i should add there's that card on your chair if you feel like donating to the dart center and our work, please fill it out, credit cards, checks, cash. >> you're watching 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span's booktv.

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