>> and now i booktv, robert jay lifton talks about his life on record subjects such as the, dropping of the atomic bomb at hiroshima, communist revolution in the vietnam war. this is about an hour and a half.

>> okay. we can begin. i am grew shapiro, executive chair of the dart center for journalism and trauma. the columbia school of journalism. welcome on behalf of those the dart center and columbia appeared the dart 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 in the world. everything from street crime and family violence had to war crimes and human rights. i'll talk more about the dart center in a few minutes. we are here tonight go for a conversation in a celebration. a conversation with robert jay lifton, psychiatrists, public intellectual historian at the

best and a celebration of his wonderful and beautiful new memoir, witness to an extreme century. this event is cosponsored by a the dart center and also by nation magazine. i would like to bring up victor novosti, editor emeritus of the nation and mentor to many people in this room, to get a welcome on behalf of the nation and say whatever he wants to say. >> hi, what i want to say is, you know, the nation has had dozens of contributors over the years. and there are only a handful that one looks to to put the whole world in the event for moral guidance. and you're lucky this evening to have robert jay lifton here it seems to me.

but i also will tell you why i think you are lucky, but they also want to give you a warning and just take a minute or so. it seems to me you are lucky because he has as a psycho historian and a unique perspective on history because he deals with great set checks. and if you look at these books i haven't inspected all of them. but among his subjects are the nazi doctors and medical killing, psychology of genocide, survivors said she were she not, capital punishment. these are huge subjects that take over all of us and everybody out there. so my warning is that robert jay lifton to me is the ultimate

geographer of moral responsibility and it is impossible to listen to him talk without getting defensive year-round -- at the moral dimensions of what you do. and those of you who are students here comment it seems to me that you can't 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 weigh yourselves. so it is an honor, a pleasure to be part of this. and bob, i can't wait to hear you, sitting in that. >> i am just going to say -- first of all, thank you. i'm going to see a few more words of introduction, both about robert, but also about this evening. first, some housekeeping. as you can see, this event is

being video taped by c-span. it is also being audiotaped by the journalism school and leave the post on the dart center website, deadbeat daddy w..dart center data work. because we are doing this for c-span, i have to important messages. first of all, after a bit of conversation with two q&a. and when they do, please line up at the two microphones here. if you are physically tallish we have a wireless portable mic. but the easier thing for the rest of us is to use these links 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, and there is a twitter hash tag for two 22

nights. refreshments in the back. please saville yourself of them freely, but quietly as setauket going on. a dart center announced that for journalists here. on october 22nd 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 center here at the journalism school. if you or a colleague know someone who is interested, by all means go to www.the dart center.org and apply for it. the deadline is december 26. dart center swag highest up in the back. there are pamphlets. there are stress, officials stress which arrived today. please take one. there also, i'm your chairs, these cards. these are donation cards.

if you're interested in supporting the work of the dart center, improving coverage of violence, encouraging a deepening of the craft of reporting on violence here in the u.s. and around the world, support our work. you can donate online at www.dart center.org. there are 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'd like a segregated male restroom, you'll need to go down to the basement. but the unisex restroom should work fine. and finally, i want to thank a few people. i too think that friends come including victor editor katrina vanden google says to public rothberg are. c-span for recording this and putting it on sub 10 at some

point in the not-too-distant future. in the columbia bookstore, which is in the back with copies of witness to an extreme century, which robert jay lifton will be happy to assign later in the evening. and of course the wonderful colleagues at the dart and are for and trauma who have put this evening together. i don't want to take too much time, but i feeling to make a few words of introduction. and build on it is very apt description of robert as the arbiter of a kind of moral universe. it may be an interesting question by journalism arguments on base at a journalism school is sponsoring a talk with a psychiatrist. i have to say when i read "witness to an extreme century," one of the things i learned as robert was briefly a journalist in college. but he violated the covering of

the team to play on the tennis team. >> that was my advocacy. >> the end of a promising career in journalism. but also and really because so much of what we chart a string list world today, whether it is for or terrorism perpetration of violence, survivors of violence, torture, all this action that robert jay lifton was their first. at the dart center i spent a lot of time talking with friends and colleagues, journalists, clinicians, researchers dealt with these issues. in one issue after another you trip over encounter facedown for dialogue with the work of robert jay lifton, listing ablest to

understand the nature of the survivors encounter with death, the nature of perpetrators, moral universe and how those all interact, both for individuals and for society's. it is for that began in the summer of 1953 as the book tells us, when a young psychiatrist had been in the air force, heard about repatriated u.s. pows from korea who had been through it the press was calling brainwashing, thought reform and conduct did the first study of pows and thought reform and not lead to a persistent issue and started down that road that led to the first significant study says hiroshima survivors, vietnam veterans religious colds of nazi.tears that shaped our

understanding of the impact of war and atrocity in what happens to individuals and communities and nations that encounter large-scale violence and death. what happens to a social contract, how we heal or down for vengeance fits in. this is a crucial landscape. we are talking here in new york on stays after the 10th anniversary of september 7, when they preoccupy in preoccupy in some ways for the number. robert has now written this memoir and i can tell you that it is not only richly informative integrates third of travelogue through this journey, and is also surprising, funny, beautifully written. through what you hear the voices not only meet his often harrowed

subjects of people you've talked to over the years, but his friends, a few of his mentors like erick erickson and even you encounter many of robert streams. which is a fascinating kind of internal autobiography. i'm going to invite robert zoellick a little about this book, how it came to be, any thoughts on it. then we'll have a conversation and then we'll 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 they also, both bruce and to her and i also appreciate the sponsorship by the dart center and the nation.

and i am enormously glad that these joints to duchenne six says. still, one has to do some need to extricate oneself from introductions like that. in my case, when people ask me how i study these terrible things extensively stand by while doing it, my answer is eyedropper cartoons. the one that stands i call my existential classic that goes this way that is a small enthusiastic yen per looks up and says, all of a sudden, i had this wonderful feeling. and an older, bigger, more experienced bird looks down and says you are wrong. [laughter] on that note, i began.

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 maxis games. i am 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. traveled around the world a lot to do studies, the lived for many decades in new york city. that is central to ordinary cave-in always came back to new york as well as to keep god. on that matter of a story or a narrative -- and this is not a tell-all memoir. it is an intellectual memoir. but it's quite personal. and then narrative creates in writing a memoir always has more coherence than a life is

actually lived because during that life on the stressed about by various sources. one had more than one sure confusions. one didn't always know what one is doing in the narrative somehow take shape and have a kind of coherence. yet still, even though that's re-created, it matters in terms of one's own sequence of ones life. in all this work, there has been an imperfect balance or imbalance between the scholarship and activism for me. so i did all the work through interviews. and not give it an empirical -- i was talking to human beings and that the baseline from which everything can stem. but at the same time, i didn't stop. how could one not take a stand about nazi doctors in genocide or the vietnam war? so, the activism became very important in my life and it's

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 not do this and without scholarship may lose its intellectual center. anyhow, that's been an effort all through my work. the memoir could take shape as with any book, only when one comes to a structure. structure is all. and one doesn't think about later becomes the most obvious of structures, which in my case in this book was to structure the book around for it by nature at least the research studies that i thought were most important chinese thought reform come in the hiroshima bombing and nazi.errs in making that the

basis for the study of the memoir along with other things that happened along the way. and that became my structure as a say in retrospect completely obvious, but not so for quite a long time where one was struggling forward. each of these studies did something powerful to me. and i try to convey that in a memoir. chinese thought reform ran towards my aversion to totally some, to all an insistence of, which claimed absolute truth and absolute virtue. i think we are haunted by a total of some of many different kinds alter the world. i think that by the way, are not so incidentally, our president would do well if he understood more about the totally some that

he faces, rather than seeking to reconcile with the points of view that allows for no compromise. so that study -- it also took me to the beginning of an identity of someone who does these things. it was a significant decision for me to stay in hong kong. howeveruncertain about the things at the beginning because that set me on a certain path on which i could begin to see myself as someone who does these studies. the study appeared shema was an overwhelming experience. the first that he was in the mid 50s in this study was in 1962 when my wife and i lived there for six months and i interview survivors. it is one thing to be told in detail about things that happen. it's another thing to sit down with survivors and spend hours hearing a visceral sense in

connection with the cruelest month at ever devised. has altered my view of the road. i have since spent still see the world through a lens or prison of sure she's not. and of course it led to concerns about nuclear weapons and more broadly the psychology of what i call a nuclear reason, the embrace of the weapons, almost as deities that time i sent being that keeps the world going, even as absolute tease premaster find ourselves with. also this study appeared shema took me to the very important realm of the of survivors and above all the overall need of survivors to find meaning in their encounter if they are to have meaning for the rest of their lives.

the third study, my work with antiwar veterans, which i did most of the early 70s took me to the whole war peace issue and above all to what i came to call an atrocity producing situation come a situation so structured militarily and psychologically fit for married people, no better or worse than you or me could enter into that environment and be capable of committing atrocities. has extraordinary power of extreme environments to influence human behavior. there's never more devastating than in connection with the vietnam war. always been studying vietnam veterans, i've kind of had a dialectic about american warmaking and war in general. on one hand it was very rich and

had specific or breadsticks. on the other hand it was a war. one must see it in relation to war in general as well as its own specificity. and of course the vietnam war turns out to have ultimate common for subsequent wormy gene in iraq and afghanistan. again, atrocity producing situations and the results that we've seen. one thing that i would add cumin the work with vietnam veterans also was transformative. one could see these veterans undergoing change in a very hopeful way. not everything about them changed, but they could change not only their attitude about the war, but their relationship with other people, with families, girlfriends in

significant ways in a matter of months while of course other things stayed the same. this is a powerful lesson in human behavior that had to do with work and other so-called professionals performed. the fourth study of subtype that yours is a real descent into evil. but i've discovered as have others pc that dissent is unhappily, socialization to evil. nazi doctors encounter until they cut you off switch for 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've preferred them them to be with the mark of cain. also of course, the whole nazi project, killing to heal and the

whole psychology of genocide in which even outside of nazi behavior has another genocides that idea of healing a nation through killing those who are seen as dangerous or polluting. well, those four studies became the basis for my memoir. i was enormously helped by another new york institution, the new york public library collects my papers on which of the curators dared, had organized them in a much more coherent way than i ever could have. so i would find myself in perhaps what is the ultimately narcissistic action of immersing myself in my own papers at the wonderful manuscript room in the library like a month of old except for the country the great scriptures i was looking through

my nose. but it helped me enormously. as you now, it can be a powerful correct good too and things are accurate memories of these events. and i try to be as accurate as i could in the pic to none. i then found myself coming back to new york and holding meetings in psychology and history which has meant a great deal to me but also in a dialect ticketless and practicing. i do 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 witness. but i've done my share of talking over time and i've enormously valued dialogue with all kinds of people who might describe not only my mentors,

but also other people from different professions and specialties, and the give-and-take of real conversation of real dialogue is crucial to taking him so much about one's time. these are dark times now in american politics. it is easy to become discouraged. how can one avoid such feeling at least some of the time. but i refer you to a wonderful line who said very simply in a dark time, the eye begins to see -- were capable of seeing, capable of acting and that is the kind of message. that cosmic resolution, but at least the message of being able to enter into these issues and take a stand. that is more than enough perhaps

for me to start out unwelcome on this conversation. hot hot [laughter] >> thank you, robert. i was a wonderful introduction to the book and gives you as well a feel for the kind of narrative architecture that one of the real surprises and delights for me was learning that you did save most of your writing to yourself. for those of us who struggle to sort of put a paragraph together, that idea of the spoken writing process is an interesting one. >> i don't claim that they people should write, but i've done it and i see people talk about a handbrake, connection and typing on a computer. i have a brain lyrics connection somehow for better or worse.

so i can try to see the words before me while speaking them and work through a laborious process. i don't recommend it for everyone. >> that may begin a bit in the present tense and then maybe go back. it is unavoidable. we are talking here a few days after the 10th anniversary of september 11th attacks. over the course of the last decade, you consider the meaning of this atrocity and american soil and the wars that followed. you go to about what you call superpower syndrome. we are now at a point where perhaps these words are winding down. in any event there has been this marking of an event that despite a decade still feels awfully raw. where do you think we are?

how does your thinking over the years and the years informed 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 get is hard to understand the american reaction to 9/11 without understanding the viet more. most of us in this room when we took the meaning of life and from the vietnam war, took a very simple one. don't get involved in that kind of war ever again. but there is a powerful nucleus of people who became leaders, political leaders around george w. bush that were called falcons for good reason they name themselves, which took the opposite he needs to we have to overcome the so-called viet am

syndrome, which was equated with weakness and project american power in the world and the response to 9/11 as part of that hamas is the iraq war who has nothing to do it that directly. so that is one aspect. 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 frustration, but since world war ii especially the bush industry should, which is one of and always shattered. and the question is what meaning do we derive from it? been the predominant meaning for the so-called war on terror is unless and fruitless and counterproductive in every single way as opposed to a wiser

set of meaning and are not absolutely without that maybe still in minority ways, and meanings that ask, how did this come about? what kind of policies has america been following them may be changed? what kind of attitudes have been built in relation to s.? in a way, this is an opportunity where arab spring concert and not people throughout the middle east and elsewhere in the world and it could strengthen our capacity to derive weisser survivor meaning from 9/11. i think the context psychologically historically continues among americans. >> you begin your work adding that they are very polarized black-and-white time. you begin the game at korean

pows at a time when the world seemed divided between on the one hand a u.s. that was in the grip of mccarthyism and black-and-white thinking on the other hand the soviet union dealing with someone and its aftermath. in the medal of this, you begin asking these questions. in describing her back and countering early mentors, people like ericsson and reasoning. he talked about these long walks he would take. where it is not earlier with these guys. what did those thinkers of that generation -- how did they hope he was a young man navigate a very polarized black-and-white world and begin this interesting work? >> welcome in the struggle for me was to take a strong stand against totalist.

total is then becomes a psychological or psycho historical equivalent of totalitarianism. to take a strong stand against that without becoming close and take intellectual in the main thrust of one's intellectual life. and there, both were helpful, but also someone i called a mentor from a distance because in his grave book, the radical, is about a brilliant exposé of totalist and an pretty much calls it by that. and at the same time, an insistence that we remain brambles and critical of the status quo. that combination, that a lot that caught what she will became important to me and not always to sustain. they were just briefly with eric

send he showed how one could bring psychoanalysis into history. it didn't have to be just in the clinic for the office on the couch. >> when you knew him, he was doing studies that martin luther and others. >> absolutely. in my first meeting with him, we talked for hours comparing 16th century catholic training for the priesthood with chinese thought reform because he was about to do his book and i was struggling with my work on thought reform. and david weise then was an extraordinary intellectual of limited facets and extraordinarily kind and impacted man. and he taught me how to be an

intellectual. i came to realize, yes, i was doing studies in hong kong and japan, but i did that as an american intellectual. and he also taught me something that is all too evident now the backlash potential of a conservative society that we live in, the absence of a culture has made us more vulnerable perhaps to changes in people's reactions to the change as as a form of backlash. those are some of the things. and then there is an inchoate probability of relationship between mentor and father of a particular time or at lease for a period of time, which things happening in which one sees oneself of the capacity and right to have a ds of one's own that might matter.

>> over the moments when you felt the struggle is most vividly and where did? >> well, i think all of us have our greatest struggles with her first book. i knew i'd done exciting work in interviewing people coming out of china, westerners and chinese. the question was, could i put it together in book form and conversations i had with ericsson and reasoning began to convince me that maybe i could and reasoning performed the unbelievably generous task of writing page after page of letters. we were walking frequently seen each other regularly going on this long walks in the park and cambridge, but he would still write letters like a 19th century correspondence. and wrote in response to each of my chapters with enthusiasm and

openings where they took him. and so, i could turn to the sense that yes they could write this book and it might even have something to say. is that the days when overall smoking. this was in the late 60s. and i found myself -- is never a heavy smoker, but i found myself looking more and more trying to finish this book until i finished it and i could stop smoking altogether. what the surgeon generals reported around that time. [laughter] so would have refusenik involvement in the studies. >> let me ask you a question about the hiroshima book and interviews. he talked in your introduction as an interviewer, as a listener. we live in a world now in which there are libraries of a 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 and that kind of debt to people who then threw that extreme inexperience. how did she develop an approach that earned the trust of the survivors in the material you need it? where did it come from? >> you know, something that seems profound decision could be something quite less than that. i had been trained in psychiatric interviewing in my psychiatric residency. pages two years of that before i was drafted into the military kicking and screaming. i didn't want to go to the military, but i did. it seemed to me if i wanted to understand what people went

through in china, in prison for special sensors where they were put through a systematic 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 were to talk to them i had to have a systematic approach that i approved everyone in more or less the same way to have the kind of group that i could look for the same sort of things that i came to call sherri themes. that seemed an appropriate way to go about study. when you think about research, when you see the word methodology, the where. [laughter] when you see the word that said, that's important. her method is very important. what message can evoke which are

trying to look at as opposed to making methodology and idle of the marketplace in which you came to methodology tickets to the heart of things. i think that the interview -- when you talk about questions of holocaust studies and other interviews and 9/11 now, these are very valuable and useful to have. in the end, someone has two right in the end give them a narrative that draws both upon the information of the interviews and one's own sensibility of his and witness to this. that is the way i see it. but the interview is still an underused method. psychiatrists are moving away from it to the detriment of our field in the exaggerated praise of medications and i don't think most psychologists realize how

extraordinarily this method can serve as socialist journalist and others interested in getting out what people are really experiencing. there is no more beautiful method than talking to people. >> you talk in the book about meeting to retool your interview a narrative that is when it comes years later to your encounters with first-class perpetrators, nazi.nurse. talk about that. this matters a lot assist journalists since we often divide our own time between victims or survivors, especially human rights journalists. talk a little bit about that. >> you for a guy to nazi doctors, which was the late 70s, all the people i interviewed i felt sympathetic to as survivors. vietnam veterans were

complicated. i did feel deeply sympathetic i did feel deeply sympathetic got the first subtitle on vietnam veterans got the first subtitle on vietnam veterans was vietnam veterans and victims or executioners. that was a tad bit taboo phrase, warning of the two goals we should never assume that had been pressed into both roles by their society. so i felt sympathetic to people who had been pressed into thought reform to be upon veterans was not the.her son is hardly the case. and that was a difficult enterprise to sit down with nazi.tears. i felt all kind of emotions including rage in a sense of grotesqueness and they sent it being tainted and sitting down with them in certain ways.

on the other hand -- >> was that because they were doctors at evil itself? >> the evil itself. i'm the kind of doctor. i call myself a farmer.or. but in any case, it was more the evil than the medical profession and yet, erik erikson once said to me something that said to me. he said when you do this work, you might find that you touch that piece of their humanity. to sit down with someone is to have a conversation. that made an easy because i knew what they had done. it is very important for me. i was won by france. some 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 double dimension in

which i was seeking to understand motivations while holding them responsible for what they did. so therefore i was probing historical forces conducive to evil, not losing sight of the evo 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 recent history. one way they did that was to help me. they helped develop intellectually and in a profound way emotionally, even during the interviews when i needed an interpreter and the kind of support from two or three people who are my colleagues and assistance became very close. it was the case of the younger person being rather therapeutic to the older one who is really suffering from things i asked

nazi doctors to tell me and then i found myself enraged and miserable in hearing them say it. but all of that happened and i talked about the difficulties of sitting down with them in my memoir. >> one of the challenges and again been here in a journalism school with many professional colleagues could use a sin that we face is to send it being poisoned a little bit by our immersion in the subjects the individual perpetrators and also the horrible suffering. you describe in the vote a bunch of terms related to this. i wanted to stick out at me and then i want to ask about how you take care of yourself. one you have this dream of the infernal chorus towards the end of your work on this nazi doctors and which you were

feeling profoundly tainted. and the other is this funny dream involving vatican grapes. talk about that. the remedy is. >> let me say a word about the way i use streams in my memoir. in addition to some of the meanings that's where it gave them to nearly, dreams of a date dimension in my view. that is why so many cultures and thus predict in the future. i don't predict the future, but they can reveal certain feelings in a direction that she experienced yourself as moving from the immediate present. and in that case they are prescribed to and the internal core service became an important

dream. there is a barbershop chord -- harbour shop quartet and i was singing in it, but it was an infernal chorus. i knew in the tree and then when i woke up, infernal meant, death, all the things that means. and they woke up very upset that i was talking to these people and felt tainted by it. under this time i felt strongly to leave the course to have interviews and go home and have my say about them and what i saw them to be and how done. and the way, it was the kind of signal that i was ready to wind up the work in the field and go home and i also talk about how i knew i could clear my desk of those interviews until i wrote the book.

the dream about vatican grapes was a more -- many of my dreams and i think everyone streams have a humorous, sometimes the gallows humor and sometimes it something else. the vatican grapes was a sense of some thing nice and good and delicious and sensual. >> you describe yourself as desperate for antidotes at that point. >> i need antidotes and ways of expressing antidotes to the dreadful distract goodness and evil that i was encountering. and so i could make jokes about it and my wife and i would talk about it. we said what about jewish grapes? but anyhow, some of the dreams -- i. would say that one needs a certain amount of humor all the way through about the

absurdity of what one is encountering. this expresses itself in extremes and they combined with some being that one is struggling with quite strong. >> you matching your wife and she is a constant presence in this boat. 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 tell and she died from a very formless pneumonia that they couldn't content very quickly. she'd had illnesses before this, but nothing like that.

i've been the memoir -- i couldn't have been able to write much or any of the memoir but she died for some time. it was an extraordinarily painful kind of grief. i've been saying that the study of grief reactions for decades in my work come up it didn't fully understand what that was until i was subject to that myself. but having the memoir connected after a while do the editing and the manuscript for publication was that enormous file you to me because it was an assertion of my work, which included vijay very centrally and issue of the stages thus comes through with the memoir. and it helped me to have that task. even in my dedication of the memoir, which include my

children and their children, my grandchildren, i said into bj rather than into the spirit of bj, i don't want there to be dead at least until the end of the book where she is so vital to care for her all through what i did and what i did in this work and my sense could not been possible without that relationship as to what has been a very tough year for me. and it is 10 months now and things changed in one minutes ahead, but not easily. and much remains of the whole struggle. >> you now have a new project. do you want to talk about it a little bit? >> i have just the beginnings, the faint beginnings of a new project which stems from what

i've done before in a limited way. it has to do it generally speaking are summing it up, how psychologically and historically were because were. in other words, were because were because of meetings begin to the previous word. you can take the example of world war i and world war ii, vietnam war and subsequent wars which are again mentioned. and i have interested in exploring in more detail and in a more expensive way how this comes about and how it might interest that vicious circle of war be getting more. that is at least a beginning sensitive. it is always important to have a new project with which one is moving ahead. >> is the scholarship activism? this is a too flowing together? how does that work for you? it's not always an easy merit.

>> that's right. i said i try to have a balance between them, but it looks that conflict along the way, perhaps still do about how much to do and how much the other. i know i am bound to both of them. i tell what for me was a moving experience with a good friend who is a professor of chinese history at dl and she developed a cedar lake lung cancer. she called me in to see here and i thought she wanted to talk to me about this process of dying as i studied so much that related to it, but it totally underestimated her. it was her after my after my hero shema talk i had been very act gave at yale and other antiwar activities and the word revolution in 1970. in any case, she's at work, i

know what you're doing as inactivates and agree what you're doing. but just remember what you did is not the 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 that it is some interns of my effort at scholarship and writing accounts be an intellectual witness to these events. that made a profound, not only in terms of my own effort to continue a balance between them, but her extraordinary generosity in what she did. >> i think this is a good moment to turn to questions from you folks. lineup if you would. there's two mics.

one in the middle and one on your left, my rate. if you could line up so that c-span in france here can record this for us dirty. keep your question brief and focused as there'll be a bunch of people want to say stuff. let's have a conversation goes through here. >> at a few really quick ones. take either one you want. one as -- isn't totalist of our reaction formation to fragmentation. and the other is what is evil and what choice -- >> the first one was about the nature of totalist them. the kind of fragmentation. >> well, you can call it a reaction formation and i would contest that. but i try to avoid criminal

terminology unlucky not ideologically shared tendencies and totalist i'm has to be seen only as well as individually ico. and it is the tendency towards claiming complete truth and complete virtue. and it tends to arise and this is what you are getting at by calling it a reaction formation. in responsible to the fear of change are what i call prodi in tennessee, briefly that is something i say about totalist them. in terms of the nazi doctors -- >> what is evil and what choice do they have? >> and maybe just amplify that. how does your understanding of evil change through your -- the bulk of their encounters? >> well, my understanding has been enormously influenced by what i have found.

and that is how people can be socialized to evil. as the holocaust and one theory that says that the committed the holocaust because they had a unique form and degree of anti-semitism. i am not at all sure that is the case. think there is as much anti-semitism in other places. but the capacity to adapt to the vote, to be socialized to evo was what i learned. that is related to the bin out the lady at evo, but i modify what she's had so that of course she understood that he was sent evil or that's often missing. it was the people who committed evo and also that when you

commit evil of a period of time you change and you're no longer so ordinary. but the general lesson i learned about evil has to do with the way in which ordinary people can be socialized in vivo and that makes the whole problem of genocide or mass killing more difficult to confront. and i think that truth has to be acknowledged. >> just let me understand how you're defining evil. >> we can talk about that later overbook some snacks. >> how do you explain the post-9/11 dearth of immediate 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 terrorism there. all this domestic surveillance of the cia, which is not supposed to be involved in this.

>> is not easy to answer that question and if you send this, but i think that where one can feel profoundly and convince others that one's own sense of existence is threatened, one can take ingested by the most extreme measures that threat to a sense of existence is sometimes called national security, which is, you know, a misleading term used for many, many things and abused in many different ways. and where one can be the group is threatened by a force of some kind. you can do wild things that you describe in terms of the series

of post-vietnam america mourns and warmaking. the other thing is that much depends on what i am calling survey of remaining, what meaning do we give to 9/11? if we polarize the world can see the perpetrators of 9/11 is representing pure evil, then we must represent pure good. an activation and absolute polarization was certainly the bush administration was prone to make, though not only the bush administration, could lead to any of these extreme actions. >> leverages saskia amplify that. what have you learned not only about the complex ways in which ordinary people can buy history get roped into these facts, but also the resources for resisting

the moral compromise? >> yes, i should say and i have had too much about it. as indicated in talking about antiwar veterans that people who find studied how showed resilience. mr. interested in interviewing a man who didn't fire at the light. and people can draw upon on the strength, strength of restraint and the man who didn't fire life, he drew upon noaa that i was surprised to hear, not happy to hear his greatest source of strength in restraint was his idealism of the military. he left the military. ..

>> they bring 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 being, and if we become part of a group in some significant way, we're deeply affected by the more race of that group, and that isn't superficial. it runs powerfully into one's

psyche, and it's a collective phenomena so all of those things come into play, but knowing something about it is of enormous help. >> yeah, sir? >> she was ahead of me. >> okay. ma'am? >> these are two closely related questions. the first part is as you were dealing with especially the vietnam veterans and 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 was just at a high level policy briefing that called the war in iraq wrong headed and democracy of afghanistan as delusional, and these were intelligence of the administration officials using these terms. we got over 300 in iraq and

afghanistan now, and how do we compassionately accompany them throughout the next period characterizing their experience? >> yes. in terms of working with anti-war veterans, it was a profound experience to participate in what we call wrap group, and i wrote about this in my memoir and i had wrote about it before to some extent, and what you raised about one's own levels of involvement became very important and profession of the shrinks as we call it, the shrinks and the vets. the vets had hostility towards us at first because the veterans remembered when they went to see somebody after being overwell

realmed with what they were experiencing, the chaplain's job was to keep them strong enough. some found ways of getting around that and really tried to help people, but with us, in those wrap groups, we had to give up our stance of being arbiters, our high hats so to speak, of being knowledgeable therapists, and we had to join in the process with them. it was both providing some kind of therapeutic current, 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 and those wrap groups what i call the atrocity producing situation, and it was a very powerful experience that

influenced my sense of being a professional. there's a way of being a professional with technical knowledge, and that's to be desired, but on the other hand, it's too distancing or a source of what i call psychic numbing, and i learned there's a way to get closer to people while doing this and still expressing certain knowledge, and, yes, in the veterans' administration, we were told -- at first, the veteran's administration was a source of hostility of the vietnam veterans resenting them. they were part of the problem, but eventually, they came under much more enlightened leadership in relationship to vietnam veterans, and a very talented man crated it, and it turned out

to be extremely helpful, and he had the kindness to say iraq groups were a model for that larger program. we couldn't reach many people, but he could reach hundreds of thousands of people, and so i think with -- you know, i have no great -- i have not worked presently with veterans of afghanistan and iraq, and i deeply feel for them in terms of what they have been through, and i think they probably require, 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 have been through, and they need not only understanding voices, but voices committed to combating the destructiveness of what they have been through. i don't mean people who have to

be as antiwar as i am, 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 to them for them to be responsive. that's a general kind of observation. >> sir? >> yeah, you mentioned you were drafted into the army. how do you feel about the draft in relation to vietnam to the nazi doctrine and our modern society? >> a draft in american society? >> yeah, and in relation to the vietnam war. >> i'm a little torn, but i think i can see the argument for a draft. an argument for a draft if those drafted 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 occurring and therefore inhibits protests 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, a form of service, rather than just military service. service is not a bad thing for young people, and i think many crave such service. >> steven? >> i'm a little intimidated to ask you anything. i've been interested in what you talk about you're moving towards how war propagates war, and in

your recounting of the wars, there's one i find that or i think about that may have set up the present one, and that's the gernada war, although it was not called that. ronald reagan when he came out of it he said this made us number one again and created, i think, an illusion and helped recreate an illusion of trust in this country about our power, and part of the question is i look at a lot of group behavior as product of individual psychology coming up throughout the group in the same way, and maybe 9/11 also is, to me at least, more than its actuality, the fracturing of an illusion we had about inas ainvulnerability and so two questions about what do you feel about the

relationship of individual psychologies man tests 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 like -- >> let me speak to the very general issue that's so important about individual and collective psychology in the kind of work i did. i think nay have to be blended. it was important for me to interview individual people and see them as a member of a group that had been acting on history or agented upon or both as 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. collective 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 or of world views or meaning. they combine all of those which have so much to do in determining behavior and in that sense and in looking at how war begets war or any of these war sichtions that we've -- situations that we've been talking about, one requires both and i have not fully determined in my full project what interview i'll do or how to go about it, but one requires at least a focus on individual

psychology as it feeds and interacts with classic behavior. i also learned not to be too quick to clinicallize 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 these clinical settings, and there's all things people can do without being immobilized psychologically. it's unfortunately, "normal" or relatively normal people, who do us in more often than not. however, those are some thoughts i have to your questions. >> tough. >> robert, i want to ask you about vulnerability and invulnerability.

one of the prejudices of evil, it seems to me, sort of to to to totalist evil -- if you don't kill the jews, they'll kill you. if you don't kill the come mewists, they'll kill you. if you don't scour the world of terrorists, they'll -- it's the, you know, you are with us or with the terrorists add to do is predicated actually on a kind of conviction of absolute nakedness that we are basically helpless. now, my question is about what you learned about how this perverse premise of absolute vulnerability can be dealt with as a political factor? i remember during the 2004 election at some point john

kerry said something that was largely treated as a gaffe, meaning an inconvenient admission of truth, namely, something to the effect, we have to reach the point at which we could see terrorism, and i think he used the word, "as a nuisance," and i mean, it takes a certain willingness to face the inevidentability of as a vulnerability it seems to me. you know what i'm asking you. [laughter] >> i do. i know what you're asking. i've been asking the same questions. i would start from just the image that you ended with. really, all of human life is vulnerable. >> yeah. >> we face death, and we are the an molls whom know we die. we are vulnerable from the

beginning, and we are vulnerable along the way. we are vulnerable to losses, and we're vulnerable to our own demise and our own weakening, so that the claim to or quest for invulnerability is a violation of what you might call psychobilogical existence, and totalism is a quest for that invulnerability, and what you mention is kind of a paradox how if the nazis could feel the jews were such a threat to them, they must have felt vulnerable indeed, but the quest for -- there's the quest for invulnerability to deny, suppress, eliminate the basic psychobilogical truth of our

vulnerability, and i think that's where the 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 say in connection with your question and comment, when you see it that way i think one's task as i tried to say in the task about totalism earlier, is to uncover it, and find ways of avoiding it. the part of american tendency and including the intelligence agencies was to embrace it instead. we wanted some of that communism magic of, you know, of

controlling human minds, and that is a harmful mechanism that we're still suffering from today, but there is a strand in american life that is critical totalism that looks towards democracy as a con straint questioning again in the model of the rebel, and we're capable of strengthening that as well. >> yes? >> you've had a long and distinguished career as an activist, and i'm wondering in this post-9/11 period where we see a pleat ray of -- variety of projects, and can you enlighten us how to get beyond the fatigue? i know a number of people who

lock themselves away this past sunday because they were like, i had enough, i can't listen to more names, i can't listen to anymore 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 myself even 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, and how do you keep the 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 dispair and fatigue that you describe, and, you know, one approach is self-serving. that is, i tried to protect myself while doing these studies. i joke about it and say to friends and students don't read the stuff after 9 p.m., you know? [laughter] but that signifies that one is

aware, that one has its own limitations in this and one has to step back at times. it also is useful to recognize that there's never going to be a moment where we've solved these matters, but rather it's just a continuing struggle, and we have little victories, and we have steps back ward and defeats and sometimes they seem to -- the latter seem to outnumber the former, but 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. >> gayle, last question. >> hi, robert. about war begets war. two major thoughts. two major -- one is 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 multigeneration rail or mostly multigeneration aspects of war, and that's from the decision makers point of view and their length of life, and the other, of course, reminds me of when i spoke in the soviet union in a big room, and i said everyone in this audience -- >> everyone? >> in the audience. >> in the audience. >> is either a son of a world war i or ii veteran and grandchildren of world war i veteran or a son of these, and this multigenerational legacies of trama in general and wars in

particular really, for me, of course, embraces my thinking about it. i wanted to know about your own. >> 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're talking about a political leader who get us into the wars, though they need support to do it, i distinguish between immediate survivors, the people who do the actual fighting in a war or who were in the twin towers at 9/11 and more distant or historical survivors, the rest of us, who didn't necessarily experience it directly, but still have strong reactions, and the politicians, of course, belong in the latter group, and there's some sort of interaction between the immediate and the more distant survivors in which the more distant survivors take over opinion patterns as much as they can, and heavy influx of

political thinking and ideologies, and that's why they can, as you said, neglect the long range and 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 to try to interrupt this kind of process. you know, one thing i would say, i'm sure you had this experience too, in working with anti-war veteran, i discovered that as kids they sat on their father's knees. the father was a world war ii veteran. it was a glorious war. became exaggerated with the 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 the patriotism, but his manhood, and enter this 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 the war, but these are some of the survivor meanings that we have to think about and question. >> since we want to give report -- robert a chance to sell and sign you all some books, i'll take the chair's privilege to ask a final question, but we'll continue informally afterwards. i want to bring it back to a witness of the extreme century, to this book, this wonderful new book. you're there in the new york public library. yoir researching your -- you're researching your own life in this grand narcissistic exercise you described, and you structured the book and put it together. what are some of the big arguments you found yourself

having with yourself, and what did you learn? i know when we write, we learn stuff in the process of structuring a book. it's very surprising. what were the arguments, whean -- and what did you learn? >> well, the arguments with myself had to do with what i was becoming and doing in relationship to the studies, so we mentioned how i was struggling with being anti-totalist, being strongly anticommunist when communism was so central in society. i can perhaps illustrate that by mentioning a conversation i had with irving howe, that i do describe in the book. he was an intellectual i respected enormously and whose

opinions i mostly shared, but i asked him how he could be so relatively uncritical of america's cold war behavior despite holding those social-democratic views, and he said something very interesting to me that i never forgot. he said, look, he said, i experienced in my generation -- he was just a few years older than i was, but there was a generational difference maybe because i was slow to come into the fray, but he said the great betrayal was the soviet union, and it was for him and other american intellectuals, and he said anything america does to combat stalinism i'm for, and i thought to myself for me the great historical experience was hiroshima. yes, i was anti-communist, but

therefore, my psyche struggled with the whole idea of the world being blown up by nuclear weapons with her roche what -- hiroshima as the beginning model. it has to do with what one feels and what one does. other arguments with myself i hinted at too with the struggle of nazi doctors, and i found myself talking at some length in the memoir about the excruciating 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 saying "how far should we go in in sitting down with them? 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 about -- 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 up -- invading a country to do it. it's not the same thing. of course, though, the taliban's giving him protection, but invading a whole country instead of some kind of limited effort was 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 are problems within myself. sometimes they were struggles with my fellow protesters and

intellectuals who varied about the positions they took. the whole -- 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 motive and struggles to have certain principles that one is consistent with. >> thank you. that's a good place to end. thank you, robert jay lifton. again, thank you to -- [applause] thank you to my colleagues here at the columbia graduate school of journalism and the dart center of journalism and trama. go buy the book in the back of the room, eat some food, and enjoy the rest of the evening and the conversation will continue. thank you.

>> now on your screen is eli, a staff writer with the "washington post," and he's written a new book called "ten letters,", and what are the ten letters? >> the ten letters are ten of the letters that come into president obama every day, and really they are a reflection of the mail that comes from across the country. republicans and democrats, 4th graders, grandmothers. it's just really democratic collection every night that comes into him that he reads and usually writes back to one or two letters a day. >> so how are the letters delivered to him? are they carefully edited? is it pretty -- can they be frank with him as well? >> they can be frank with him, but getting the letters to the desk really requires an army. i mean, mail used to be handled inside the white house before the anthrax scare, and now it's off sight to a secret building downtown dc where 1500 volunteers and 100 full-time af