THREATENING? STRONG-ARMING? TERRORIZATION?
Searching for what it actually is, and how to think about it
I heard again on the news the threats that permeate among many of our leaders now. One commentary talked about Trump and stochastic terrorism associated with him, a long standing behavior he has displayed many times. With mass shootings by the loners who seem usually to be of the MAGA movement as one example of what we have to suffer, The attack on Paul Pelosi is frequently mentioned, but one cannot pretend that the targets will not expand in scope, to include many others. I have written a verse shown below and two images showing recent examples of threats and violence.
Below are several quotes I found applicable to the subject of hand.
“Words and threats, if they are not accompanied by action, appear vain and contemptible.”
— Demosthenes.
Demosthenes (384 – 12 October 322 BC) was a Greek statesman and orator in ancient Athens. His orations constitute a significant expression of contemporary Athenian intellectual prowess and provide insight into the politics and culture of ancient Greece during the 4th century BC. Demosthenes learned rhetoric by studying the speeches of previous great orators. He delivered his first judicial speeches at the age of 20, in which he successfully argued that he should gain from his guardians what was left of his inheritance. For a time, Demosthenes made his living as a professional speechwriter (logographer) and a lawyer, writing speeches for use in private legal suits.
“Despots govern by terror.”
— Burke.
Edmund Burke (12 January 1729 – 9 July 1797) was an Anglo-Irish statesman, economist, and philosopher. Born in Dublin, Burke served as a member of Parliament (MP) between 1766 and 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. Burke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state. These views were expressed in his A Vindication of Natural Society. He criticised the actions of the British government towards the American colonies, including its taxation policies. Burke also supported the rights of the colonists to resist metropolitan authority, although he opposed the attempt to achieve independence. He is remembered for his support for Catholic emancipation, the Impeachment of Warren Hastings from the East India Company, and his staunch opposition to the French Revolution.
With Burke I find many quotes taken by themselves which succinctly put into words concepts that seem spot-on for America in 2023, and have a solid truth to them. But, I realize that this man’s total philosophy would not be one of which I could agree with. Hence, I see deep reasoning in many isolated quotes I read, far from what the modern American conservative may espouse. Below is a default quote from Burke to enable a more balanced view of the man in question. The problems of perpetual aristocracy in any country at any time really need no debate in my opinion.
Forgive me for quoting Edmund Burke so often. I also feel that in the present day for the MAGA extremists, who call themselves conservatives, would ever wish to actually come up with a set of principles to actually work toward to be truly conservative, Edmund Burke probably has to be a starting point. This is my opinion, perhaps not without its flaws.
“Aristocracy, if they are what they ought to be, are in my eye the great oaks that shade a country, and perpetuate their benefits from generation to generation.”
— Burke. 👎🏻
“Nothing violent can be permanent.”
— Marlowe.
Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon the "many imitations" of his play Tamburlaine, modern scholars consider him to have been the foremost dramatist in London in the years just before his mysterious early death.[b] Some scholars also believe that he greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was baptised in the same year as Marlowe and later succeeded him as the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright.
“Violence becometh not a Christian.”
— J. Moody
James Moody (c. 1744 – April 6, 1809) was a loyalist volunteer during the American Revolution who became a farmer and political figure in Nova Scotia. He represented Annapolis County in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly from 1793 to 1806. He wrote one of the most important loyalist memoires of the war.
“He that lives in perpetual suspicion lives the life of a sentinel - of a sentinel never relieved, whose business it is to look out for and expect an enemy, which is an evil not very far short of perishing by him.”
— T. Young.
Thomas Young FRS (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) was a British polymath who made notable contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony, and Egyptology. He was instrumental in the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, specifically the Rosetta Stone. Young has been described as "The Last Man Who Knew Everything". His work influenced that of William Herschel, Hermann von Helmholtz, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein.
I found the following quote and its associated word and definition and definition applicable to the 2023 American concerns in regards to politics. The sophistry of one man in particular leads to threats and incitements of violence. And “for the sake of unlawful gain” rings particularly true in this particular case.
“*Sophistication is the act of counterfeiting or adulterating anything with what is not so good, for the sake of unlawful gain.”
— J. Quincy.
QUINCY, JOHN, born, 1652; an English medical writer and author; died, 1723.
*soph·ist·ry — noun
1. the use of fallacious arguments, especially with the intention of deceiving. “trying to argue that I had benefited in any way from the disaster was pure sophistry"
I found a recent paper dealing with the Psychology of threats. It is studied quite intensively, based on what I read. I have included excerpts from the paper with bases for the psychological model. Climate change is explicitly mentioned in the study. I took the model and tried to utilize it on the threats that Trump and his followers poise to society, and by extension myself. The image below shows my attempt to analyze it given my ability as to my actual knowledge. I found it rather enlightening.
Soc Personal Psychol Compass. 2021 Apr; 15(4): e12588. Published online 2021 Feb 26.
Exploring the landscape of psychological threat: A cartography of threats and threat responses
Stefan Reiss, Eline Leen‐Thomele, Johannes Klackl, and Eva Jonas.
Since the late 1980s, the threat and defense literature has accumulated a vast amount of research on how psychological threat influences human physiology, affect, motivation, and behavior, both on a personal and societal level. This research suggests that the experience of psychological threats such as uncontrollability, uncertainty, or the awareness of one's mortality can foster negative attitudes towards outgroups, intergroup bias, and the defense of cultural worldviews. For example, climate change threat has shown to increase authoritarian tendencies (Fritsche, Cohrs, Kessler, & Bauer, 2012), confrontation with one's mortality has increased religious zeal (McGregor, Nash, & Prentice, 2010) and nationalism (Pyszczynski et al., 2006).
Many models and theoretical approaches regarding psychological threats and defenses show substantial overlap (e.g., cognitive dissonance theory, Festinger, 1957; self‐affirmation theory, Steele, 1988; terror management theory, Greenberg et al., 1990; meaning maintenance model, Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006). Between theories, there are conceptual similarities in what constitutes a threat, how individuals instantaneously react to it, and how they manage to leave this immediately activated state. Jonas and colleagues (Jonas et al., 2014) formulated a unifying model of threat and defense that intends to explain and predict individuals' responses to threats.
This model, termed General Process Model of Threat and Defense (GPM; Jonas et al., 2014), postulates that threat is the experience of discrepancy between the situation, a personal current cognitive focus, or current personal motives (Jonas & Mühlberger, 2017). People then usually experience anxiety, arousal, and attentional vigilance (for a more in‐depth discussion of the biological processes, see Gray & McNaughton, 2000; McNaughton & Corr, 2004). In cases where humans cannot resolve the source of the threat (e.g., they cannot achieve literal immortality), they need to deal with the anxiety in a different way: by avoiding threat‐related thoughts, a strategy termed proximal defense. After a delay—when thoughts of the threat have been removed from conscience—a second set of defense mechanisms follows, the so‐called distal defenses. If a concrete resolution of the threat is easily available, people can directly approach this resolution and try to mitigate the anxious state. However, if a solution is not easily available, people might turn to strategies that indirectly solve the threat or that are palliative. For instance, after confronting people with the prospect of their own mortality, they defend their own culture more strongly than people in a nonthreatening control condition (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010; Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Greenberg, 2015). However, defending one's own culture is not the only possible behavioral response to psychological threat.
The GPM has made explicit suggestions on the dimensions along which to map defenses, namely abstract versus concrete and personal versus social (Jonas et al., 2014). However, dimensions of threats have not been proposed or investigated. We will first discuss potential dimensions to categorize psychological threats, and subsequently the defense taxonomy provided by the GPM (Jonas et al., 2014). The proposed dimensions are illustrated in Figure 1 and exemplary categorization can be found in Table 1.
The understanding of the intricacies of threat‐and‐defense processes may also be valuable to political decision‐makers. By understanding what drives instantaneous and delayed responses, and which threat experiences are more likely to lead to positive distal reactions, we can improve the communication of potentially worrying information without it leading to negative or inhibited responses by the recipients. Trying to mitigate negative defenses that increase intergroup biases and may perpetuate intergroup conflicts, information should be presented in a way that assists an individual to not be overwhelmed with negative effects leading to attentional avoidance of threat‐related thoughts and cognitions. Instead, they should face the issue and try to “deal with it”, that is, trying to resolve the issues at hand and not drifting to palliative behaviors and attitudes. For policymakers, this implies communicating a topic in a way that prevents individuals from avoiding the topic and engaging in unrelated, abstract defenses that make themselves feel better, but provide no sustainable solution for an issue. Following existential concerns, palliative efforts may prove helpful to deal with aversive arousal, however following concrete situational psychological threat, resolution efforts may provide the more effective route (Stollberg et al., 2020).
An important exemplary topic is the communication of climate change, a scientifically evidenced process that carries an ever‐increasing urgency to act. However, many people react to news about melting glaciers, rising sea levels, desertification of wide areas, deforestation of the amazon, and scarceness of resources with avoidance, indifference, or even active pollution. Thus, communication with overwhelmingly threatening information may lead individuals to abstract, threat‐unrelated defenses (Uhl, Jonas, & Klackl, 2016; Uhl, Klackl, Hansen, & Jonas, 2017). Instead, providing concrete guidelines for beneficial behavior and encouraging [one] to face the threat should result in more positive outcomes.
Often I have wondered if the United States increases in corruption, will it result in increasing violence? I did find a paper directly addressing this. I have included parts of the paper in the images below.
I wondered about the mood of the people in the North just prior to the Civil War. What were their fears, who were they feeling threatened from? I could not easily find this in an explicit writing. But I ran into the one time governor from Massachusetts,John Albion Andrew, an ardent abolitionist, and I found an interesting account of direct protests of his inclinations to be understanding of John Brown, even being of legal counsel to him. Shortly after the governor was elected as a Radical Republican (my, how that has changed). The account is found below in the images taken from Andrew’s biography.
John Albion Andrew (May 31, 1818 – October 30, 1867) was an American lawyer and politician from Massachusetts. He was elected in 1860 as the 25th Governor of Massachusetts, serving between 1861 and 1866, and led the state's contributions to the Union cause during the American Civil War (1861-1865). He was a guiding force behind the creation of some of the first African-American units in the United States Army, including the 54th Massachusetts Infantry. Educated at Bowdoin College, Andrew was a radical abolitionist of slavery from an early age, engaged in the legal defense of fugitive slaves against owners seeking their return. He provided legal support to John Brown after his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, raising his profile and propelling him to the Massachusetts governor's chair. Andrew was a persistent voice criticizing President Abraham Lincoln's conduct of the war, and pressing him to end slavery. By the end of the war, his politics had moderated, and he came to support the Reconstruction policies of Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson.
My mother, born in 1913, was a first generation German American. She grew up in a German from Russia community in Western North Dakota. She spoke German early in life. Her siblings generally had rather thick German accents. But my mother did not. She was educated in Montana and became a grade school teacher, teaching over thirty years in rural Montana schools. She intentionally lost her accent in order to not face the anti-German prejudice of the day. She would say that her parents were from Russia, and not openly say she was German in the small communities she taught in. I wished to find an account of this anti-German sentiment starting before the First World War. This is generally forgotten in the nation, and I only wished to learn a little more about it.
In World War I, They Faced Suspicion, Discrimination Here at Home
As a result of this wholesale persecution, German American men, no matter how long they had lived in the country, rushed to prove their loyalty to the United States by enlisting in the military.
Even though most Germans who emigrated were required to sign a document renouncing their German citizenship, many people doubted that the document repre- sented the hearts and minds of Germans who came to the United States. President Wilson, in a 1917 Flag Day speech, fueled the fire of prejudice with the words: “The military masters of Germany . . . have filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators.” German Americans who were considered enemy aliens were detained in government-operated and -funded internment facilities across the United States.
Anti-German Sentiment Fuels Acts of Violence
Federal authorities directed state governments to create state councils of defense, ostensibly to prepare the United States against foreign aggressors as the war escalated in Europe.
It did not take long for people to realize that the primary task of the councils would involve investigations of loyalty and patriotism. The super-patriotic American Protection League boasted more than 200,000 untrained volunteers who were authorized to investigate individual loyalty. They judged loyalty through the purchase of war bonds, singing the National Anthem, and declarations of allegiance to the American flag. Woe to a German American citizen who voiced doubts about the necessity of America going to war.
Although the American ambassador to Germany, James W. Gerard, said, “the great majority of American citizens of German descent have shown themselves splendidly loyal to our flag,” he also declared, “if there are any German-Americans here who are so ungrateful for all the benefits they have received that they are still for the Kaiser, there is only one thing to do with them. And that is to hog-tie them, give them back the wooden shoes and the rags they landed in, and ship them back to the Fatherland.”
Etiquette of the Stars and Stripes” specifically stated: “These and similar lines [of the Pledge of Allegiance] should be learned by every American child, and those of FOREIGN-BORN PARENTS, TOO.”
The similarly private group, the American Defense Society, encouraged the burning of German books. It took a strong- willed person to persist in pride of German descent when faced with these odds stacked against him.
A farmer living in Wisconsin in 1917 said: “many German Americans began to conceal their ethnic identity . . . stopped speaking German [and] quit German American organizations.”
In Collinsville, Illinois, in April 1918, a German-born unemployed coal miner, Robert Paul Prager, made a speech containing pro-German comments and references to socialism. Town citizens, over the mayor’s protestations, were so incensed that a mob of 300 men and boys lynched Prager. The incident became notorious in the nation’s newspapers, which for the most part defended the lynching. None of the 300 participants was ever found guilty....
Germans had come to the United States in droves in the mid- to late 1800s to escape religious conflicts, military conscription, and the lingering poor agricultural condi tions that beset northern Germany. German immigrants brought to their new country expertise in farming, education, science, and the arts. They enriched their adopted home land immensely as they assimilated, serving in government and military institutions. German-origin trade names such as Bausch and Lomb, Steinway, Pabst, and Heinz were commonly used every day in America.
Relatively few Germans returned to their European homeland because their home now was America. Nevertheless, as a vision of war encroached on the American psyche, German Americans were suspected of foreign allegiances and worse, espionage.
This atmosphere of distrust pressured young men of German descent to enlist and fight in the war against the country of their ethnic origin. Other Germans who were not yet U.S. citizens joined the military as a means to citizenship.
I wondered if Adolf Hitler regularly employed stochastic terror out of curiosity. I found this paper, Rethinking the Nazi Terror System, from February 1991, and reading through it it might seem that the Nazi terror was not random while that of Stalin was. I’ve included some of the paper in the image below for which I found interesting.
I wondered the same of Mussolini, if he used stochastic terror, and I did not find a ready answer but a review of a book from Cambridge Press on the violence of the Fascist State in Italy says the following:
Michael Ebner, Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy, 2010
Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy analyses this system of political confinement and, more broadly, its effects on Italian society, revealing the centrality of political violence to Fascist rule. In doing so, the book shatters the widely accepted view that the Mussolini regime ruled without a system of mass repression.
The Fascist state ruled Italy violently, projecting its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination, and other quotidian forms of coercion.
Moreover, by promoting denunciatory practices, the regime cemented the loyalties of “upstanding” citizens while suppressing opponents, dissenters, and social outsiders. Fascist repression was thus more intense and ideological than previously thought and even shared some important similarities with Nazi and Soviet terror.
Here is a reference on Mussolini’s terror and the cooperation from the Italian police force in it. This is only part of the abstract of the paper. It appears that Mussolini may not have used random rhetorical speech when I wished for terror, but I’m uncertain. But certainly in the terror movement down levels, it most likely was a feature, or at least I assume so.
BREAKING THE POLICE: MUSSOLINI'S USE OF TERRORISM (1987)
Mussolini came to power by using illegal political violence to frighten most of his ideological opponents into submission, the 20th century's first example of successful terrorism against a developing democracy. Faced with what they perceived as a dangerously powerful Marxist revolutionary movement at the time, the Italian police were impressed by the appearance of Mussolini's fascist ideas in 1919. Over time, Mussolini gained the support of the police, often through bribes, and also had economic backing from large landowners.
I’m frankly tired of this unnerving topic. It’s time to end. I’m a little more knowledgeable from this exercise. The anxiety remains, but actually writing and publishing this is an action which I’m able to do. I end with a little writing from Bertrand Russell. The book, which can be read online, primarily focused upon war at about the time of World War I. Perhaps it’s uplifting enough to end on.
From:
A METHOD OF ABOLISHING
THE INTERNATIONAL DUEL
BY BERTRAND RUSSELL, M.A., F.R.S. 1920
“They have been swept into the war, some on one side, some on the other. Some are still fighting, some are maimed for life, some are dead; of those who survive it is to be feared that many will have lost the life of the spirit, that hope will have died, that energy will be spent, and that the years to come will be only a weary journey towards the grave.”
“Wisdom and hope are what the world needs; and though it fights against them, it gives its respect to them in the end.”
— Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS] (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
47th Posting, July 9, 2023