Featuring:
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Howard Zinn was raised in a working-class family in Brooklyn,
and flew bombing missions for the United States in World War Two, and
experience he now points to in shaping his opposition to war. In 1956,
he became a professor at Spelman College in Atlanta, a school for black
women, where he soon became involved in the civil rights movement, which
he participated in as an adviser tothe Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Commitee(SNCC) and chronicled, in his book SNCC: The New Abolitionists.
Zinn collaborated with historian Staughton Lynd and mentored a young student
named Alice Walker. When he was fired in 1963 for insubordination related
to his protest work, he moved to Boston University, where he became a
leading critic of the Vietnam War. He is perhaps best known for "A
People's History of the United States"..... (from Wikipedia) Howard
Zinn is professor emeritus at Boston University.
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Robert Fisk is a British Journalist, based in Beirut, who currently
serves as a Middle East correspondent for The Independent newspaper in
London. Over the last 35 years he has covered the conflict in Northern
Ireland, Israeli invasions of Lebanon, the Iranian Revolution, theIran-Iraq
War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Gulf War, wars in Algeria
and the former Yugoslavia, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Most
recently, much of Fisk’s reporting has been on the invasion and
occupation of Iraq. (from Lannan) He is one of the few western Journalists
to have interviewed Osama bin Laden (three times).
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Dahr Jamail. In late 2003, weary of the overall failure
of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq
for the Iraqi people and US soldiers, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to report
on the war himself. His dispatches were quickly recognized as an important
media resource.He is now writing for the Inter Press Service, The Asia
Times and many other outlets. His reports have also been published with
The Nation, The Sunday Herald, Islam Online, the Guardian, Foreign Policy
in Focus, and the Independent to name just a few. Dahr has spent a total
of 8 months in occupied Iraq as one of only a few independent US journalists
in the country. In the MidEast, Dahr has also has reported from Syria,
Lebanon and Jordan. (from dahrjamailiraq.com)
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Norman Solomon is a nationally syndicated columnist on media
and politics. He has been writing the weekly "Media Beat" column
since 1992. Solomon's latest book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents
and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," was published in 2005. Solomon
is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy,
a national consortium of policy researchers and analysts. His book "Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You” (co-authored with
foreign correspondent Reese Erlich) was published in 2003 by Context Books.A
collection of Solomon’s columns won the George Orwell Award for
Distinguished Contribution
to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language. Norman Solomon is a longtime
associate of
the media watch group FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting). (from
normansolomon.com)
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Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international
relations at Boston University. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy,
he received his Ph.D. in American diplomatic history from Princeton. Before
joining the faculty of Boston University he taught at West Point and at
Johns Hopkins. Dr. Bacevich is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel
and a veteran of both the Vietnam and Gulf Wars. His most recent book
is titled "The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced
by War".
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Robert Jay Lifton, M.D. is an American psychiatrist
and author, chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes
and effects of war and political violence and for his theory of thought
reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory.
His most influential books, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima
(1968), Home from the War: Vietnam Veterans—Neither Victims nor
Executioners (1973), and The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology
of Genocide(1986), focused on the mental adaptations made by humans in
extreme wartime environments—whether as survivors of atrocities
or, in the latter case, perpetrators. In each case Lifton believed that
the psychic fragmentation experienced by his subjects was an extreme form
of the pathologies that arise in peacetime life due to the pressures and
fears of modern society.
His studies of the behavior of people who had committed war crimes, both
individually and in groups, concluded that while human nature is not innately
cruel and only rare sociopaths can participate in atrocities without
suffering lasting emotional harm, such crimes do not require any unusual
degree of personal evil or mental illness, and are nearly sure to happen
given certain conditions (either accidental or deliberately arranged)
which Lifton called "atrocity-producing situations". The Nazi
Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical professionals rationalized
their participation in the Holocaust, from the early stages of the T-4
Euthanasia Program to the extermination camps.
In the Hiroshima and Vietnam studies, Lifton also concluded that the sense
of personal disintegration many people experienced after witnessing death
and destruction on a mass scale could ultimately lead to a new emotional
resilience—but that without the proper support and counseling, most
survivors would remain trapped in feelings of unreality and guilt. In
his work with Vietnam veterans, Lifton was one of the first organizers
of therapeutic discussion groups in which mental health practitioners
met with veterans, and he lobbied for the inclusion of post-traumatic
stress disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
(Wikipedia)
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