The Nature of Courage by Gråulf

I always figured the liberal nose pickers want to ban violence so they can bad-mouth conservatives without getting knocked on their asses. They are everywhere, especially in the schools, where they have been brainwashing our children to turn the other cheek for a generation. They have been very successful, and have finally created a culture that can propagate nonsense such as “I support our soldiers, but I hope they loose”. What dribble! Democrats pretend to honor our soldiers while they condemn them for killing enemies, and now they want to prosecute soldiers for torture because they poured water on some terrorists. At the same time they are trying to make friends with fanatics who cut peoples heads off on live television.

This is Memorial Day weekend, and I was reading the stories of some of the Medal of Honor recipients when I got curious about the nature of courage. What are the qualities that turn some people to acts of heroism, and others to acts of depravity and cowardice. There are lots of theories, but it seems the difference is mostly a matter of circumstance.

Thirty years ago a man by the name of Philip Zimbardo launched what is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. He selected twenty-four young men to participate in his experiment, and randomly assigned them roles as “prisoners” or “guards” in a simulated jail in the Stanford University psychology department. Everything from the deliberately humiliating prison uniforms to the cell numbers on the laboratory doors to the mandatory strip searches and delousing were designed to replicate the depersonalizing experience of being in a real prison. The men who were assigned to be guards were given khaki uniforms, mirrored glasses, and billy clubs.

The idea was to study the psychology of imprisonment -- to see what happens when you put good people in a dehumanizing place. But within a matter of hours, what had been intended as a controlled experiment in human behavior took on a disturbing life of its own. After a prisoner rebellion on the second day of the experiment, the guards began using increasingly degrading forms of punishment, and the prisoners became more and more passive. Each group rapidly took on the behaviors associated with their role, not because of any particular internal predisposition or instructions from the experimenters, but rather because the situation itself so powerfully called for the two groups to assume their identities. Even the experimenters were so caught up in the drama that they lost all objectivity. The experiment was scheduled to last two weeks, but was terminated after six days when an impartial outsider stepped in and stopped the experiment.

It is disturbing to realize that the hero in a firefight could as well have been one of the guards at Abu-Greeb if the circumstances had been different. It is disturbing that weekend soldiers are sent to Iraq and made prison guards, without supervisors who are aware of the Stanford Prison Experiment. And, it is disgusting that liberals, who have never been near a firefight, are passing judgment on soldiers for sometimes killing civilians in combat situations.

Gråulf.