Louise Juhl

I den seneste udgave af the New Yorker er der et langt interview med den 97-årige forfatter og psykoanalytiker Robert Jay Lifton under overskriften “How to maintain hope in an age of catastrophe.”
Lifton har i årtier undersøgt både ofre for- men også udøvere af totalitære og menneskefjendske handlinger: interviews med overlevere efter Hiroshima, nazisoldater, støtter af det kinesiske Mao-styre og kultmedlemmer.
Han har også udgivet to tegneserier ‘Birds’ og ‘PsychoBirds’, begge centreret om samtaler mellem to fugle. Jeg nævner det, fordi en af disse samtaler er refereret i artiklen:
En fugl spreder sine vinger og siger: ‘All of a sudden I had this wonderful feeling: I am me!’ ”
Hvortil den anden fugl svarer: “You were wrong.”

Journalisten spørger til Liftons arbejde – i særdeleshed, hvordan det giver mening i dag: Med Trump og Putin og Nethanyahu og Hamas og klimakrise og mistrivsel. Jeg har lyst til at referere det fulde interview, men det er langt, så derfor blot denne ene udveksling , som jeg synes er så slående præcis for den situation, vi oplever i mellemøsten i dag. Journalisten spørger til en række af Liftons termer, her er han nået til et begreb, der vel bedst kan oversættes med “grusomhedsgenererende situationer”:

Journalisten: Next on my list is “atrocity-producing situation.”

Lifton: That’s very important to me. When I looked at the Vietnam War, especially antiwar veterans, I felt they had been placed in an atrocity-producing situation. What I meant by that was a combination of military policies and individual psychology. There was a kind of angry grief. Really all of the My Lai massacre could be seen as a combination of military policy and angry grief. The men had just lost their beloved older sergeant, George Cox, who had been a kind of father figure. He had stepped on a booby trap. The company commander had a ceremony. He said, “There are no innocent civilians in this area.” He gave them carte blanche to kill everyone. The eulogy for Sergeant Cox combined with military policy to unleash the slaughter of My Lai, in which almost five hundred people were killed in one morning.

Jeg kan varmt anbefale hele interviewet, det er indsigtsfuldt og nuanceret, og jeg tror ikke, at nogen vil gå uberørte fra læsningen.