colonel@gloria.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman) (05/17/85)
First, I will not join the debate about visiting Bitburg. People
were upset less by the visit than by some of the things Reagan said
when defending it. (By the way, the N. Y. Times reported that Reagan
got into hot water in Spain when a Spanish paper published a remark
he made once about Americans in the Spanish civil war "fighting on
the wrong side." Presumably the Fascists were the right side. Any
follow-up on this?)
A recent article on psychological studies of torturers was so weakly
conclusive, I think psychologists must be losing ground rather than
progressing! Eric Berne on torturers, Nazis, and the like:
His nickname is Creepy and his hero is someone who keeps
everybody in line. In the front room he does what he thinks
the O.K. people are doing and conspicuously avoids the not-
O.K. ones, while in the back room he performs outlandish
deeds, or even horrors. He lives in a world where he is
misunderstood except by his cronies, and his script calls for
him to be done in for one of his secret misdeeds. He does not
protest much when the end comes, because he feels he really
deserves it according to his own slogan: "He who breaks the
rules of Everybody must suffer."
And he'll give up his gun when they pry his cold, dead fingers off it.
When Jews were burned, or banished from the land,
Then stirred within him a tumultuous joy;
The demon whose delight is to destroy
Shook him, and shouted with a trumpet tone,
"Kill! kill! and let the Lord find out his own!"
--Longfellow, "The Theologian's Tale"
--
Col. G. L. Sicherman
...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel