The “Lucifer Effect” - Values…
The human rights violations - at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere - sanctioned (if not directly ordered) by this administration will be a stain on this nation for years to come. Worse still, our soldiers were by design stripped of their humanity so that they could in turn dehumanize the victims of the Bush-Cheney policy of torture.
“MONTEREY, California (AFP) - The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a famed social psychologist said Thursday.
Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo described a “Lucifer effect” as he flashed shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in California.
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“Abu Ghraib abuses went on for three months … Who was watching the store? Nobody, and it was on purpose.”
Zimbardo, 75, is renowned for the 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students on summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the university’s campus in Northern California.
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“Because I had seen those cells before at Stanford. The power is in the system. It’s not bad apples, but bad barrel makers.”
Zimbardo, wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a devil flanked by two angels, paced the stage as images of horrors flashed on large screens. He lays out his conclusions in a recently released book titled “The Lucifer Effect.”
How can a society that creates such monsters ever be called civilized?
Posted by Larisa Alexandrovna on February 29, 2008 at 09:24 AM
