Puerto Rico Series

This series excerpts from a few books [War Against All Puerto Ricans being a primary source] and lays a groundwork of historical reference. Puerto Ricans have clashed with the United States before, an assassination attempt of President Truman and fired shots in the House of Representatives, wounding five lawmakers. There are significant Puerto Rican communities in the United States, especially in NYC, Bay Area, and Hawaii. Puerto Ricans span all ethnicities, all colors.

 

Before the 2020 earthquakes and even before the 2017 hurricane that largely destroyed the island's electrical grid, Puerto was on the horizon for debt default, and the debt still exists even after earthquakes and hurricane, no forgiveness. The Puerto Rican debt crisis is still a dominating issue.

Lolita Lebron

The Battle for Paradise

Puerto Rican Debt in the News

War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson Denis, 2015, Excerpts

Spanish Rule 1493-1897

Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano, 1971, Excerpts

Sugar Conquest

War Against All Puerto Ricans

Charter of Autonomy 1897 – Spanish American War 1898

Hurricane Ciriaco 1898 – Disaster Capitalism

First Civilian Governor 1900 – King of Sugar

Nationalist Party Founded 1912

Pedro Albizu Campos – Harvard Law 1921

Pedro Albizu Campos – Rise of a Nationalist

Cancer Transplanting 1931

Pedro Albizu Campos – Nationalist Party President - Speech January 1934

Albizu Meets Chief of Police Riggs – January 1934

Governor Winship Strike Breaker - January 1934

The Rio Piedras Massacre 1935

Police Chief Riggs Assassinated 1935

Female Sterilization 1937

The Ponce Massacre - Palm Sunday March 21,1937

The Ponce Massacre - Photographed and Filmed

The Ponce Massacre Museum

Albizu Imprisonment – 1937 to1943

Albizu Returns to Puerto Rico – 1947

Gag Law 1948

Further Lucifer Effect Resources

Lucifer Effect Series

Books:

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

Cold War to the Terror War by Alfred McCoy, photographs from Abu Ghraib.

Escape from Freedom by Eric Fromm, first step a fascist leader takes in a democratic society.

The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib by Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel.

Oath Betrayed by Steven H. Miles professor of medicine and bioethics.

Without Sanctuary, a documentary catalogue of lynching postcards

Photography of the Holocaust by Janina Struk

Film:

Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment [1985]

Das Experiment is a German film based on the SPE that has been widely shown around the world.

Repetition by Polish artist ArturZmijewski. A forty-six minute film that highlights the seven days paid volunteers spent in his mock prison.

Faces of the Enemy, Sam Keen show how archetypes of the enemy are created by visual propaganda that most nations use against those judged to be the dangerous “them,” “outsiders,” “enemies.”

The Marine Machine a full, graphic depiction of the making of a Marine by William Mares

The Wave, a powerful docudrama of this simulated Nazi experience captured the transformation of good kids into pseudo Hitler Youth.

Suicide Killers by French filmmaker Pierre Rehov viewed many Palestinians in Israeli jails who were caught before detonating thier bombs or had abetted would-be attacks.

Links:

www.lucifereffect.com

www.prisonexp.org

Quotes:

We must learn that passively to accept an unjust system is to cooperate with that system, and thereby to become a participant in its evil. Martin Luther King

Milgram’s Authority Study

Lucifer Effect Series

The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, which measured the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts that conflicted with their personal conscience. Milgram first described his research in 1963.

The Perils of Obedience by Stanley Milgram

Harpers 1974

The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation. Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

Methods from Milgram’s paradigm:

- Prearranging some form of contractual obligation, verbal or written, to control the individual’s behavior in pseudo-legal fashion.

- Giving participants meaningful roles to play that carry with them previously learned values and automatically activate response scripts [teacher, guard]

- Presenting basic rules to be followed that seem to make sense before their actual use but then can be used arbitrarily and impersonally to justify mindless compliance.

- Altering the semantics of the act, the actor, and the action. Replacing unpleasant reality with desirable rhetoric, gilding the frame so that the real picture is disguised.

- Creating opportunities for the diffusion of responsibility or abdication of responsibility for negative outcomes; others will be held responsible.

- Starting the path toward the ultimate evil act with a small, seemingly insignificant first step, the easy “foot in the door” that swings open subsequent greater compliance pressures, and leads down a slippery slope.

- Increasing steps on the pathway that are gradual.

- Gradually changing the nature of the authority figure from initially “just” reasonable to “unjust” and demanding, even irrational.

- Making the “exit costs” high and making the process of exiting difficult by allowing verbal dissent, which makes people feel better about themselves while insisting on behavioral compliance.

- Offering an ideology, or a big lie, to justify the use of any means to achieve the seemingly desirable, essential goal. Most nations rely on ideology, typically, “threats to national security,” before going to war or to suppress dissident political opposition. - When citizens fear that their national security is being threatened, they become willing to surrender their basic freedoms to a government that offers them that exchange. Erich Fromm’s classic analysis in Escape from Freedom made us aware of this trade-off, which Hitler and other dictators have long used to gain and maintain power: namely, the claim that they will be able to provide security in exchange for citizens giving up their freedoms, which will give them the ability to control things better.

- There are no male-female gender differences in obedience.

 

Keys to Resistance

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

The key to resistance lies in development of the three Ss: self-awareness, situational sensitivity, and street smarts.

I made a mistake: Encourage admission of our mistakes, first to ourselves, then to others. Doing so openly reduces the need to justify or rationalize our mistakes and thereby to continue to give support to bad or immoral influence.

I am mindful: We must transform our usual state of mindless inattention into mindfulness, especially in new situations. Ask for evidence to support assertion; demand that ideologies be sufficiently elaborated to allow you to separate rhetoric from substance. Try to determine whether the recommended means ever justify potentially harmful ends. Reject simple solutions as quick fixes for complex personal or social problems. Support critical thinking from the earliest times in children’s lives, alerting them to the deceptive TV ads, biased claims, and distorted perspectives being presented to them.

I am responsible: Taking responsibility for one’s decisions. We become more resistant to undesirable social influence by always maintaining a sense of personal responsibility and by being willing to be held accountable for our actions. Obedience to authority is less blind to the extent that we are aware that diffusion or responsibility merely disguises our individual complicity in the conduct of questionable actions.

I will assert my unique identity: Do not allow others to deindividuate you, to put you into a category, a box, a slot, to turn you into an object. Make eye contact. Anonymity and secrecy conceal wrongdoing and undermine the human connection. They can become the breeding grounds that generate dehumanization that provides the killing ground for bullies, rapists, torturers, terrorists, and tyrants. Never allow or practice negative stereotyping; words, labels, and jokes can be destructive, if they mock others.

I respect just authority but rebel against unjust authority: Work to distinguish between those in authority who, because of their expertise, wisdom, seniority, or special status, deserve respect, and the unjust authority figures who demand our obedience without having any substance. Doing so will reduce our mindless obedience to self-proclaimed authorities whose priorities are not in our best interests.

I want group acceptance, but value my independence: The power of that desire for acceptance will make some people do almost anything to be accepted and go to even further extremes to avoid refection by the Group. There are times when conformity to a group norm is counterproductive to the social good. It is imperative to determine when to follow the norm and when to reject it.

I will be more frame-vigilant: Who makes the frame becomes the artist, or the con artist. The way issues are framed is often more influential than the persuasive arguments within their boundaries. Moreover, effective frames can seem not to be frames at all, just sound bites, visual images, slogans, and logos.  They influence us without being conscious of them, and they shape our orientation toward the ideas or issues they promote. It is crucial to be aware of power and to be vigilant in order to offset its insidious influence on our emotions, thoughts and votes.

I will balance my time perspective: We can be led to do things that are not what we believe in when we allow ourselves to become trapped in an expanded present moment. Situational power is weakened when past and future combine to contain the excesses of the present.

I will not sacrifice personal or civic freedoms for the illusion of security: The need for security is a powerful determinant of human behavior. We can be manipulated into engaging in actions that are alien to us when faced with alleged threats to our security or the promise of security from danger. Never sacrifice basic personal freedoms for the promise of security because that sacrifices are real and immediate and the security is a distant illusion. Such as when a leader promises personal safety and notional security at the cost of a collective sacrifice of suspending laws, privacy, and freedoms.

I can oppose unjust systems: Individuals falter in the face of the intensity of the systems we have described: the military and prison systems as well as those of gangs, cults, fraternities, corporations, and even dysfunctional families. But individual resistance in concert with that of others of the same mind and resolve can combine to make a difference. Resistance may involve physically removing one’s self from a total situation in which all information, rewards, and punishments are controlled. It may involve challenging the groupthink mentality and being able to document all allegations of wrongdoing. Systems have enormous power to resist change and withstand even righteous assault.

Heroism

Lucifer Effect Series

The Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts

Heroism can be defined as having four key features:

·       it must be engaged in voluntarily

·       it must involve a risk or potential sacrifice, such as the threat of death, immediate threat of physical integrity, a long-term threat to health, or the potential for serious degradation of one’s quality of life

·       it must be conducted in service to one or more other people or the community as a whole

·       it must be without secondary, extrinsic gain anticipated at the time of the act.

The physical risk demanded of civilians who act heroically differs from a soldier’s or first responder’s heroic acts, because professionals are bound by duty and a code of conduct and because they are trained but the style of engagement and potential sacrifice the action demands is very similar.

Other forms of personal risk that qualify as heroic acts include risks to one’s career, the possibility of imprisonment, of the loss of status. For example, heroism might include persistent behavior in the face of known long-term threats to health or serious financial consequences; to the loss of social or economic status; or to ostracism. Sacrifice entails costs that are not time-limited. Typically, civil heroes have the opportunity to carefully review their actions and to weigh the consequences of their decisions, including arrest, imprisonment, torture, and risk to family members, and even assassination. This broadens the definition of heroism considerably. Some forms of apparent heroism might not be heroic but pseudo-heroic.

Ingrid Betancourt - FARC Prisoner 6 Years

Lucifer Effect Series

Ingrid Betancourt was born Dec 25, 1961, in Bogota, Columbia. As a politician and a presidential candidate, she was celebrated for her determination to combat widespread corruption. In 2002 she was taken hostage by the FARC, a Columbian guerrilla organization. For six years, the FARC held her hostage in the Columbian jungle. She was rescued on July 2, 2008.

Ingrid Betancourt, without proselytizing politics, describes the day-to-day experiences and struggles of being a war zone hostage, along with other hostages, in primitive jungle conditions, constantly on the move. At one point, she aptly references the Stanford Prisoner Experiment, consciously aware of the psychological horror in her own prison/guard relationships, while trying to maintain her own humanity. This was her uncertain daily reality for six years.

Her book is the perfect companion book to The Lucifer Effect.

Even Silence has an End by Ingrid Betancourt, 2010, Excerpt

My Six Years of Captivity in the Colombian Jungle

A few months before my abduction, I’d switched on the television and come on a fascinating documentary. In the 1970s, Stanford University had undertaken a simulation of prison conditions to study the behavior of ordinary people. The findings were astonishing. Well-balanced, normal young people disguised as guards, with the power to open and close doors, turned into monsters. Other young people, equally well balanced and normal, masquerading as prisoners, let themselves be mistreated. One guard dragged a prisoner over to a closet, where he could only stand, not sit, and left him there for hours, until he passed out. It was a game. However, faced with peer pressure, only one of them had been able to react “out of character” and demand that the experiment be stopped.

I know that FARC was playing with fire. That we were in an enclosed world, without cameras, without witnesses, at the mercy of our jailers. For weeks I had observed the behavior of these armed children, forced to act as adults. I could already detect all the symptoms of a relationship that could easily degenerate and turn poisonous. I thought it was possible to fight against it, by preserving one’s own character. But I also knew that peer pressure could turn those children into the guardians of hell.

When you’re chained by the neck to a tree, and deprived of all freedom – the freedom to move around, to talk, to eat, to drink, to carry out your most basic bodily needs – well, it took me several years to realize it, but you still have the most important freedom of all, which no one can take away from you: that is the freedom to choose what kind of person you want to be.