I just received a most timely e mail from my friend Gary Spaeth in which he introduces me to an online published book "The Authoritarians" by Professor Bob Altemeyer of the University of Manitoba. Here's what Altemeyer has to say about George Bush:
"The last string of studies I want to lay before you regarding authoritarian
submission concerns authoritarians’ willingness to hold officials accountable for their
misdeeds. Or rather, their lack of willingness--which catches your eye because high
RWAs generally favor punishing the bejabbers out of misdoers. But they proved less
likely than most people to punish a police officer who beat up a handcuffed
demonstrator, or a chief of detectives who assaulted an accused child molester being
held in jail, or--paralleling the trial of U.S. Army Lt. William Calley--an Air Force
officer convicted of murder after leading unauthorized raids on Vietnamese villages.
The “Milgram experiment,” which we shall discuss at the end of this book,
offers another example of authoritarian followers “going easy” on authorities. In his
famous study Stanley Milgram maneuvered subjects into a situation in which they
were ordered by an Experimenter to inflict painful, and possibly lethal, electric shocks
on another person (who in fact was not hurt at all). The subjects clearly did not want
to deliver the shocks, but the Experimenter told them they had to. The Experimenter
even said, if pressed, that he would accept responsibility for whatever happened. Yet
Tom Blass of the University of Maryland at Baltimore found that high RWA (Right Wing Authoritarian) students
tended to blame the Experimenter less for what happened to the victim than most
students did.15 Whom did they blame instead? I found, when I replicated the study,
they blamed the poor devil who was ordered to deliver the shocks, and the victim,
more than most others did.
If some day George W. Bush is indicted for authorizing torture, you can bet
your bottom dollar the high RWAs will howl to the heavens in protest. It won’t matter
how extensive the torture was, how cruel and sickening it was, how many years it
went on, how many prisoners died, how devious Bush was in trying to evade
America’s laws and traditional stand against torture, or how many treaties the U.S.
broke. Such an indictment would grind right up against the core of authoritarian
followers, and they won’t have it. Maybe they’ll even say, “The president was busy "
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Please, when you get time, go to: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/%7Ealtemey/.
Fascinating and frightening!
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