The 1994 documentary "Moving the Mountain" is about the student leadership of the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989.
For Americans, the protests were an inspiring example of people asserting their right to a democratic and free society.
Several inconvenient facts emerge almost immediately during the documentary. First, the students were typically sons and daughters of the elites. Second, the protests started over dormitory conditions and escalated from there. Third, the student leaders had a range of motivations, and idealistic motives were not primary. The typical student leader (certainly not all of them) comes across as a young, self-regarding politician. Fourth, as the authorities -- essentially, the students' parents -- escalated the level of violence, the students likewise responded with violence. The Tiananmen protests has less to do with democracy and simply had a logic of escalation that ratcheted up the rhetoric, and violence, over time.
One classic example of the psychology of political escalation would be the beating in the Senate floor of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner by South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks in 1856.
The beating nearly killed Sumner and it drew a sharply polarized response from the American public on the subject of the expansion of slavery in the United States. It has been considered symbolic of the "Breakdown of reasoned discourse"[1] that eventually led to the American Civil War.
Three years later, this attack would inspire the terrorist John Brown to attack a federal armory in Virginia to lead a slave rebellion.
The psychiatrist James Gilligan has argued that acts of violence are always rooted in feelings of shame and humiliation that can be expiated only by the destruction of someone who was a witness, in some sense, to one’s shame. Brown in Kansas at first might seem to be without this cue to action—he was neither implicated nor particularly humiliated by the vigilantes—until one realizes that the real trigger was something that had happened two days before in Washington. There, as Reynolds reminds us, a South Carolina congressman had beaten Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, nearly to death with the gold head of his cane for daring to speak out against the pro-slavery forces in Kansas and, in a feudal manner, for criticizing a kinsman of his. Sumner, though no pacifist, had been unable to defend himself. (His feet seem to have got caught under his little desk.)
This assault was put forward, instantly, as crowning proof of the difference between the Southern honor culture and the Northern procedural one; a Northerner could talk trash, but he couldn’t stand up for himself. Brown, one of his sons said, “went crazy—crazy. It seemed to be the finishing, decisive touch.” It was not a cool evaluation of the potential uses of violence in Kansas but the transferred sense of humiliation that he felt on behalf of Sumner that drove Brown crazy and into the massacre.
One might find a similar pattern in the suspect in the 2019 mosque shootings Christchurch, New Zealand. Up until relatively recently, he seemed open minded and curious about world cultures, even while taking an interest in the right-wing politics. Like John Brown, he seems to have been overwhelmed with rage at terrorist attacks by Muslims in Europe several years prior to his own terrorist attack. During a 2017 visit to France he began to take seriously the idea that Muslims with a high birth rate and an unwillingness to assimilate were taking over Europe.
Tarrant’s travels took him through much of Europe, North Korea, India and Japan.
Last year, he described Pakistan as "an incredible place filled with the most earnest, kind hearted and hospitable people in the world".
"The beauty of hunza and nagar valley in autumn cannot be beat," he wrote online, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
At some point during this journey, something in Tarrant changed and the roots of his violent rampage began to take hold.
He is thought to have become obsessed with the terrorist attacks that took place in Europe in 2016 and 2017, specifically referencing the death of 11-year-old Ebba Akerlund, one of five people killed in a terror attack in Stockholm in 2017, in a rambling manifesto he published online.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/terrorist-suspect-traced-his-radicalization-to-a-visit-to-france-11552695240
For the suspect in the Christchurch attacks, identified by the Australian government as Brenton Tarrant, the idea of white Europeans being replaced by immigrants loomed large as he crisscrossed France in the spring of 2017, around the time of President Emmanuel Macron ’s election.
In the manifesto, the suspect bemoaned how French President Emmanuel Macron’s face-off with Ms. Le Pen “wasn’t even close,” adding: “The truth of the political situation in Europe was suddenly impossible to accept. My despair set in. My belief in a democratic solution vanished.”
The suspect recalled how he had been “hearing and reading of the invasion of France by nonwhites, many of these rumours and stories I believed to be exaggerations, created to push a political narrative. But once I arrived in France, I found the stories to not only be true, but profoundly understated.”
The suspect writes that he crossed France, stopping in small towns to watch Muslims who he described as “invaders” go about mundane tasks, like shopping.
“I found my emotions swinging between fuming rage and suffocating despair at the indignity of the invasion of France,” he wrote.
The Christchurch mosque attacks supposed inspired further terrorist attacks by both right-wing extremists and Muslim terrorists. That would be the classic psychology of escalation.
What might be the solution to political escalation?
The Christian ethic of forgiveness? It seems that Christianity, rather than staunching revenge, often lends revenge the aegis of a crusade.
Rationality? Rationality might only lend revenge a cool-headed effectiveness.
The solution to rage might be emotional depression. On the Sopranos, depression is explained as the flip side of anger, and depression might have a useful sobering effect. Abraham Lincoln was always a very depressed person, and that made him more amenable to reconciliation and understanding.
Laughter might also work.
An extended study of Trump at his rallies draws a complicated picture. Trump rants and raves, but it's pretty clear that it has nothering to do with politics and everything to do with his damaging childhood. The odd thing is that not only do Trump's supporters get all riled up, but so do those who oppose Trump. Trump's unhappy childhood gets everybody in America agitated.
This is similar to an episode of Star Trek in which a glowing entity of pure energy feeds off the desperate, violent emotions of humans and Klingons that it maneuvers into conflict. The solution is laughter.
[Star Trek, S3E07, trailer]
The national antidote to Trump's traumatic childhood is sadness and humor, as Abraham Lincoln might have prescribed.
