Toronto Star, Canada
April 14 2006

Contempt first step to hell

Bully mentality behind massacres, parenting guru says

Apr 14, 2007 04:30 AM
RON CSILLAG
special to the star

Barbara Coloroso’s latest book has a different look. There’s no warm,
fuzzy photo of the parenting guru, no shots of shiny, happy kids
ready to make their beds and eat their veggies.

Instead, the cover of Extraordinary Evil is jet-black austere,
anchored by a pile of skulls. Blood-red ink announces the jarring
subtitle: A Brief History of Genocide.

Coloroso, the U.S. author of bestsellers on nurturing and
non-violence, tackles the incongruous subject of 20th century
genocide and makes the claim, which may also cause a few double
takes, of a direct link between bullying and mass murder.

"It’s not a giant leap," Coloroso, a former Franciscan nun, says of
the progression from taunting to hacking a child to death. "It’s a
short walk. I wish this book had been called that, actually:
`Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide.’"

She’s hoping that change will be made for the U.S. edition. The book
will be launched next Saturday.

"It’s a short walk from being abusive on the playground – teaching
kids it’s okay to dehumanize another human being – to hate crime,
which, sad to say, is on the rise in both our countries, to
genocide," she says, speaking from her Littleton, Col.-based
educational consulting company, kids are worth it! (also the title of
probably her best-known book).

The other component is political, she says. Bullying turns into
genocide when there is unquestioning obedience to authority, when
cruelty becomes routine and when the targeted group is devalued. And
that has resulted in 60 million genocide deaths in the 20th century
alone.

Coloroso, who will speak Tuesday at Beth Tzedec Congregation, at 1700
Bathurst St., feels it’s important not to confuse bullying with
conflict.

"When you have the dehumanization of another human being, it’s not
about anger, not about conflict. This is about contempt for another
human being. The other person becomes an `it.’"

Coloroso discusses three genocides: the 1.4 million Armenians killed
in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1918, the 6 million-plus Jews,
Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) murdered in the Nazi Holocaust, and the more
than 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus literally butchered in Rwanda
in just 100 days in April, 1994. It was a trip to Rwanda that led to
the book being written. Two years ago, Coloroso was invited to
lecture at the National University of Rwanda in Butare on her latest
release, The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander. "It was such a
disconnect for me, that I would be speaking on the grounds where half
the staff had killed the other half, and half the students had killed
the other half."

The experience turned Coloroso inward.

She flew home and completely rewrote her next book, Just Because It’s
Not Wrong Doesn’t Make It Right, to reflect the horrors she’d
encountered in Rwanda. She was toasting the volume’s completion when
her publisher suggested she write a book on genocide. "I dropped my
glass," she recalls.

She had already touched on tough ethical and moral issues in all her
books but producing this volume was personally harrowing. "I actually
found myself emotionally shutting down during the time I wrote the
book. To be able to listen to people’s stories….I had to remind
myself: I’m only listening."

Coloroso’s main point is that all kinds of bullying and subsequent
brutality are learned behaviour.

"You have to be taught that somebody is less than you before you can
have contempt for them," she says. "But it can be caught as much as
it is taught. Children are hard-wired to manifest their aggression in
conflict. They are not hard-wired to have contempt for another other
human being."

It’s mainly up to teachers and parents to raise moral children, she
says.

"They have to create an environment for children to learn to care
deeply, share generously and help willingly. That is the key to
breaking this horrific cycle of violence."

And they have to be active against genocide. "We can’t afford to be
passive, inattentive, bored, alarmed or merely deeply saddened."

Put another way, "there are no innocent bystanders."

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress