Judge Not.....

When I was young, I saw people in more black and white terms than I do today. This resulted in liking some and disliking others. Long experience has shown me that people are the result of many influences. All have aspects I like and ones that I dislike. Some are more compatible with me, so I still tend to like them better I suppose, but at least I have learned not to be as judgmental as I was.

Even Josef Stalin, who instigated the deaths of millions of his own people, had an honorable side to him. I am reminded how he refused to save the communists in Greece from the British after the Second World War because he had promised Churchill that Britain could have Greece. It would surely have been in his interests to have a communist Greece, but he kept his word. I know we could argue that he kept his word because if he hadn’t, then Britain would not have allowed the Soviets free reign in the Slavic countries, so it was really in Stalin’s interests to honor his promise, but I don’t see how Britain was in any position to stop Russian predominance in Eastern Europe.

Long ago I started asking Why in regards to people’s behavior, partly out of curiosity, but partly to know how to influence better behavior. I’m a Bible student, and I know that the Bible is not so much into the Why of human behavior so much as the What and How. I mean Bible based therapy is focused on What, not Why. William Glasser’s Reality Therapy is a solid approach to psychological problems that focuses on the What far more than the Why. This is in contrast to psychotherapy, which wants to explore childhood and formative influences to understand what is going on. The problem is that no amount of understanding of how you got to where you are is going to fix the problem. Reality Therapy is about identifying and making choices and then acting on them. It is done with the aid of a therapist who behaves as an interested and loving friend, whereas the psychotherapist practices detachment.

Back to the point that began this post. We are all a mixture of good and bad. Propaganda sometimes tries to persuade us to make enemies. I grew up during the Cold War. The godless Soviets were not to be trusted. They wanted to bury us, so thankless were they for the USA winning the War. Now that I am older, I see that it was really the Soviets that won the war. They cost the Germans 6 million men, whereas the USA and other allies took out only 1 million. The Soviets lost more personnel in the Battle of Stalingrad than did all the Allies during the entire war.

FDR recognized this and he appreciated it. He viewed the Soviets as America’s friends. He died, and the rather inexperienced Truman, who in his 82 days as vice-president had only met FDR twice, began listening to Edward Stettinius and other business moles in government who felt threatened by communism. They urged Truman not to trust the Soviets. Even the dropping of the 2 atomic bombs on Japan seems to have been to threaten the Soviets. Japan was already defeated by that time. The mega “slaughter bombing” had destroyed both military targets and hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Anyway, just musing this morning about the complications of people’s motives and how they are not always evident, so we need to be slow to judge.