1968 SPECIAL REPORT: "QUESTION OF AMERICAN VIOLENCE"

Hour-long program produced on film in black and white.This program, presented five days after the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, examined the nature of violence and its roots in American life. It also studied the innate character of aggression and its relation to overt acts, to neglect, and to example such as the depiction of violence in the media.

The program included the case of hostile child in a Detroit class for preschoolers. It showed his behavior with other children, depicting his parents visit with a psychiatrist, to whom they revealed their bewilderment and resulting anger. Another segment, at the Childrens Hospital in Detroit, dramatized the effects of an act of omission in this case, an eight-month-old who was the victim of severe neglect, resulting in physical and psychological disorientation. The program also provided a historical view of violence in America the assassinations of leaders, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the brutal squelching of strikes and other demonstrations, and the code of the gun (the latter celebrated in such current films as Bonnie and Clyde, which was excerpted here).

A seminar on violence, held in Los Angeles just before Robert Kennedys death, elucidated various aspects of the subject. Among those present were anthropologist Margaret Mead, who indicated television for its predilection for violent events; psychiatrists Ralph Greenson of UCLA Medical School and Alvin Poussaint of Tufts University; and writer Paul Jacobs (The New Radicals), who noted the necessity of violence in a society that resists non-violent reform.

The program concluded with the assertion by Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles that a society can spur or control both the act of violence and the direction of individual aggression. He cited the example of Nazi Germany, One of the most well-educated and enlightened nation as in the history of the world, at a time that predated television. NET Journal This Question of Violence is an NET production.

Видео 1968 SPECIAL REPORT: "QUESTION OF AMERICAN VIOLENCE" канала Hezakya Newz & Films