Stephan:   The immigrant concentration camps created by criminal Trump and his racist minion Stephen Miller, have produced countless horror stories of family separation. It is still going on. I have tried to focus attention on the reality that ordinary Americans are committing these atrocities. How could they? We were just following orders, that statement in several variations became one of the defining claims of the Nuremberg  Trials when the Nazis testified. This report recounts the same justification invoked by a US Border Patrol Officer. I have been looking at this issue for two decades now, and I have come to think that obedience at that level is an issue that democracies, society's seeking to foster wellbeing, need to be aware of and plan for. Psychologist Stanley Milgrim in the 1960s carried out an historic series of experiments on obedience. Men and women who were paid a fee to be teachers in a (supposed) behavior modification experiment would shock people to the point of death, even as they screamed in agony. (The people receiving the shock were in fact actors who acted out the pain the teachers were administering. They did not actually experience it.)  As Milgrimi described it: “At 75 volts, he grunts; at 120 volts, he complains loudly; at 150, he demands to be released from the experiment. As the voltage increases, his protests become more vehement and emotional. At 285 volts, his response can be described only as an agonized scream. Soon thereafter, he makes no sound at all.” Before he had begun the experiment Milgram sought predictions about the outcome from psychiatrists, college students, middle-class adults, and faculty in the behavioral sciences. They predicted virtually all the subjects would refuse to obey the experimenter. They expected that only 4 percent would reach 300 volts, and that only a pathological fringe of about one in a thousand would administer the highest shock on the board. So what actually did happen? Sixty five per cent of the "teachers" went all they way to the lethal end.  Not one teacher stopped before 300 volts. Milgram S. The Perils of Obedience,  Harper’s Magazine 1974.  E-version to be found at: http://home.swbell.net/revscat/perilsOfObedience.html.  Was this just a one-off. No, it was not. The study was replicated four decades later, in 2006, by Jerry M. Burger, a professor of psychology at Santa Clara University in California. Burger replicated Milgram’s findings. We need to deal with this reality by creating a society that fosters wellbeing so no one is ever asked to do what we witnessed last summer in family separation and the child concentration camps. Because whatever the vileness people will do it as long as it is done under color of authority.