Unquestioning obedience paves the way for routinization. Killing and torture become a workaday activity, just a job. This helps overcome moral inhibitions in two ways. First, following a rigid routine eliminates any need for making decisions, and thus entertaining awkward moral questions. Second, focusing on programmatic minutiae of his job makes it easier for the perpetrator to hide from the meaning of his actions.
As important as authorization and routinization are, Kelman thought that they are not sufficient for overcoming moral resistance to cold-blooded violence. For this, dehumanization is required. “To the extent that the victims are dehumanized,” he wrote, “principles of morality no longer apply to them and moral restraints are more readily overcome.” If others are not really human, we can treat them as we like, or as we are instructed, without moral reservations getting in the way.55
The idea that dehumanization causes moral disengagement comes up again a few years later in a study by Stanford University psychologist Albert Bandura, who put Kelman’s hypothesis to an empirical test. Bandura and his coworkers recruited college students to participate in the experiment. The experimental setting consisted of three cubicles, into which students were escorted three at a time. Each of the cubicles was equipped with an “aggression device”—a contraption that supposedly delivered an electric shock at ten levels of intensity. It was arranged that, once in the cubicle, the students would overhear someone explaining to a group of people in an adjoining room that they were participating in an experiment dealing with the effect of punishment on the quality of collective decision-making, that the participants were recruited from a variety of social backgrounds, and that each decision-making group would consist of three people with similar attributes. This was, of course, an elaborate ruse orchestrated for the benefit of the true experimental subjects—the students sitting in their cubicles eavesdropping on the briefing.
Next, each of the students was told that he or she would supervise a group of three decision-makers. If a member of their group proposed an effective decision, an amber light would flash in the cubicle, and no action would be required of the student. But if an ineffective decision was proposed a red light would flash, and the student would have to give the participants an electric shock. They could give the shock at any level they chose, from one (mild) to ten (painful). Of course, in reality no shocks were administered.
After this, the students were made to believe that they were privy to a conversation between the experimenter and his assistant, broadcast on an intercom system. After the click of a microphone switch, the experimenter announces that the experiment will soon begin, but he’s immediately interrupted by the assistant, who asks him where some scoring forms are kept. The microphone is “accidentally” left on, and during the ensuing exchange, the experimenter describes the decision-making group to his assistant in one of three ways. They’re either described as humanized (perceptive, understanding, and so on), dehumanized (animalistic, rotten), or described in a neutral manner. The episode concludes with the experimenter discovering that the microphone was left on, and hastily switching it off.
Bandura devised this experiment to investigate whether the dehumanizing descriptions would have any effect on the students’ punitive behavior. The outcome was precisely what one might expect.
Dehumanized performers were treated more than twice as punitively as those invested with human qualities and considerably more severely than the neutral group.… Subjects gradually increased their punitiveness toward dehumanized and neutral performers even in the face of evidence that weak shocks effectively improved performance and thus provided no justification for escalating aggression. By contrast, with humanized performers, subjects consistently adhered to mild punishment.56
When the shocks failed to improve performance, the students’ behavior was even more disturbing. “Under dysfunctional feedback,” he commented, “subjects suddenly escalated punitiveness toward dehumanized performers to near maximum intensities.”57
Beginning with Hume’s brief comments in the An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, the idea that dehumanization promotes moral disengagement has gained widespread acceptance. When a group of people is dehumanized, they become mere creatures to be managed, exploited, or disposed of, as the occasion demands. Throughout history, propagandists have exploited this to serve their political ends. There’s no better way to promote a war than by portraying the enemy as a bloodthirsty beast that must be killed in self-defense. And there is no better way to whip up enthusiasm for genocide than by representing the intended victims as vermin, parasites, or disease organisms that must be exterminated for the purpose of hygiene.
The architecture of our minds makes us vulnerable to these forms of persuasion. Images like these speak to something deep inside us. If you still believe that you are the exception, and are immune from these forces, I hope that by the end of this book you will have embraced a more realistic assessment of your capacity for evil.
5
LEARNING FROM GENOCIDE
I am not one accepted in your parish.
Bleistein is my relative, and I share
the protozoic slime of Shylock, a page
in Stürmer, and, underneath the cities,
a billet somewhat lower than the rats.
Blood in the sewers, pieces of our flesh
float with odure on the Vistula.
—EMANUEL LITVINOFF, “TO T. S. ELIOT”1
HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED what it would be like to participate in genocide? Have you imagined yourself as a guard at Auschwitz herding new arrivals from the train to the gas chambers, or as a Rwandan Hutu hacking men, women, and children to death with a machete? Try to do it, graphically and realistically. Was it difficult? Now try again, this time with the help of political scientist Daniel Goldhagen.
You cut him. Then cut him again. Then cut him again and again. Think of listening to the person you are about to murder begging, crying for mercy, for her life. Think of hearing your victim’s screams as you hack at or “cut” her and then cut her again, and again, and again, or the screams of a boy as you hack at his eight-year-old body.
Your imagination probably recoils from this exercise. Picturing it makes you feel sick. But this reassuringly natural response presents a conundrum, for genocide does occur. As Goldhagen goes on to remark, “the perpetrators [of genocide] do it, and hear it. And they do it with zeal, alacrity, and self-satisfaction, even enjoyment.”2
NEITHER MONSTERS NOR MADMEN
What kinds of people willingly perform acts that most of us have difficulty even imagining? The knee-jerk answer is that they are monsters. Wasn’t Hitler a monster? How about Stalin, Mao, or Saddam Hussein? Surely, they were all monsters! But what are monsters?
Monsters have always haunted the dark places of human imagination. The eerie images on cave walls in Spain and southern France painted by anonymous Stone Age artists include monstrous portraits. Interspersed with lifelike images of Pleistocene fauna we find strange figures that are neither clearly human nor unequivocally nonhuman. Some of them have human bodies with animal heads. Another displays a distorted human face with a strange, animalistic snout, and yet another human-looking figure has a snakelike appendage for a head. The most famous prehistoric monster portrait of all is at the Trois-Frères cave in southwestern France, which shows “some kind of half-man, half-beast creature, with staring, glowering eyes, powerful looking humanoid legs, and a weird head bearing horns or antlers.” (Archaeologists have dubbed the Trois-Frères portrait “the sorcerer” on the assumption that it depicts a shaman dressed in animal skin performing a rite of hunting magic.)3
Monsters embody everything that we find dangerous and terrifying, and which we want to keep at arm’s length. It is in this capacity that they play a prominent role in the religious mythology of the high civilizations of the ancient Middle East. In Egypt, the paradigmatic monster was Apep, an immense serpent that perpetually threatened to drag the ordered world into a seething abyss
of chaos and mayhem, while Mesopotamian texts described a similarly awesome creature named Tiamat, whose coils covered thirty acres (the prototype for the biblical monster Leviathan).
While gigantic creatures like these represented the wild, uncontrollable, destructive forces of nature, smaller, anthropomorphic monsters embodied the predatory danger posed by other animals—especially the human ones. “Like most monsters worth the name before or since,” writes anthropologist David Gilmore, “these smaller … beasties were wont to tear people apart and eat them.” People believed themselves to be continuously stalked by ferocious specters; vampirelike, legions of succubae ripped open people’s throats, drank their blood, and devoured their flesh. They dripped deadly poisons from their jagged maws; their razor-sharp claws were polluted and lethal.4
Interest in matters monstrous continued throughout classical antiquity. Greco-Roman monsters typically “combined human and animal traits in shocking or terrifying ways.”5 The Roman author Pliny the Elder included detailed information about monsters in his encyclopedic Natural History; creatures like cynocephali, creatures with human bodies and dogs’ heads said to dwell in the remote mountains of India, and the amazing manticore, a creature with “a triple row of teeth like a comb, the face and ears of a man, gray eyes, a blood-red color, a lion’s body, and inflicts stings with its tail like a scorpion.”6 Pliny’s lurid account of the “monstrous races” is what prompted Augustine to emphasize that what makes someone human is something internal—the possession of a rational soul—rather than their outer bodily shell.
Concerns about monsters continued through the Middle Ages. During this period, the most important source of information about monsters was a book entitled Liber Monstrorum de Diversis Generibus—The Book of Monsters of Various Kinds—which was written some time between the ninth and eleventh centuries. It sets out a taxonomy consisting of human beings, lower animals, and monsters. Liber Monstrorum describes the monstrous as a category, sandwiched between man and beast; less than human, but more than animal. It’s this combination of human and animal traits that gives them their uncanny quality. Some are born of monster parents, while others began life as humans, but degenerate into monsters in consequence of their wickedness. But whatever their genealogy, monsters are invariably evil, harboring malice toward humans and hatred toward the divine order.7 Their eyes glow continuously. Their teeth, angled in their mouth, are lethal weapons, underscoring their predatory, nonhuman character. “Made as they were,” the text concludes “the order of creation must keep them on the outside.”8
Hitler, Stalin, and others who perform wicked acts were not monsters. Monsters don’t exist. Like it or not, these men were human beings, as were all mass killers throughout history.
So, why do we call them monsters?
Croatian journalist and novelist Slovenka Drakulić offers an answer. Describing her experiences observing the trial of Balkan war criminals in The Hague, men like Ratko Mladic, who slaughtered nine thousand Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica, and the infamous Slobodan Milosevic, Drakulić remarks:
You sit in a courtroom watching a defendant day after day, and at first you wonder, as Primo Levi did, “If this is a man.” No, this is not a man, it is all too easy to answer, but as the days pass you find the criminals become increasingly human. You watch their faces, ugly or pleasant, the way they yawn, take notes, scratch their heads or clean their nails, and you have to ask yourself: what if this is a man? The more you know them … the more you realize that war criminals might be ordinary people, the more afraid you become.
Why?
This is because the consequences are more serious than if they were monsters. If ordinary people committed war crimes, it means that any of us could commit them. Now you understand why it is so easy and comfortable to accept that war criminals are monsters.9
Calling these people “monsters” merely dehumanizes the dehumanizers, and thus becomes a symptom of the disease for which it purports to be the diagnosis. Calling people monsters is a way of whistling past the graveyard, a way of reassuring ourselves that they are so very different from us. It’s not the “order of creation” that keeps them on the outside: It’s you and me.
Another distancing tactic is to call these people “sick”—that is, mentally ill. Surely, one might think, anyone who performs such terrible, brutal acts, or orders them to be done, has got to be severely psychologically disturbed. How many times have you heard Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Saddam, and even Osama bin Laden described as “madmen,” “psychotics,” or “psychopaths”? It’s true that mental illness can explain bizarre and sometimes violent human behavior. However, these excursions into do-it-yourself psychiatry are usually ill conceived, because the sort of “sickness” ascribed to genocidal killers has nothing to do with malfunctions of the central nervous system. It’s a secular euphemism for evil—a moral diagnosis dressed up as a medical one. The senior officials in Hitler’s regime are often touted as paradigmatic examples of genocidal madmen. But what’s the evidence for this? If anyone was in a position to know it was Leon Goldensohn, the American psychiatrist assigned to care for the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg in 1946. But Goldensohn didn’t confirm the popular prejudice. Instead, he found that, “With the exception of Rudolf Hess and in the later stages of the trials possibly Hans Frank, the defendants at Nuremberg were anything but mentally ill. Alas, most of them were all too normal.…”10 The desire to exterminate the Jews wasn’t the Nazis’ problem—psychological or otherwise. It was their solution. The same is true of the contemporary poster children for moral insanity: Muslim “terrorists.” Psychiatrist Marc Sageman interviewed almost two hundred jihadists and reports finding “no obvious mental health problems.”11 There is no evidence that the people who plan and implement mass killing are more prone to psychopathology than any person, picked at random, walking down Main Street USA.
This brings us back to our original question: What is it that enables some people to engage in genocidal killing? To answer it, we need to get a foothold in the genocidal mind-set. We need to get a sense of what sort of concerns lead otherwise ordinary people—people like you and me—to commit acts of barely imaginable atrocity.
GOEBBELS IN LODZ
One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.
—FRANZ KAFKA, THE METAMORPHOSIS12
In the fall of 1939, just after the German conquest of Poland, a film crew arrived in the Polish city of Lodz. Charged with the mission of shooting documentary footage for a film entitled The Eternal Jew, the crew worked under the personal supervision of Hitler’s propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels was a committed anti-Semite, who was responsible for the Kristallnacht pogrom during which German synagogues were burned, Jewish businesses destroyed, and tens of thousands of men, women, and children were deported to concentration camps. Now he was in Lodz, shooting what he called his “Jew film”—a film which, according to historian and Holocaust scholar Stig Hornshøj-Møller, may have been responsible for convincing Hitler of the need to annihilate the Jewish people
It is easy to imagine Goebbels as nothing more than a twisted, evil man—a monster, if you will—cold-bloodedly conspiring to wipe innocent people off of the face of the earth. But this would underestimate his complexity, and his humanity. Goebbels sincerely believed that Jews were dangerous subhuman creatures. In his mind, destroying them wasn’t an act of cruelty: it was his moral duty.
Prior to flying from Berlin to Lodz to supervise the filming, Goebbels ordered the director, Fritz Hippler, to shoot some preliminary footage capturing “everything of Jewish ghetto life” including the practice of kosher ritual slaughter (sechita). Hippler showed the film to Goebbels on October 16. According to Hippler,
Goebbels … wanted to show me how somebody with a proper attitude toward the Jewish question would react. Almost every close-up was accompanied by shouts of disgust and loathing … at the ritual sla
ughter scenes he held his hands over his face.13
These weren’t just histrionics. Goebbels recorded in his diary on October 17 that the scenes that Hippler showed him were “so dreadful and brutal in their details that one’s blood freezes. One pulls back in horror at so much brutality. This Jewry must be exterminated.”14
The theme continues in diary entries written after he joined the film crew in Lodz on November 2, and accompanied the cinematographers into the heart of darkness. “These are no longer human beings,” he wrote, “but animals. It is, therefore, also no humanitarian task, but a task for the surgeon. One has got to cut here, and that most radically. Or Europe will vanish one day due to the Jewish disease.” The next day he spoke with Hitler about it, and noted in his diary that, “The Jew is garbage. Rather a clinical than a social matter.” Oddly, the Nazis had quite a different attitude toward real nonhuman animals. The long, gruesome scene in The Eternal Jew depicting ritual slaughter of livestock was bound to have been upsetting to Hitler, who was an ardent vegetarian, antivivisectionist, and exponent of animal welfare.15
Other Germans made excursions to the ghetto as well. The state-sponsored leisure service Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organized bus excursions so that soldiers could observe the subhumans at close range. A report produced by the Polish government in exile describes these grotesque urban safaris.
Less Than Human Page 15
