The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  These early experiences are one source of my intense and lifelong concern with kindness and cruelty. But even after I had begun to integrate my past experiences with my scholarly interests, I remained reluctant to mention them in lectures or articles. I thought that the origins of my concerns should not matter, and I feared that audiences and readers might discount the validity of what I had to say. I hope that readers will see such experiences as motivating my study of the issues discussed in this book, but not as determining my conclusions.

  I have several reasons for mentioning my childhood experiences here. In 1985 I published an article about the psychology of perpetrators and bystanders.3 Reviewers, who recommended publication, objected that I analyzed the Holocaust along with seemingly much lesser cruelties, for example, the disappearances in Argentina, where between nine and thirty thousand people were tortured and then killed. The Holocaust literature confirms my sense that some readers, given their own personal suffering and identification with victims, may feel that the tremendous tragedy of the Holocaust is diminished when it and other genocides and mass killings are studied together.

  I deeply appreciate the horrors of the Holocaust: the Nazis’ obsession with eliminating the Jews as a people, the murder of six million in factories of death, and the great brutality with which victims, who in no way provoked the perpetrators, were treated. Still, extreme evil defies comparisons of magnitude. What is the degree of evil in the act of torturers who insert a tube into a man’s anus or a woman’s vagina and seal into it a rat, which then tries to get out by gnawing its way through the victim’s body? This method of torture was used in Argentina. I intend to make no comparisons of the magnitude of horrors; I do wish, however, to enhance our understanding of the commonalities (and differences) in the psychological and cultural origins of mass killings and genocides.

  I also fear that some readers may see me as exculpating killers; I have no such intention. Understanding the motives of those who perpetrate genocide may seem to blunt outrage because the individual and group changes that lead to increasingly vicious acts may become not only more comprehensible, but even seemingly natural. Although outrage is easier to feel in the face of uncomprehended evil, to understand is not necessarily to forgive. In fact, understanding can increase our awareness of the culpability of perpetrators of great evil because we can see them as human beings, not as beasts without moral capacity.

  Perpetrators make many small and great decisions as they progress along the continuum of destruction. They choose leaders, adopt ideologies, create policies and plans, and engage in harmful and violent acts. Their circumstances and characteristics (which themselves evolve) move them in certain directions. But human experience is always multidimensional and other directions are possible. Other aspects of the self and of experience can be guides to contrary choices. Choice clearly implies responsibility. We must maintain a double vision that both searches for understanding and acknowledges human responsibility. (These issues are discussed at several points, especially in Chapters 2 and 10.)

  In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, people wondered whether the special characteristics of Germans as a people led them to perpetrate the Holocaust. However, the many atrocities committed by many states since World War II have led to a view that “Germanness” is no explanation. Many now doubt that cultural characteristics determine such conduct. In this book I reassert the importance of culture – not the old notion of “national character,” but a certain pattern of characteristics that enhances the potential for group violence. The psychological processes leading to extreme destructiveness arise when this pattern combines with extreme difficulties of life.

  Although this book includes a great deal of historical material, it is primarily a psychological work that attempts to draw on history in the service of psychological understanding of how genocides and mass killings come about.

  I want to mention another bit of personal history. I was invited to give a lecture on the psychology of genocide at the University of Trier, in West Germany, in June 1987. At my request, my hosts very kindly arranged for me to talk with a group of students and with a group of people who lived under Hitler. A scheduled two hours with a group of twenty 60- to 75-year-old men and women turned into an intense four-hour discussion of their experiences in the Hitler era. We spoke in German, which I learned when I lived in Vienna between 1956 and 1959 and to my surprise remembered well. I am grateful for the willing participation of members of this group. I will refer in a few footnotes to this discussion and to a ninety-minute discussion with a larger group of students.

  Acknowledgments

  A book reflects many influences on the writer and the contributions and support of many people. At the University of Massachusetts, the continuing interest of Seymour Epstein, George Levinger, Susan Fiske and other colleagues in my attempts to understand the roots of human destructiveness has been more helpful than they might have imagined. The early intellectual influence of Walter Mischel, as well as Perry London, Eleanor Maccoby, and others at Stanford, during my graduate-school years (and subsequently) has also been important. The friendship and support of Lane Conn, a former colleague at Harvard, and Sarah Conn, a former student of mine there, have been of great value.

  I am grateful to a number of scholars who read and commented on drafts of all or parts of the book. The sociologist Helen Fein, the historian David Wyman, and the German psychologist Wolfgang Stroebe, as well as two anonymous reviewers, commented on the whole book; the historian Robert Potash commented on the chapter on Argentina, and the anthropologist Joel Halpern commented on the chapter on Cambodia.

  The book was typed and retyped on the computer as I revised and edited it. The staff of the psychology department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst provided essential help. Melanie Bellenoit was involved from the beginning to the end; her contribution was outstanding and invaluable. Joanne Daughdrill, Amanda Morgan, Stacie Melcher and Jean Glenowicz also made significant contributions. Lisa Sheehy did an excellent job in collecting some materials on Turkey and Argentina and translating some Spanish sources. People routinely thank their families for help and support. Mine certainly deserves thanks. Once more they lived with me through years of the obsession of writing a book – an obsession perhaps more intense with this book – and with books about mass killing, genocide, and torture lying around the house. I am grateful to Sylvia, Adrian and Daniel for their forbearance and love. I hope that my continuing interest in and work on some of the positive aspects of human behavior provided relief for them, as I hope that my concern throughout this book with the roots and evolution of caring, helping, altruism, cooperation, and nonaggression will do the same for the readers of this book.

  Finally, I appreciated the hospitality of the Department of Phychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I worked on this book in the spring of 1987.

  Part I

  Psychological and cultural bases of genocide and other forms of group violence

  1 An introduction

  A central issue of our times is the murder, torture, and mistreatment of whole groups of people. The widespread hope and belief that human beings had become increasingly “civilized” was shattered by the events of the Second World War, particularly the systematic, deliberate extermination of six million Jews by Hitler’s Third Reich. Millions of other noncombatants were also killed, systematically or randomly and carelessly.

  The destruction of human groups has a long history. In many ancient wars inhabitants of cities were massacred, often with great brutality, and the cities razed to the ground. Many religious wars were extremely brutal, if not genocidal. Our own century has witnessed, in addition to two world wars, mass killings by colonial powers, the genocide of the Armenians, and the mass destruction of lives in the Soviet Union through repeated purges and deliberate starvation of peasants.

  Genocides, mass killings, and other cruelties inflicted on groups of people have not ceased since the Second Wo
rld War. Consider the millions killed by their own people in Cambodia and Indonesia, the killing of the Hutu in Burundi, the Ibo in Nigeria, the Ache Indians in Paraguay, and the Buddhists in Tibet, and the mass killings in Uganda. Dictatorial governments have recently tended to kill not only individuals but whole groups of people seen as actual or potential enemies. This trend is evident in the Argentine disappearances and the death squad killings in El Salvador and Guatemala.

  How can human beings kill multitudes of men and women, children and old people?a How does the motivation arise for this in the face of the powerful prohibition against murder that most of us are taught? We must understand the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of genocide and mass killing if we are to stop such human destructiveness. As cultures, societies, and individual human beings we must learn how to live together in harmony and resist influences that turn us against each other. My analysis is intended as a contribution to these goals.

  Genocide and war have much in common. In one, a society turns against a subgroup seen as an internal enemy; in the the other, a society turns against a group seen as an external enemy. Identifying the origins of genocide and mass killing will also help to enlighten us about sources of war, torture, and lesser cruelties such as group discrimination that can be steps to mass killing or genocide.

  Aggression, violence, torture, and the mistreatment of human beings are all around us. But kindness, helpfulness, generosity, and love also abound. Some Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe risked their lives to save Jews and other persecuted people. Many nations helped in response to starvation in Cambodia at the end of the 1970s and Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, the destruction wrought by earthquake in Soviet Armenia in 1988, and other tragedies.

  This book presents a conception of how a subgroup of a society, whether historically established or newly created (such as the “new people” in Cambodia, the name the Khmer Rouge gave the inhabitants of cities they forced into the countryside), comes to be mistreated and destroyed by a more powerful group or a government. The conception is then applied to the analysis of four instances: in greatest depth to the Holocaust, the extermination of six million Jews in Nazi Germany; to the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915-16; the genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s; and the disappearance and mass killing of people in Argentina during those same years.

  The approach and content of the book

  A brief preview. Certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society, combined with great difficulties or hardships of life and social disorganization, are the starting point for genocide or mass killing. The resulting material and psychological needs lead the society to turn against a subgroup in it. Gradually increasing mistreatment of this subgroup ends in genocide or mass killing.

  Under extremely difficult life conditions certain motives dominate: protecting the physical well-being of oneself and one’s family and preserving one’s psychological self, including self-concept and values; making sense of life’s problems and social disorganization and gaining a new comprehension of the world, among others. It is difficult, usually, to fulfill these aims by improving the conditions of life. Instead, people often respond with thoughts, feelings, and actions that do not change real conditions but at least help them cope with their psychological consequences. These include devaluing other groups, scapegoating, joining new groups, and adopting ideologies – all of which may give rise to the motivation for, and diminish inhibition against, harming others.

  What motives arise and how they are fulfilled depend on the characteristics of the culture and society. For example, a society that has long devalued a group and discriminated against its members, has strong respect for authority, and has an overly superior and/or vulnerable self-concept is more likely to turn against a subgroup.

  Genocide does not result directly. There is usually a progression of actions. Earlier, less harmful acts cause changes in individual perpetrators, bystanders, and the whole group that make more harmful acts possible. The victims are further devalued. The self-concept of the perpetrators changes and allows them to inflict greater harm – for “justifiable” reasons. Ultimately, there is a commitment to genocide or mass killing or to ideological goals that require mass killing or genocide. The motivation and the psychological possibility evolve gradually.

  Such a progression is made more likely by the passivity of bystanders – members of the society not directly affected and outside groups, including other nations. Active opposition by bystanders can reactivate the perpetrators’ moral values and also cause them to be concerned about retaliation.

  In the next chapter I will present a more detailed description of the core concepts. In subsequent chapters of Part I, I examine in greater detail each component of the conception, including the psychology of individual perpetrators, bystanders, and heroic helpers. In Part II, I apply the conception to a detailed analysis of the Holocaust; in Part III, to the analysis of the other genocides and mass killings.b

  In Part IV, I discuss how, with some changes and extensions, this conception provides an understanding of the origins of war, the other major form of group violence. The difficult life conditions that lead to war may include internal problems, problems in the international order, and conflicts with other nations.

  Genocide and mass killing are tragedies for the perpetrators also. Their characters are affected, and at times the cycle of violence makes them victims as well. To diminish the chance of such tragedies, we must identify elements of culture, institutions, and personality that reduce hostility and aggression and enhance caring, connection, helpfulness, and cooperation within and between groups. To promote these ends we must create crosscutting relations that allow members of different subgroups (and of different nations) to work and play together; we must help groups develop positive reciprocity in their relationships; and we must guide individuals and groups to act in others’ behalf. In these and other ways we can create a progression, an evolution of caring, connectedness, and nonaggression in opposition to the continuum of destruction. How the young are socialized by parents and schools is also essential. In Chapters 17 and 18, I present an agenda for creating caring and nonaggressive persons and societies.

  Differences and similarities and the selection of cases. This book searches for the origins of genocides and mass killings. The outcomes differ greatly (for example, in the number of people killed and methods of killing), and the influences that lead to genocide are not identical. Difficult conditions of life vary. Severe economic problems, political violence, war, and even rapid, substantial social change can result in social chaos and personal upheavals. Of the cultural-societal characteristics that have the potential to generate violence, only some may be influential in a given instance. The continuum of destruction takes various forms as well. In some cases a society has progressed along this continuum for decades or even centuries. In other cases, the progression develops over a much shorter time under the influence of difficult life conditions or of the ideologies adopted to deal with them.

  Why did I choose the Holocaust, the genocides in Turkey and Cambodia, and the disappearances in Argentina for study and analysis? Each is significant in its own right, yet they differ in many ways. If we can identify commonalities in their origins, we can gain confidence in our understanding of the origins of genocides and mass killings in general.

  The Holocaust is an instance of suffering and cruelty that informs our age. It gave rise to a deep questioning of the nature of individuals and groups, of human beings and human societies. For many, the evil embodied in the Holocaust is incomprehensible. For some, it is preferable not to comprehend, because comprehension might lead to forgiving.1 But as I have noted, only by understanding the roots of such evil do we gain the possibility of shaping the future so that it will not happen again.

  The genocide of the Armenians is the first modern genocide. Turkey and the Turks have never admitted that it happened. The say it was self-defense, the deportation of an internal enemy in t
ime of war. For this reason alone, the Armenian genocide deserves attention. There are other important differences between the Holocaust and this genocide. The Holocaust made use of bureaucratic management and advanced technology in the framework of a totalitarian system. The genocide of the Armenians was less planned, with limited bureaucratic organization and very little advanced technology in its execution.

  Paradoxically, in this highly technological age, we are horrified by the nontechnological brutality of the Cambodian genocide, its direct, primitive methods of murder on a large scale. In this case people were killed not because of their religious or ethnic origin, but for political reasons. Because of their past or because of their current deviation from rules, many people were deemed incapable of living in the type of society envisioned by the Cambodian communists. Because the victims were members of the same racial and ethnic group as the perpetrators, and even religion did not enter into their selection, the mass killing in Cambodia can be regarded as “ autogenocide.”

  Five to six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, probably about eight hundred thousand Armenians in Turkey, and between one and two million people died in Cambodia. The disappearances in Argentina cannot be compared in magnitude: between nine and thirty thousand people were killed. The Argentine victims were regarded as political enemies who endangered the state: communists, communist sympathizers, or left leaning.