repugnance.”
SECTION III
Killing and Physical Distance:
From a Distance, You Don’t Look Anything Like a Friend
Unless he is caught up in murderous ecstasy, destroying is easier when done from a little remove. With every foot of distance there is a corresponding decrease in reality. Imagination flags and fails altogether when distances become too great. So it is that much of the mindless cruelty of recent wars has been perpetrated by warriors at a distance, who could not guess what havoc their powerful weapons were occasioning.
The link between distance and ease of aggression is not a new discovery. It has long been understood that there is a direct relationship between the empathic and physical proximity of the victim, and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill. This concept has fascinated and concerned soldiers, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists alike.
At the far end of the spectrum are bombing and artillery, which are often used to illustrate the relative ease of long-range killing.
As we draw toward the near end of the spectrum, we begin to realize that the resistance to killing becomes increasingly more intense. This process culminates at the close end of the spectrum, when the resistance to bayoneting or stabbing becomes tremendously intense, and killing with the bare hands (through such common martial arts techniques as crushing the throat with a blow or gouging a thumb through the eye and into the brain) becomes almost unthinkable. Yet even this is not the end, as we will discover when we address the macabre region at the extreme end of the scale, where sex and killing intermingle.
In the same way that the distance relationship has been identified, so too have many observers identified the factor of emotional or empathic distance. But no one has yet attempted to dissect this factor in order to determine its components and the part they play in the killing process.
CHAPTER ONE
The soldier-warrior could kill his collective enemy, which now included women and children, without ever seeing them. The cries of the wounded and dying went unheard by those who inflicted the pain. A man might slay hundreds and never see their blood flow….
Less than a century after the Civil War ended, a single bomb, delivered miles above its target, would take the lives of more than 100,000 people, almost all civilians. The moral distance between this event and the tribal warrior facing a single opponent is far greater than even the thousands of years and transformations of culture that separate them….
The combatants in modern warfare pitch bombs from 20,000 feet in the morning, causing untold suffering to a civilian population, and then eat hamburgers for dinner hundreds of miles away from the drop zone. The prehistoric warrior met his foe in a direct struggle of sinew, muscle, and spirit. If flesh was torn or bone broken he felt it give way under his hand. And though death was more rare than common (perhaps because he felt the pulse of life and the nearness of death under his fingers), he also had to live his days remembering the man’s eyes whose skull he crushed.
Hamburg and Babylon: Examples at Extreme Ends of the Spectrum
On July 28, 1943, the British Royal Air Force firebombed Hamburg. Gwynne Dyer tells us that they used the standard mixture of bombs, with
huge numbers of four-pound incendiaries to start fires on roofs and thirty-pound ones to penetrate deeper inside buildings, together with four thousand-pound high explosive bombs to blow in doors and windows over wide areas and fill the streets with craters and rubble to hinder fire-fighting equipment. But on a hot, dry summer night with good visibility, the unusually tight concentration of the bombs in a densely populated working class district created a new phenomenon in history: a firestorm.
Eventually it covered an area of about four square miles, with an air temperature at the center of eight hundred degrees Celsius and convection winds blowing inward with hurricane force. One survivor said the sound of the wind was “like the Devil laughing.”
…Practically all the apartment blocks in the firestorm area had underground shelters, but nobody who stayed in them survived; those who were not cremated died of carbon monoxide poisoning. But to venture into the streets was to risk being swept by the wind into the very heart of the firestorm.
Seventy thousand people died at Hamburg the night the air caught fire. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly, since those of soldiering age were generally at the front. They died horrible deaths, burning and suffocating. If bomber crew members had to turn a flamethrower on each one of these seventy thousand women and children, or worse yet slit each of their throats, the awfulness and trauma inherent in the act would have been of such a magnitude that it simply would not have happened. But when it is done from thousands of feet in the air, where the screams cannot be heard and the burning bodies cannot be seen, it is easy.
It seemed as though the whole of Hamburg was on fire from one end to the other and a huge column of smoke was towering well above us — and we were at 20,000 feet! Set in the darkness was a turbulent dome of bright red fire, lighted and ignited like the glowing heart of a vast brazier. I saw no streets, no outlines of buildings, only brighter fires which flared like yellow torches against a background of bright red ash. Above the city was a misty red haze. I looked down, fascinated but aghast, satisfied yet horrified.
From twenty thousand feet the killer could feel fascinated and satisfied with his work, but this is what the people on the ground were experiencing:
Mother wrapped me in wet sheets, kissed me, and said, “Run!” I hesitated at the door. In front of me I could see only fire — everything red, like the door to a furnace. An intense heat struck me. A burning beam fell in
