On Killing

taker, but it is actually more complex than that and occurs in three stages:

• First the victim experiences an increase in association with the hostage taker.

• Then the victim usually experiences a decrease in identification with the authorities who are dealing with the hostage taker.

• Finally the hostage taker experiences an increase in identification and bonding with the victim.

One of the more interesting of many such cases was the Moluccan train siege in Holland in 1975, In this instance the terrorists had already shot one hostage and then selected another for execution. This intended victim then asked permission to write a final note to his family, and his request was granted. He was a journalist, and he must have been a very good one, for he wrote such a heart-wrenching letter that, upon reading it, the terrorists took pity on him… and shot someone else instead.

Sometimes this process can happen on a vast scale. Many times in World War I there were unofficial suspensions of hostilities that came about through the process of coming to know each other too well. During Christmas of 1914 British and German soldiers in many sectors met peacefully, exchanged presents, took photographs and even played soccer. Holmes notes that “in some areas the truce went on until well into the New Year, despite the High Command’s insistence that it should be war as usual.”

Erich Fromm states that “there is good clinical evidence for the assumption that destructive aggression occurs, at least to a large degree, in conjunction with a momentary or chronic emotional withdrawal.” The situations described above represent a breakdown in the psychological distance that is a key method of removing one’s sense of empathy and achieving this “emotional withdrawal.” Again, some of the mechanisms that facilitate this process include:

• Cultural distance, such as racial and ethnic differences, which permit the killer to dehumanize the victim

• Moral distance, which takes into consideration the kind of intense belief in moral superiority and vengeful/vigilante actions associated with many civil wars

• Social distance, which considers the impact of a lifetime of practice in thinking of a particular class as less than human in a socially stratified environment

• Mechanical distance, which includes the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim.

Cultural Distance: “Inferior Forms of Life”

In the section “Killing in America,” we will examine the methodology a U.S. Navy psychiatrist developed to psychologically enable assassins for the U.S. Navy. This “formula” primarily involved classical conditioning and systematic desensitization using violent movies, but it also integrated cultural distance processes in order

to get the men to think of the potential enemies they will have to face as inferior forms of life [with films] biased to present the enemy as less than human: the stupidity of local customs is ridiculed, local personalities are presented as evil demigods.

— quoted in Peter Watson War on the Mind

The Israeli research mentioned earlier indicates that the risk of death for a kidnap victim is much greater if the victim is hooded. Cultural distance is a form of emotional hooding that can work just as effectively. Shalit notes that “the nearer or more similar the victim of aggression is, the more we can identify with him.” And the harder it is to kill him.

This process also works the other way around. It is so much easier to kill someone if they look distinctly different from you. If your propaganda machine can convince your soldiers that their opponents are not really human but are “inferior forms of life,” then their natural resistance to killing their own species will be reduced. Often the enemy’s humanity is denied by referring to him as a “gook,” “Kraut,” or “Nip.” In Vietnam this process was assisted by the “body count” mentality, in which we referred to and thought of the enemy as numbers. One Vietnam vet told me that this permitted him to think that killing the NVA and VC was like “stepping on ants.”

The greatest master of this in recent times may have been Adolf Hitler, with his myth of the Aryan master race: the Ubermensch, whose duty was to cleanse the world of the Untermensch.

The adolescent soldier against whom such propaganda is directed is desperately trying to rationalize what he is being forced to do, and he is therefore predisposed to believe this nonsense. Once he begins to herd people like cattle and then to slaughter them like cattle, he very quickly begins to think of them as cattle — or, if you will, Untermensch.

According to Trevor Dupuy, the Germans, in all stages of World War II, consistently inflicted 50 percent more casualties on the Americans and British than were inflicted on them. And the Nazi leadership would probably be the first to tell you that it was this carefully nurtured belief in their racial and cultural superiority that enabled the soldiers to be so successful. (But, as we shall see in “Killing and Atrocities,” this enabling also contained an entrapment that contributed gready to the Nazis’ ultimate defeat.)

But the Nazis are hardly the only ones to wield the sword of racial and ethnic hatred in war. European imperial defeat and domination of “the darker races” was facilitated by cultural distance factors.

However, this can be a double-edged sword. Once oppressors begin to think of their victims as not being the same species, then these victims can accept and use that cultural distance to kill and oppress their colonial masters when they finally gain the upper hand. This double-edged sword was turned on the oppressors when colonial nations rose up in fierce insurrections such as the Sepoy Mutiny or the Mau Mau Uprising. In the final battles that overthrew imperialism around the world, the backlash of this double-edged sword was a major factor in empowering local populations.

The United States is a comparatively egalitarian nation and therefore has a little more difficulty getting its population to wholeheartedly embrace wartime ethnic and racial hatreds. But in combat against Japan we had an enemy so different and alien that we were able to effectively implement cultural distance (combined with a powerful dose of moral distance, since we were “avenging” Pearl Harbor). Thus, according to Stouffer’s research, 44 percent of American soldiers in World War II said they would “really like to kill a Japanese soldier,” but only 6 percent expressed that degree of enthusiasm for killing Germans.

In Vietnam cultural distance would have back-lashed against us, since our enemy was racially and culturally indistinguishable from our ally. Therefore we tried hard (at a national policy level) not to emphasize any cultural distance from our enemies. The primary psychological distance factor utilized in Vietnam was moral distance, deriving from our moral “crusade” against communism. But try as we might we were not completely successful at keeping the genie of racial hatred in its bottle.

Most of the Vietnam veterans I have interviewed developed a profound love for the Vietnamese culture and people. Many married Vietnamese women. This egalitarian tendency to mingle with and accept, admire, and even love another culture is an American strong point. Because of it America was able to turn occupied Germany and Japan from defeated enemies to friends and allies. But many U.S. soldiers in Vietnam spent their year in-country isolated from the positive, friendly aspects of Vietnamese culture and people. The only Vietnamese they met were either trying to kill them or were suspected of being or supporting Vietcong. This environment had the capacity to develop profound suspicion and hatred. One Vietnam veteran told me that, to him, “they were less than animals.”

Because of this ability to accept other cultures, Americans probably committed fewer atrocities than most other nations would have under the circumstances associated with guerrilla warfare in Vietnam. Certainly fewer than was the track record of most colonial powers. Yet still we had our My Lai, and our efforts in that war were profoundly, perhaps fatally, undermined by that single incident.