On Killing

England and Germany little was accomplished by such bombings except to steel the resolve of the enemy.

But while the United States was fruitlessly bombing the North, the North was efficiently murdering the infrastructure of the South, one by one in their beds and homes. As we have seen before, death from twenty thousand feet is strangely impersonal and psychologically impotent. But death up close and personal, visiting the manifest intensity of the enemy’s Wind of Hate upon its victims, such death can be hideously effective at sapping the will of the enemy and ultimately achieving victory:

A squad with a death order entered the house of a prominent community leader and shot him, his wife, his married son, and daughter-in-law, a male and female servant and their baby. The family cat was strangled, the family dog was clubbed to death, and the goldfish scooped out of the fishbowl and tossed onto the floor. When the communists left, no life remained in the house — a “family unit” had been eliminated.

—Jim Graves

“The Tangled Web”

There is a simple, horrifying, and obvious value resident in atrocity. The Mongols were able to make entire nations submit without a fight just on the basis of their reputation for exterminating whole cities and nations that had resisted them in the past. The term “terrorist” simply means “one who uses terror,” and we don’t have to look very far — around the world or back in history — to find instances of individuals and nations who have succeeded in achieving power through the ruthless and effective use of terror.

Killing Empowerment

Mass murder and execution can be sources of mass empowerment.

It is as if a pact with the devil had been made, and a host of evil demons had lived and thrived on the victims of the Nazi SS (to select just one example), empowering its nation with an evil strength as a reward for its blood sacrifices. Each killing affirmed and validated in blood the demon of Nazi racial superiority — thereby establishing a powerful pseudospeciation (categorizing a victim as an inferior species) based on moral distance, social distance, and cultural distance.

Dyer’s book War has a remarkable photograph of Japanese soldiers bayoneting Chinese prisoners. Prisoners in an endless line are in a deep ditch on their knees with their hands bound behind their backs. Along the banks of the ditch stands another endless line of Japanese soldiers with bayonets fixed on their rifles. One by one these soldiers go down into the ditch and inflict the “intimate brutality” of the bayonet on a prisoner. The prisoners hang their heads in dull acceptance and mute horror. Those being bayoneted have their faces contorted in agony. Remarkably, the killers have their faces contorted in a way similar to their victims.

In these execution situations strong forces of moral distance, social distance, cultural distance, group absolution, close proximity, and obedience-demanding authority all join to compel the soldier to execute, overcoming the forlorn forces of his natural and learned decency and his natural resistance to killing.

Each soldier who actively or passively participates in such mass executions is faced with a stark choice. On the one hand, the soldier can resist the incredibly powerful array of forces that call for him to kill, and he will instantly be denied by his nation, his leaders, and his friends and will most likely be executed along with the other victims of this horror. On the other hand, the soldier can bow before the social and psychological forces that demand that he kill, and in doing so he will be strangely empowered.

The soldier who does kill must overcome that part of him that says that he is a murderer of women and children, a foul beast who has done the unforgivable. He must deny the guilt within him, and he must assure himself that the world is not mad, that his victims are less than animals, that they are evil vermin, and that what his nation and his leaders have told him to do is right.

He must believe that not only is this atrocity right, but it is proof that he is morally, socially, and culturally superior to those whom he has killed. It is the ultimate act of denial of their humanity. It is the ultimate act of affirmation of his superiority. And the killer must violently suppress any dissonant thought that he has done anything wrong. Further, he must violently attack anyone or anything that would threaten his beliefs. His mental health is totally invested in believing that what he has done is good and right.

It is the blood of his victims that binds and empowers him to even greater heights of killing and slaughter. And when we realize that this same basic empowering process is what motivates satanic murders and other such cult killings, the analogy of a satanic pact is not as strange as it seems. This is the strength, the power, and the attraction that have resided in human sacrifices over millennia.

Bonding to Leaders and Peers

Those who command atrocities are powerfully bonded by guilt to those who commit atrocities, and to their cause, since only the success of their cause can ensure that they will not have to answer for their actions. With totalitarian dictators, it is their secret police and other such Praetorian guard-type units who can be counted on to fight for their leader and their cause to the bitter end. Nicolae Ceausescu’s state police in Romania and Hitler’s SS units are two examples of units bonded to their leaders by atrocity.

By ensuring that their men participate in atrocities, totalitarian leaders can also ensure that for these minions there is no possibility of reconciliation with the enemy. They are inextricably linked to the fate of their leader. Trapped in their logic and their guilt, those who commit atrocities see no alternatives other than total victory or total defeat in a great Gotterdammerung.

In the absence of a legitimate threat, leaders (be they national leaders or gang leaders) may designate a scapegoat whose defilement and innocent blood empowers the killers and bonds them to their leaders. Traditionally, high-visibility weak groups and minorities — such as Jews and blacks — have filled this role.

Women have also been defiled, debased, and dehumanized for the aggrandizement of others. Throughout history women have been probably the greatest single group of victims of this empowerment process. Rape is a very important part of the process of dominating and dehumanizing an enemy; and this process of mutual empowering and bonding at the expense of others is exactly what occurs during gang rapes. In war, empowerment and bonding through such gang rapes often occur on a national level.

The German-Russian conflict during World War II is an excellent example of a vicious cycle in which both sides became totally invested in atrocity and rape. This reached the point at which, according to Albert Seaton, Soviet soldiers attacking Germany were told that they were not accountable for civil crimes committed in Germany and that personal property and German women were theirs by right.

The incidence of rape as a result of these encouragements appears to have been in the millions. Cornelius Ryan, in The Last Battle, estimated that there were one hundred thousand births resulting from rapes in Berlin alone following World War II. In recent years we have seen the use of rape as a political tool by the Serbs in Bosnia. The thing to understand here is that gang rapes and gang or cult killings in times of peace and war are not “senseless violence.” They are instead powerful acts of group bonding and criminal enabling that, quite often, have a hidden purpose of promoting the wealth, power, or vanity of a specific leader or cause… at the expense of the innocent.

Atrocity and Denial

The sheer horror of atrocity serves not only to terrify those who must face it, but also to generate disbelief in distant observers. Whether it is ritual cult killings in our society or mass murders by established governments in