On Killing

the world at large, the common response is often one of total disbelief. And the nearer it hits home, the harder we want to disbelieve it.

Most Americans have been able to accept the millions of murders committed by Nazi Germany because our soldiers were there and were personally exposed to the Nazi death camps. Eyewitness accounts, films, a vocal and powerful Jewish community, and shrines at death camps like Dachau and Auschwitz all combine to make it almost impossible to deny the horror. Yet even in the face of all this evidence, there is a bizarre minority in our nation that truly believes that it never happened.

The sheer awfulness of atrocity makes us wish it away, and when we are faced with events such as genocide in Cambodia we would rather turn our heads. David Horowitz, a 1960s radical, writes about how this denial process occurred in him and his friends:

I and my former comrades in the Left dismissed the anti-Soviet “lies” about Stalinist repression. In the society we hailed as a new human dawn, 100 million people were put in slave-labor camps, in conditions rivaling Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Between 30 and 40 million people were killed in peacetime in the daily routine of socialist rule. While Leftists applauded their progressive policies and guarded their frontiers, Soviet Marxists killed more peasants, more workers, and even more communists than all the capitalist governments combined since the beginning of time.

And for the entire duration of this nightmare, the William Buckleys and Ronald Reagans and other anti- communists went on telling the world exactly what was happening. And all that time the pro-Soviet Left went on denouncing them as reactionaries and liars, using the same contemptuous terms….

The left would still be denying the Soviet atrocities if the perpetrators themselves had not finally acknowledged their crime.

Although this is a most remarkable example of naivete, a significant and vocal minority in America was trapped in this program of self-deception. Those who were deceived are mainly good, decent, highly educated men and women. It is their very goodness and decency that cause them to be so completely incapable of believing that someone or something they approve of could be so completely evil. Perhaps denial of mass atrocity is tied to our innate resistance to killing. Just as one hesitates to kill in the face of extreme pressure and despite the threat of violence, one has difficulty imagining — and believing — the existence of atrocity despite the existence of facts.

But we must not deny it. If we look around the world carefully we will find somebody somewhere wielding the dark power of atrocity to support a cause that we believe in. It is a simple tenet of human nature that it is difficult to believe and accept that anyone we like and identify with is capable of these acts against our fellow human beings. And this simple, naive tendency to disbelieve or look the other way is, possibly more than any other factor, responsible for the perpetuation of atrocity and horror in our world today.

CHAPTER THREE The Entrapment of Atrocity

“The Horror! The Horror!”

— Kurtz

in Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [34]

Despite its short-term benefits, atrocity as policy is normally (but not always) self-destructive. Unfortunately this self-destruction usually does not occur in time to save its immediate victims.

The process of bonding men by forcing them to commit an atrocity requires a foundation of legitimacy for it to continue for any length of time. The authority of a state (as in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany), a state religion (as in the emperor worship of imperial Japan), a heritage of barbarism and cruelty that diminishes the value of individual human life (as existed among the Mongol Hordes, in imperial China, and in many other ancient civilizations), and economic pressures combined with years of prior experience and group bonding (as in the KKK and street gangs) are all examples of varying forms of “legitimizing” factors that, singly or combined, can ensure the continuing commission of atrocities. They also, however, contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Once a group undergoes the process of bonding and empowerment through atrocity, then its members are entrapped in it, as it turns every other force that is aware of their nature against them. Of course, those who commit atrocities understand that what they are doing will be considered criminal by the rest of the world, and this is why at the level of nation-states they attempt to control their population and press.

Still, controlling people and knowledge is only a stopgap measure, particularly as ubiquitous electronic communication becomes widely available. The existence of the Nazi Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag were debated, and instant worldwide television transmissions of the Tiananmen Square Massacre allowed the Chinese Communist regime no denials.

Burning Bridges and One-Way Streets

Forcing men to commit atrocities is much easier than getting them to accept the atrocity as a bonding and empowering process. But once they have accepted the empowering process and firmly believe that their enemy is less than human and is deserving of what has happened to him, then they are stuck in a profound psychological trap.

Many students of German conduct during World War II are puzzled by the paradox of the Nazis’ handling of the war against Russia. On the one hand the Nazis had a remarkably competent war-fighting organization, while on the other hand they failed to capitalize on opportunities to “liberate” the Ukraine and convert defecting Soviet units to their cause. The problem was that the Nazis were entrapped by the very thing that enabled them. Their racist, atrocity-based denial of the humanity of their enemies made their forces powerful in battle, while it simultaneously prevented them from treating anyone other than an “Aryan” as a human being. Initially the Ukrainian people greeted the Nazis as liberators, and Soviet forces surrendered en masse, but they soon began to realize that there was something that was even worse than Stalinist Russia.

For now it would appear that atrocity has succeeded as policy in China and in Bosnia. In Vietnam, the North won by using atrocity. And for decades the Soviets stayed in power in Russia and Eastern Europe by wielding the dark power of atrocity. But in most cases those who attempt to wield atrocity as a systematic national policy have been struck down by this two-edged sword. Those who choose the path of atrocity have burned their bridges behind them. There is no turning back.

Enabling the Enemy

During the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, a German SS unit massacred a group of American POWs at Malmedy. Word of this massacre spread like wildfire through the American forces, and thousands of soldiers resolved never to surrender to the Germans. Conversely, as was mentioned earlier, many Germans who would fight the Russians to their last breath made a point of surrendering to the Americans at the earliest honorable occasion. Those who commit atrocities have burned their bridges behind them and know that they cannot surrender, but even