We see the rapists entrapped in atrocity: caught red-handed and knowing that if they surrender they will be executed, they have no option but to try to fight. We see Stuart-Smyth’s reluctance to kill these men even in the face of their atrocities. We see the low target attractiveness associated with the ludicrous and harmless sight of a naked man with his arms waving “frantically up and down, like a featherless black bird attempting to take flight.” We see the role of obedience-demanding authority in that even in the face of all this provocation Stuart-Smyth must be ordered to kill. We see a diffusion of responsibility in that the individual giving the order to kill did not fire his weapon. We can see the development of Stuart-Smyth’s rationalization and acceptance process as he first says, “I didn’t feel a damn thing!” and later contradicts this statement by saying, “I didn’t feel guilt, shame, or remorse at killing my fellow man — I felt pride!” And we can see that Stuart-Smyth’s rationalization and acceptance was gready assisted by the fact that the men he killed were committing atrocities.
We see all these things. But most of all, as we see them, we see the powerful process of atrocity at work in the lives of the individuals playing out their parts in this tiny microcosm of war.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Price and Process of Atrocity
The psychological trauma of living with what one has done to one’s fellow man may represent the most significant toll taken by atrocity. Those who commit atrocity have made a Faustian bargain with evil. They have sold their conscience, their future, and their peace of mind for a brief, fleeting, self-destructive advantage.
Sections of this study have been devoted to examining the remarkable power of man’s resistance to kill, to the psychological leverage and manipulation required to get men to kill, and to the trauma resulting from it. Once we have taken all of these things into consideration, then we can see that the psychological burden of committing atrocities must be tremendous.
But let me make it
The Cost of Compliance…
The killer can be empowered by his killing, but ultimately, often years later, he may bear the emotional burden of guilt that he has buried with his acts. This guilt becomes virtually unavoidable when the killer’s side has lost and must answer for its actions — which, as we have seen, is one of the reasons that forcing participation in atrocities is such a strangely effective way of motivating men in combat.
Here we see a German soldier who, years later, has to face the enormity of his actions:
[He] retains a stark image of the burning of some peasant huts in Russia, their owners still inside them. “We saw the children and the women with their babies and then I heard the poouff — the flame had broken through the thatched roof and there was a yellow-brown smoke column going up into the air. It didn’t hit me all that much then, but when I think of it now — I slaughtered those people. I murdered them.”
The guilt and trauma of an average human being who is forced to murder innocent civilians don’t necessarily have to wait years before they well up into revulsion and rebellion. Sometimes, the executioner cannot resist the forces that cause him to kill, but the still, small voice of humanity and guilt wins out shortly thereafter. And if the soldier truly acknowledges the magnitude of his crime, he must rebel violently. As a World War II intelligence officer, Glenn Gray interviewed a German defector who was morally awakened by his participation in an execution:
I shall always remember the face of a German soldier when he described such a drastic awakening…. At the time we picked him up for investigation… in 1944, he was fighting with the French Maquis against his own people. To my question concerning his motives for deserting to the French Resistance, he responded by describing his earlier involvement in German reprisal raids against the French. On one such raid, his unit was ordered to burn a village and allow none of the villagers to escape…. As he told how women and children were shot as they fled screaming from the flames of their burning homes, the soldier’s face was contorted in painful fashion and he was nearly unable to breathe. It was quite clear that this extreme experience had shocked him into full awareness of his own guilt, a guilt he feared he would never atone. At the moment of that awakening he did not have the courage or resolution to hinder the massacre, but his desertion to the Resistance soon after was evidence of a radically new course.
On rare occasions those who are commanded to execute human beings have the remarkable moral fiber necessary to stare directly into the face of the obedience-demanding authority and refuse to kill. These situations represent such a degree of moral courage that they sometimes become legendary. Precise narratives of a soldier’s personal kills are usually very hard to extract in an interview, but in the case of individuals who refused to participate in acts that they considered to be wrong, the soldiers are usually extremely proud of their actions and are pleased to tell their story.
Earlier in this study, we saw the World War I veteran who took tremendous pride in “outsmarting” the army and intentionally missing while a member of a firing squad, and we saw the Contra mercenary who was overjoyed that he and his comrades spontaneously decided to intentionally miss a boat full of civilians. A veteran of the Christian militia in Lebanon had several personal kills that he was quite willing to tell me about, but he also had a situation in which he was ordered to fire on a car and refused to do so. He was unsure of who was in the car, and he was proud to say that he actually went to the stockade rather than kill in this situation.
All of us would like to believe that we would not participate in atrocities. That we could deny our friends and leaders and even turn our weapons on them if need be. But there are profound processes involved that prevent such confrontation of peers and leaders in atrocity circumstance. The first involves group absolution and peer pressure.
In a way, the obedience-demanding authority, the killer, and his peers are all diffusing the responsibility among themselves. The authority is protected from the trauma of, and responsibility for, killing because others do the dirty work. The killer can rationalize that the responsibility really belongs to the authority and that his guilt is diffused among everyone who stands beside him and pulls the trigger with him. This diffusion of responsibility and group absolution of guilt is the basic psychological leverage that makes all firing squads and most atrocity situations function.
Group absolution can work within a group of strangers (as in a firing-squad situation), but if an individual is bonded to the group, then peer pressure interacts with group absolution in such a way as to almost force atrocity participation. Thus it is extraordinarily difficult for a man who is bonded by links of mutual affection and interdependence to break away and openly refuse to participate in what the group is doing, even if it is killing innocent women and children.
Another powerful process that ensures compliance in atrocity situations is the impact of terrorism and self- preservation. The shock and horror of seeing
