I am grateful to a number of scholars who read and commented on drafts of all or parts of the book. The sociologist Helen Fein, the historian David Wyman, and the German psychologist Wolfgang Stroebe, as well as two anonymous reviewers, commented on the whole book; the historian Robert Potash commented on the chapter on Argentina, and the anthropologist Joel Halpern commented on the chapter on Cambodia.
The book was typed and retyped on the computer as I revised and edited it. The staff of the psychology department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst provided essential help. Melanie Bellenoit was involved from the beginning to the end; her contribution was outstanding and invaluable. Joanne Daughdrill, Amanda Morgan, Stacie Melcher and Jean Glenowicz also made significant contributions. Lisa Sheehy did an excellent job in collecting some materials on Turkey and Argentina and translating some Spanish sources. People routinely thank their families for help and support. Mine certainly deserves thanks. Once more they lived with me through years of the obsession of writing a book – an obsession perhaps more intense with this book – and with books about mass killing, genocide, and torture lying around the house. I am grateful to Sylvia, Adrian and Daniel for their forbearance and love. I hope that my continuing interest in and work on some of the positive aspects of human behavior provided relief for them, as I hope that my concern throughout this book with the roots and evolution of caring, helping, altruism, cooperation, and nonaggression will do the same for the readers of this book.
Finally, I appreciated the hospitality of the Department of Phychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where I worked on this book in the spring of 1987.
Part I
Psychological and cultural bases of genocide and other forms of group violence
1 An introduction
A central issue of our times is the murder, torture, and mistreatment of whole groups of people. The widespread hope and belief that human beings had become increasingly “civilized” was shattered by the events of the Second World War, particularly the systematic, deliberate extermination of six million Jews by Hitler’s Third Reich. Millions of other noncombatants were also killed, systematically or randomly and carelessly.
The destruction of human groups has a long history. In many ancient wars inhabitants of cities were massacred, often with great brutality, and the cities razed to the ground. Many religious wars were extremely brutal, if not genocidal. Our own century has witnessed, in addition to two world wars, mass killings by colonial powers, the genocide of the Armenians, and the mass destruction of lives in the Soviet Union through repeated purges and deliberate starvation of peasants.
Genocides, mass killings, and other cruelties inflicted on groups of people have not ceased since the Second World War. Consider the millions killed by their own people in Cambodia and Indonesia, the killing of the Hutu in Burundi, the Ibo in Nigeria, the Ache Indians in Paraguay, and the Buddhists in Tibet, and the mass killings in Uganda. Dictatorial governments have recently tended to kill not only individuals but whole groups of people seen as actual or potential enemies. This trend is evident in the Argentine disappearances and the death squad killings in El Salvador and Guatemala.
How can human beings kill multitudes of men and women, children and old people?a How does the motivation arise for this in the face of the powerful prohibition against murder that most of us are taught? We must understand the psychological, cultural, and societal roots of genocide and mass killing if we are to stop such human destructiveness. As cultures, societies, and individual human beings we must learn how to live together in harmony and resist influences that turn us against each other. My analysis is intended as a contribution to these goals.
Genocide and war have much in common. In one, a society turns against a subgroup seen as an internal enemy; in the the other, a society turns against a group seen as an external enemy. Identifying the origins of genocide and mass killing will also help to enlighten us about sources of war, torture, and lesser cruelties such as group discrimination that can be steps to mass killing or genocide.
Aggression, violence, torture, and the mistreatment of human beings are all around us. But kindness, helpfulness, generosity, and love also abound. Some Christians in Nazi-occupied Europe risked their lives to save Jews and other persecuted people. Many nations helped in response to starvation in Cambodia at the end of the 1970s and Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, the destruction wrought by earthquake in Soviet Armenia in 1988, and other tragedies.
This book presents a conception of how a subgroup of a society, whether historically established or newly created (such as the “new people” in Cambodia, the name the Khmer Rouge gave the inhabitants of cities they forced into the countryside), comes to be mistreated and destroyed by a more powerful group or a government. The conception is then applied to the analysis of four instances: in greatest depth to the Holocaust, the extermination of six million Jews in Nazi Germany; to the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey in 1915-16; the genocide in Cambodia in the late 1970s; and the disappearance and mass killing of people in Argentina during those same years.
The approach and content of the book
A brief preview. Certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society, combined with
