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The Genocidal Mindset - Page 2

© Ralph Zuljan

While most people would comfortably condemn the lack of moral courage that Dyson mentions, the moral dilemma would not be so readily dispensed with if such persons were placed in the organizational context in which it took place. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist who conducted a now famous series of postwar experiments into the willingness of individuals to do harm to others as a consequence of obedience to authority, noted that "even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped Cyclon-B into the gas chambers was able to justify his behavior on the grounds that he was only following orders from above. Thus there is a fragmentation of the total human act; no one man decides..." (Obedience to Authority, 11). Milgram's psychological experiments demonstrated beyond doubt that "ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process" (6). Even so, the idea that it could have happened here -- and in an other form did happen here -- is an ethically devastating conclusion that very few have come to terms with.

During the war, the sophistication of bureaucratic organization made hitherto unthinkable possibilities thinkable through the distancing of the individuals engaged in tasks assigned to the organization as a whole. The war gave rise to several bureaucracies dedicated to killing an objectively defined enemy on a mass scale. This is the uncomfortable link between the Holocaust and strategic bombing; Himmler, Harris and LeMay had more in common than is generally admissible even in the present day. The target enemy in each case was defined as such without regard to the combatant vs. noncombatant status of the groups of individuals targeted. These bureaucracies were not only tasked with mass killing, they were driven to do so efficiently and technological innovations facilitated the process while ensuring that the psychological distancing of the perpetrators increased as a result. Gas chambers and atomic bombs were both results of a search for superior ways of killing large numbers of individuals collectively. The fact that such results were realized confirmed to the collective and individual conscientiousness a change in the meaning of war.

For the individuals who lived through it, therefore, the Second World War produced a social transformation with which we have yet to come to terms. There is no meaningful way of describing the sum total impact of this event without becoming clinical. There is no way to absorb the individual experiences of the millions of people who endured the direful events of the war without a descent into madness. Distancing was necessary at the time and remains necessary if we are to avoid that descent, but it has produced a generally depressed and somewhat nihilistic world view as we try to reconcile what was, and what is, with what our ethical sense suggests should be.

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