How and why do people sometimes mass murder others because they belong to a different race, creed or people? Historians and sociologists often say that it is mainly 'the circumstances' that determine everything. Forced by the situation, 'you and I' can also be a camp executioner. ’ One of the great clichés of our time, says Abram de Swaan in his new book Compartments of destruction.
In 1963, the Jewish philosopher and journalist Hannah Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem against Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. She noticed one thing in particular about the person responsible for the Holocaust on trial:what an insignificant, meaningless little man that Eichmann really was.
In her report, with the famous subtitle A report on the banality of evil, Arendt described him as an ordinary bourgeois man, used to following orders and not thinking too much for himself. Eichmann was then partly responsible for the mass extermination of the Jews during the Second World War, there was nothing special about his character.
That description fit her time. In the 1950s, the Nazi mentality was ridiculed with the ironic slogan Befehl ist Befehl. The perpetrators of the Holocaust were mainly accused of following orders docilely and unscrupulously, and knowingly sent millions of Jews to their deaths. Ordinary 'banal' men, who did horrible things due to circumstances. Eichmann was one of them, according to Arendt. But even in 1963 there was evidence that Eichmann was anything but a "banal" bureaucrat who only followed orders. He was known as one of the most fanatical jew hunters of the Nazi regime.
Eichmann worked day and night to ensure that the logistics surrounding the Final Solution of the Judenfrage run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. Arendt fell for the defensive technique used by many Nazis after the war:the passing of personal responsibility by referring to orders from above. Eichmann merely pretended to be a "normal" man who followed orders. In this way, many perpetrators of the Holocaust had previously received a reduced sentence.
But Arendt's Banality of Evil became an outright bestseller. Adolf Eichmann as the embodiment of the faceless, thoughtless killer stuck with the general public. According to Arendt, no special murderous personality was needed to commit genocide. If this boring bourgeois man can commit an industrialized mass murder, then perhaps everyone is capable of the same evil.
Electric shocks
Also in 1963, American psychologist Stanley Milgram published the results of his notorious research in which volunteers had to administer 'electric shocks' to a 'student', in reality an actor, whenever he made a mistake in reproducing word combinations he memorized. should have learned. A small majority of the contestants continued to ramp up the voltage of the shocks, despite the actor's increasingly loud yelling. Simply because the researcher, an authority in a white coat, instructed them.
The combination and popularization of the work of Arendt and Milgram, later supplemented by countless other studies, led to a still popular way of thinking about genocide:potentially all people are genocidal perpetrators, they just have never been in a situation where that would turn out to be the case. In the right circumstances, 'you and I' could also be a camp executioner, it is often said. Many writers and historians have tried to explain the Holocaust and other genocides with the help of Arendt and Milgram.
But it is also a cliché full of hidden assumptions and strange twists and turns, sociologist Abram de Swaan now states in his new book Compartments of destruction. More than a third of Milgram's volunteers refused to deliver stronger shocks at some point and chose to do so consciously. Isn't it strange then that Milgram drew only one conclusion? Namely that it was mainly the situation, not the personality, that determined whether someone continued to administer the shocks?
Investigating perpetrators of genocide is difficult, admits De Swaan. During the crime, outsiders have no access to the perpetrators and afterwards they have the utmost interest in concealing their actions and distorting the truth. But a proper sociological study of perpetrators of genocide has never been conducted, writes De Swaan. In sociology and psychology, people must be understood in the context of the specific situation in which they find themselves and in terms of their individual personality. But apparently this does not apply to genocide perpetrators. What we think we know about the perpetrators of genocides is therefore all too often based on clichés.
“Why? I have a lot of choices.”
In Compartments of Destruction De Swaan makes an attempt to ignore this. Central to almost every genocide is the psychological process of "compartmentalization"; the inclusion and exclusion of certain groups or individuals. Compartmentalization must be understood first if you want to be able to say anything meaningful about the origin and course of genocides and the behavior of perpetrators. De Swaan describes in detail how this process took place in various genocides, such as the Holocaust, but also the genocide by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia and that in Rwanda.
His subject is and remains sensitive, and De Swaan is well aware of this. Compartments of Destruction is a book about perpetrators, even mass murderers. But that is not to say that it cannot and should not be examined in the same way as other phenomena in sociology.
Very strong, compelling and in a remarkably sober way, De Swaan disproves old explanatory models, such as in the Milgram experiment:'The 'researcher' forces his participant to continue with the shocks and says:"You have no choice." The man replies, “Why? I have a lot of choices.” And he stops. An ordinary person, "just like you and me", refused to inflict suffering on another person under the same circumstances.'
De Swaan asks many new questions about his research subject. But there is no definitive answer, he warns in the introduction. Because every question leads to new questions, some questions must remain open, and there are only uncomfortable answers. Nevertheless, this is an impressive and important book.