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Review Essay: The Psychology of Genocide1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Kristen Renwick Monroe
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Type
Review Essay
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 9 , March 1995 , pp. 215 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1995

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References

2 Canada provides an excellent example of a society with such cleavages but low levels of violence.Google Scholar

3 Although the practice of genocide has existed for centuries, the term itself was coined around 1933 by Raphael Lemkin as part of his campaign to obtain an international convention outlawing genocide. For further discussion of this, see Lemkin, 's 1944 study, Axis Rule In Occupied Europe (1944; New York: Howard Fertig, 1973)Google Scholar, or Kuper, Leo's excellent book Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Kuper also discusses the extent to which persecution of political groups constitutes genocide in his book The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)Google ScholarPubMed.

4 Different definitions of genocide are used in the literature. Fein pays particular attention to these definitional differences. Ethnocide is not considered as serious as genocide under existing international conventions.Google Scholar

5 Although some analysts (such as Fein) find this definition lacking, it remains the preeminent definition codified in international law.Google Scholar

6 Miller and Miller, Survivors, 45; Kuper, Genocide, 19.Google Scholar

7 See Kuper, Genocide and The Prevention of Genocide, or LeBlanc, Lawrence J., The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 2–3Google Scholar. Also quoted in Miller and Miller, Survivors, 209, n. 4.

8 Some analysts (for example, Kuper) believe a plural society is a prerequisite of genocide. I remain unconvinced since this would eliminate genocides between two countries or between societies, such as the genocides that occurred in colonial situations where it could be argued that two societies meet. Regardless of how one defines society, all analysts agree that the persistent nature of the cleavages between social groups is significant. Genocide has a long memory. The current fighting in Bosnia, for example, can be viewed as a continuation of the genocide against Serbs in the Second World War, which arose out of a long history of religious conflict between Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats, assisted by the Muslims.Google Scholar

9 Such formal institutionalization of political inequalities would guarantee that no more than 40 percent (for example) of the legislative seats would go to a particular religious, linguistic, or ethnic group.Google Scholar

10 Sartre, for example, claimed that colonization was a major creator of plural societies that lead to genocide.Google Scholar

11 Indeed, the present situation for Armenians is complicated by their existence in more than one nation.Google Scholar

12 The Armenian survivors, who believe the first step in forgiveness is the acknowledgment that a crime was committed, complained bitterly about this to the Millers.Google Scholar

13 See also Burleigh and Wippermann (1991) for an excellent analysis of the racial foundations of the Nazi state.Google Scholar

14 It is important that shared goals are not assumed to be volitional but are instead related to characteristics endowed by birth. For example, a Christian living in a predominantly Islamic region is presumed by virtue of being born a Christian to be opposed to the goal of creating an Islamic state. While the Christian could convert to Islam and then share this goal, it is considered most unlikely that one would do so while remaining Christian.Google Scholar

15 The Northern Ireland situation may differ from this scenario in this regard; that is, Protestants may share Unionist goals and vice versa. Whether this is related to the containment of ethnic violence in Northern Ireland provides intriguing speculation.Google Scholar

16 For the Native Americans in North and South America the white man's burden of bringing civilization and Christianity served this function.Google Scholar

17 Lerner's book makes a powerful and disturbing argument that the biological justification preceded Hitler. In particular, Lerner points to the importance of biological determinism, Social Darwinism, and eugenics as contributors to this justification for such inhumane treatment of human beings. He also makes the important point that this movement extended into “negative eugenics” such as infanticide, not just of Jewish children but of any children who were “diseased.” These included bedwetters, those with malformed ears, or merely those children marked by someone as “difficult to educate.” (p. 33.)

Browning also touches on the connection between biology and anti-Semitic policy in Path To Geno-cide, where the discussion focuses more on the role of medical authorities in closing the Polish ghettos and acquiescing in the eventual murder of the Jews as a way to restrict diseases the Jews supposedly carried. While Jews were singled out as the “eternal bloodsuckers, vampires, germ carriers, people's parasites, and maggots in the rotting corpse,” the “genetic determinist thinking in Germany prior to the advent of the Nazi era—involving the Social Darwinist Monist League, the eugenics movement, and the “new science” of racial hygiene—indicate that neither racist doctrines of National Socialism nor the ideas for their application to the social world either began with Hitler and his cohorts or were concen-trated in a small group of socially marginal fanatics” (Lerner, p. 31). Lemer's chapter 2 is particularly informative on the historical precedents for Nazi genocide, although chilling in its suggestion that Hitler was only one of many such advocates of biological determinism.

18 “[F]or at least two thousand years…social actions have been implemented based on the belief that certain people had something inherent in them, something in their blood, that made them less than human and consequently deserving of persecution or even death. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that this doctrine became broadly legitimated in society and science.” (Lerner, p. 11) Lerner spells out the relationship between Darwin's view of evolution, Spencer's social evolution, eugenics, and genocide, while making clear that the “connection between the doctrine of biological determinism (or, more specifically, of genetic determinism)…and racism and political movements…is neither a necessary nor an isomorphic one.” (Lerner, p. 17)

The British delegation to the first international eugenics conference, called to improve the race through the science of eugenics, was led by Winston Churchill.

19 Although much of the anti-Jewish legislation was in place by the end of 1933, Browning's volume pays special attention to the series of decisions (made between 1939 and 1941) which set up the Final Solution.Google Scholar

20 The intentionalists focus on Hitler and his ideology. They explain the Jewish policies as “primarily determined by the decisions of Adolf Hitler, which in turn were calculated or ‘intended’ to realize the goals of an ideologically derived ‘program’ to which he had clung with fanatical consistency since the 1920s.” In contrast, the functionalists emphasize the structure and institutions of the Third Reich, arguing that what occurred was an “unplanned ‘cumulative radicalization’ produced by the chaotic decision-making process of a polycratic regime and the ‘negative selection’ of destructive elements from the Nazis' ideological arsenal….” (p. 86).Google Scholar

21 Millet is a religious sect in the Arabic language. The Turks borrowed this term to refer to the national corporations set up by Sultan Mohammed II in his attempt to reorganize the Ottoman state as the heir to the Eastern Roman empire in 1453. As originally established, each millet had a written charter and was presided over by a patriarch who was elected by his community and who served as liaison between this community and the government, at whose pleasure he held office. The millets had effective authority over religion, culture, education, and social life, but their political power was limited.Google Scholar

22 Many of the writers on genocide are driven by their own family experiences. Lerner opens his book with a touching story from his Jewish grandmother. Lorna Miller's parents were survivors of the deportations and the Millers are quite open about the extent to which their book constitutes an act of love on their part for her parents, the Armenian community, and the other children who endured these deportations. Given this emotional involvement, it is worth remarking on the extent to which all the books reviewed here reflect both the scholars' sense of fairness and respect for the truth and the passion of the partisan.Google Scholar

23 In fact, the Armenians were given quotas, and if they did not have enough guns they had to buy them from their Turkish neighbors before they could hand them in to authorities.Google Scholar

24 The similarity of this to the Nazi pattern is striking; the use of the murder of a minor German official (not even a Nazi Party member) in Paris by a Jewish refugee as the excuse for Kristallnacht is but one example.Google Scholar

25 The fact that Armenians were given the option of converting also differs from the situation for the Jews under the Nazis. Such conversions are referred to as white genocide, for although the individual member of a group is not killed the culture itself is effectively destroyed when its members are assimilated into the dominant culture through conversion or dispersion into the diaspora.Google Scholar

26 Two nationalistic physicians were heavily involved in organizing the killer units. Other physicians were also involved in the Armenian genocide. One was accused in postwar trials of having gassed and poisoned infants and children, others of poisoning or of disposing of bodies.Google Scholar

27 Since bullets are an expensive way to kill people, state-induced famine has been an effective tool of genocide in places like Stalin's Ukraine (James E. Mace, in Fein, 113).Google Scholar

28 The mass starvations that occurred under Stalin are frequently described as deliberate genocide. Starvation of the Jews in the ghettos was a conscious part of the Nazi genocide, as Browning makes clear in The Path To Genocide.Google Scholar

29 Some scholars argue that the number was as low as 800,000. Much of the controversy centers on the size of the Armenian population in Turkey at this time and whether or not to calculate statistics from the period 1894 to 1923 or to use the narrower time frame of 1915 to 1916.Google Scholar

30 Michael Urben has suggested in private conversation that genocidal psychology oscillates between two stages. In the first phase, the genocidalist constructs an enemy who is prepared to victimize him and his people. This sets up the genocidalist as pure victim. The emotions are focused on the need to protect oneself and family. This is what Urben calls the energy-building moment, the moment at which moral culpability enters. (My killing others is justified as a preemptive attack on those who threaten me.) Urben notes that this passive moment actually contains the hot emotions. The second moment is the dehumanizing moment. Here, the emotions are no longer hot but cold as the genocidalist engages in the physical act of murder, as we would coldly and ruthlessly exterminate insects. Ironically, then, genocide seems the opposite of the frenzied killing during battle in which one goes berserk.Google Scholar

31 Talaat, quoted in Miller and Miller, Survivors, 90.Google Scholar

32 “In mid-March of 1942, some 75 to 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, while some 20 to 25 percent had already perished. A mere eleven months later, in mid-February 1943, the situation was exactly the reverse. Some 75 to 80 percent of all Holocaust victims were already dead, and a mere 20 to 25 percent still clung to a precarious existence…. The center of gravity of this mass murder was Poland” (Browning, Path To Genocide, 168).Google Scholar

33 Although Buchmann received another assignment, a cruel fate meant that after the war he was one of the few men in Battalion 101 to receive punishment for his actions.Google Scholar

34 Bittner, one of the few men to openly oppose the Battalion's actions toward the Jews, tells that he was assigned Sunday duties and special watches because of this opposition:

[F]rom the first days I left no doubt among my comrades that I disapproved of these measures and never volunteered for them. Thus, on one of the first searches for Jews, one of my comrades clubbed a Jewish woman in my presence, and I hit him in the face. A report was made, and in that way my attitude became known to my superiors. I was never officially punished… but anyone who knows how the system works knows that outside official punish-ment there is the possibility for chicanery that more than makes up for punishment. (p. 129)

35 Babi Yar was a ravine near Kiev and the site of one of the largest massacres in history, in which 100,000 bodies were found, 35,000 of whom were Jews believed massacred on September 29–30, 1941.Google Scholar

36 Lerner offers further disturbing evidence of the limited extent to which the Nazi perpetrators of genocide were ever prosecuted.Google Scholar

37 This special identity did not exempt these Jews from being killed but it did often forestall death or, ironically, mean that the death would be sudden and unexpected, something that in the bizarre world of the Nazis was meant as a special kindness. “By 1942 standards of German-Jewish relations, a quick death without the agony of anticipation was considered an example of human compassion!” (p. 154–55).Google Scholar

38 The cynic might draw the following general moral principle from this: Better to slaughter innocent women and children than lose face in front of one's comrades.Google Scholar

39 Frenzy has been used to explain the kind of brutality that occurs in war (as at My Lai) and in domestic situations where there appears to be the overuse of power by authorities, as in the 1992 Rodney King beating in Los Angeles.Google Scholar

40 “Many scholars of the Holocaust…have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process. This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim…. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range. No one confronted the reality of mass murder more directly than the men in the woods at Jozefow. Segmentation and routinization, the depersonalizing aspects of bureau-cratized killing, cannot explain the battalion's initial behavior there.” (Browning, Path to Genocide, 162).Google Scholar

41 Steiner, , “The SS Yesterday and Today: A Sociopsychological View,” in Dimsdale, Joel E., ed., Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust (Washington: Hemisphere Publishing, 1980), 431–43Google Scholar.