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Le vite ordinarie dei carnefici
Per Richard Rechtman, non sono le ideologie a uccidere, ma le persone. Persone che se ne incaricano apparentemente senza problemi, uccidendo con la stessa facilità con cui altri vanno al lavoro. Questo libro compie una vera e propria discesa agli inferi nella vita quotidiana dei responsabili di genocidio e nel loro processo di immunizzazione rispetto alla sofferenza e alla morte. Sonda le abitudini di uomini indifferenti, capaci di giustiziare decine di persone ogni giorno. E dimostra che a occupare la maggior parte dei loro pensieri non è l’atto di uccidere: più semplicemente quella è la loro vita quotidiana. Eseguono il loro terribile compito con la stessa tenacia e fatica richieste da un lavoro qualsiasi. Perché a uccidere con tanta facilità non sono i più motivati, i più sadici o i più indottrinati, ma soprattutto i più disponibili. Questo perturbante saggio sulla violenza estrema non si prefigge dunque di sapere chi siano questi carnefici o in nome di cosa possano tormentare e uccidere, ma di mostrare quali elementi, in contesti particolari, consentano ad alcuni uomini di trasformarsi in anonimi operai della morte.
178 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2022
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October 17, 2021
Richard Rechtman has a very unusual job, even for a psychiatrist. He studies men and women who commit genocide, slaughtering people by the hundreds and thousands as their full time job. In the English edition of his newest book Living in Death (first published in French one year ago) Rechtman applies his decades of experience to show how truly ordinary and even mediocre the genocidaires really are.
In deep research and innumerable personal interviews, Rechtman has found that people who kill all day are not psychos. They do not exhibit blood lust. They are not criminally insane. They are not out to wipe out a race or creed. They aren’t extreme supremacists. It’s not like they can’t wait to kill again. They appreciate a day off.
They tend to be ordinary people, really ordinary, with pressure from their managers, complaints about their working conditions and the usual family stresses. They are not rising stars; they tend to be average and mediocre. Killing is not a fabulous career move; it is a living. He says of them: “They only admit to sometimes having felt disgust, to often having experienced fatigue and to regularly having been tired of repeating the same gestures. These were their only secrets.”
They complain about repetitive gestures, such as firing their weapons constantly all day, or having to grip a knife for hours on end, or having to club people to death by hitting them repeatedly. Maybe fifty of them during their shift. They don’t like the smell. They’re not fond of cleaning up the mess.
Killing on an industrial scale is a logistical challenge too. On a daily basis, they have to get the victims together, maybe by transport, slaughter them, then ship the bodies out and dump them in mass graves or incinerate them. It all requires planning, organization and labor. And like any other low level job, it is boring, repetitive, annoying and unrewarding. There is blood everywhere, and bodies to dispose of. Job satisfaction is low.
They joke about death a lot, because that is their milieu.
They drink a lot after work, much like working class people everywhere.
They don’t really notice that they are killing people. They don’t know names or faces, histories or families. They have one thing to do, and they do it.
It was the same in Germany, Russia, Rwanda, Poland, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Eritrea and throughout history, when people told their own stories.
Among Rechtman’s numerous findings is that many are forced into it, or face death themselves. Refusing such an assignment is a big black mark in a society where the government sees its role as killing a large segment of the population. Refuse, and you could easily become one of Them. The neighbors will know; the family will know. The secret police will know.
It is not evil to them. Rather, evil “lies in the idea of disobeying orders, failing to accomplish the tasks with which they have been charged, or worse- proving to be unworthy of their hierarchical superiors’ confidence,” he says. For mediocre little men like Eichmann (Nazi Germany) and Duch (Cambodia),”this fear of ‘evil’ becomes an obsession. It is the source of their fears and the thing that guides their consciences, acts, and even eventually their regrets and remorse.”
In studying mass murders in numerous countries (there seems to be no shortage), Cambodia sticks out because it doesn’t fit the definition. The UN says mass murder pertains to some identifiable Other in society: another nationality, another race, another religion, another class. The definition is necessary for prosecutions to take place if and when the perpetrators are caught. But in Cambodia, Pol Pot mobilized the whole country to slaughter “the new people”, those who lived in cities rather than farming in the country (the old people). Before they knew what happened to them, he rounded up everyone in cities and shipped them to killing fields, where they were questioned, beaten and murdered. Maybe two million people (a third of the population – in less than four years), who might even have been supporters. Just the fact they used their brains instead of their muscles was enough for a summary execution in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge-run Cambodia.
When he was tried, some thirty years later, Duch, who ran the infamous S-21 operation in Cambodia, turned out to be a small weakling, who only feared his superiors not approving of his performance. He never killed anyone, he said. He was doing his job, managing a large government agency that happened to be mass murderers.
Pol Pot’s government turned the whole country into an elimination plant. The nation was plastered with signs, posters and banners that said things like: “Better to destroy ten innocent people than to let one enemy go free.” It became the daily normal for everyone.
The daily normal could also be seen around Nazi concentration camps. Rechtman cites Marie Albrecht, a letter carrier, who passed the Sobibor camp on her way to work every day. She said everyone knew Jews were being exterminated in that facility. “One side (was) mail sorting, and on the other, Jews (were) gassed.” It was not controversial; it was daily, ordinary life.
In these societies, “Mass murder is explicitly included in everyone’s ordinary life,” Rechtman says. It becomes routine and banal. It is found in daily conversation, letters from parents to their children, and of course in government edicts. In some instances, it became a tourist attraction. People in Poland asked to shoot into the mass grave pits of Jews just for the thrill of it. In the USA, people sold postcards of lynchings at other lynchings. In Cambodia they held throat-slitting contests. Daily routine (quotidien) is the most common term in the book, showing up several times on seemingly every page.
But Rechtman specifically denies that everyone can be a mass murderer. It is not a character flaw of Man. It is not innate. It is not true that a whole country can be transformed into psychotic killers. Humans are not ready-made to be tipped over into being murderers. But for certain people, it becomes a living.
He tells the stories of several young men who escaped Afghanistan and made it to France (usually they head for Calais to try to get to England where there is a well-established Afghan community). Back home, the Taliban come for them as soon as they hit age 17. They berate and beat and torture them into becoming heartless killers. Their task list for the day is kidnapping girls, conscripting boys, and killing several people, maybe whole families. And killing anyone who gets in the way. Then they go home.
But many young men refuse. It could cause their families to be murdered, their homes bombed, and still they are sought out by the relentless Taliban, made up of those who were themselves conscripted. So many young men make a run for it. Smugglers take their money and get them into another country, where other smugglers catch them, beat them and extort money from their families to free them. This gets them to another country where the same thing happens again. Eventually, smugglers extort money from the whole village to spare the boy and send him on to another country.
If he can survive it all and make it to France, he has nothing left but regrets, as France denies him asylum. His story is just not horrifying enough. That might be terrible, but the point of the stories is that plenty of young men flat out refuse to become killers. They will sacrifice everything to avoid it. Those who accept reflect the lower quality, ordinary and banal characteristics Rechtman describes of mass murderers all over the world.
As I read, I thought often of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, about working lives in the slaughterhouse and meat packing district of Chicago in 1906. It too was quotidien. The book upset the whole country and led Teddy Roosevelt to push for laws on working conditions, sanitation and humanitarian killing – of animals. I wonder what Rechtman would say about a comparison.
Rechtman has been doing this for a long time, and his writing reflects it. It is straightforward and fact-filled, with little or no drama, emotion or color on his part. Clinical probably describes it best. There is a high level of certainty to it, as the pattern repeats all over the world and throughout history. Although he does his duty and also examines serial killers, official executioners and the writings of Freud, Milgram and others, that isn’t what this book is about. It is about ordinary people doing a job to stay out of trouble and impress the boss. It is, unfortunately, profoundly memorable.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
In deep research and innumerable personal interviews, Rechtman has found that people who kill all day are not psychos. They do not exhibit blood lust. They are not criminally insane. They are not out to wipe out a race or creed. They aren’t extreme supremacists. It’s not like they can’t wait to kill again. They appreciate a day off.
They tend to be ordinary people, really ordinary, with pressure from their managers, complaints about their working conditions and the usual family stresses. They are not rising stars; they tend to be average and mediocre. Killing is not a fabulous career move; it is a living. He says of them: “They only admit to sometimes having felt disgust, to often having experienced fatigue and to regularly having been tired of repeating the same gestures. These were their only secrets.”
They complain about repetitive gestures, such as firing their weapons constantly all day, or having to grip a knife for hours on end, or having to club people to death by hitting them repeatedly. Maybe fifty of them during their shift. They don’t like the smell. They’re not fond of cleaning up the mess.
Killing on an industrial scale is a logistical challenge too. On a daily basis, they have to get the victims together, maybe by transport, slaughter them, then ship the bodies out and dump them in mass graves or incinerate them. It all requires planning, organization and labor. And like any other low level job, it is boring, repetitive, annoying and unrewarding. There is blood everywhere, and bodies to dispose of. Job satisfaction is low.
They joke about death a lot, because that is their milieu.
They drink a lot after work, much like working class people everywhere.
They don’t really notice that they are killing people. They don’t know names or faces, histories or families. They have one thing to do, and they do it.
It was the same in Germany, Russia, Rwanda, Poland, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Eritrea and throughout history, when people told their own stories.
Among Rechtman’s numerous findings is that many are forced into it, or face death themselves. Refusing such an assignment is a big black mark in a society where the government sees its role as killing a large segment of the population. Refuse, and you could easily become one of Them. The neighbors will know; the family will know. The secret police will know.
It is not evil to them. Rather, evil “lies in the idea of disobeying orders, failing to accomplish the tasks with which they have been charged, or worse- proving to be unworthy of their hierarchical superiors’ confidence,” he says. For mediocre little men like Eichmann (Nazi Germany) and Duch (Cambodia),”this fear of ‘evil’ becomes an obsession. It is the source of their fears and the thing that guides their consciences, acts, and even eventually their regrets and remorse.”
In studying mass murders in numerous countries (there seems to be no shortage), Cambodia sticks out because it doesn’t fit the definition. The UN says mass murder pertains to some identifiable Other in society: another nationality, another race, another religion, another class. The definition is necessary for prosecutions to take place if and when the perpetrators are caught. But in Cambodia, Pol Pot mobilized the whole country to slaughter “the new people”, those who lived in cities rather than farming in the country (the old people). Before they knew what happened to them, he rounded up everyone in cities and shipped them to killing fields, where they were questioned, beaten and murdered. Maybe two million people (a third of the population – in less than four years), who might even have been supporters. Just the fact they used their brains instead of their muscles was enough for a summary execution in Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge-run Cambodia.
When he was tried, some thirty years later, Duch, who ran the infamous S-21 operation in Cambodia, turned out to be a small weakling, who only feared his superiors not approving of his performance. He never killed anyone, he said. He was doing his job, managing a large government agency that happened to be mass murderers.
Pol Pot’s government turned the whole country into an elimination plant. The nation was plastered with signs, posters and banners that said things like: “Better to destroy ten innocent people than to let one enemy go free.” It became the daily normal for everyone.
The daily normal could also be seen around Nazi concentration camps. Rechtman cites Marie Albrecht, a letter carrier, who passed the Sobibor camp on her way to work every day. She said everyone knew Jews were being exterminated in that facility. “One side (was) mail sorting, and on the other, Jews (were) gassed.” It was not controversial; it was daily, ordinary life.
In these societies, “Mass murder is explicitly included in everyone’s ordinary life,” Rechtman says. It becomes routine and banal. It is found in daily conversation, letters from parents to their children, and of course in government edicts. In some instances, it became a tourist attraction. People in Poland asked to shoot into the mass grave pits of Jews just for the thrill of it. In the USA, people sold postcards of lynchings at other lynchings. In Cambodia they held throat-slitting contests. Daily routine (quotidien) is the most common term in the book, showing up several times on seemingly every page.
But Rechtman specifically denies that everyone can be a mass murderer. It is not a character flaw of Man. It is not innate. It is not true that a whole country can be transformed into psychotic killers. Humans are not ready-made to be tipped over into being murderers. But for certain people, it becomes a living.
He tells the stories of several young men who escaped Afghanistan and made it to France (usually they head for Calais to try to get to England where there is a well-established Afghan community). Back home, the Taliban come for them as soon as they hit age 17. They berate and beat and torture them into becoming heartless killers. Their task list for the day is kidnapping girls, conscripting boys, and killing several people, maybe whole families. And killing anyone who gets in the way. Then they go home.
But many young men refuse. It could cause their families to be murdered, their homes bombed, and still they are sought out by the relentless Taliban, made up of those who were themselves conscripted. So many young men make a run for it. Smugglers take their money and get them into another country, where other smugglers catch them, beat them and extort money from their families to free them. This gets them to another country where the same thing happens again. Eventually, smugglers extort money from the whole village to spare the boy and send him on to another country.
If he can survive it all and make it to France, he has nothing left but regrets, as France denies him asylum. His story is just not horrifying enough. That might be terrible, but the point of the stories is that plenty of young men flat out refuse to become killers. They will sacrifice everything to avoid it. Those who accept reflect the lower quality, ordinary and banal characteristics Rechtman describes of mass murderers all over the world.
As I read, I thought often of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, about working lives in the slaughterhouse and meat packing district of Chicago in 1906. It too was quotidien. The book upset the whole country and led Teddy Roosevelt to push for laws on working conditions, sanitation and humanitarian killing – of animals. I wonder what Rechtman would say about a comparison.
Rechtman has been doing this for a long time, and his writing reflects it. It is straightforward and fact-filled, with little or no drama, emotion or color on his part. Clinical probably describes it best. There is a high level of certainty to it, as the pattern repeats all over the world and throughout history. Although he does his duty and also examines serial killers, official executioners and the writings of Freud, Milgram and others, that isn’t what this book is about. It is about ordinary people doing a job to stay out of trouble and impress the boss. It is, unfortunately, profoundly memorable.
David Wineberg
If you liked this review, I invite you to read my book The Straight Dope. It’s an essay collection based on my first thousand reviews and what I learned. Right now it’s FREE for Prime members, otherwise — cheap! Reputed to be fascinating and a superfast read. https://www.amazon.com/Straight-Dope-...
July 3, 2024
Libro poco sistematico e confuso. L'autore saltabecca da un esperto all'altro, da un esempio all'altro, come se non avesse una direzione precisa. Verso la fine, in una sorta di ricapitolazione, ci dice che ciò che caratterizza gli esecutori degli sterminî di massa è la loro ordinarietà, uomini comuni che svolgono la loro attività con indifferenza; c'è chi fa la fiorista o il camionista e c'è chi fa l'assassino al servizio di un regime, un lavoro come tanti in cui i fastidî maggiori sono la ripetitività del compito e la stanchezza fisica che induce. Ma ho letto altri libri che pongono la questione in maniera diversa, più complessa, quindi non so se fidarmi del tutto. Poi, nelle ultime pagine, l'autore compie una sorta di piroetta teorica e aggiunge che, sì, c'è chi finisce per ammazzare in serie quando le circostanze lo impongono o lo permettono, ma moltissimi altri si sottraggono o si ribellano. Però non spiega cosa faccia la differenza, o se lo spiega io non l'ho colto.
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February 20, 2023french academic wrote something i enjoyed
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