Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ervin Staub
Started reading
September 5, 2020
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.
Dictatorial governments have recently tended to kill not only individuals but whole groups of people seen as actual or potential enemies.
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.
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.
Certain characteristics of a culture and the structure of a society, combined with great difficulties or hardships of life and social disorganization, are the starting point for genocide or mass killing.
Under extremely difficult life conditions certain motives dominate: protecting the physical well-being of oneself and one’s family and preserving one’s psychological self, including self-concept and values; making sense of life’s problems and social disorganization and gaining a new comprehension of the world, among others.
a society that has long devalued a group and discriminated against its members, has strong respect for authority, and has an overly superior and/or vulnerable self-concept is more likely to turn against a subgroup.
Genocide does not result directly. There is usually a progression of actions.
Ultimately, there is a commitment to genocide or mass killing or to ideological goals that require mass killing or genocide. The motivation and the psychological possibility evolve gradually.
Such a progression is made more likely by the passivity of bystanders
Genocide and mass killing are tragedies for the perpetrators also. Their characters are affected, and at times the cycle of violence makes them victims as well.
the influences that lead to genocide are not identical.
The Holocaust is an instance of suffering and cruelty that informs our age.
But as I have noted, only by understanding the roots of such evil do we gain the possibility of shaping the future so that it will not happen again.
The Holocaust made use of bureaucratic management and advanced technology in the framework of a totalitarian system. The genocide of the Armenians was less planned, with limited bureaucratic organization and very little advanced technology in its execution.
The Soviet Union and other nations objected to the inclusion of political groups as victims of genocide, arguing that the etymology of the term should guide the definition: only racial and national groups could be objectively designated.
Some objected that the inclusion of political groups in the convention “would expose nations to external intervention in their domestic concerns,”4 and political conflict within a country could become an international issue.
Killing groups of people for political reasons has become the primary form of genocide (and mass killing) in our time.
In this book genocide means an attempt to exterminate a racial, ethnic, religious, cultural, or political group, either directly through murder or indirectly by creating conditions that lead to the group’s destruction.
The ideology that led to the killings in Cambodia demanded many more victims.7
In the midst of World War I, during the night of April 24, 1915, the religious and intellectual leaders of the Armenian community in Constantinople were taken from their beds, imprisoned, tortured, and killed.
In 1975, after a five-year civil war, the communist Khmer Rouge, or Red Khmer, gained victory and power in Cambodia.
The killings were not entirely systematic.
About two million people died
from execution and starvation between 1975 and 1979.12
At least nine thousand were killed, with some estimates as high as thirty thousand.
In essence, difficult life conditions and certain cultural characteristics may generate psychological processes and motives that lead a group to turn against another group.
The behavior of bystanders can inhibit or facilitate this evolution.
Political violence threatens the security even of people who are uninvolved.
The meaning assigned to life problems, the intensity of their impact, and the way groups of
people try to deal with them are greatly affected by the characteristics of cultures and social organizations.
They carry the potential, the motive force; culture and social organization determine whether the potential is realized by giving rise to devaluation and...
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Greater rigidity makes the difficulties of life more stressful.
Difficult life conditions give rise to powerful needs and goals demanding satisfaction.
Hard times make people feel threatened and frustrated.
people will be powerfully motivated to seek a new world view and gain a renewed comprehension of reality.
Without such comprehension life is filled with uncertainty and anxiety.
Because people define themselves to a significant degree by their membership in a group, for most people a positive view of their group is essential to individual self-esteem – especially in difficult times. The need to protect and improve societal self-concept or to find a new group to identify with will be powerful.
The need for connection, enhanced by suffering, will be powerful.
Threats and frustrations give rise to hostility and the desire to harm others.
Hostility is especially likely to arise if people regard their suffering as unjust, as they often do, and especially if some others are not similarly affected.
and to follow a practically beneficial course of action.
Some of these internal processes are basic psychological tendencies common to all human beings: differentiation of ingroup and outgroup, “us” and “them"; devaluation of those defined as members of an outgroup; just-world thinking, which is the tendency to believe that people who suffer, especially those already devalued, must deserve their suffering as a result of their deeds or their characters; and scapegoating, or blaming others for one’s problems.
Blaming others, scapegoating, diminishes our own responsibility. By pointing to a cause of the problems, it offers understanding, which, although false, has great psychological usefulness. It promises a solution to problems by action against the scapegoat. And it allows people to feel connected as they join to scapegoat others.
Devaluation of a subgroup helps to raise low self-esteem.
The groups that are attractive in hard times often provide an ideological blueprint for a better world and an enemy who must be destroyed to fulfill the ideology. Sometimes having a scapegoat is the glue in the formation of the group.
Small, seemingly insignificant acts can involve a person with a destructive system: for example, accepting benefits provided by the system or even using a required greeting, such as “Heil Hitler.”
Initial acts that cause limited harm result in psychological changes that make further destructive actions possible.
Deeply ingrained, socially developed feelings of responsibility for others’ welfare and inhibitions against killing are gradually lost.
The most terrible human capacity is that of profoundly devaluing others who are merely different.
