On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society

by Dave Grossman

The sheer awfulness of atrocity makes us wish it away, and when we are faced with events such as genocide in Cambodia we would rather turn our heads. David Horowitz, a 1960s radical, writes about how this denial process occurred in him and his friends: I and my former comrades in the Left dismissed the anti-Soviet “lies” about Stalinist repression. In the society we hailed as a new human dawn, 100 million people were put in slave-labor camps, in conditions rivaling Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Between 30 and 40 million people were killed in peacetime in the daily routine of socialist rule. While Leftists applauded their progressive policies and guarded their frontiers, Soviet Marxists killed more peasants, more workers, and even more communists than all the capitalist governments combined since the beginning of time. And for the entire duration of this nightmare, the William Buckleys and Ronald Reagans and other anti-communists went on telling the world exactly what was happening. And all that time the pro-Soviet Left went on denouncing them as reactionaries and liars, using the same contemptuous terms…. The left would still be denying the Soviet atrocities if the perpetrators themselves had not finally acknowledged their crime.

And this simple, naive tendency to disbelieve or look the other way is, possibly more than any other factor, responsible for the perpetuation of atrocity and horror in our world today.