Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

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Becoming EvilHow Ordinary People Commit
Genocide and Mass Killing

• Dr. James Waller
• Dept. of Psychology
• Whitworth College
• Spokane, WA 99251
• jwaller_at_whitworth.edu

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Social Conflict in Human History

• Since Napoleonic Wars, we have fought an average
  of 6 international wars and 6 civil wars per
  decade.
  
• An average of 3 high-fatality struggles have been
  in action somewhere in the world at any moment
  since 1900.
  
• The 4 decades after the end of WWII saw 150 wars
  and only 26 days of world peace.
  
• Today, a third of the worlds 193 nations are
  embroiled in conflict nearly twice the Cold War
  level.
  
• The story of the human race is war. Winston
  Churchill
  
• Only the dead have seen the end of war. Plato

And it came about when they were in the field,
that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and
killed him (Genesis 48).
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The Age of Genocide

• Destruction of Hereros by Germans in South-West
  Africa in 1904.
  
• Murder of 1 ½ million Armenians by Turks between
  1915 and 1923.
  
• Implementation of Soviet man-made famine in
  Ukraine in 1932-1933.
  
• Holocaust of 1939-1945.
• Mass killings and genocide in
• Indonesia (1965-66)
• Bangladesh (1971)
• Burundi (1972)
• Cambodia (1975-1979)
• East Timor (1975-1979)
• Guatemala (1980s-90s)
• Iraq (1987-88)
• Rwanda (1994)
• Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995)
• Genocide alerts in Sudan, Chechnya, and Ethiopia.

A family of Armenian deportees walk toward the
Syrian desert with no means of shelter from the
elements. The woman in the foreground is
carrying a child in her arms, shielding it from
the sun with a shawl (1915).
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Players in the Tragedy
Bystanders
Perpetrators Architects Bureaucrats
Rank-and-File Killers
Victims
German soldiers of the Waffen-SS and the Reich
Labor Service look on as a member of an
Einsatzgruppen prepares to shoot a Ukrainian Jew
kneeling on the edge of a mass grave (Ukraine,
1941-1943).
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General Principle

• Political, social, or religious groups wanting to
  commit mass murder do. Though there may be other
  obstacles, genocidal regimes are never hindered
  by a lack of willing executioners. They can
  always find individual human beings who will kill
  other human beings in large numbers and over an
  extended period of time.

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Research Questions

• How many people does it take to carry out
  genocide and mass killing?
  
• Who are these people and how are they enlisted to
  perpetrate such extraordinary evil?

Men with an unidentified unit execute a group of
Soviet civilians kneeling by the side of a mass
grave (Kraigonev, USSR, 1941).
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What are the arguments for the extraordinary
origins of extraordinary human evil?
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Central Argument

• It is ordinary people, like you and me, who
  commit genocide and mass killing.
  
• Why is this argument so difficult to admit, to
  understand, to absorb?
  
• My business is to teach my aspirations to
  conform themselves to fact, not to try and make
  facts harmonize with my aspirations.
  
• T.H. Huxley (1860)

A young boy in the Khmer Rouge (Cambodia,
1975-1979).
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Ultimate Influences The Evolution of Human Nat
ure


Proximate Influence Social Construction of Cru
elty
Proximate Influence Psychological Construction
of the Other
(1) Collectivistic Values (2) Authority Orienta
tion
(3) Social Dominance
(1) Professional Socialization (2) Group Identi
fication
(3) Binding Factors of the Group
(1) Us-Them Thinking (2) Moral Disengagement (
3) Blaming the Victims
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Conclusion

• Is the Age of Genocide over?
• Continuation of exponential population growth.
• Corresponding scarcity of resources.
• Is there a difference between explaining behavior
  and excusing it?
  
• To explain behavior is not to excuse the behaver
  to understand is not to forgive.
  
• Understanding facilitates prevention and
  intervention.
  
• Book published as Becoming Evil How Ordinary
  People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (New
  York, NY Oxford University Press, 2002 2nd
  edition due out in June, 2006).