All political regimes, all leaders, rely on followers to uphold their existence and rule, and to implement their policies. When a regime’s existence depends upon the regular use or manifest threat of violence to suppress substantial parts of populaces at home or abroad, its followers must apply the violence and make the threat credible. If the regime’s followers stop supporting a regime that depends upon violence to sustain itself, then the regime itself will not survive. Few regimes and leaders want to risk turning their followers against them. Few regimes have such a hold on society that they would chance alienating their core followers, and alienating them in the most thoroughgoing way, by forcing them to slaughter people they think—if they did actually think it—are innocent or undeserving of their fate. Simply put, except possibly in the rare instances of an utterly terrorized society—and this has not been so in virtually every mass extermination and elimination, including those by the Turks, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Guatemalans, Serbs, Hutu, Sudanese, and even the overwhelming majority of Germans during the Nazi period—it is extraordinarily difficult, verging on impossible, for a regime to terrorize all perpetrators and potential perpetrators. (This is especially so because intensifying terror and totalitarian control to this enormous degree makes productive economic and social life, which depends upon people’s generally willing compliance, all but impossible, endangering the regime and its leaders, as well as crippling their capacity to carry out other projects.) Coercing the regime’s most loyal followers into committing mass murder is morally and psychologically akin to attacking them—leaving no one to defend the regime and its leaders. And if the leaders’ followers themselves do not want to slaughter the intended victims, who would coerce them anyway? Few political leaders would dare, or are in a position, to risk in this way losing the people on whom their power, lives, and goals depend.
The evidence is that, except possibly in a few mass annihilations and eliminations, leaders do not coerce their followers. In mass murder’s vast annals, there is little credible evidence of such coercion, and certainly not on a widespread basis. Sometimes a regime’s killers coerce local civilians to aid them in killing. The Indonesian perpetrators who slaughtered communists did this in some towns. The Guatemalan mass murderers of Maya did this in some villages. In Rwanda, where popular participation in the mass murder was so enormously widespread, some Hutu were compelled to participate along with the hundreds of thousands who killed willingly. Mectilde Kantarama, a Tutsi survivor, explains: “Ten percent helped; 30 percent were forced to kill; 20 percent killed reluctantly; 40 percent killed enthusiastically.”2 In speaking about the 20 percent who killed “reluctantly,” she does not mean they opposed the killing (otherwise, she would have added them with the 30 percent she estimates were “forced to kill”), but merely that they were less enthusiastic than the enthusiastic killers, of which there were so many and whose enthusiasm was so stunningly effervescent that run-of-the-mill willing executioners looked temperate by comparison. By her count, which is but one person’s estimate, 60 percent of the enormous number of ordinary Hutu who slaughtered Tutsi did so willingly and 40 percent were “enthusiastic” killers of their neighbors. Such figures are especially amazing given the mass-murdering machete season’s brutality and gruesomeness—which should be kept in mind when considering why the 30 percent might not have wanted to wade in blood (notice that Kantarama did not say they opposed the extermination). Ample witnesses and perpetrators alike confirm this mass social participation in and assent to the killing. It is no surprise that in these rare circumstances of virtually an entire society falling upon its ethnic minority in machete-wielding butchery—spearheaded by the zealous Hutu Interahamwe paramilitary—the majority dragged some along, forcing them to kill. Even so, the majority, perhaps the vast majority, did so willingly. And as the substantial, candid testimony of the Hutu killers in the commune of Nyamata indicates, except for the first few days when people had to participate, people were not forced to kill, and indeed, the whole atmosphere of killing was rather lax, with all kinds of opportunities for Hutu to adjust how and when, and whether they slaughtered their Tutsi neighbors.
As with this majority of Hutu, the Germans in South-West Africa, the Belgians in Congo, the Turks, the Germans during the Nazi period, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians, the Khmer Rouge, the Pakistanis, the Tutsi in Burundi, the Guatemalans, the Serbs, and the Sudanese, the general absence of coercion has been the rule of eliminationist assaults, and easy to explain: In mass murder after mass murder, leaders have easily found people wanting to kill the targeted victims. Coercion has been unnecessary. Therefore, when select individuals have not wanted to kill, the regime did not need to make them. More than enough people have been willing to do the job.
Authority is a second notion commonly invoked to account for how people who supposedly do not believe the victims deserve to die will nonetheless kill them. Authority is deemed so powerful, it might as well be hypnotizing. The contention is that when authority, particularly state authority, issues an order, it assumes an ineluctable quality of rightness and necessity. People who would otherwise disapprove of the act deem it a duty to perform it anyway. This notion, that state authority elicits its own obedience, is frequently invoked for the Germans killing Jews, and put forward also for other mass murderers, particularly the Hutu. It is an especially convenient trope for those seeking to exonerate the perpetrators.
This crimes of obedience postulate actually has two different, if sometimes overlapping, parts. The first is that state authority is seen with reverence and awe, and therefore individuals believe they are duty bound to carry out state orders even when they themselves believe the orders are wrong or immoral. The second is that state orders tend to be seen as inherently legitimate, so people find themselves accepting their rightness assuming, or with the reasoning, that the country’s leaders would never issue fundamentally immoral or criminal orders. Although this argument’s second version must be examined, it is not about how people can be brought to kill others they believe undeserving of death, but about how people might come to believe the killing is necessary and right (so it is discussed later). The crimes of obedience argument’s first version, that state orders are thought to be sacrosanct and therefore lead people to act against their inner beliefs, to willingly commit deeds they believe criminal, is the relevant version here.
The notion is manifestly absurd. People disobey, evade, and ignore state and governmental orders, laws, and regulations all the time. They do so in democracies and in dictatorships, in society’s loosely and heavily policed areas. They do so whether the issuing authority is a supposedly divinely ruling monarch, a popular democratic president, a supposedly charismatic leader, or an all-powerful totalitarian ruler. People the world over (not just proverbially in Italy) evade taxes. In all human societies crime of all kinds exists. Policemen in all types of societies fail to enforce certain laws they dislike or think unwise, and they themselves often break the law. Even soldiers, from generals to privates, often disobey or turn on their leaders. The czar’s soldiers during the 1917 Russian Revolution would not fire on the revolutionaries. In 1986 Filipino soldiers disobeyed orders to suppress those challenging Ferdinand Marcos’ rule. In the Lebanon war of 2006, Israeli soldiers refused orders to advance. American draft dodgers refused to serve in Vietnam, and many American soldiers were insubordinate in Vietnam during the war. Desertion, often on a massive scale, has beset armies throughout history and during our time. But such insubordination and desertion has not been a problem for the legions of perpetrators carrying out eliminationist projects.
Such enormously widespread and varied disobeying, evading, and ignoring of state authority, institutions, and laws and policies disproves the notion that people deem state authority sacrosanct. What’s more, virtually every country’s people have seen even greater challenges to state authority: rebellions, coup d’états, and revolutions. Germany, home to the people imputed to be slavish executors of state orders par excellence,
has had many. The Nazis themselves fought in the streets to overthrow the existing state authority of Weimar. During the Nazi period, Germans disobeyed the state on all manner of matters and the perpetrators themselves often disobeyed and did not implement orders they disliked.3 It has been no less true around the world, and particularly in countries where governments have initiated mass slaughters and eliminations. In many of those countries—Turkey, Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Indonesia, Uganda, Iraq, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Rwanda, Sudan, and many more—the mass-murdering regimes themselves came to power by rebelling and overthrowing the previously lawful state authority. Often soldiers, actually generals, the people deemed to be the most reflexively order-following, are the revolutionaries. More generally, most of these countries’ peoples had nothing like the culture of hallowed obedience to the state allegedly once characterizing certain stable European monarchies grounding their right to rule in God. Many countries where mass murders and eliminations occur are characterized by widespread, endemic violence; state authority and legitimacy are enormously weak; and the alleged blind reverence for and obedience to the state has simply never existed or even been said to exist, as it has been in the mainly fictitious intellectualized form that was asserted to exist in Prussia and which then somehow instantaneously spread throughout Germany when Germany was formed in 1871 and then throughout Austria when Germany annexed it in 1938.
Authority, including governmental authority, orders, and policies, is contested all the time, at all levels, by societies as a whole, groups within societies, including insurgent groups, and individuals—those who would overthrow the authority or who disagree with specific policies. This notion of blind obedience to authority seemed to have some applicability only when supported by clichés about Germans and the virtually racist, dehumanizing accounts of their putative inability to make moral judgments for themselves that cast them as barely human robots. Despite its obvious flaws, this notion gained further credence when it was undergirded by Stanley Milgram’s pseudoscientific social psychological experiments at Yale University in the 1960s, which purported to show that in response to an authority figure’s exhortation, human beings will do almost anything. Milgram, to lend credence to his otherwise invalid conclusion, invoked the one seemingly propitious case, that of the putatively robotic Germans and the Holocaust, and asserted that he had the key to it. Had Milgram instead written about paying taxes or voluntary corporate compliance with governmental laws and regulations, let alone crime in general, his notion that people just do what the government says only because of the magical power of its authority would have been treated as a put-on.
As we coolly examine the vast historical record and move beyond the mythical world of clichés, unsupported assertions, and badly understood pseudoscientific laboratory experiments, the evidence actually demonstrates government authority’s weak power to get people to comply only and merely because the government says something should be done. The postulate’s sheer implausibility that people will feel duty bound, namely an absolute moral necessity, to kill their neighbors, to slaughter children, just because a government says to, is in itself stunning. It is difficult to understand—aside from people’s political and personal interests in exonerating the perpetrators and rehabilitating Germany—how such a notion about the perpetrators could have ever gained such great currency.4
Another commonly adduced postulate to account for why the perpetrators kill is that social psychological pressure moves people to slaughter others. This notion has many variants, though their essence is that particular social circumstances are in themselves sufficiently powerful to propel people to kill. This argument is no more sensible than the one about government authority. To begin with, the general social psychological context for the perpetrators varies enormously from one mass murder to the next and even varies greatly for the perpetrators of a given mass murder working in different killing institutions and settings. No general argument about social psychological pressure’s potency to turn all people into killers even makes sense, because whatever the specific social psychological facts a given postulate presumes, these “facts” have not been present for enormous numbers of perpetrators or in many mass murders.
The typical form this social psychological assertion takes is that peer pressure compels people to kill others. Subjected to other people’s words, the prospect of their disapproval, or the example of their actions, people’s conduct, it is said, inevitably falls into line. Yet in one mass murder after another, no actual evidence exists that this has occurred. And no evidence whatsoever exists to show it is a widespread phenomenon. Additionally, this postulate suffers a disqualifying flaw, which its proponents do not address. Even if it correctly describes certain perpetrators’ actions, it cannot explain why the majority of perpetrators kill. This postulate relies on an assumption that makes impossible what its proponents claim to explain: It assumes that most perpetrators actually want to kill, because for there to be such social psychological pressure, the majority, probably the overwhelming majority, must favor the deed. This willing majority supposedly pressures the unwilling minority. Therefore, the social psychological postulate, by definition, cannot apply to most of the killers, who according to the postulate already want to kill. If, however, the majority, not to mention the overwhelming majority, does not want to kill, then there would be no peer pressure to kill but precisely the opposite: a common resolve not to kill.
As a general explanation, peer pressure implodes on itself. It cannot possibly explain why the perpetrators in general kill their victims. At most it might provide clues about the conduct of disapproving individuals finding themselves surrounded by willing killers who furthermore create intolerance against dissenters. But even so, the postulate is useless in explaining the existence and character of the majority’s initial approval and willingness—which is the fundamental fact that must be explained and on which the postulate’s existence depends.
Thus, in the best known instance of a peer-pressure argument, the author strained to get out of this problem by advancing a convoluted variation on the theme. Even though precious few of these German mass murderers in the single unit he studied wanted to kill, each one felt obliged not to excuse himself from the killing. Why? Because it was more important for virtually every one of them not to leave the dirty work to his comrades. So virtually every one of them preferred to slaughter men, women, and children whom he believed to be wholly undeserving of dying and thereby to make himself into a mass murderer , and to commit the gravest crime, moral transgression, and sin against God (many of them were practicing Christians) rather than to let others dirty their hands. These were the Germans of Police Battalion 101 who murdered tens of thousands of Jews over the course of months, and who had been told by their solicitous and beloved commander, Major Wilhelm “Papa” Trapp, that they did not have to kill.
Aside from this convoluted claim’s sheer implausibility, the author, to even advance it, had to ignore or downplay much evidence of the perpetrators’ willingness, including that these supposedly reluctant men, unbidden by their superiors, repeatedly brutalized and tortured their victims, so much so that their commander reprimanded them for their rampant cruelty! How, furthermore, could these men persist psychologically in slaughtering so many people, often shooting them at point-blank range, if they had really thought it a crime, murder, and (for the religious among them) a sin, even a mortal sin? But let us imagine against the evidence that this sort of peer pressure—for every man to choose to do what none of them wants to choose to do—had somehow operated on this unit’s men merely because, according to this author, they came from the same metropolis of Hamburg, which, despite its being a big, anonymous city, somehow made them feel such overwhelming duty to one another. It still would be all but irrelevant to explaining the perpetrators’ conduct. Why? Because this alleged critical fact of a common city or town of origin (which magically produces adamantine solidarity among killers) did not exist for most killers in most kil
ling institutions during the Nazi period, in which strangers from all regions of Germany (including Austria) were often thrown together to kill. It also did not exist for most, probably the overwhelming majority, of our age’s mass murders. So, aside from all the other reasons that this peer-pressure postulate is hollow even for the single unit for which it was advanced—and not just one unit but one idiosyncratic unit among the German killing institutions and among killing institutions and perpetrators in general—the postulate would in any event have no general relevance for explaining perpetrators’ conduct. Even the existence of the underlying fact that makes this argument possible, namely the supposedly psychologically overwhelming solidarity, is highly dubious. In big cities, such as Hamburg, the sense of identity and communal solidarity with strangers is notoriously weak, and in this particular unit many men were relative newcomers, so when they began mass murdering there had been virtually no time to develop strong bonds. Moreover, the extensive records about these men and their deeds contains very little real evidence that such group solidarity existed. Aside from these many disqualifying features that this sort, or any sort, of peer pressure moved these men to slaughter Jewish men, women, and children, not a single man among the more than two hundred in this unit who testified about their mass murdering ever said this sort of peer pressure existed, let alone ever pointed to such pressure to explain why he or his comrades killed.5
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