Personal Worlds
Cruelty refashions worlds.
For a victim, intense physical and psychological pain concentrates the mind exclusively on the pain itself, becoming his world. Acute pain alters the nexus of space and time as nothing else does. It compresses space so all one can apprehend is located on the (often tiny) afflicted body part. It changes the experience of time, elongating every second, every minute, every hour, every day. Each seems to stretch and drag on beyond what time’s actual unit can contain and the sufferer can bear. Think of pain’s instant effect on you: slicing your hand, hitting your finger with a hammer, or twisting your ankle. Think how your world shrinks in that elongated moment, which compared to eliminationist cruelty’s victims’ suffering is a droplet of intensity and duration. Multiply the pain, your world’s shrinking and time’s elongation, by a hundred, a thousand, a million, by some indeterminably large number, and imaginatively enter the physical world of cruelty and suffering the perpetrators create for the victims. Then add the commensurate psychological and emotional suffering. The perpetrators’ cruelty for the victims can, perhaps, now somewhat come into focus. For as long as the perpetrators’ domination lasts, such cruelty refashions the victims’ world, because even if a respite occurs, they know the perpetrators can and likely will resume. If the victims survive, such cruelty refashions their world forever. The victims never forget their pain, torment, and suffering. The horror will always cast a pall over their lives. It will likely become a life-defining experience, perhaps the defining one, to be relived and relived, whether they want to remember it or, much more likely, though they wish to forget it forever.
For the perpetrator, cruelty also concentrates the mind. It is an unusual social moment most perpetrators have never had: rendering human beings into playthings. Some practitioners of cruelty turn the humanistic Kantian maxim—not to use people as means but to treat them as ends—on its head, toying with and hurting the victims for amusement, pleasure, and gratification. Other practitioners of cruelty expand the Kantian maxim into the definitive instance of using people as means and ends. They use the victims as playthings and inflict their cruelty for another purpose: to teach the victims—in the perpetrator’s eyes, finally and properly—how abject they are. For the perpetrator, cruelty brings enormous satisfaction. He enjoys it. He revels in it. It invigorates and sustains him. He creates an out-of-this-world world for himself in the concentrated moment of flogging, battering, or dismembering his victims, and an out-of-this-world world for communities of cruelty as perpetrators share their joys collectively. The question is: What forms of cruelty do perpetrators inflict on the victims and why?
Cruelty is a common feature of eliminationist assaults. Cruelty is also an enormously significant aspect of them. It is significant foremost because the victims endure violence and suffering at their tormentors’ hands. It is also significant because its perpetration tells us much about the perpetrators. Yet such cruelty remains little analyzed and poorly understood.
Without taking up the fine conceptual and psychological aspects of defining cruelty and torture, we can say the perpetrators know their victims suffer, and while they, at least in principle, might not wish their victims to suffer excessively beyond the already enormous suffering their eliminationist assault and act itself require for their execution, they minimally are at least willing (almost always gladly and rarely with lament) to inflict that high baseline of suffering. In an expansive notion of torture and cruelty’s meaning and universe, eliminationist policies and their acts themselves might rightly be seen as cruelty if not torture. Many countries’ legal systems and people consider the death penalty cruel and inhumane punishment. Treating exterminationist acts as inherently cruel is an easily sustainable position. The same could be said for other eliminationist acts, such as driving people from their homes or incarcerating them in camps. Death marches are almost always a particularly cruel way to kill people, as the perpetrators themselves recognize. When missionaries asked a Turkish perpetrator why the Turks did not kill women and children on the spot and chose instead to make them so “wretched” by sending them on a death march, he explained that in addition to being a good way to prevent corpses from stinking up their villages, “It is right so, they must become wretched.”74
Nevertheless, for analytical purposes, I leave the eliminationist acts themselves aside and consider only perpetrators’ acts of cruelty or torture going beyond what is strictly required of them in eliminating the victims. When a person’s task is to kill someone, he need not gratuitously beat, torture, or degrade that person first. He need not take initiative to augment her suffering. Yet perpetrators routinely do, so much so that just in the killing act itself in one of the eliminationist assaults where it is most frequently said the perpetrators were conscripted and had no choice, the perpetrators subjected an amazingly high percentage of the victims to enormous gratuitous cruelty and suffering. When asked what “overkill” means, Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation processing victims’ remains uncovered in mass graves, explains: “Well, see, overkill would be associated, like I said, to many different strikes or many different impacts when they’re not necessary to cause a person’s death. And they’re more geared to brutality and to this part of human nature that I don’t fully understand, when things get out of hand and it becomes a matter of just making this person pay for something or making a point of the killing.” Asked to estimate the percentage of victims on whom the Guatemalan perpetrators inflicted overkill, Peccerelli replies, “I would say maybe between 15 to 20 percent.”75 This incredibly high number comes just from the moment of the kill, just from assessing the small percentage of all the perpetrators’ cruelties cutting all the way to, and incising marks into, the victims’ bones (the skeletal remains being all the forensic pathologists can investigate decades after the fact), and just from the bones uncovered for each victim, many skeletons being far from complete, leaving many additional instances of even to-the-bone overkill undetected.
By no means are the perpetrators cruel toward their victims and torturing them only when killing them, but far more often when they are guarding, herding, or just passing by them. In Kenya, Major wa Wanjiru, a notorious killer, and his men regularly tortured Kikuyu before killing them. Esther Muchiri describes an episode where the perpetrators stripped her and several dozen men and women naked:We were beaten the whole day until evening, when we were separated from the men, who were ordered to sit a distance away with their hands cuffed together. Then the interrogators started to squeeze their private parts with a pair of pliers. There was only a short distance between where they were and ourselves. I even saw one of them being hit on his face, a blow that sent him sprawling down unconscious. A whole bucket of water had to be poured on his body to revive him. The same evening, the men were loaded onto a vehicle and driven away. We were to learn the following morning that all of them had been executed.76
Such cruelty that is unnecessary for carrying out the eliminationist act itself—whether or not during the act of killing or elimination—constitutes excess cruelty. In eliminationist and exterminationist assaults, excess cruelty is a commonplace, and it varies widely from one eliminationist assault to the next. Both these aspects, and their sources, are significant and need to be explored if we are to understand our time’s mass murders and eliminations.
There are different kinds of excess cruelty. A two-dimensional matrix, with one dimension being whether the cruelty is ordered from above and the other being whether it is individually or collectively performed, specifies four kinds of excess cruelty.
Ordered from Above Not Ordered
Collective Organized and structured Group performance
Individual Supervised Individual initiative
In the annals of eliminationist assaults, individually supervised cruelty is rarely ordered from above. A second kind of cruelty ordered or governed from above, which is collective and not performed by individuals, is exterm
inationist and eliminationist programs’ constitutive feature. This organized and structured cruelty is embedded in the fabric of the world the perpetrators create for the victims. It includes the pain and suffering in how they house them, undernourish them, systematically punish them, transport them, and generally mistreat them, including by tearing families apart. Camps are such cruelty’s quintessential sites. Perpetrators create them in a manner guaranteeing the victims will suffer such cruelty—regularly, daily and nightly, often in virtually every moment and aspect of life. “Work,” a central feature of camp life, often as the perpetrators’ explicit intention and almost always effectively, is classic structured cruelty. Having just explored camps and their multifarious structured (and often unstructured) cruelties (and their variations), the discussion here concentrates on the cruelties not ordered from above, on individual excesses and group performances, although the analysis often pertains also to structured cruelty, especially in camps.
Killing in a manner inflicting maximal suffering—systematic torturing of individuals, beating, brutalizing, maiming, sexually abusing, ritually degrading, mocking, using victims as playthings, and more—is the hallmark of eliminationist politics and onslaughts. Clémentine, a Hutu from Nyamata, describes how the killers sometimes returned from a search-and-destroy mission with a victim, whom they brought to the marketplace:These doomed victims were usually acquaintances who had tried to cheat—to pass for Hutu, for example. Or people who had been rich and important before. Or acquaintances disliked because of old quarrels.
The killers would call everyone to watch. All the women and children would gather to see the show. There were people still carrying drinks, or nurslings on their backs. The killers would cut off the victims’ limbs, they would crush their bones with a club, but without killing them. They wanted them to last. They wanted the audience to learn from these torments. Shouts would rise up from all sides. These were raucous village jamborees, quite rare and quite popular.77
This account’s elements are instructive. For these ceremonial torture performances, the perpetrators usually chose a known person, one particularly incensing them. There was an element of score-settling. Yet the score could be for an act not injuring the perpetrators individually but transgressing against the Hutu collectively—something as impersonal as a Tutsi trying to pass for a Hutu. It may be that personal acquaintanceship was also important because it provided the perpetrators and the onlooking community the joint opportunity to teach the victim more meaningfully what happens to Tutsi trying to cheat or cross the Hutu. The more personal it is, the more the victim understands his abject state as his life dissipates in agony. The perpetrators did not seek to hide their deeds. They were not ashamed of their butchery. The opposite: They celebrated their deeds. More, they expected, correctly, that their community would joyfully share in their celebration. All the women willingly came to watch. They brought their children. Perhaps most significant, aside from the victims’ unspeakable suffering and the perpetrators’ unspeakable cruelty, which were the bases of collective enjoyment that become the whole community’s festive, “raucous” affairs, was the perpetrators’ elongating the misery because they “wanted the audience to learn from these torments.” To learn what? Obviously not torture’s techniques, but the right way to treat a Tutsi. That is why the perpetrators made especially sure the children attended these episodic educational sessions. These jamborees were popular affairs. They reflected the popular will and further helped to cement it with the celebratory dismemberings that produced this Durkheimian collective effervescence or euphoria. The community was saying to itself Tutsi should—even must—be treated in this manner.
Dwelling even briefly on eliminationist assaults’ personalized violence and cruelty is enough to sicken anyone possessing a shred of fellow feeling. To sit before and listen to victims around the world recount the cruelties they suffered, as I have, is all but unbearable. Yet to the perpetrators, as individuals and often as a class, and even to the broader societies from which they come, this fellow feeling has been blunted for contemplating the targeted groups and even when watching them suffer collectively and individually. More revolting, this fellow feeling has been corrupted and inverted so that, for perpetrators and their approving bystanders, the most horrifying acts become self-righteous justice’s satisfying, even aesthetically pleasurable, expressive displays.
The prejudice, hatred, and enmity moving perpetrators to kill, expel, or otherwise eliminate the victims of their mental and emotional animosity also predispose them to want to take other retribution (as they understand it) upon them. After all, they are killing, forcing from their homes and country, or incarcerating in hellish camps people they deem less than fully human or demonic, or consider to have already greatly harmed or to be threatening to harm them and their loved ones. It would be unusual if the perpetrators did not treat the victims extremely brutally, with excess cruelty. Given how easily human aggression is switched on, especially in situations of actual or potential face-to-face physical conflict (which any personalized eliminationist moment is), and how satisfying aggression’s venting can feel, it is no surprise that excess cruelty is virtually the constituent feature of eliminationist programs. Nevertheless, enormous differences exist. Sometimes cruelty is institutionalized, namely ordered from above or embedded into the rules, practices, and patterns of given eliminationist situations or institutions, such as camps. Sometimes groups collectively perform cruelty in patterned ways. Sometimes individuals take their own initiative to make their victims suffer excessively. It needs to be emphasized that, just as illuminating similarities and differences among different eliminationist and exterminationist assaults does not value any victims’ lives more or less, or make a person’s death in one onslaught any less or more meaningful or tragic than another’s death, neither does comparing cruelty, brutality, and torture make one eliminationist assault morally worse or more meaningful than another.78
As we know, camps are places of extreme, deadly privation, the American camps, however inadequate and horrible, interning more than 100,000 Japanese Americans being the exception. Perpetrators, those creating the camps’ overall conditions and those manning its daily operations, normally systematically, extremely, and callously disregard the prisoners’ well-being. Yet some camps and camp systems direct far more organized or more personal cruelty at the victims. Comparing the full character and extent of such excess cruelty from camp system to camp system, not to mention from one eliminationist onslaught to the next, requires far more knowledge than we have or are likely to acquire of many systems, given their vastness, the highly incomplete to nonexistent records (in no small measure owing to the witnesses’ deaths), and the certain variability from camp to camp, from killing locale to killing locale, within each vast camp system and larger eliminationist program. Nonetheless, concerted research projects into every camp system’s and eliminationist program’s cruelty would considerably enhance our understanding of cruelty’s commonalities, patterns, and variations, and therefore of eliminationist programs themselves.
The eliminationist assaults we know the most about, the Germans’ various programs against the Jews, mentally ill, Sinti, Roma, Poles, Russians, and others, and an eliminationist camp system we have recently learned much more about, that of the British in Kenya, illustrate (by themselves and when compared to other eliminationist assaults) several critical distinctions among types of cruelty that help us better understand cruelty’s sources and nature.
To begin with, the evidence is overwhelming that the Germans’ cruelty toward Jews was virtually unsurpassable, not in the sense that other perpetrators did not commit unspeakable brutalities against their victims, because, as the sickening evidence presented here from so many eliminationist assaults unequivocally demonstrates, they did. Unlike other eliminationist perpetrators whose cruelties consisted mainly of time-limited torturing and literally butchering their victims to death, or episodic cruelties over longer periods, the Germans were cruel
to their Jewish victims steadily over extensive periods, daily and hourly, with an incessantness and drive that is singular and gave the appearance of people acting on a compulsion. A work camp the Germans set up just for Jews they were keeping alive to “work,” the Lipowa Camp near Lublin, Poland, is illustrative. Virtually all of Lipowa’s personnel carried whips or some functional equivalent, and the survivors’ testimony makes clear almost all used the whips frequently, energetically, and willfully without being under any supervision, striking the Jews often arbitrarily and without any apparent cause, even by the Germans’ liberal notions of causality. In addition to such quotidian use of whips, the Germans’ routine cruelty took particular forms including:• Brutal beatings with whips into which small iron balls had been wrought
• Incarceration in a bunker for indeterminate time
• Beatings in a bunker on a special “whipping table” one of the Germans had invented specifically for such occasions
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