Each kind of excess cruelty has a different source and is grounded in a different aspect of personal or social life. Conradian cruelty originates in aspects of human nature—humanity’s capacities and dispositions developed through evolution—which presumably are relatively constant across humanity, and in the psychological and social-psychological dispositions common to a society’s or culture’s members, which vary enormously. There does appear to be some fundamental and widely distributed human capacity to be cruel, to vent the passions civilization normally constrains, perhaps even more intensively because they ordinarily do not find outlets. But this general capacity and propensity (whatever it is) to express itself does not explain why cruelty comes out in different eliminationist assaults and in different settings by different perpetrators toward different victims to differing degrees. Different cultures socialize people with different emotional stances toward others’ suffering, different tastes for violence and brutality, and with different practices toward outgroups, not to mention toward enemies. When restraints are lifted, when people are licensed to do as they please with others, what people of different societies and cultures will happily do varies enormously. Human nature must be a powerful source of eliminationist onslaughts’ cruelty, but it hardly explains cruelty’s character, quantity, and distribution across such political practice. Even adding perpetrators’ social and cultural differences would explain only part of the variation.
Zimbardoian cruelty emerges from the structure of relations, namely the dynamic of the conflict between guards for domination and prisoners to resist or free themselves. It is the structure—the guards’ objective and then psychologically grafted need to keep the prisoners cowed—that leads them to adopt brutal practices.
Condign cruelty is grounded in norms of right conduct, which, though perverted or inverted according to our moral compass, guide the executioners, administrators of subjectively just and necessary sentences of suffering, as other moral norms have guided religious crusaders of various kinds. Across cultures criminals would be punished even if they no longer posed a threat and punishing them had no deterrent value, merely because people believe those committing crimes deserve punishment. In some societies and cultures, historically and today, the further moral belief has broadly existed that criminals’ punishment should be hard and they should suffer to a greater or lesser degree. So too the practitioner of condign cruelty is animated to make the putative criminals before him suffer.
Vengeful cruelty is grounded in experience, the experience of one’s own people’s suffering at the hands of one’s victims. The experience may be real (the Soviet peoples did actually suffer at the Germans’ hands), but it is usually figmental, derived from the perpetrators’ prior prejudices about their victims. Even if real, the perpetrators typically magnify the suffering wildly and apply responsibility for it so indiscriminately to the target group according to the blanket, unforgiving, and even paranoid thinking of the perpetrators’ prejudices, racism, and hatreds, that the kernel of truth that may seed the perpetrators’ vast fury is barely relevant for understanding the perpetrators’ brutality. “Experience” in this context does not mean the individual perpetrator’s experience but almost always his knowledge (faulty though it may be) acquired from others about the victims’ putative harming of him, his people, or his ethnic group, society, or country. The perpetrator comes to experience these supposed injuries as if they had been done to him or a loved one, or as if they are in the offing, producing in him the rage of people being physically or otherwise attacked or threatened. This sense of injury or danger can well up inside the perpetrator whenever he confronts or thinks of confronting his victims.
Machiavellian or purposeful cruelty is grounded in eliminationist aims beyond the immediate gratification of passions, self-expression, or the structuring of relations between the perpetrator and his victims. It is a consciously calculated choice and strategy to achieve a well-defined goal.
These five kinds of excess cruelty are grounded in five sources: Conradian in human nature, Zimbardoian in social relations, condign in moral norms, vengeful in collective experience, and Machiavellian in political aims. Each source and thus each kind of cruelty is sociological, having nothing to do with the individual perpetrator’s personality or psychology. They are patterned forms of excess cruelty within the cognitively and politically unleashed eliminationist project, the prerequisite of which is the perpetrators’ conceiving of the targets as people deserving elimination. Two of them, Zimbardoian and Machiavellian, can further be called instrumental cruelty in that they have some conventionally understood purpose other than, or often in addition to, the victims’ suffering itself or the satisfaction of teaching the victims a lesson. Rouen Sam recounts an instance when the instrumental purpose of the Khmer Rouge’s cruelty supplemented the perpetrators’ satisfaction derived from their treatment of a Khmer who enraged his tormentors when, instead of gratifying them by providing a show “confession” in front of assembled children prisoners, he, protesting his innocence, accused the Khmer Rouge of injustice: Suddenly one of them hit him from the back, pushing him, and he fell face to the ground. It was raining. We sat in the rain, and then the rain became blood. He was hit with a shovel and then he went unconscious and began to have a seizure. Then Angka [the Khmer Rouge] took out a sharp knife and cut the man from his breastbone all the way down to his stomach. They took out his organs.
When I saw this I felt so shocked, like I was blind. It felt like they were hitting me just as they hit the prisoner. The person cut him open and took a sharp piece of wire and stuck it in what I think was the liver and the bowels. They tied the organs with wire on the handlebars of a bicycle and biked away, leaving a bloody trail.
Angka calmly told us over the microphone, “All girls and boys, you have seen with your own eyes. If someone feels compassion or sympathy for the enemy that has just died, then you will be punished just like him.”88
Zimbardoian cruelty arises out of the perpetrators’ need to control insubordination, which here, with utterly cowed children, was not at issue. Perpetrators use Machiavellian cruelty for strategic political ends, such as terrorizing the victims, here to further dam up the children’s compassion. These two forms of instrumental cruelty are by far the least frequent kinds of cruelty in eliminationist assaults, and as in this instance’s Machiavellian display, they almost always combine with or are grafted onto other forms of cruelty. The other three far more common kinds of cruelty, all noninstrumental, are ends in themselves, providing moral and psychic satisfaction to the perpetrators. The Tutsi survivor Rwililiza, his sociological and psychological knowledge rooted in vast bitter experience, speaks to the Hutu butchers’ voluntarism and its utterly noninstrumental sources:So why did they chop people up instead of killing them straightaway? I do not think it was to punish them for having tried to escape. Nor to discourage the living from running, from fleeing from the assassins all day long, saving themselves any way they could. Or perhaps they did so for a tiny percentage only. Whatever the case, these villains thought they would end it for us.
They chopped us out of a taste for barbarity, nothing more.89
Each exterminationist and eliminationist assault’s brutality is patterned. Within the context of the character of an individual eliminationist program’s general cruelty, perpetrators express their shared and individual emotional and psychological, even psychopathological, propensities, intensifying or ameliorating that onslaught’s baseline brutality in general or its particular settings. Rwililiza explains: “Amongst them there were normal Hutu who killed normally, wicked Hutu who killed wickedly—most often interahamwe; and finally there were extremists in wickedness who killed with extreme wickedness.”90 Sometimes, as among the Jews, Kikuyu, and Tutsi, when survivors describe a particularly cruel perpetrator, they take their tormentors’ enormous baseline cruelty so much for granted that they remark upon the perpetrators’ routine cruelty in passing, as an ordinary expectation. One Jewish victim, a wo
man, reports that in her camp “Wagner was a sadist. He would not only beat the women; that was done by all the SS men.” She explains further: “He was active not with a gun, but with a whip, and he frequently beat women so terribly that they died of the effects. . . . In his sadism towards women, Wagner appeared to us to be absolutely abnormal; the other SS men, who held total power over us, were of course also very cruel, but were not sadistic in the same way as Wagner.”91
In principle, we could construct a better understanding, singly and comparatively, of perpetrators’ cruelty by systematically collecting and analyzing all relevant data in light of cruelty’s five types and sources.l Even with our current knowledge we can understand a great deal about the perpetrators’ excess cruelty merely by finally focusing on it and analyzing it according to its variable nature and sources.
Substantial correspondence exists between the social theory governing perpetrators’ treatment of targeted groups—deriving from their conception of them—and their excessive cruelty’s character. Perpetrators almost always see existential enemies as having inflicted great injury upon them and their society, and (by definition) of wanting to continue. The perpetrators are in a rage. In their eyes the eliminationist assaults are almost by definition retributive. The social theory that tends to inform the perpetrators’ treatment of existential enemies is realpolitik, which complements their aggression, and desire to wreak vengeance, with a sense that they must be brutal to their victims—not necessarily in a calculated way but almost as a constituent aspect of their relations with them, to keep them down and in check.
Perpetrators approach putative subhumans with a utilitarian social theory akin to using implements, animals, and things, with one critical difference. Because the putative subhumans have understanding, speak, and display (sub)human emotions, the perpetrators can take pleasure in mistreating them, in being cruel to them, as they cannot for things or implements, or even animals. Because they conceive the victims to lack some fundamental human quality, their eliminationist assaults tend to produce the purist Conradian brutality, allowing the perpetrators, absent civilization’s restraints, to repeatedly express and sate their most violent urges. Their cruelty toward subhumans has two additional aspects: The perpetrators, because their conception of humanity dehumanizes others, are already enmeshed in a brutalizing worldview that inhibits fellow feeling and promotes licentiousness and their taking out of their otherwise bottled-up aggression and urges on the subhuman victims and playthings. Someone unable to kick his boss might kick his dog, or anger quickly at his children, or punch a wall, or rip something up. Such a dynamic affected the Japanese perpetrators in Nanjing and across their Asian empire, especially soldiers. As masters of colonial subhumans, they acted upon the pent-up resentment and rage at their own culture’s and institutions’ brutal treatment of them. They butchered their victims with abandon and glee.92 John Rabe, the German businessman documenting in his diary the Japanese’s predations in Nanjing, recorded that the “same reports are coming in from all sides [in the region] about rapes, murder, and mayhem,” leading him to observe that “one might be led to think that the entire criminal population of Japan is in uniform here.”93
The perpetrators of eliminationist violence against putative subhumans, including the Japanese perpetrators, come from societies and cultures that do not recognize human beings’ universal and intrinsic moral equality. In their eyes the victims have rendered themselves fit and necessary to be eliminated not by contingent beliefs or actions but intrinsically by the danger of their diminished human, in other words subhuman, essence. In such contexts, though anything is permissible, cruelty is not necessary. The perpetrators’ have nothing more complex to teach the subhumans about their place than they would a pack of dogs.
Perpetrators assaulting demonized victims, whether heretics (who are demonized) or demons (who are demonized and dehumanized), tend to express condign cruelty, wanting to treat their victims according to, in the case of heretics, their eschatological moral theory, or in the case of demons, their inverted Kantian morality. The brutality is often justified according to a well-articulated ideology and moral theory about treating or instructing the miscreants about the one true path they unconscionably oppose: Demons and heretics must suffer at the hands of their betters, goodness’ guardians. Only then will they come to know their way’s error, apostasy, inhumanity. The members of the perpetrators’ communities are welcome to know and to watch all this, so they too can feel righteous and even, as in the Rwandan village’s torture jamborees, “learn from these torments.” The particular social and moral theories governing the perpetrators can produce widely differing expressions of brutality, from the Soviets’ comparatively low incidence of excess cruelty to the Germans’ and the Hutu’s virtually boundless cruelty toward, respectively, the putatively irredeemable Jews and Tutsi.
Whatever the central tendencies of perpetrators’ cruelty during each kind of eliminationist assault, perpetrators frequently convince themselves that, whatever else they do, they also avenge or prophylactically prevent heinous crimes against themselves and their societies. Thus, vengeful cruelty, rooted in this imagined experience, exists across eliminationist assaults.
If Conradian cruelty has central tendencies, though also a potential near ubiquity, if Zimbardoian cruelty appears only in selected circumstances, if condign cruelty is an attribute of the slayers and eliminators of demons and heretics, and if vengeful cruelty also has its central tendencies and ubiquity, Machiavellian cruelty of political aims is least patterned. As all eliminationist assaults are political, Machiavellian cruelty could inherently be produced in any of them. Yet such cruelty appears only when the leaders and their followers choose to conceptualize excess cruelty as a political instrument, which, like eliminationist slaughters themselves, is unpredictable and happens less frequently than might be supposed.
Whenever a perpetrator strikes a victim with the instrumental purpose of affecting, including by terrorizing, other victims or of weakening the victim group, it is politically motivated excess cruelty. This kind of cruelty, like other widespread cruelties having such consequences, might—as its explicit purpose is eliminationist—also be conceptualized as an eliminationist means in its own right, and not just an eliminationist assault’s complement or byproduct. But however we conceive it, politically inspired cruelty often appears in conjunction with cruelty’s other forms, meaning cruelty’s infliction has mixed sources, motives, and types, which complicates the isolation and identification of Machiavellian cruelty’s presence.
Aside from these general kinds of cruelty, perpetrators reserve certain cruelties for certain specific members of targeted people or groups. If far too little attention is devoted to collecting information on, publicizing, and analyzing perpetrators’ cruelty in general, still less attention goes to perpetrators’ cruelty toward specific subgroups of victims. Perpetrators often target two such kinds of victims, women and children, with specific horrors—though their deeds are little recognized, and not conceptualized and analyzed as specific instances of cruelty. This failure reflects the general lack of attentive analysis given to the perpetrators’ acts in general—almost all studies focus on killing, but not the perpetrators’ manner of killing, general treatment of the victims, and other acts. Yet it also reflects women’s and children’s general invisibility as distinct victim groups. Women’s and children’s particularity cannot rightly be ignored by subsuming them under the general category of victims, or by treating them as no different from men. The perpetrators’ particular treatment of and cruelty toward women and children, perhaps even more than general cruelty, has not been focused upon probably for another reason: Doing so reveals the hollowness of so much existing analysis.
Perpetrators’ sexual cruelty toward women of targeted groups, though vast, is generally poorly documented and significantly under-analyzed. For decades, really throughout the past, such cruelty has been treated—if deemed noteworthy at all—as an otherwise nonsignifi
cant byproduct of war and other assaults and of men’s nature. With the feminist revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, and the concomitant discovery of women and gender as historical and political subjects, the intellectual space opened up for devoting proper attention to eliminationist assaults’ sexual cruelty, the most common kind being rape. Nevertheless, in retrospect it took longer than might have been expected, especially as the Pakistanis’ vast sexual cruelty against Bangladeshi women in 1971 was contemporaneously recognized. Only in the twentieth century’s last decade did people begin to understand such cruelty as often being politically inspired—Machiavellian in the term’s fullest, most dastardly, and cruelest sense.
Such politically inspired cruelty’s classical instance—it was here the phenomenon was first “discovered” and became an investigative theme—was the Serbs’ sexual cruelty against Bosniak women and later against Kosovar women. Serbs, during their eliminationist assault in Bosnia, killed many military-age men and expelled others from their villages and regions. They also decided to systematically rape Muslim women as another means of undermining the Bosniak people. They physically and/or emotionally maimed a huge number of individual women, their families, who, in this shame culture, had to absorb the shame, and Bosniak society itself, which treated raped women as polluted and untouchable. Knowing this, Serbs calculated that the more women they raped, the more the number of reproductive Bosniak women and future Bosniak generations would decline. The rapes’ political purposefulness and central organization is clear. Melika Kreitmayer, the doctor leading a gynecological team that examined twenty-five victims, reports that the rapes were meant “to humiliate Muslim women, to insult them, to destroy their persons and to cause shock. . . . These women were raped not because it was the male instinct. They were raped because it was the goal of the war.” She adds, “My impression is that someone had an order to rape the girls,” an impression the victims corroborate, recounting their rapists explicitly telling them they were on a mission.94 To achieve their political ends, the Serbs set up rape camps where soldiers, paramilitary troops, and others could regularly rape the women. Serb rape gangs roamed Bosnia. The Serbian leadership essentially green-lighted any Serb to rape any Muslim woman anywhere. After impregnating Muslim women, which was also this cruelty’s explicit political purpose, the Serbs often incarcerated them until they could no longer safely terminate the pregnancy, forcing them to bear children of Serbian men whom they (and apparently many Bosniaks) believed would weaken and dilute the Bosniak people. “We’re bringing you to a concentration camp,” one Bosniak woman reports being told. “The next time we meet, you’ll have one of our kids in your belly.” A Serb she knew prior to the eliminationist campaign raped her, saying “[I] was the hundredth one to be raped anyway [in that camp], and I certainly wouldn’t be the last.”95 In this political campaign of sexual cruelty, Serbs raped between twenty thousand and fifty thousand women, many of them dozens of times.96
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