The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  In my review of serial sexual homicide, where the term evil is applied almost universally, I found only three men (Ian Brady, Leonard Lake, and David Parker Ray) who recorded the agony of their victims. But Dr. Salter has found that almost half of the sadistic men she has studied made "trophies" of this kind.103 As we know, evil can be the final common path of myriad sources, some that we are now beginning to understand, others that remain mysterious. We have seen selfish, narcissistic wife killers, the mentally ill, the morbidly jealous, the cold psychopathic predatorsschizoid ones as solitary as the leopard, gregarious ones who tell their wives they'll be late for dinner (as they go off in search of "prey"), some with obvious neurological and neurochemical abnormalities we are just beginning to understand, others as outwardly "normal" as the next-door neighbor (like Dave Pelzer's mother to most everyone else except Dave), some who shift gears into evil only after priming themselves with alcohol or drugs, others who need no such stimulation. When I think of the multiple routes to evil, I think of the dozen or so railroads, arranged like the spokes of a wheel, centered at Auschwitz-Birkenau that carried their victims from the four corners of Europe to the death camps. Think of evil as the common meeting ground where all the different pathways we have been looking at converge. Their common element is the horror that certain acts elicit in us, that provoke in us the emotion we identify as evil ... and that make us utter the word: evil.

  FINAL THOUGHTS

  We studied our serial killers, nonces and murderers in the same way we did our scientists, intellectuals and artists, looking for answers to the mystery of our nature.

  -Irvine Welsh, Crime

  n this book the spotlight has been on evil in peacetime: extreme violent actions, that is, committed by people who for the most part are outside the ordinary run of mankind. As we have seen, some are people ordinary in appearance and conduct before they explode into violence. They shock us not just by their actions but by the sheer unexpectedness of their actions. We tend to regard those whose violence moves or revolts us as evil-as "monsters." An acquaintance of mine from Sydney, Australia, for example, learned that her seemingly nice neighbor was a serial killer. With others who encounter violent persons, the shock doesn't come until a violent act has been performed because they already seemed quite different from ordinary folk-either because of mental illness, peculiarity of personality, or chronic antisocial behavior.

  The situation in times of group conflict, especially in wartime, is different. To be sure, many of the leaders in such times, especially the aggressors, partake of this "otherness"-being awash in violence-to the point of becoming monsters. We must not forget the butchery carried out, or inspired, by Dr. Mengele at Auschwitz, Dr. Zawahiri from the caves of Afghanistan, or the recently captured Serbian doctor, Radovan Karadzic-a psychiatrist, no less. Yet much of the actual damage (or even carnage) is inflicted by ordinary people who become swept up in the tide of battle, their minds replaced temporarily, as it were, by the mind of the leader. The behavior of the soldiers or of other participants is uncharacteristic of their usual selves. Still, many of those "ordinary" soldiers who commit atrocities are not all that ordinary: they may have been the ones who beat their wives, were harsh or cruel with their children in such a way that they found war a welcome opportunity to give vent to sadistic tendencies that were kept somewhat under wraps in civilian life. These were not good men, that is; they were ordinary only in the sense that as civilians they had led unremarkable lives that garnered little attention. It is not likely that neuroimaging studies would reveal much brain abnormality in such men.

  This crucial difference has been highlighted in a recent work by Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic in her book They Would Never Hurt a Fly. One of her more interesting comments is, "War turns ordinary men into monsters."' She contends that in times of war and group conflict, men (and even some women) are transformed into moral zombies, capable of committing the most appalling atrocities upon the enemycivilians included-only to revert, once the cease-fire has sounded, to their previous lives as grocery clerks, taxi drivers, farmhands, teachers, and, yes, doctors. But again, although they may revert to being ordinary people, they may not be good people.

  As with evil, the word monster is one we reserve for behavior that is so unlike our behavior as to create a comfortable distance between our self-image and our perception of those freakish aberrations of nature, those monstrosities (as we prefer to regard them), who actually are inclined to behave like, well, evil monsters. The cartoonist Walt Kelly put it all very simply when Pogo, the main character of the titular comic strip-who happens to be an opossum-says, in a moment of reflection, "We have met the enemy-and he is us."

  Since most of us go from cradle to grave without ever participating in evil acts, it is tempting to think-flattering to think-that many of us are truly inoculated against evil, as though there were some invisible divide separating the majority of us from those "others"-the monsters. Certainly it helps to come from a good family, surrounded by a supportive and accepting community, and to be blessed with the good fortune not to have inherited risk genes (either for mental illness or abnormal personality), nor to have suffered birth complications or sustained a serious head injury.

  But put yourself in the place of twenty-four-year-old Drazen Erdomovic, a half-Serb, half-Croat soldier transported in mid July with his unit in 1995 to Srebrenica, not knowing what his mission was. His commander, Brano Gojkovic, soon made his mission clear: he was to join with his mates in shooting to death some twelve hundred Muslim civilians, men and boys, who had been bused there for the purpose. As Drakulic tells the story, Drazen had no taste for this sort of thing. When he expressed his disinclination to take part in the massacre, his mates mocked him. He was after all only a half-Serb in their eyes: not someone they could readily trust. His commander then told him: "If you don't want to do it, walk over there and stand with the prisoners so we can shoot you too. Give me your machine gun."3 Now Drazen is given the choice between a good and an evil. He could stand on moral high ground-and die. Or he could kill some innocent men and boys-and live, perhaps to tell the world of the still greater evil into which he was forced by his commander, who obeyed an even worse commander, General Mladic, who gleefully carried out the orders of Dr. Karadzic, whoignoring the Hippocratic Oath ("First, do no harm")-happily obeyed the genocidal edict of President Slobodan Milosevic. Drazen chose lifefor himself, which meant the deaths of the sixty people he spent a quarter-hour shooting. He did tell the story, and because his story was believable, his sentence at court was reduced from ten years to five. Was it better that Drazen live to let the world know what happened on that killing field? Or would it have been better if he (and all the men compelled to take part in the massacre) died, leaving the truly evil and guilty commanders and generals and presidents to live out their lives unsuspected and unpunished? Because Drazen had a conscience, he lives on as a spiritually broken man. And Mladic and Karadzic live on, too-contented and unrepentant. In the young soldier's place, what would I have done? What would you have done? I ask this only as a rhetorical question. If we are honest, we cannot say what we would have done.

  The banality of evil, of which Hannah Arendt spoke, was the banality of Adolf Eichmann, the oil company agent; of Josef Mengele, the doctor; of Joachim Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman; of Martin Bormann, the estate agent; of Hans Frank, the attorney; of Reinhard Heydrich, the violinist and navy officer. None of these men were mentally ill; none had suffered a head injury or any illness affecting the brain. Most of these men had what Dr. Kernberg has called malignant narcissism-they were ego centric, ambitious, ruthless, yet capable of loyalty to their group or within the confines of family. Several had been raised in virulently anti-Semitic families (Heydrich, Alfred Rosenberg) and were uncommonly arrogant. Of Ribbentrop it was said that he was disliked by everyone except his wife and Hitler; even Hitler found him tiresome. Only two of the top Nazis denounced Hitler during the 1945-1946 Nuremberg trials: the Hitler Youth leader Bald
ur von Schirach, and the architect Albert Speer. All these men had come under the sway of Hitler, but for which they would not have set in motion the Holocaust; all would have died in the same obscurity in which they had been born. Hitler was the catalyst that activated the potential for evil in these men. And I suspect all these men would have shown little or no abnormality if tested with MRI.

  Hans Frank, who went on to become governor general of occupied Poland, was one of the war criminals hanged at the Nuremberg trials. His son Niklas was seven at that time and had been raised amid luxury in the castle his father had taken over. His mother used to take him in the chauffeured limousine to go into town and buy mink coats for a few zlotys from Jewish women who were about to go, unknowingly, to their deaths at Auschwitz. Despite such beginnings, Niklas developed a strong moral center-how this happened is a mystery-and later wrote a book condemning his father, regretting that he was not privileged to witness his father's hanging.4

  Niklas was almost alone among the children of the Nazi higher-ups to condemn, rather than excuse, their fathers.I Some twenty years ago I wrote him a letter, asking if he had any clue what helped him gain high moral ground in the face of the evils that both parents represented and that surrounded him on all sides. He responded, expressing how he felt red with both shame and joy at receiving my letter. He had no answer for how he retained moral integrity while growing up in that home. But he did comment how it was clear from his own text the danger we all are in, adding, "Who knows whether, if I had been born in my father's time, I wouldn't have ended up like my father? "6 In his efforts to come to grips with the ordinariness of many who commit atrocities in wartime, Niklas Frank pondered the question in this way: "There are two people inside each German. One of them is well-behaved, hardworking, a solid citizen. That is the official version of the respectable German. But beneath it, behind it, as if made up of negative ions, there are the authentic Germans, a people of mur derers." 7 Here he was too harsh in condemning his countrymen as a whole-especially those born after the war. But his remark does underline as if with yellow highlighter how vulnerable we are as human beings to shift in wartime from the honorable to the despicable; how easy is the transition in such times from a life of innocence to a life of evil.

  What I am saying here does not lessen the responsibility of those who, in wartime, make the descent from the ordinary into the evil of atrocity, who selectively switch off their compassion-that essential ingredient of goodness-and end up blind to the humanity of the noncombatants, even of the children of the enemy. This means that Lieutenant William Galley of Vietnam's My Lai massacre was responsible;' Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who confessed to beheading the Wall Street Journal bureau chief Daniel Pearl, was responsible; the American soldiers who tortured Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were responsible; the Russian guards who brutalized Ivan Denisovich in the gulag (the prisoner immortalized by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) were responsible; and so on in an endless list. All of these men started out as ordinary men. Ordinary men, carrying out the orders of their fanatical or sadistic leaders, or, in the case of the highly educated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, radicalized by experiences in times of group conflict.

  Ordinary men, briefly put, can turn into monsters in time of war or group conflict, committing acts that horrify and disgust-acts we label "evil." And then they can turn back again into ordinary men. Once the leader has dehumanized the enemy, the value system the followers may have brought to the conflict originally is scrapped and supplanted by the leader's value system. And that system is quite simple: the enemy is the enemy; the enemy is not really human. Uniformed troops, guerillas, combatants, civilians, men of fighting age, women and children ... all are fair game. Thus the three thousand civilians killed on 9/11 were not "really" civilians; they were "soldiers" in the front lines of the Great Satan's infidel capitalist army. The North Vietnamese at My Lai were women who might be hiding bombs, children who might one day grow into enemy soldiers. Best not to take chances.

  Apart from a declared war, there are innumerable instances of civil strife and politically inspired terrorism where we witness the transition: ordinary man-torturer-ordinary man once again. The Brazilian police during the military regime of 1964-1985 had been carefully instructed in torture and murder by way of suppressing those considered "subversives" in that era. Beggars were taken off the streets and tortured-for practice-the torturers having been carefully mentored by a US police officer.9 The policemen involved showed "no evidence of premorbid personalities that would have predisposed them to such careers"; those with cruel tendencies were actually steered away from that work by the authorities.10 This, from a chapter in Violence Workers entitled "Ordinary Men Doing Evil Deeds."

  The behavior of the common soldiers in the Franco-Algerian war of 1954-1962 went along similar lines. The tortures taking place on both sides led French journalist Jacques Servan-Schreiber to write: "There is no one who is naturally evil.... There are situations which inflame the beast in man.... You have seen in Algeria how easily men can become the helpless playthings of the set-up into which they are thrown."11 Servan-Schreiber is, I believe, nearly correct: the "naturally evil" are rare; they are the psychopathic men (and the still rarer women) who, in peacetime and without maltreatment or provocation, kill and torture for sport. Usually they occupy Category 22 of my Gradations of Evil scale, though the majority of them have been so brutalized in their younger years that it would be improper to call them "naturally evil."

  In an earlier chapter we saw how uncommon it was to encounter a murderer whose acts could be attributed to Bad Seed alone. There is of course an intermediate group: persons who have spent all their adult lives (and much of their adolescent lives) doing one violent or socially repugnant act after another. These are the persons who seem "perpetually" evil. Some have endured neglect or humiliation in their early years (Charles Sobhraj, who killed a string of tourists in Southeast Asia; the Angel of Death nurse Jane Toppan; San Francisco's "Zodiac Killer" Arthur Allen; Florida serial killer Daniel Conahan; Francisco Montes, the Spanish man who sneaked into youth hostels in a dozen countries, raping and killing young women). Others came from apparently good homes (such as Vancouver's serial killer, Clifford Olson).

  About certain others, we know little concerning their early years: Franklin Delano Floyd, who kidnapped a girl, kept her for many years as his "daughter" and then killed her when she tried to leave him and marry; Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who imprisoned his daughter in the bunker under his house and had seven children by her. Then there is Paul Schaefer, whose life was depicted under the arresting title "The World's Most Evil Man."" That is a gross exaggeration, though there is ample evidence to place Schaefer as one among the most evil men. A man of twenty-four at the end of World War II, he became a charismatic cult leader and moved with his flock from Germany to Chile. He created a compound, Colonia Dignidad, cut off from the rest of the country and ruled his subjects with absolute control-engaging in the sexual molestation of boys, forced labor, weapons trafficking, kidnapping, torture, and murder. A large but unknown number of murder victims lay buried in the hinterlands near Santiago. Through intimidation of his followers, the news of the unspeakable practices going on at the Colonia were so slow to reach the outside world that Schaefer was not arrested until 2006-when he was eighty-five. Given a twenty-year sentence, he will die in prison, but his crimes are no worse than those of David Parker Ray or Leonard Lake, described in an earlier chapter. There is no "most evil man"though there are many serious contenders.

  As for the men who have fomented the wars or the political conflicts, and in whose names atrocities were committed, their abnormalities were confined to the subtle area of personality. Sensitivity about short stature (Joseph Stalin) or physical abnormality (Joseph Goebbels, with his deformed leg from childhood osteomyelitis) affected some of these men.13 Mental illness and brain injury were not a part of the picture; instead was a picture composed in varying fractions of grandiosity, hatred, sadism, vengefulness, bigotry, and
a lust for power. Also, we should not overlook the quest for fame, as we see in many of today's terrorists who, nonentities at the outset, purchase fame through martyrdom, knowing that leading a blameless life earns no notoriety-but slaughtering a few innocents makes headlines.14

  Evil in peacetime is quite another matter. In the absence of prior attack by an enemy bent on one's degradation and destruction, evil acts emerge neither from the aggressors nor from extremes of retaliation by the vic- tims.ls As outlined in the chapters of this book, evil in peacetime sometimes has its origins in aberrations of personality alone, but the more usual background picture is an amalgam of abnormal personality and other factors relating to mental illness or brain disorders. An extremely harsh early environment is commonplace (parental brutality, disparagement, or neglect), especially in the ranks of men committing serial sexual homicide. This was true of many of the leaders in wartime but is not a regular feature of those whom they inspire to carry out the atrocities against the enemy. Once the enemy has been demonized and dehumanized, the all-too-ordinary men committing these acts seldom regard them as atrocities.16

  Evil in peacetime lends itself to neuroscientific study: the men involved in evil acts in peacetime are seldom the "ordinary" men of wartime soldiery.17 As noted earlier, however, many of those "ordinary" soldiers committing these atrocities are not all that ordinary. Probably a good many were wife beaters, cruel and perhaps even sadistic to their children, men who found satisfaction in wartime situations where they could, now free of all restraint, unleash their sadistic desires.