Ruminations on Mass Evil
Nov 29, 2007
A few months ago, I read an incredibly chilling book called A time for machetes by Jean Hatzfeld. It is a compilation of interviews with ten men who had participated in the genocide in the Nyamata region slaughtering dozens of their own friends and neighbors. The book also contains heart-rending interviews with many of the survivors. Reading this book gave me a terrifying insight into the nature and dynamics of evil and raised questions about our ability to fully comprehend and analyze it.
Hannah Arendt once wrote about 'the banality of evil' during the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann and although it has become something of a cliché, I couldn't help pondering it while I read what these men said. The killers discussed their acts in a matter-of-fact way with no sign that they grasped the gravity or implications of it. There was no real remorse- only an overwhelming sense of self-pity. It made me wonder about that disconnect and how the men had so easily been able to live with their deeds after they had been captured. It challenges the idea that what happened was only a kind of 'temporary madness' that wore off once the killings had been stopped by the RPF and brought to mind the casual insouciance that Arendt was describing when she watched Adolf Eichmann on trial.
Nyamata was a microcosm of the genocide but it revealed the gradual evolution of the evil that came and how it took hold of every aspect of daily life. Survivors talked about the increasing brutality of the weekly village football games in the weeks leading up to the genocide. Something that had once been a symbol of unity was-like virtually everything else during this period- expropriated by the men who would soon be hunting down their neighbors. Everything else had to fit into this new framework of evil. Nightly prayers became a source of strength to carry on the killings the next day. The men's wives ceased nagging their husbands once the killings started and kept silent because they could not- or would not- stand in their way. Indeed the silence of the killer's wives is one of the puzzling aspects of the genocide. It is hard to understand how they insulated themselves from what their husbands were doing and how they did not let that affect their marriages. It is a testament to how powerfully the propaganda and new zeitgeist had rendered them either helpless or active collaborators with those who were killing others.
Any functioning community has at its foundation a culture of the celebration of life. Our relationships, actions and thoughts are often geared towards improving the lot of ourselves and those we love and we see often society as a kind of vibrant, living organism of which we are merely a component. In Nyamata- as in most of Rwanda during that period- this was instead manifested as a culture of death and the goal became destruction and what amounted to a kind of nihilism. Everything was perfectly aligned for genocide and these men appeared to have been a willing part of the phenomenon.
The book gives a revealing look into the minds of killers. Although some of the men were indeed forced to kill, there is no evidence in the book that they grappled with their conscience at all. They simply took it into their stride and once the momentum was unstoppable, there seemed to be a sense of relief that conscience was now a non-issue. They were completely unquestioning in their allegiance to a cause they did not even truly understand. They did not show any pity to the victims or even contemplate sheltering them. Once they had established what was effectively a cult of death- a perverse reversal on orthodox religion-they could not leave and nor did any of them wish to. The implication of the interview is that many of these men had finally found what amounted to a meaning to life but this was perversely expressed in the act of killing others on a massive scale. Now they contemplate life after prison and talk casually about how they expect the survivors to forgive them. Perhaps this lackadaisical approach has only been achieved precisely because these men appear to be entirely disconnected from reality as a kind of psychological defence.
Like most parts of Rwanda at the time- and something that has persisted after the genocide-Nyamata's population was overwhelmingly religious. How did the killers individually or collectively reconcile their deeds with their belief in God? That such a devoutly religious country could have defended into barbarity on such a mass scale poses a troubling challenge to the thesis that religion can provide an unshakable moral framework for societal relations. If a widespread belief in God cannot stop genocide then what can? If a religious bond is not enough to prevent a slide into barbarity then what kind of bonds does society need to develop to ensure that such deeds do not occur?
Perhaps Stanley Milgram's famous experiments provide an insight into this question. Milgram was a social psychologist who conducted an experiment to gain an understanding of the concept of obedience to authority. To find out how willingly people would obey an authority figure even though what they were being asked to do was unsavoury, Milgram created an experiment in which volunteers were told that if they pushed a certain lever, they would electrocute another volunteer (although unbeknownst to those pushing the lever, there was no actual electrical machine and the person to be electrocuted was one of the experimenters). This was ostensibly to discover the effect of punishment on learning. It was an experiment designed to test how far people would push their moral boundaries in the face of an authority figure urging them to do so. The results were incredibly chilling-as many as two-thirds of the volunteers administered the highest voltage once urged to do so by those in charge of the experiment.Although the 'victim' was merely feigning pain, the other volunteers did not know this. Many were uncomfortable with the experiment but went ahead anyway. They did so because they did not see themselves as being responsible for what was happening even though they were delivering the 'shocks.' Once told by the experimenters that they would not be held responsible, their moral outlook changed dramatically.
The Milgram experiment might go some way towards explaining the genocide in two ways. On the one hand, it shows how strong the culture of obedience can be and how the killers could suspend any moral qualms because they were ordered to do so. Once sufficient numbers of people had an identical mind-set, the momentum for killing was unstoppable. To explain this unquestioning obedience, one might identify religion as a primary force. Having grown up in strong, religious communities, religion became a higher figure of authority that was unquestionable. Once that figure of authority was supplanted by genocidal forces, the unquestioning culture of obedience instilled by religion made the genocide possible. Perhaps we should not wonder why religion did not prevent the killings- perhaps instead the strong religious background unknowingly sowed the seeds for evil. It could go some way to explaining why so many priests actively aided the killers and sent their parishioners to their deaths without any misgivings.
After reading this book, I had another chilling insight- as much as we discuss evil and try to understand it we can never fully do so. How can someone on the outside ever truly grasp such depravity? How can you fully understand such a radical transformation of societal rules and norms? Individual evil may be easier to understand, but mass evil is a much more puzzling and troubling concept and any theory one discusses can only go some way towards an explanation but can never present an over-arching theory. The book gave me the chilling realization that evil may be fundamentally beyond our ability to understand.
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