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The National. UAE
Jan 8 2015
The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder is a study of a
century of state killings
Steve Donoghue
January 8, 2015
"Homo homini lupus est" goes the old Latin truism: man is a wolf to
man. The ancient Romans blandly accepted this fact of human existence
- Cicero, their foremost public thinker, not only executed political
enemies but was himself executed by political enemies - but the
essayist and public thinker Abram de Swaan, professor emeritus at the
University of Amsterdam, has devoted years to studying humans killing
humans, and his latest book, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality
of Mass Murder, is a penetrating and thrillingly thought-provoking
analysis of the subject.
De Swaan's concentration is asymmetrical killing; he's less interested
in the clash of armies by night than he is by the wide-scale murder of
non--combatants - not just strictly genocide, he carefully
distinguishes, but any wide-scale killings by a state apparatus
conducted against non-soldiers. And despite his deliberately
provocative opening line, "We live in peaceful times", his primary
focus - the 20th century - provides him with plenty of examples to
study. The Armenian massacre, the killing fields of Cambodia, the
-government-sponsored famines of Mao's China, the pogroms of Stalin,
of course the Nazis and their Final Solution - states murdered
non-combatants in the 20th century on a sheer scale undreamt of by the
Romans, or the Persians, or the Huns.
De Swaan seeks to understand not only why this is so, but also how
it's so, what the actual -interpersonal mechanisms are by which states
can do these things. After all, he isn't for the most part studying
soldiers under arms - he's studying ordinary people pressed into the
task of killing other ordinary people, and the numbers are staggering.
"Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people are led to destroy
hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people," he writes. "But
before that, most of them may not have harmed a living soul. Once it
is over, most of them by far will never again physically hurt another
person. Where does this extreme violence come from, and how can it
disappear again, seemingly without a trace?"
His fundamental contention is that "mass annihilation" - the more or
less systematic killing of large numbers of civilians by a state
apparatus - occurs in societies that have become "compartmentalised"
in one to four ways: mentally, socially, institutionally or
physically. He asserts early on in his book that it simply "won't do"
to fall back on that old Roman truism; man, he claims, is not a wolf
to man - not generally. Such depredation only happens when
compartmentalisation has subjected certain elements of a population to
stresses well -outside their normal environment. Compartmentalisation
likewise extends to the victims: they're cut off, isolated from
extended communities, characterised as inhuman.
One of the many brilliant conceptual strokes of The Killing
Compartments is de Swaan's breakdown of these stresses into four
general categories, four "modes" by which mass killings are
facilitated. The first and perhaps most straight-forward of these is
something he calls "conqueror's frenzy", which "occurs far from home,
largely un-beknown to the domestic public", and is "perpetrated
exclusively by the military". The horror inflicted on the Belgian
population by advancing German soldiers in 1914 would be an example of
this, or even more wide-scale events such as the "Rape of Nanking"
carried out by Japanese soldiers in 1937. The stresses here are at
least familiar: front-line soldiers, under arms and anxious about
being killed, unleash their pent-up anxieties in the form of rage.
De Swaan's second mode is "rule by terror", which "employs
professional violence specialists and a dedicated system of insulated
detention and extermination sites". Here the reader might think of
operations such as the gulag system of Soviet Russia, where terror
motivated ordinary citizens to spy and inform on each other
(including, infamously, family members turning on each other to save
themselves) and the arrested were sent to "insulated" extermination
sites, such as the distant work camps of Siberia.
Opposing the more formalised state-run system of rule by terror is
another of de Swaan's modes of annihilation, the "megapogrom", in
which "a wave of apparently spontaneous deadly local riots" erupt
along the fracture points of a society, creating "a free-for-all for
whoever joins the slaughter of a vaguely defined target group".
Pressure events, de Swaan claims, such as military defeat or social
upheaval, "provoke, synchronise, and concatenate these local events
into one huge campaign of annihilation, condoned if not covertly or
even openly encouraged, by the regime in power". A standout example of
this would be the Red Guard groups that appeared and flourished during
Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, roving bands of young people
exacting ad hoc punishments on alleged offenders without the direct
cooperation of the state police.
And the most seemingly irrational of all four of de Swaan's killing
modes would be the "losers' triumph", in which "genocidal regimes
facing imminent destruction by an enemy army surprisingly continue and
perhaps intensify their campaign to annihilate the target group" - as
seen in recent history during the genocide in Rwanda, when the
Hutu-led government intensified its slaughter of Tutsi non-combatants
even as the RPF forces were advancing from the north.
De Swaan hardly needs to point out that the darkest and most ready
20th-century exemplar of all four of these modes of annihilation is
Nazi Germany, and it's natural to read his book as a response, in
part, to the concept of "the banality of evil" first popularised in
Hannah Arendt's 1963 account of Adolf Eichmann's war-crimes trial in
Jerusalem. De Swaan takes issue with Arendt's characterisation of
Eichmann as just one ordinary, faceless bureaucrat in a state
mechanism of terror (he points out, for instance, that "even at the
time, it was well known that Eichmann had been a fanatical Jew hunter
who knew full well what fate lay in store for his prey"); it's his
fundamental contention that evil is not banal, and that it's only
perpetrated on a large scale by ordinary people under extraordinary
pressures.
"I very much doubt that I, or most of my readers for that matter," he
protests, "on being brought into the killing site would have started,
like auto-matons, clubbing, knifing, shooting, gassing people to death
by the thousands, for weeks and months at a stretch."
In short, The Killing Compartments is an elaborate exculpation of
humanity from the charge of being genetic "genocidaires"; de Swaan
argues that turning ordinary people into mass killers requires either
-extreme duress - the threat of war or economic destruction - or
extensive preparation, in which certain target groups are
compartmentalised to such a point that their slaughter no longer seems
abhorrent. As he puts it, "There is nothing 'banal' about such an
experience."
It's a masterful, clutter--clearing summation, and it's only slightly
hampered by the fact that de Swaan has engineered his categories to be
all-inclusive. If his overview has a flaw, it's not found in
"conquerors' frenzy" or "rule by terror" or "losers' triumph" but in
his concept of the "megapogrom", in which the ruling state steps back
and allows natural upwellings of homicidal, genocidal aggression to
make accomplices out of the general population.
De Swaan is forced to admit that in such cases compartmentalism is
either "much less elaborate" or non-existent; "mobs seem to assemble
spontaneously to murder their targeted victims out in the open, in a
brief period of blood frenzy". He tries to mitigate this by pointing
out that those crowds are suffering from long-term pressures, but what
general populace doesn't feel long-term pressures?
Likewise his contention that most 20th-century examples of mass
annihilation "never proceeded in dispassionate, calculated
destruction". Without exception, he writes, these episodes were
"grisly, bloody, and wild". But the 20 or so mass annihilations de
Swaan examines almost universally belie this characterisation, as does
his own concept of the spontaneously flaring "megapogrom": in
virtually all the cases he cites, from Stalin's institutionalised
famines to the busy train schedules of the Final Solution to the
extensive slaughter plannings in the Rwandan genocide, there's a
depressing abundance of -dispassion and calculation. Enough, perhaps,
to justify a harder look at whether or not humans are hardwired for
killing.
Steve Donoghue is managing -editor of Open Letters Monthly.
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/books/the-killing-compartments-the-mentality-of-mass-murder-is-a-study-of-a-century-of-state-killings#full
Jan 8 2015
The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder is a study of a
century of state killings
Steve Donoghue
January 8, 2015
"Homo homini lupus est" goes the old Latin truism: man is a wolf to
man. The ancient Romans blandly accepted this fact of human existence
- Cicero, their foremost public thinker, not only executed political
enemies but was himself executed by political enemies - but the
essayist and public thinker Abram de Swaan, professor emeritus at the
University of Amsterdam, has devoted years to studying humans killing
humans, and his latest book, The Killing Compartments: The Mentality
of Mass Murder, is a penetrating and thrillingly thought-provoking
analysis of the subject.
De Swaan's concentration is asymmetrical killing; he's less interested
in the clash of armies by night than he is by the wide-scale murder of
non--combatants - not just strictly genocide, he carefully
distinguishes, but any wide-scale killings by a state apparatus
conducted against non-soldiers. And despite his deliberately
provocative opening line, "We live in peaceful times", his primary
focus - the 20th century - provides him with plenty of examples to
study. The Armenian massacre, the killing fields of Cambodia, the
-government-sponsored famines of Mao's China, the pogroms of Stalin,
of course the Nazis and their Final Solution - states murdered
non-combatants in the 20th century on a sheer scale undreamt of by the
Romans, or the Persians, or the Huns.
De Swaan seeks to understand not only why this is so, but also how
it's so, what the actual -interpersonal mechanisms are by which states
can do these things. After all, he isn't for the most part studying
soldiers under arms - he's studying ordinary people pressed into the
task of killing other ordinary people, and the numbers are staggering.
"Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people are led to destroy
hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people," he writes. "But
before that, most of them may not have harmed a living soul. Once it
is over, most of them by far will never again physically hurt another
person. Where does this extreme violence come from, and how can it
disappear again, seemingly without a trace?"
His fundamental contention is that "mass annihilation" - the more or
less systematic killing of large numbers of civilians by a state
apparatus - occurs in societies that have become "compartmentalised"
in one to four ways: mentally, socially, institutionally or
physically. He asserts early on in his book that it simply "won't do"
to fall back on that old Roman truism; man, he claims, is not a wolf
to man - not generally. Such depredation only happens when
compartmentalisation has subjected certain elements of a population to
stresses well -outside their normal environment. Compartmentalisation
likewise extends to the victims: they're cut off, isolated from
extended communities, characterised as inhuman.
One of the many brilliant conceptual strokes of The Killing
Compartments is de Swaan's breakdown of these stresses into four
general categories, four "modes" by which mass killings are
facilitated. The first and perhaps most straight-forward of these is
something he calls "conqueror's frenzy", which "occurs far from home,
largely un-beknown to the domestic public", and is "perpetrated
exclusively by the military". The horror inflicted on the Belgian
population by advancing German soldiers in 1914 would be an example of
this, or even more wide-scale events such as the "Rape of Nanking"
carried out by Japanese soldiers in 1937. The stresses here are at
least familiar: front-line soldiers, under arms and anxious about
being killed, unleash their pent-up anxieties in the form of rage.
De Swaan's second mode is "rule by terror", which "employs
professional violence specialists and a dedicated system of insulated
detention and extermination sites". Here the reader might think of
operations such as the gulag system of Soviet Russia, where terror
motivated ordinary citizens to spy and inform on each other
(including, infamously, family members turning on each other to save
themselves) and the arrested were sent to "insulated" extermination
sites, such as the distant work camps of Siberia.
Opposing the more formalised state-run system of rule by terror is
another of de Swaan's modes of annihilation, the "megapogrom", in
which "a wave of apparently spontaneous deadly local riots" erupt
along the fracture points of a society, creating "a free-for-all for
whoever joins the slaughter of a vaguely defined target group".
Pressure events, de Swaan claims, such as military defeat or social
upheaval, "provoke, synchronise, and concatenate these local events
into one huge campaign of annihilation, condoned if not covertly or
even openly encouraged, by the regime in power". A standout example of
this would be the Red Guard groups that appeared and flourished during
Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, roving bands of young people
exacting ad hoc punishments on alleged offenders without the direct
cooperation of the state police.
And the most seemingly irrational of all four of de Swaan's killing
modes would be the "losers' triumph", in which "genocidal regimes
facing imminent destruction by an enemy army surprisingly continue and
perhaps intensify their campaign to annihilate the target group" - as
seen in recent history during the genocide in Rwanda, when the
Hutu-led government intensified its slaughter of Tutsi non-combatants
even as the RPF forces were advancing from the north.
De Swaan hardly needs to point out that the darkest and most ready
20th-century exemplar of all four of these modes of annihilation is
Nazi Germany, and it's natural to read his book as a response, in
part, to the concept of "the banality of evil" first popularised in
Hannah Arendt's 1963 account of Adolf Eichmann's war-crimes trial in
Jerusalem. De Swaan takes issue with Arendt's characterisation of
Eichmann as just one ordinary, faceless bureaucrat in a state
mechanism of terror (he points out, for instance, that "even at the
time, it was well known that Eichmann had been a fanatical Jew hunter
who knew full well what fate lay in store for his prey"); it's his
fundamental contention that evil is not banal, and that it's only
perpetrated on a large scale by ordinary people under extraordinary
pressures.
"I very much doubt that I, or most of my readers for that matter," he
protests, "on being brought into the killing site would have started,
like auto-matons, clubbing, knifing, shooting, gassing people to death
by the thousands, for weeks and months at a stretch."
In short, The Killing Compartments is an elaborate exculpation of
humanity from the charge of being genetic "genocidaires"; de Swaan
argues that turning ordinary people into mass killers requires either
-extreme duress - the threat of war or economic destruction - or
extensive preparation, in which certain target groups are
compartmentalised to such a point that their slaughter no longer seems
abhorrent. As he puts it, "There is nothing 'banal' about such an
experience."
It's a masterful, clutter--clearing summation, and it's only slightly
hampered by the fact that de Swaan has engineered his categories to be
all-inclusive. If his overview has a flaw, it's not found in
"conquerors' frenzy" or "rule by terror" or "losers' triumph" but in
his concept of the "megapogrom", in which the ruling state steps back
and allows natural upwellings of homicidal, genocidal aggression to
make accomplices out of the general population.
De Swaan is forced to admit that in such cases compartmentalism is
either "much less elaborate" or non-existent; "mobs seem to assemble
spontaneously to murder their targeted victims out in the open, in a
brief period of blood frenzy". He tries to mitigate this by pointing
out that those crowds are suffering from long-term pressures, but what
general populace doesn't feel long-term pressures?
Likewise his contention that most 20th-century examples of mass
annihilation "never proceeded in dispassionate, calculated
destruction". Without exception, he writes, these episodes were
"grisly, bloody, and wild". But the 20 or so mass annihilations de
Swaan examines almost universally belie this characterisation, as does
his own concept of the spontaneously flaring "megapogrom": in
virtually all the cases he cites, from Stalin's institutionalised
famines to the busy train schedules of the Final Solution to the
extensive slaughter plannings in the Rwandan genocide, there's a
depressing abundance of -dispassion and calculation. Enough, perhaps,
to justify a harder look at whether or not humans are hardwired for
killing.
Steve Donoghue is managing -editor of Open Letters Monthly.
http://www.thenational.ae/arts-lifestyle/books/the-killing-compartments-the-mentality-of-mass-murder-is-a-study-of-a-century-of-state-killings#full