Ordinary people, extraordinary evil

What kind of person can attack, mutilate and kill a total stranger or even a neighbor? A scholar talks about the dark potential in all of us.

By Suzy Hansen

Aug 22, 2002 | In 1864, somewhere in the Colorado Territory of the United States, a former Methodist minister named Col. John Milton Chivington instructed his men to destroy an Indian village: "Kill and scalp all, little and big ... Nits make lice." During the seven hours of the attack, a 6-year-old bearing a white flag was shot dead on the spot. One soldier carved out a woman's genitals and brandished them on a stick. Bodies were mutilated, brains knocked out, infants clubbed.

In this case of genocide, the perpetrators were 700 American soldiers, and the victims, 500 noncombatant Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians. But a similarly horrific example might have surfaced from Babi Yar or Dili, Srebrenica or Rwanda. Genocides in vastly different cultures share this reality: Scores of innocent people die at the brutal hands of ordinary men.

James Waller, a professor of psychology at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash., suggests that perpetrators of genocide -- those who commit what Waller calls "extraordinary human evil" -- aren't just ideologically committed sociopaths or else passive weaklings who've been forced to pull the trigger. And contrary to what historians such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, the author of "Hitler's Willing Executioners," contend, there isn't a far-reaching cultural explanation for why one ethnic, religious or political group decides to slaughter another. Instead, according to Waller, complex forces in human nature make all of us capable of committing acts of genocide.

Salon spoke to Waller from his office in Spokane about how even healers become killers, how women can be just as brutal as men, and why we should expect more cases of genocide in the future.

Some people don't like your explanation of the motives of genocide perpetrators because they feel you're somehow justifying what these murderers have done.

I've spoken on this topic a lot, and often that comes from Jewish voices in the audience who feel as if this is too apologetic for the perpetrators. I was worried about that a lot. It seems to me that there are two mistakes you could make. One would be to just morally condemn these acts and not try to understand them. That doesn't seem to be terribly helpful. The other mistake would be to try to understand these acts of extraordinary evil but, "I'm not going to morally condemn them." That's irresponsible.

What I'd like to do is neither of these things. We can understand how perpetrators come to commit extraordinary evil and at the same time hold them morally and legally accountable. In most cases, they haven't been forced to do it. They've made choices.

Many people will want to know if you found differences according to gender. The generalization is that men commit these crimes. Is that true?

I struggled with this. At this point, virtually all we have in terms of perpetrator behavior is male behavior, and that's pretty much been the focus of my book in its entirety because those are the records we have. Were I to write this book 10 years from now, I think that would change tremendously. Since the fall of the [Berlin] Wall in 1990, and the opening of Eastern Europe, we've opened up tons of archives in Eastern Europe having to do with the Holocaust that we didn't have access to before. Those archives are being translated, sorted, analyzed, and it's still going to be a few years before that dwindles down to people like me.

But the people working in those archives -- I'm thinking of one woman in particular, Susannah Heschel from Dartmouth College -- tell us two things. One is there were a lot more female perpetrators in the camp systems in Nazi Germany than we ever thought before. Thousands more. The second thing is that these female perpetrators had the capacity to be just as brutal, just as sadistic, as any of the male perpetrators that we have records of.

So what Susannah Heschel would argue is that we're not talking about a difference in capacity to commit evil between males and females. Probably what we're looking at is a difference in opportunity. In other words, most of the genocides have occurred in male-dominated societies. Males have been welcomed into the military, females have typically not been. Women simply haven't had the types of opportunities to exhibit the type of evil and cruelty that men have had the opportunity to exhibit in genocide and mass killings. The more we uncover information, the more we'll see female perpetrators.

You see that in Rwanda as well. One of the first people convicted for crimes of genocide in Rwanda was a woman. The first woman in history to be convicted of that. Certainly, survivors from the Holocaust have written about the brutality of their female guards and so on, but we've tended to view them as extraordinarily evil females. We've not seen that as part of the general female pattern of responding to authority.

Why do you think that genocide is more and more likely to occur? What conditions will make it continue to happen?

First: exponential population growth. Second: the scarcity of resources. Those two things really set the stage for continuing collective violence like we see today in the Sudan. In the Middle Ages, if you had wanted to kill 6 million people, like the Nazis killed the Jews, you would have had to travel far and wide to get your hands on that many people. Today, it doesn't require that much mobility.

My own pessimism comes more from understanding human nature and the relative ease with which ordinary people can come to commit extraordinary evil. Until we fully understand and appreciate that, we're kind of at a loss to try and stop it. It seems to me that some of our discussion still revolves around the idea that perpetrators of genocide are very much on the fringe, and that there aren't a lot of these people. But when we recognize how relatively easy it is for ordinary people to become involved in this, that just takes the discussion to a different place.

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