Genocide & Torture - the boss made me do it

"People do not spontaneously engage in gratuitous counter-evolutionary destruction of their own species. There is always a free pass for genocide, granted by the ruling classes to citizens on the ground."
Reg Corleonis, 2008

Dr Milgram was a very clever man.

In the early 60's he proved that we're all capable of genocide. This is how ...

Milgram got white-coated lab scientists to instruct experimental subjects to administer painful and sometimes fatal electric shocks to ordinary people, who were paid to act as if they were in pain or on the brink of death. (ie. they weren't really experiencing the shocks, just pretending to.)

Even though the experimental subjects knew they were hurting people, and in some cases understood that their "victims" were close to death, they continued to administer the shocks at ever-increasing voltages. Some of them felt uncomfortable about doing it. But the guy in the white coat said it was ok. So they carried on regardless.

Milgram's results prove that when human beings operate within an authoritative matrix which sanctions torture and death, they suspend their innate sense of compassion and empathy in favour of discharging their civic duty. If the moral environment legitimises and demands genocide, for example, people very easily controvert their own consciences in order to perpetrate these abuses.

While they may not feel good about it, they would rather conform to the prevailing authority, which in Milgram's case was the white-coated lab technician directing the experiment and instructing them to administer the shocks.

The 20th-century may go down in history books as a period of technological innovation and space travel that revolutionized the way people live. In the history book I am writing for my children, the 20th-century is headlined "Century of Genocide", which has revolutionised the way people die.

Starting with the Armenian genocide sanctioned, encouraged, and perpetrated by the Young Turks, by some accounts as many as 1.5 million Armenian Christians died between 1915 and 1916. Joseph Stalin developed a new technique: genocide by deliberately induced famine, which ostensibly caused the deaths of over 10 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. We move on to the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s which targeted Jews, gypsies and homosexuals, inter alia. Then there were the millions of people genocided at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s. The Rwandan genocide of the 1990s where half a million souls gave up their lives in a brief yet intense orgy of inter-tribal factionalism. I am sure I have missed a few.

In all the above cases, without exception, the behaviours demonstrated so tangibly by Dr Milgram were responsible for these tragedies. When the common folk buy into the philosophies of persecution and death touted by senior members of their communities and societies, genocide happens.

Tthe genocidal habits of the previous 100 years continue to manifest with vigour. The ongoing Darfuri genocide perpetuated by sophisticated Sudanese Arab plutocrats against tribal Africans in the west is heading for half a million victims, although accurate figures are difficult to come by. The Iraqi genocide courtesy Washington-style liberation must be just about crossing the 1 million mark – the full extent of this travesty has been concealed by a well-oiled spin apparatus.

Genocide just keeps on going.

Milgram’s experiment and the behaviours it identified are just as pertinent as they ever were. The question is, why? Why do people descend into the abyss simply because authority figures redefine the norms?

Is there a way out of this? What is the way out? I have a few social theories which I will be posting to Pierre's Other Blog in due course. Maybe, we can find an answer to this.