How soldiers deal with the job of killing

[carl]

What enabled the Germans and especially the Japanese to participate in mass murder and torture? Their culture? Lower level of social development? Superior social development? Is it undefinable? When did we become relatively moral compared to our enemies? Was there a turning point in history?

This is from a guy who hasn't seen nearly what you guys have.

I think that capability exists in almost all of us, and it exists very close to the surface. In young men it is even closer to the surface. What holds it in check is the process of acculturation and learning that parents do from just a little after the day of birth. The results of that process are reinforced and held in place by a social structure. If you remove that social structure, all that learning and nodding your head yes when your mother tells you not to pull the wings off flies can be forgotten in a extremely short time, almost as if was never there.

To me the most important part of the that social structure that keeps us from savagery is the "legitimate authority figure". I put that in quotes because that can vary with circumstance, but if the authority figure says it's ok to (name your atrocity), those "good boys (or men or women)" will do it and have fun doing it and brag about it. There are some saints out who won't, God bless them, but they will tend to get washed away with the tide if they aren't backed by authority figures.

That is one reason I get so upset when people want to give a pass on things like hazing or desecrating bodies. It is chipping away at the dike holding back that tide of savagery and that dike is always under severe strains. Even minor cracks can develop into catastrophic breaks unless they are fixed immediately.

An example of that is Capt. Medina's company. He set that company up for that crime for months by, IIRC, telling them that it was ok to act on their savage impulses. The legitimate authority figure gave them permission so they did it.

A more extreme but perhaps more illuminating example is the child soldier of Africa. These kids are removed from their social support world and given a new authority figure who is then able to create a sweet faced monster in just a few days. This is independent of continent or race. You can take most any 12 year, 14 or 16 year old anywhere and if you handle him right, you will have a stone cold but giggly killer of his own parents in 3 weeks or less. (Peter Singer's book Child Soldiers is great on this.)

The Germans and Japanese did those things because their leaders told them it was ok. If our leaders tell us it is ok, we will do the same thing. We already have on a minor scale, "enhanced interrogation." We can revert to savagery in a very short time if we don't constantly tell each other "We're Americans. We don't do that ####." (Thank you Brandon Friedman.)

Of course that begs the question, when do leaders on a big scale, say that #### is ok? Maybe it is a millenniumist (sic) ideology, Nazi for the Germans, that contrived bushido emporer nonsense for the Japanese, and you can add communism for any number of countries. All totalitarian ideologies that subordinated everything to the ideology.

[Fuchs]

The Germans and Japanese did those things because their leaders told them it was ok. If our leaders tell us it is ok, we will do the same thing. We already have on a minor scale, "enhanced interrogation." We can revert to savagery in a very short time if we don't constantly tell each other "We're Americans. We don't do that ####." (Thank you Brandon Friedman.

Not sure this is how it works. A widespread remark was "Wenn der Fuehrer das wuesste!" (~ "If only Hitler knew about it!")
They often KNEW it was wrong and they often ASSUMED that top leadership was not intently tolerating it. That was usually an illusion, of course.

The reason for bystanding passively was probably more the feeling of being but a tiny wheel in a huge, unstoppable machinery.

The ones who actually committed (war) crimes (and there's no war, no active war party without some!) probably did it for the reasons illuminated in the Stanford Prison Experiment.


PS: Since when does the forum delete Umlaute?