Atrocities? Impossible!
By Since the horrors of Abu Ghraib were made public, we’ve witnessed numerous bizarre rhetorical coping strategies. The “a few bad apples” defense defies common sense as well as emerging evidence, but it persists none the less. Along side this defense, we also see an “everyone does it, they’d do it worse” kind of defense. These sit rather uneasily next to each other–not necessarily in direct contradiction, but not exactly complementary either.
It’s rather easy to file this equivocating nonsense under “Bush, stupid things people say in a desperate attempt to get him reelected” and that’s probably where they belong, for the most part. But it’s also entirely consistent with history. There has long been an unwillingness to recognize the worst behaviors of war. In this excellent post, quicksauce reminds us of the unwillingness to accept the horrors of My Lai, in which contradictory accounts were used in the defense of Calley and company.
It’s also tempting to file this stuff under “patriotism trumps reason and common sense, again” category. But sometimes the unwillingness to accept the worst horrors of war. I’m reminded of the story of Jan Karski, a Polish diplomat who managed to pose as a Ukrainian soldier and infiltrate a Nazi death camp in Poland, and escape with significant documentary evidence of the ongoing genocidal activities of the Nazis in Poland. For much of 1942, he sought out audiences with powerful and influential figures in the West, in an attempt to get them to understand exactly what was happening in Poland. Despite the powerful documentary evidence he found, people were not inclined to believe him. Here’s the tale of one exchange:
Karski traveled to the US and met with Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, who graciously heard him out and then responded, “I don’t believe you.” When a stunned Karski protested, Frankfurter interrupted and explained “I do not mean that you are lying. I simply said I cannot believe you.” Frankfurter literally could not conceive of the atrocities Karski was describing. He was not alone. Isaiah Berlin, who worked at the British embassy in Washington from 1942, say only a massive pogrom. So, too, did Nahum Goldman, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, and other leading Zionists.
The source for this astonishing anecdote is Samantha Power’s The Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide which should be required reading for all people. She goes on to document similar incredulity amongst American policy-makers regarding the atrocities in Cambodia and other cases, despite the fact that educated people who know their history really have no excuse for being surprised anymore.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting that Abu Ghraib and My Lai deserve to be listed alongside the atrocities of Pol Pot and Hitler. I’m simply suggesting that there is a consistent and persistent unwillingness amongst many, many people to believe, in spite of history, evidence, and common sense, what people are capable of. Even those who take the terrorism of Al Qeada and similar groups as an excuse to believe the worst about an entire region/religion/loosely defined ethnic group have a tendency to be remarkably abstract about it. Here I refer to the psychological function served by the invention of “islamofascism.” This is an amorphous, ill-defined concept that explains exactly what its invokers need it to explain and little more.
As a left-liberal, I’ve been on the receiving end of more than a few pious lectures about how the various schemes to improve humankind I might advocate are “unrealistic” because I have a “naive” understanding of “human nature” that doesn’t properly account for our innate selfishness or depravity or what have you. And perhaps sometimes these lectures, while framed terribly, may (occasionally) have a point. But whatever you can say about my worldview, it accounts for the possibility that under certain circumstances and condition, great evils might be committed by ordinary, everyday people. Such a position doesn’t sit well with our self-understandings, infused with rather strong notions of individualism and autonomy, but the historical record is rather clear.