Beyond Demonization A Model of How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

Abstract

Abstract As we look at perpetrators of genocide and mass killing, we need no longer ask who these people are. We know who they are. They are you and I. There is now a more urgent question to ask: How are ordinary people, like you and me, transformed into perpetrators of genocide and mass killing? The importance of this question is matched only by the complexity of its answer. As we lay out one set of possible answers, we are wise to remember H. L. Mencken’s Law: For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong. The solution to the complex problem of how ordinary people come to commit extraordinary crimes is neither simple nor neat. The precise “how” of the transformation process by which ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing remains veiled from us, as it may have remained veiled from the men and women who experienced it. As Claude Lanzmann writes about the Holocaust, “Between the will to kill and the act itself there is an abyss.” Indeed, the multiplicity of variables that lead an ordinary person to commit genocide and mass killing is difficult to pin down. It is impossible to establish general “laws” that apply to all individuals in all contexts and at all times.