The Macabresque

Abstract

This book provides an original interpretation of the emotional psychology and disordered will of perpetrators during episodes of genocide and mass atrocity that have taken place throughout the twentieth century. It focuses on the persistence of staged human violation and lurid degradation as a prelude to the death of victims, who are forced to act out the diabolical fantasies of perpetrators. Explanations of ludic dying derive from a cultural, psychological, and psychosocial examination of the macabresque, the theatrical realm of depraved inhumanity that, as this study shows, invite perpetrators to release demonic drives in satanic desire for sadistic cruelty during genocide and mass atrocity. More broadly this applies during national conflicts involving ideological politics of hate and enemy-making. The macabresque is ever present in genocide and mass atrocity across time, place, and episode. Beyond the horrors of lethality, it is the defining feature of concentration camps and death camps, detention centers, prisons, ghettos, killing fields, and the houses, places of worship, schools, and hospitals converted into hubs for torture and torment. Victims, once trapped, are forced to act out the diabolical fantasies of perpetrators. They undergo crazed but systematic torture, the hellish torments of mutilation and dismemberment, and unspeakable agonies of humiliation and sexual violation. But dramaturgical styles of cruelty vary. Contrasts of performative transgression reveal contrasts in social values, and how cultural assumptions and attitudes influence patterns of degeneracy and defilement in the macabresque.