Coercion and Obedience in Political Repression
- Robin Collins -

Most of us believe that we would never commit an atrocity simply as an act of obedience, but there is convincing experimental and historical evidence that suggests otherwise. When torture, genocide or mass terror has taken place -- as in Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalinist USSR, Rwanda, Guatemala and elsewhere -- large numbers of people participated in the dispensing of acts of extreme violence and repression, mostly against innocents, and in pursuit of some political or social objective. To what extent was participation coerced, and to what extent was it voluntary? This paper will argue that while coercion1 plays a disciplining role, a willingness to obey authority is fundamental when a large proportion of the population participates in terror or enables it to take place. The political and social nature of authority2 will be considered. Some policy options will be suggested that may help inoculate us from the political exploitation of mass obedience.

Guatemala Never Again...?

Monseignor Prospero Penados el Barrio, the Archbishop of Guatemala, in introducing the report of the Archdiocesan Human Rights Office that outlined the crimes committed against the population of Guatemala over a period of thirty-six years, asks how it could be possible for such things to happen. “We must consider the living conditions of the vast majority, deprived of their basic needs...so that they were unable to develop in conditions befitting human beings”. We should consider the anarchy prevalent in the country, the wound of armed intervention that “allowed a glimpse of humankind’s hidden capacity for destruction”. The civil war, he points out, was “characterized by torture and murder. Entire communities were obliterated, terrorized...and destroyed” (REMHI:xxvii-xxix).

One of the reasons the Archbishop pleads for reconciliation, healing and forgiveness in his remarks, is that not a few individuals were directly involved in extreme levels of violence, torture and fratricide. According to the report, “twenty percent of rural youths were forced into two years of military service”, during which time they were indoctrinated into the ways of military customs and culture. Others volunteered, and while some feared to leave the military, “many soldiers who were forcibly recruited refused to remain in the army” and deserted, even knowing they might face harsh punishment (REMHI:127). A system was in place for enforcing complicity, for dehumanizing and humiliating both soldiers and their victims -- to compel compliance and to teach lessons. But this accompanied what is described as a selection process that sought both the “skills the army considered relevant to the counterinsurgency” effort and “an inclination toward absolute obedience”.

There is no question that coercion was used as a tool to enable submission to the repression from the government side (even if not from the rebel side in equal measure). There is some doubt that a protracted terror was possible without the complicity and obedience of a large (albeit often desperate) segment of the population.

There may be a predictable, human inclination to obey the wishes of authorities.

Hitler’s Germany

There are few examples more scrutinized in the current inquiry than an explanation for why a sophisticated, highly-educated society -- as was Weimer Germany in the 1930s -- succumbed to years of Nazi rule and repression.

Early post-war assessments of the period often assumed that a “maniacal Hitler was firmly in command of a smoothly functioning, monolithic state and party apparatus that controlled the German population by means of unrestricted terror” (Johnson:11). In this formulation, (an unlikely parody devised perhaps to absolve German citizens of guilt for Nazism), specialized agents and spies equipped with elaborate surveillance technologies kept “close tabs at all times on all citizens”. Eric Johnson, in his study Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans, suggests that Hannah Arendt was one of those responsible for over-emphasizing both the totalitarian character of Nazism and claiming that there was an unbroken history of anti-semitism in Germany. Writers such as Ian Kershaw later argued that an indifference to what was occurring around them clouded the perspective of much of the German population. Nonetheless, and as Richard Evans points out, “the destruction of the Weimer Republic, as numerous scholarly studies have shown, was in the first place the work of the Nazi Party, which gained 37 percent of the vote in 1932, more than any other party had done in the whole history of the Republic”. This was a triumph of the Nazi Party, but also of ”the conservative groups which tolerated it or collaborated with it [...] namely the army, the industrialists, the large landowners, the senior civil service and other elites” (Evans:108).

In his essay “Political Violence and the Nazi Seizure of Power”, Richard Bessel writes that “while it was the machinations of men of power and influence which put Hitler in the saddle in Berlin, it was the actions of the Nazi storm troopers in the cities and towns throughout the country which helped smash opposition to the ‘new Germany’” (Bessel:2). But Bessel also points out that the Left opposition (primarily social-democrats and communists) was able to do little “to stop a powerful right-wing movement which has mass support, allies in powerful places, and control of the repressive apparatus of the State”. And if this was the case, he asks, “just how important was political violence for putting the Nazis” into power? Membership in the SA (the militant Nazi storm troopers) rose from half a million at about the time Hitler was appointed Chancellor, to three million a year later. Recruitment was made simpler by unemployment, but the appeal to the storm troopers was as a haven for hundreds of thousands of young men and, significantly, its success was due to “building upon mainstream social values” (Bessel:6-15).

More recently some historians have suggested that ordinary Germans not only played a determining role in what happened, but willingly killed Jews because of a German “eliminationist anti-Semitism”. Such is a key thesis presented in the controversial study by Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Even while disputing Goldhagen’s particular claim about German anti-semitic motivations, as does Eric Johnson, one can agree that “it is no longer possible to maintain that the Holocaust was perpetrated exclusively, or even especially it seems, by elite Nazi special-forces units, for average German citizens formed the core of both the reserve police battalions and the German army” (Johnson:18). Robert Gellately also takes issue with Goldhagen’s “monocausal” thesis about pre-existing anti-semitism being “unleashed” by Hitler, and suggests rather that “social agreement with or merely popular toleration of Hitler and the dictatorship was attained for many reasons, some of the most important of which had little or nothing to do with the persecution of the Jews.” Antisemitism, in this view, was not the primary source of support for Hitler. Indeed it was “soft-pedalled, not only because depriving the Jews of making a living would hurt the economic recovery, but [...] also because most Germans in 1933 did not feel as strongly and as negatively about the Jews as did Hitler and the Nazis” (Gellately:4).

In the process of cultivating popular opinion, the Nazis were able to avoid the widespread terror (such as had been used in revolutionary France, Russia or China) because many Germans went along willingly. This was “not because they were mindless robots, but because they convinced themselves of Hitler’s advantages and of the ‘positive’ sides of the new dictatorship” (Gellately:257). Generally speaking, Gellately argues, “the coercive practices, the repression, and persecution won far more support for the dictatorship than they lost” (259). It is implausible that a nation of 60 million could be “brainwashed”, yet surprisingly large numbers of citizens “could not afford to let themselves see the situation, including the brutalities, for what they really were, and could do nothing more than be for Hitler or at least for Germany” (264).

“Being for Hitler and for Germany” were key expressions of obediance at the pleasure of a charismatic leader, and in the service of ethnic (or tribal) nationalism. Nationalism and anti-communism both played a significant role. Reluctance over the excesses of the German regime, Nazism as an ideology, and Hitler himself, were put aside as a service to the nation. Rampant racism and persecution, torture and murder of those outside the reconstituted “community of the people” (including Jews, communists, gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill3 and religious minorities) were then given significant space to increase.

Pol Pot’s Cambodia

More than a million people were killed in the 1970s in Cambodia at the hands of the Cambodian government. The Khmer Rouge, ring-leaders of the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) coalition, implemented a program of genocide and social engineering based on “racial” and Maoist or Marxist-Leninist ideological imperatives. The Khmer Rouge regime was toppled when Vietnam invaded Cambodia to oust Pol Pot in 1978.4

While the terror raged, however, the S-21 existed as a secret interrogation centre where over 14,000 were questioned, tortured, forced to confess real or imaginary crimes and (in most cases) then put to death. Confessions were documented and thousands of these records were found piled high when the centre was shut down.

In an address to S-21 staff in 1976, the director of of the facility was recorded as saying that torturers should dispense with the prejudice that beating prisoners was cruel and inhumane. “Kindness is misplaced [in such cases]. You must beat [them] for national reasons, class reasons, and international reasons.” David Chandler notes that while most victims were of the same “race” as their torturers and executioners, “turning the victims into ‘others’, in a racist fashion -- and using words associated with animals to describe them -- made them easier to mistreat and easier to kill” (Chandler:151). More difficult would have been to act inhumanely without some sufficiently convincing authority to do so.

There is a reoccurring pattern in the practice of extreme political oppression: "the same callousness towards ‘guilty people’ and similar bursts of sadism characterized, among others, the judges in the Moscow show trials in the 1930s, the perpetrators of massacres in Indonesia in 1965 and 1966, the military torturers in Argentina, and those who organized the mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s. As a twentieth-century phenomenon, S-21 was by no means unique" (Chandler:142).

Torturers and interrogators commit abominations against their victims, but they are more than likely not selected for their duties because they exhibit unusual personality disorders. Indeed, those who worked as sustaining staff at S-21, could also volunteer to become torturers. As Chandler points out, those who participated in the delivery of atrocities in Nazi death camps and at S-21 did not have long histories of being brutal. Rather, they were often poor people “cast in brutal roles”.

Alexander Hinton suggests and Chandler agrees that: "destruction of ‘enemies’ at S-21 was made easier because of the deference and respect that were traditionally offered in Cambodia to those in power from those ‘below’ them. This culture of exploitation, protection, obedience, and dependency had deep roots in Cambodian social practice and strengthened the grip of those in power in [Democratic Kampuchea], in spite or even because of the power-holders’ insistence that pre-revolutionary power relations had been destroyed" (in Chandler:148-9).

These relations did not disappear with the advent of the Khmer revolution: “familiar, lopsided relationships involving a new set of masters and servants (however much they might be deemed ‘empowered’ and designated as comrades), as well as a new set of victims, came into play” (Chandler: 148).

Hand-written confessions found in the S-21 facility when it was closed, together with accompanying photographs of victims taken before or after their executions, suggest a perverse obsession with legitimizing by documenting what was being done (rather than revealing any perceived need to justify it) -- there seemed to be no inclination to try and hide it. What was happening was known to be morally wrong, but it was being done in deference to the Khmer Rouge’s “privileged relationship to historical laws” (Chandler:150). How else to explain the meticulousness of the bureaucratic procedures?

The ordinariness of those who implemented the mission is further evidence that the mission professed by the leadership came to be broadly shared. There is disagreement, however, over whether the Khmer Rouge Party Center led the masses or followed them in the fury to avenge historical injustices. Michael Vickery suggests that the Khmer terror was driven by fervent and spontaneous class hatred. But while “peasantness” was probably a mobilizer, the extensive documentation that was produced -- which included the speeches of officials -- suggest a top-down hierarchy of authority. Whatever happened in the period which preceded the killing fields, Vickery writes, it was “a war between town and countryside in which the town’s battle was increasingly for the sole purpose of preserving its privileges while the rural areas suffered” (Chomsky:293).

Pol Pot’s political objective was to correct the imbalance by creating an homogenous population as rapidly as possible, and in order to do so he “turned to the youngest members of the poorest levels of Cambodian society to recruit cadres [and in particular the hill tribes from the Northeast of the country] who would willingly destroy the old society because they resented it and had little stake in it” (Kenneth Quinn in Jackson:236). This was also how Mao Zedong recruited Red Guards to implement the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Both were primarily ideology-driven waves of repression. Recruitment was not coerced (if we accept this explanation), but a selection process that exploited the grievances held by ordinary, if undereducated and vulnerable, peasants.

Stalin’s Soviet Union

The potent mixture of grievance and ideological mission -- the theoretical underpinnings for the “dictatorship of the proletariat” that did not originate with, but preceded Stalin -- best explains the sustaining of the Stalinist repression for over three decades in the Soviet Union. The level of coercion was uncompromising. The resort to violence, famine, partisan purges and broad repression was justified (if it was admitted) as one or another “inevitable” stage of historical and scientific socialism. As noted by Stéphane Courtois in the ambitious The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, a “transformation of ideology and politics into absolute, ‘scientific’ truth is the basis of the totalitarian dimension of Communism. The Party answered only to science. Science also justified the terror by requiring that all aspects of social and individual life be transformed” (Courtois: 739). The downward slide followed an initial seduction by doctrine, and then “after a relatively short period, society passes from the logic of political struggle to the process of exclusion, then to the ideology of elimination, and finally to the extermination of impure elements. At the end of the line, there are crimes against humanity” (748). But to what extent did the majority of people accept the doctrine?

Many historians have documented the brutality that was called upon to construct the “new society” in the USSR (a data collection process made much easier for academics since the opening up of the Soviet archives, post-1989). Robert Conquest and others point to the “Marxist conceptions” that defined class enemies and bourgeois nationalism, the personal ambitions of Party members, “devotion to the Party line”, and widespread fear of reprisals for disobedience (Conquest:328). Fear alone does not adequately explain thirty years of Stalinism5 or Communist Party memberships held by not a few Soviet citizens. Nor does it explain the participation by countless individuals who found a home in the apparatus of repression and terror, despite the periodic churn. Millions shared the social mission -- sometimes to defend their nation, often in deference to real achievements, otherwise in the service of an idea personified by Stalin6. Nicolaus Werth, in concluding his segment on Soviet communism in The Black Book of Communism writes:

Many grey areas remain, particularly regarding the everyday behaviour of people reacting to violence. If one wishes to find out who the executioners actually were, then it is the whole of society that must be questioned -- all those who took part in the events, not just the victims. (Courtois: 268)


Rwanda

An estimated 800,000 to one million Rwandas were killed in a 100 day period in 1994 -- effectively the highest rate of genocide in history. The slaughter was inspired (and broadcast) by political manipulators who stirred up hatreds between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups7. As described by Bill Berkeley in “Road to a Genocide”, the fact that this was done for “cynical ends does not change the fact that the divisions were there to be manipulated, in the hearts and minds of those below” (Mills:103). Huge numbers of Rwandans were directly involved in the slaughter of 1994 as it raged at the rate of one person killed every ten seconds, day and night, for more than three months.

“No one really knows what proportion of Rwanda’s Hutus participated in the genocide” writes Berkeley. “By some accounts as many people killed as were killed. The broad participation of tens of thousands of ordinary Hutus undoubtedly was a function of Rwanda’s by-now notorious culture of obedience”.

Milgram’s Experiment

Rwanda, Guatemala, Germany, Cambodia, and the USSR are a few of many examples of wide-scale torture, mass violence and genocide that could be offered. All suggest there is a role for authority and coercion in the carrying out of crimes against humanity.

We know they are crimes against humanity, legally-speaking, because they violate Article 5 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. They violate Article 31 of the Geneva Convention (1949), the “Declaration Against Torture” (1987) and several other legal instruments that are recognized or ratified internationally, even if they are not implemented in practice. That they are not necessarily implemented is significant because international humanitarian laws themselves are international instruments of authority that are designed to influence the behaviour of states and citizens within their borders.

Stanley Milgram performed a series of obedience and authority studies at Yale University between 1960 and 1963, in part to explore the problem of how the Holocaust could have happened.. In the experiments, Milgram’s subjects were asked to apply an electric shock in increasing increments to a victim whenever he failed to correctly answer a question. The “victim” was actually an actor, and whether or not the subject thought he or she was inflicting pain, the equipment did not in fact deliver electrical pulses at all. The carefully crafted experiments were designed to determine whether subjects would obey orders simply if told to do so, even if there was evidence of effects that could conceivably cause death. It was found that although participants knew they were acting against their own value system, they continued to follow commands. Milgram concluded that:

Insofar as the experiments tell us something about human nature, the revelation on how men act toward each other when they are on their own is here. Whatever leads to shocking the victim at the highest [“deadly”] level cannot be explained by autonomously generated aggression but needs to be explained by the transformation of behaviour that comes about through obedience to orders. (Milgram, 1969:72)

A majority of people assume that if requested to “shock” another person on command, we would cease cooperating at least at a point where severe pain would occur. Test groups surveyed by Milgram believed that “people are by and large decent and do not readily hurt the innocent. Second, that unless coerced by physical force or threat, the individual is preeminently the source of his own behavior. A person acts in a certain way because he had decided to do so” (Milgram:31). The experiments, which were repeated many times, involving more than 1000 subjects in different facilities and cities, and sensitive to variations due to gender or occupation, revealed very different results from what was predicted. In the initial experiment (and subsequently):

Of the 40 subjects, 26 obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, proceeding to punish the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the generator. After the 450-volt shock was administered three times, the experimenter called a halt to the session. (Milgram, 1969:33)

The Milgram experiments are important for this paper’s discussion because they offer convincing evidence that a majority of randomly selected people will obey an authority -- or a hierarchy of command -- even in actions that are contrary to their personal moral code or in violation of universally-held codes of conduct. Normal human ethics are not abandoned8, for people realize they are doing wrong as they commit atrocities. However “while subjects often expressed disapproval of shocking a man in the face of his objections, and others denounced it as stupid and senseless ... [nonetheless] many followed the experimental commands” (Milgram, 1969:41).

Critiques of Milgram

There have been several critiques of Milgram’s experiments. A number of them charged that it was unethical for Milgram to have misled subjects into believing they were testing the effects of punishment on learning (when that was not the purpose of the experiment). Others argued that it was unethical to lead subjects to believe they were shocking patients when they were not, and that it was wrong to direct participants to “shock” the victim at a dangerously high or deadly level. (This paper will not address the ethics of the experiment itself.)

More relevant to the credibility of the experimental results, other critics have suggested that subjects did not actually believe that they were shocking their “victim”. For instance, Darley believes that although it may be easy to convince people to commit progressively greater violence, Milgram’s subjects’ profiles were not similar to the type of people who commit atrocities. Darley argues that the test environment itself induced Milgram’s results because the very presence of experimenters made it acceptable for the subjects to administer their “shocks” (Chandler:148).

A similar critique by Orne and Holland in 1968 also argued that Milgram was not measuring obedience, but a willingness to go along with the experiment. Milgram has pointed out in his own defence that overwhelming evidence proved the contrary was true: “This [concern] has been assessed at points during the experiment, immediately after the experiment, and in questionnaire and interview studies a year after the experiment.” Indeed, the original study findings clearly reveal that virtually all subjects showed tell-tale signs of tension when administering higher energy shocks (Milgram, 1977:125).

Milgram’s obedience experiments are generally highly regarded forty years later. A 1995 survey revealed that a disproportionate number of pages in psychology and sociology textbooks continue to be devoted to this single series of experiments, and 86% of those texts make “explicit reference to Nazi Germany in their discussion of the Milgram studies” (Saltzman in Blass:125).

Inoculation against Authority

As Doris Lessing comments in Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, while the conclusions of the Milgram experiments may be at once both discouraging and disturbing, we must take them seriously. We should teach children in school that “if you are in this or that type of situation, you will find yourself, if you are not careful, behaving like a brute and a savage if you are ordered to do it. Watch out for these situations. You must be on your guard against your own most primitive reactions and instincts” (Lessing:58).

At the same time, whereas deviance from group consensus is almost always an individual decision that conflicts with group authority, torture generally is not an individual crime carried out against orders. It is more often a crime of obedience that takes place “under explicit instructions from the authorities to engage in acts [or they occur] in an environment in which such acts are implicitly sponsored, expected, or at least tolerated by the authorities” (Kelman in Crenlinson: 19-34). That is a more encouraging indication of the natural distance most individuals instinctively show towards torture.

That natural distance also points to a higher level of responsibility and thus culpability held by those in positions of authority and who redirect individuals towards acts of political oppression. As notes Kelman, for every crime of obedience, there is a crime of authority because the acts of repression “would not have taken place without authorization” (Kelman in Crenlinson:21).

Members of the military and police forces are themselves ensnared within an abnormal hierarchical command structure which perpetuates obedience to a far greater degree, and more effectively, than authorities could ever expect of society at large. We are led to trust peace officers, security and governance authorities because we seek stable communities. By trusting, we inevitably volunteer a certain level of our autonomy. That is because, as Glover states, “[w]e have not the time or ability to think out for ourselves every decision. We need to take short cuts, and these include trusting authorities. Many things depend on some uncritical obedience...[we] have to assume [our] superiors are not guilty of outrageous blunders or moral enormities. Without such trust, social life would be difficult.” But the difference between trusting legitimate authority and blind obedience is a critical one. “Obeying orders is normally essential, but, when a war crime is ordered, disobedience is a right and perhaps a duty” (Glover: 335).

Milgram and others also found that there are degrees of submission to authority. While a majority submits, a significant minority does not. When his experiment was altered, Milgram found that “letting it be known that two refused to obey, the figures were reversed and only four of the forty obeyed”. The swaying of a majority, but “for the good”, is not only an ironic switch in the direction of obedience. As Staub notes “the courage that is required to limit violence is frequently not physical courage, the willingness to put one’s life on the line, but the courage to oppose one’s group and to endanger one’s status in the group or one’s career” (Staub in Chambers:155). In 1955, Asch found similar evidence for the power of one: “The presence of a single deviant from the otherwise unanimous majority reduced the amount of conformity to about one-quarter of what it had been when the [participants] expressed unanimity...Regardless of the size of the majority, the presence of a single dissenter always reduced conformity” (Hogan:49).

One implication of this is that not only should authorities be held accountable, but the minority which does not obey authority on command, (35% of the population in Milgram’s experiments), is also entrusted with a significant social responsibility.

Is there anything more authoritative than a great power?

Samantha Power, in her list of genocides of the current era, points to the inaction of powerful states that could have responded to growing crises and indisputable genocides-in-progress. In many cases, a diplomatic rebuke or a threat of intervention would have had sufficient positive impact, but nothing was done. Governments claimed to have insufficient evidence to act, or appeals for help were ignored, even in contravention of the Genocide Convention. In several cases (Rwanda and Srebrenica to offer two examples), these decisions were received by perpetrators as invitations to proceed.

Simply put, Western leaders did not act because they did not want to. They believed that genocide was wrong, but they were not prepared to invest the military, financial, diplomatic, or domestic political capital needed to stop it...[and as] a result of this society-wide silence, officials at all levels of government calculated that the political costs of getting involved in genocide prevention far exceeded the costs of remaining uninvolved (Power in Mills:256-257).

One can place alongside those instances where powerful states -- states in authority -- were capable of acting to halt genocide but did not, other examples where “benevolent” powers acted in ways intentionally designed to slaughter large numbers of civilians -- an act in clear violation of the rules of war and international humanitarian law. The fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo by the Allies in the Second World War are evidence of this phenomenon, as was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.9 Noted by Jonathan Glover: "The blockade [of Germany, which caused nearly 800,000 deaths] made it easier to embark on area bombing. In turn, the raids on Hamburg, Darmstadt and Dresden meant there was relatively little outcry when the American Air Force embarked on the fire-bombing of Tokyo. And that in turn eased the way to Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Glover:88).

These are examples of intentional military attacks by a democracy in wartime. But to be added to the list are the many examples of financial, military and political support knowingly given directly and indirectly by powerful states to dictatorial regimes that practice torture and other measures of political repression.

Conclusion

Authority comes in many guises. He or she is the individual authoritarian who is sometimes a charismatic national leader, yet someone who nevertheless has little effective authority without obedience:

"In Nazi Germany, the charismatic appeal of Hitler may have acted on people often conditioned to obedience by an authoritarian upbringing. But Milgram’s ‘experimenter’ had no special magic, and there is no reason to think that people in New Haven in the early 1960s [who participated in the experiments] had been brought up in a very authoritarian way. The disquieting results of Milgram’s studies suggest a widespread human tendency to give uncritical obedience to authority, even when the orders are appalling" (Glover:332).

There is also authority wielded by institutions: governance, security, national, religious, ethnic, “racial”, scientific, medical,10academic and educational institutions. No individual has his or her authority legitimated except by association with an institution.

Willingness to obey an authority may come in advance of (sometimes unnecessary) coercive practice but most agree that those who commit atrocities know that what they do is wrong. They have found stronger justifications for deciding and continuing to act, or doing little (or nothing) while others act. There is a continuum of responsibility that can be explored and that assesses individual culpability for crimes of commission through crimes of omission. It is also fair to say that when crimes of this order are committed voluntarily, they reveal an indifference that is disturbing. If so, and as Milgram suggests, “perhaps we need to invent the political structure that will give conscience a better chance against errant authority” (Milgram, 1977:14).

As notes Herbert Kelman, authority leads us to believe that “the individual is not acting as an independent moral agent and therefore [he] feels absolved of the responsibility to make personal moral choices. Through routinization, the action becomes so organized that there is no opportunity for raising moral questions and making moral decisions” (Crenlinson:28). But there should be little comfort in the illusion that individual responsibility for crimes of political repression can be dodged just because there is a human tendency to obey orders. We know that political repression happens because there are direct perpetrators (those who commit torture and executions), indirect perpetrators (those who authorize it), and because many others know, but turn a blind eye for a variety of reasons.

Doris Lessing and others suggest convincingly that our schools should therefore teach children about this darker side of human behaviour, so that we are made aware of our likely responses to the ignoble requests of authorities and peers. We need to prepare ourselves so we can hang on to our independent ethical value systems when confronted with pressures to conform.

Countries are to be held accountable too for the legal instruments they have signed and ratified that prohibit human rights abuses. Those who have not committed their signatures to those conventions and standards should be shamed until they do sign and ratify. Torture is said to be less likely in democracies, in stable societies and where human security needs are being fulfilled. At the same time, without the financial and military support of democracies that purport to discourage human rights abuse at home, there is strong case that says many dictatorial regimes would not survive.

And finally, if it is true that only a minority among us are naturally inclined to reject instructions from authorities that direct us to commit atrocities, then there is a great and necessary burden placed upon those few individuals to do exactly that. In so doing, they thereby lead by example.


References:

Bessel, Richard, Life in the Third Reich, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001.

Blass, Thomas (ed.), Obedience to Authority, Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah New Jersey, 2000.

Chandler, David, Voices from S-21, Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1999.

Chomsky, Noam, The Chomsky Reader, Pantheon, New York, 1987.

Conquest, Robert, The Harvest of Sorrow, Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, University of Alberta Press, Edmonton, 1986.

Crenlinson, Ronald and Alex Schmid, The Politics of Pain, Torturers and Their Masters, Westview Press, Boulder, 1995.

Courteois, Stéphane et al. (editors), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1999.

Evans, Richard, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past, Pantheon Books, New York, 1989.

Gellately, Robert, Backing Hitler, Consent and Coercsion in Nazi Germany, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002.

Glover, Jonathan, Humanity, A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, Random House, London, 2001.

Hogan, Patrick Colm, The Culture of Conformism, Understanding Social Consent, Duke University, Durham, 2001.

Jackson, Karl (editor), Cambodia 1975-1978, Rendezvous with Death, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1989.

Johnson, Eric, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans, Basic Books, New York, 2000.

Lessing, Doris, The Massey Lecture: Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, Anansi, Toronto, 1986.

Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority, An Experimental View, Harper and Row, New York, 1969.

Milgram, Stanley, The Individual in a Social World, Essays and Experiments, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading Mass. 1977.

Mills, Nicolaus et al. (editors), The New Killing Fields: Massacre and the Politics of Intervention, Basic Books, New York, 2002.

McMahon, Christopher, Authority and Democracy, A General Theory of Government and Management, Princeton University, Princeton, 1994.

Price, Richard, The Chemical Weapons Taboo, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1997.

REMHI (Recovery of Historical Memory Project), Guatemala Never Again!, Orbis Books, New York, 1999.

Sereny, Gitta, The German Trauma, Experiences and Reflections 1938-2001, Penguin, London, 2000.


Notes:

1 While the definition of “coercion” includes any pressure upon an individual to carry out an act against his or her will, the term is being used here primarily to indicate a threat of violence or physical harm directed against a person or family members. However, it is recognized that being deprived of income, employment, housing or sustenance all fit the definition of a coercive threat. The intention here is to distinguish degrees of threat that might influence a person to torture or murder others. This paper considers that the existence of an “authority” is not in itself a form of coercion.

2 For the purposes of this paper, “authority” will be defined as an individual or individuals, institutions or influences that effect behaviours or actions in others. McMahon describes authority in this context: “To have authority is to have a right to direct the actions of some other people”...”when one has authority, one’s directives are taken as - or are, in the case of legitimate authority -- preemptive reasons for some other people to do what is directed.” (McMahon:27)

3 Hitler eventually ordered the ‘aktion’ stopped because of public opposition (Sereny:108).

4 Many governments continued to recognize the Khmer Rouge at the United Nations in order to avoid recognition of the replacement government put in place by Vietnam.

5 More than 70 years of Soviet rule passed from the October Revolution to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

6 This is otherwise referred to as a “cult of personality”.

7 Arguably the “two groups” were not separate tribes, as they spoke the same language, lived together and inter-married. The stereotypical Tutsi was taller, thinner and lighter skinned; the Hutu was short, stockier and darker.

8 A related observation is made by Richard Price in the Chemical Weapons Taboo. Price argues that even when states or governments violated the norm against use of chemical weapons, they did so by claiming they were not signatories to the Chemical Weapons Convention and therefore were not legally obliged to conform (Iraq); they claimed they were not the first to use chemical weapons but acted only in retaliation (Iran); they implied that their foes were lesser humans (Churchill, Iraq when referring to the Kurds).

9 The stigma is such that controversy over an exhibit developed by the Smithsonian Museum to discuss the morality of bombing civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was cancelled. See for instance: http://www.nuclearfiles.org/docs/1995/950731-historians.html

10 In an interview with Gitta Sereny, Franz Stangl, a commandant at the Treblinka death camp, revealed some of the influences that made participation in the euthanasia of mental patients gradually possible: “The combination of things did -- the way he had presented it: it was already being done by law in America and in Russia; the fact that doctors and nurses were involved...”; “Here was a Catholic nun, a mother superior, and a priest. And they thought it was right. What was I then to doubt what was being done?” (Sereny:105-108).


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