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.
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.
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).
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:
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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).