Evil and Human Agency: Understanding Collective Evildoing (Cambridge Cultural Social Studies)

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Evil and Human Agency

Evil is a poorly understood phenomenon. In this provocative and original approach to evil, Professor Vetlesen argues that to do evil is to inflict pain intentionally on another human being, against his or her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm. Vetlesen investigates why and in what sort of circumstances such a desire arises, and how it is channelled, or exploited, into collective evildoing. He argues that such evildoing, pitting whole groups against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and social structure. By combining a philosophical approach inspired by Hannah Arendt, a psychological approach inspired by C. Fred Alford, and a sociological approach inspired by Zygmunt Bauman, and bringing these to bear on the Holocaust and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, Vetlesen shows how closely perpetrators, victims, and bystanders interact, and how aspects of human agency are recognized, denied, and projected by different agents. is Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of over thirteen books, including Perception, Empathy, and Judgment: An Inquiry into the Preconditions of Moral Performance (1994) and Closeness: An Ethics (with H. Jodalen, 1997).

ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN

Cambridge Cultural Social Studies

Series editors: J E F F R E Y C . A L E X A N D E R , Department of Sociology, Yale University, and S T E V E N S E I D M A N , Department of Sociology, University of Albany, State University of New York. Titles in the series ROGER FRIEDLAND AND JOHN MOHR,

Matters of Culture Challenging Diversity, Rethinking Equality and the Value of Difference K R I S H A N K U M A R , The Making of English National Identity R O N E Y E R M A N , Cultural Trauma S T E P H E N M . E N G E L , The Unfinished Revolution M I C H E` L E L A M O N T A N D L A U R E N T T H E´ V E N O T , Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology R O N L E M B O , Thinking through Television A L I M I R S E P A S S I , Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization R O N A L D N . J A C O B S , Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society R O B I N W A G N E R - P A C I F I C I , Theorizing the Standoff K E V I N M C D O N A L D , Struggles for Subjectivity S . N . E I S E N S T A D T , Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution P I O T R S Z T O M P K A , Trust S I M O N J . C H A R L E S W O R T H , A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience L U C B O L T A N S K I , Translated by G R A H A M D . B U R C H E L L , Distant Suffering M A R I A M F R A S E R , Identity without Selfhood C A R O L Y N M A R V I N A N D D A V I D W . I N G L E , Blood Sacrifice and the Nation DAVINA COOPER,

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Evil and Human Agency Understanding Collective Evildoing

Arne Johan Vetlesen

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521856942 © Arne Johan Vetlesen 2005 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2005 isbn-13 isbn-10

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To my children: Anahita, Daniel, and Petter Nicolai

Contents

page xi xii

Preface A note on the cover image

1

Introduction 1

2

The ordinariness of modern evildoers: a critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust Introduction The Holocaust as modernity’s window Reformulating the relationship between society and morality The many meanings of proximity Uncoupling responsibility from reciprocity Goldhagen’s challenge Reassessing Bauman’s thesis in the light of recent scholarship Mistaking the bureaucratic design for the reality Rendering human beings superfluous

14 14 15 21 23 27 29 33 41 47

Hannah Arendt on conscience and the ‘banality’ of evil Introduction Assessing the influence of St Augustine ‘I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary’: the Socratic bottom line Conscience and temptation Did Eichmann have a conscience? The notion of conscience in Heidegger’s Being and Time Arendt’s advocacy of the Socratic model of conscience

52 52 54 57 63 69 71 77 vii

viii

List of contents

Double dehumanization and human agency Lessons of an unforeseen proximity: Eichmann meets Storfer The attraction of superfluousness 3

4

5

The psycho-logic of wanting to hurt others: An assessment of C. Fred Alford’s work on evil Introduction ‘Evil is pleasure in hurting and lack of remorse’ Klein’s positions of experience Imagining evil as the alternative to doing it: the role of culture Evil as envy Problems with Alford’s theory Identifying with Eichmann The limitations of Alford’s approach The logic and practice of collective evil: ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia Introduction Approaches to ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia What is genocide? The explosive dialectic of individualization and collectivism ‘Ethnic cleansing’ as a case of securitization The differences between individual and collective evil Genocidal logic and the collectivization of agency Girard’s theory of the surrogate victim The design of genocide as ‘ethnic cleansing’ Genocidal rape: its nature and function Rape, shame, and agency Responses to collective evil Introduction How to pass judgment on evil? A culture of indifference The responsibility of bystanders: when inaction makes for complicity Bosnia: the follies of impartiality enacted as neutrality Three lessons of moral failure Collective agency and its disaggregation Truth commissions, trials, and testimonies

84 89 98

104 104 106 113 120 124 128 135 140

145 145 148 154 159 167 170 175 182 188 196 203 220 220 221 229 235 241 253 257 265

List of contents

6

ix

Reconciliation, forgiveness, and collective guilt Assuming vicarious responsibility and guilt

272 281

A political postscript: globalization and the discontents of the self

289

References Index

299 310

Preface

My obsession with this book’s subject goes way back in time. I remember my shock when coming across, at the age of fifteen, the autobiography of one of the handful of Jews from Norway who survived Auschwitz, Herman Sachnowitz. His book is titled It Concerns You Too. Now a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics, my early interest in how organized evil comes about and what it does to all affected is, if anything, more intense than ever. Being a contemporary to the occurrence of genocide in the 1990s – in Bosnia and in Rwanda – made the topic even more urgent. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we know only too well that the promise, nay imperative, ‘Never again!’ has been betrayed again and again. During the years spent working on this book, I have benefited from exchange with a large number of friends and colleagues. For contributions big and small, I wish to thank Per Nortvedt, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Lars Svendsen, Henrik Syse, Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Tone Bringa, Odd Bjørn Fure, and Bernt Hagtvet. Alastair Hannay once again offered his unfailing moral support. Zygmunt Bauman once again demonstrated that genuine friendship can endure heated disagreement. Thomas Cushman showed his belief in the book at a decisive moment. To all of them, and to the students who have made my seminars on evil into a workshop of ideas from which my argument in this book slowly ripened, I wish to express my deep gratitude. This also goes for my editor, Sarah Caro. Chapter 2 partly uses material originally published in my 2001 article ‘Hannah Arendt on Conscience and Evil’ (Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, 5). I am grateful to Sage Publications Ltd for permission to reuse this material.

xi

A note on the cover image

On 26 November 1942, at four o’clock in the morning, about 100 black taxis driven by Norwegian plain-clothes policemen were used to round up 532 Jews from their homes in the Oslo area. The group, which included children as well as elderly men and women, had to stand in line to wait to be given the order to embark on the German ship Donau, which would take them to Germany. The group would then be transported by freight trains to the infamous death camp Auschwitz in Poland. Of the 532 individuals deported that day, only 9 would survive Auschwitz and return to Norway after the camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945. With very few exceptions, the group was ‘selected’ for extermination by gas immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz in the early days of December 1942. This event, which went largely unnoticed at the time and was without dramatic incident (the arrests occurred without noteworthy resistance), has – somewhat misleadingly – come to be known in postwar Norway as the ‘Norwegian Kristallnacht’, alluding to the pogroms orchestrated by the Nazi Party in Germany on 9 November 1938, when German Jews were killed or beaten up, synagogues throughout Germany set on fire and thousands of books burned amid anti-Semitic speeches and shouting of Nazi slogans. The photo was taken by a young Norwegian man, Georg W. Fossum, who used to take photos for the underground resistance, sending them by courier to Sweden. Because of a series of arrests, the film of which the ‘Donau-photo’ is part was in fact not exposed until after the war. Only in 1994 did the photo become known to the wider public, having been part of Fossum’s private collection until then.

xii

Introduction

Some fifteen years ago, just after the end of the cold war, Leonard Cohen contended, ‘I have seen the future. It is murder.’ He has been proved right. Not that human evildoing is something new; far from it. If anything, what is new is the readiness of society to denounce large-scale atrocities whenever they occur and to indict those responsible, as demonstrated by the UN Conventions inspired by the ‘Never again!’ unanimously voiced in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Now take a look at what happened during the last decade of the twentieth century – the century that will go down in history as the century of (increasingly universal) human rights and as a century stained by genocide. The facts are as plain as they are deeply disturbing: the 1990s saw the slaughter of more than 800,000 people within three months in Rwanda, as well as the murder of nearly 200,000 people in the former Yugoslavia. In the former case, the victims were massacred with machetes, axes, and kitchen tools; in the latter, with guns, knives, and broken bottles. The principal victims were civilians, of both sexes and all ages. The atrocities were not carried out in secrecy; on the contrary, they were reported live on television for months on end. Despite the knowledge – or perversely, partly because of it, as I shall argue – not much was done to stop the genocides. The point is made: to embark upon a study of evil these days is to confront an abundance of empirical material. Being heterogeneous and pulling in all sorts of different directions, the material at hand dramatically explodes the framework of the conventional ‘scholarly study’, raising more questions than any academic can answer. So what to do? For a start, I have chosen to concentrate, on the empirical side, on what I referred to as large-scale atrocities; and on the theoretical side, I have sought to avail myself of a rich variety of 1

2

Introduction

approaches, ranging from Socrates to Zizek, though referring extensively to modern classics in the field such as Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Bauman. The two historical cases to receive particular attention are the Holocaust and ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia. But why this choice, considering the many other instances of well-documented evil on a large scale in recent history? First, selecting the Holocaust means engaging with what counts – in popular understanding as well as in scholarly works – as the seminal case of the worst that humans can do to each other. While agreeing on the evil nature of the Holocaust, scholars differ sharply with regard to such crucial questions as why it happened, what it reveals about human nature or the workings of modern society, and the extent to which it forces us to discard received assumptions about what spurs man-made evil. As for the second case to be discussed in depth, that of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’, a reason for its inclusion is that it allows for thought-provoking contrast with the Holocaust – think only of the industrialized way in which the Nazis’ murder of millions of Jews was carried out, as opposed to the eminent proximity (personal, emotional, physical) accompanying the killings in Bosnia. On a more theoretical level, conclusions about human nature, modern society, and the causes of man-made evil generalized from the Holocaust, are in principle open to question as soon as another historical case comes along in which the same issues force themselves upon us. Can there be such a thing as a theory about evil when the fact is that its manifestations in the world differ so widely? This brings me to my understanding of what evil is. I shall take as my point of departure a definition of evil that I intend to be both commonsensical and minimalist: to do evil, I propose, is to intentionally inflict pain and suffering on another human being, against her will, and causing serious and foreseeable harm to her. It is tempting to add that the pain and suffering inflicted needs to be ‘excessive’ – as suggests, for example, Thomas Cushman (2001: 81) – but I do not wish to make this element a part of the definition of evil, since I believe it burdens the theoretician with the task of explaining what precisely is to qualify as ‘excessive’ in each concrete case. Part of human agency, then, is an agent’s desire to do evil in the sense given. I investigate why and in what sorts of social circumstances this desire arises at an individual level, and how it is channelled – amplified, exploited – into what I call collective evildoing. I argue that such evildoing, in which whole groups are pitted against each other, springs from a combination of character, situation, and structure; factors too often set apart and viewed in isolation in the literature. To analyse the dynamics of collective evildoing in general, and the

Introduction

3

mechanisms by which individual and group fuse, so that ‘your group becomes your destiny’, a philosophical approach is combined with a psychological and sociological one. My theoretical aim is to seek a kind of synthesis between functionalist and intentionalist approaches to collective evil. Finally, my definition of evil is meant to differentiate evil from what is broadly understood as ‘immorality’: whereas acts such as lying and stealing are considered immoral as a matter of principle, they are not by the same token to be regarded as evil. Whereas all evil acts are immoral, not every immoral act is to be counted evil. Thus defined, evil is a subcategory of immorality – wrongdoing at its absolute worst. My hunch is that we, simply as human beings with some experience with others (and with ourselves), know what evil is; we know, that is, what it means to intentionally inflict pain and suffering on someone else. This knowledge is experiential; it is practical not theoretical. Hence in taking it as our chosen point of departure we do not need to commit ourselves to any particular theoretical outlook or school of thought. Ju¨rgen Habermas (1994: 185) captures this approach when he says that ‘what moral and, especially, immoral action means is something we experience and learn prior to all philosophy; it confronts us no less compellingly in compassion for the hurt integrity of others than in suffering over one’s own afflicted identity or in anxiety at its being endangered’. For all the talk about evil these days, it is a poorly understood phenomenon. Either evil is made out to be more enigmatic than it really is, or it is trivialized and robbed of its sting. Evil, no doubt, is a highly suggestive phenomenon. It contains the intellectually irresistible promise of allowing for a privileged access to ‘deep’, yet probably uncomfortable truths about us, about who we are, and what we are capable of doing to each other. However, putting it like this strikes many a present-day reader as betraying assumptions long out of fashion. Perhaps it was psychologist Stanley Milgram who, shocked by his famous experiment findings in the early 1960s, inaugurated the influential academic shift away from traditional (metaphysically or religiously flavoured) notions of what evil is and what it tells us about ourselves and our place in the world. Post-Milgram, evil – I suggest – turned into a secondary or derivative phenomenon. Deprived of its once widely held status as elementary, as a given disposition of human nature, evil came to be seen predominantly in a perspective of irreducibly social (environmental, circumstantial) constraints and influences on the individual agent. The shift I have in mind should not be associated solely with the extraordinary impact of Milgram’s experiment. It can also be linked to

4

Introduction

the theoretical shift from the most influential psychologist of the first half of the twentieth century to the most influential one of the last four or so decades: that is, from Freud to Kohut. Heinz Kohut, founding father of ‘self psychology’, rejects the ‘equal rank’ thesis of Freud’s according to which eros and the death instinct (i.e. what ‘produces’ humanity’s destructiveness) are equiprimordial, biologically given instincts. In Kohut’s view, the ‘essence of sadism and masochism . . . is not the expression of a primary destructive or self-destructive tendency’ (1977: 128). He argues that destructiveness is a secondary phenomenon, something that is not biologically rooted or constitutionally pregiven but is instead, in all its manifestations, to be traced back to a failure on the part of the person’s primary self-object(s) – most basically, a failure of empathy. To Kohut, then, ‘man’s destructiveness . . . arises originally as the result of the failure of the self-object environment to meet the child’s need for optimal – not maximal, it should be stressed – empathic response. Aggression, as a psychological phenomenon, is not elemental’ (1977: 116). Concomitantly, in social discourse evil became more an instance of ‘causing bad or immoral consequences’ than of an agent’s desire or deliberate will to do evil, to purposefully inflict suffering on others. Evildoing ceased being predominantly a moral category, at least as far as psychology and sociology are concerned; if at all claiming the interest of the scholar, it would do so as a piece of behaviour deviating from the norm, from what is the socially expected (and approved) conduct, and thus as a socially conspicuous instance of a ‘falling away from the good’. So, instead of springing from some more or less enigmatic or deep anthropological truth about human motivation and behaviour, evildoing was seen as somehow shallow, as marginal to human agency rather than as forming a core element of it. Moreover, those who pursued it, or who were persuaded by others to commit it, came to do what they did because of ‘ego weakness’ or some other factor rendering them particularly vulnerable to social pressure, especially of the kind emanating from some established authority. This development, it should be noted, is perfectly in line with David Riesman’s finding in another twentiethcentury academic bestseller, The Lonely Crowd, that post-World War II American society is characterized by a shift from the ‘inner-directed’ to the ‘outer-directed’ social type; that is to say, a shift from acting from firm beliefs and inner convictions, forming a distinct and persistent personality core, to increasingly using one’s well-tuned ‘radar’ to register and adjust to the expectations of others, especially peers (Riesman et al. 1950).

Introduction

5

The evildoer emerging from Milgram’s experiments is a person eager to please the powers that be, as distinct from someone acting selfishly and in pursuit of his own interests only, without caring for the well-being of others. In effect, if not by theoretical intention, Milgram’s studies boiled down to the message that, in the circumstances of contemporary society, evil is an – often unintended – by-product of obedience to authority. To allude to Zygmunt Bauman’s influential reformulation of Milgram’s claim, evil in modern society has more to do with patterns of social interaction than with the character and motivation of the acting individual. Evil refers to the unfortunate consequences produced – by and large unintentionally, and often also unknowingly – by individuals who, upon entering large and complex social institutions, get caught up in a so-called ‘agentic state’, in which they – in alarming numbers, and with alarming consequences for society – are willing to abandon their sense of responsibility for what they do. Social conformity, in fateful collaboration with ‘systemic’ features such as increasing specialization of tasks amid growing overall complexity, is the cause of more evil than is the once-assumed malicious – that is, evil-intending – will of human individuals. At least superficially there is significant common ground between Milgram, thus read, and Hannah Arendt’s famous notion of the ‘banality’ of evil, coined in response to the figure cut by Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi ‘desk-murderer’. Look to the ordinary, to thoughtlessness, to what is devoid of depth, and you shall be able to understand what has become of evil in the age of large-scale atrocities administrated by the institutions of the State. For reasons that I examine in depth in Chapter 2, Arendt ends up with an anti-psychological answer to why someone like Eichmann participated in collective evil. Wary of the pitfalls of ‘psychologizing’ Eichmann, Arendt presents a portrait of him as a paradigmatic evildoer in our era that I find naive: in suggesting that he was ‘merely thoughtless’, she in fact adopts the very self-presentation he cultivated. Departing from Arendt, I explore the constant make-believe instrumental in seeking to make come true the ideological notion that some humans are not human, and ‘therefore’ ought to perish. I show that this is a blindness in Arendt caused by her privileging the role of intellectual capacities over – morally crucial – emotional ones. Arguing for the precarious yet indispensable role of empathy in moral perception, my claim is that Eichmann was insensitive rather than thoughtless. To sum up, I am critical of the shift of emphasis inaugurated by Milgram and consolidated – though in different ways – in the widely read works of Bauman and Arendt. It is not that its advocates have got

6

Introduction

things completely wrong; there are trends pointing in the direction they look to, making evildoing in our modern, complex, and bureaucratic society into a matter – a consequence – of ‘patterns of interaction’ such as obedience to authority. But by looking, rather unanimously, in one particular direction to comprehend what has presently become of evil, other dimensions, forms, and features of evildoing remain in the dark. And when they – unexpectedly – resurface on the social arena, we are caught off guard, practically no less than intellectually: witness Bosnia – the event and the response (or lack of such) to it. In challenging the understanding of evil I identify as the common ground between such influential authors as Milgram, Arendt, and Bauman, I shall not opt for, say, Daniel Goldhagen’s view, in which the Holocaust is traced back to a strong desire to commit murder on the part of each and every perpetrator. Goldhagen’s ultimately dogmatic and monocausal privileging of intention over social structure, and of the particularities of German mentality over general characteristics of collective behaviour, means that he throws the baby out with the bathwater. Rather than relying on Goldhagen, I shall draw upon a study by the American philosopher C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us, to build my case for an understanding of evil that in major respects goes against the grain of much of today’s received wisdom. After devoting a chapter to the contributions of Zygmunt Bauman and Hannah Arendt, respectively, I shall discuss the alternative approach advocated by Alford. Alford comes up with a tentative theory of evil that goes out of its way to provoke the paradigm inaugurated by Milgram. In my view, Alford is good at offering a framework for analysing what I term ‘individual’ evil, in which sadism, understood as pleasure in hurting and lack of remorse, plays a large part. Such individual evil is often subtle, often clever, inconspicuous to outsiders yet profoundly damaging to those targeted by it by way of humiliation, spite, neglect, and ridicule – the list is easily prolonged, yet the hurt is effected in each case, leaving the individual victim damaged in his or her sense of self-worth. This is the type of interpersonal evil to whose agency- and life-destructive consequences a considerable portion of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic work is devoted. This everyday arena of ‘micro’ instances of evil as caused and suffered by individuals on a person-to-person, face-to-face basis is too often overlooked in academic inquiries into evil. In this respect, Alford is a welcome exception. Alford is less helpful, however, when it comes to understanding what I call collective evil: evildoing as planned and performed by groups against other groups, of which genocide stands out as

Introduction

7

the particularly salient variant and to which I devote a large portion of the book. To put it briefly, it is not obvious that what helps illuminate and explain individual evil is apt to help us understand collective evil. It is indeed my thesis that the two types of man-made evil need to be studied as much for how they differ as for what they have in common. To restrict myself to just one observation, the scapegoating of others engaged in by an individual who, in inflicting suffering on some particular other person, acts on his own behalf and for reasons all his own, is different in kind from the scapegoating of entire categories of others (Jews, Muslims, immigrants) engaged in by individuals who act in their capacity as members of a certain group, perceiving themselves as acting on behalf of and for the sake of their group and the values it represents. The phenomenon alluded to – that of allocating guilt – is a vast topic in its own right, one carrying great significance for my suggested distinction between individual and collective forms of evildoing. Allocation of guilt in a group perspective is a process closely linked with memory, a sense of shared history and fate and thus identity, and the (often very fanciful) inscription of events old and new into a master narrative – the narrative of the group’s historical interaction with its adversary. As we shall see in great detail, in some such cases the group’s sense of identity is inextricably fused with its (increasingly mythologized) victimhood, thus rendering the individual’s fate inseparable from that of the group. Whereas in instances of individual evil the agent committing it will normally perceive himself as a distinct individual, the logic underpinning most instances of collectively undertaken evil is such that the distinction between individual and collective is downplayed or outright denied in theory and virtually obliterated in practice. Collective evil as I theorize it appears to make self-fulfilling the idea that ‘your group is your destiny’, coupling this idea in disastrous ways with the sense of self-righteousness that stems from the ‘once a victim, always a victim’ logic alluded to above. In fact – or so I shall argue – human agency as such is collectivized, including its crucial elements, responsibility, guilt, and shame. My choice of theoretical approaches to evil is intended to make the present work a truly interdisciplinary one: Bauman offers a sociological approach, Arendt a philosophical one, and Alford a psychological one. Having completed my presentation and critique of these three approaches, I shift emphasis from the theoretical to the empirical. In Chapters 4 and 5, I turn to recent historical instances of collective evil, in particular ‘ethnic cleansing’. My aims are several. To begin with, I find deeply intriguing the huge differences that appear to exist between the form of evildoing exhibited in the Holocaust (analysed by Arendt and

8

Introduction

Bauman) and the form of evildoing displayed in ‘ethnic cleansing’ – even though in my vocabulary they are both instances of large-scale and collective evil, organized top-down and carried out with the support of the state apparatus. As indicated above, a salient difference between the two historical cases consists in the contrast between evildoing precipitated by mechanisms of distantiation and evildoing thriving on proximity. Sociologically put, the contrast is that between Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft types of collective evil. Accordingly, the social logic underpinning the two cases in question can be described as a systemic one in the case of the Holocaust, pursuing the achievement of anonymity in the relationship between perpetrators and victims, and as a communal one in the case of ‘ethnic cleansing’, maintaining a personalized, face-to-face relationship between perpetrator and victim, and doing so in the very act of carrying out evil (as I shall discuss in particular with regard to the practice – a deliberate policy – of rape). This contrast invites a whole series of questions. Is the pivotal role attributed to dehumanization of the victim in the case of the Holocaust conspicuous by its absence in ‘ethnic cleansing’? If so, does this repudiate the widespread view that dehumanization is a necessary condition of (as well as consequence of) evildoing? Can there be such a thing as an evildoer’s upholding the fellow humanity of his chosen victim? And what about the viewpoint of the victim? Do we find differences here that somehow correspond to those mentioned between systemic and communal forms of evil? What does it matter – in experiential terms, in moral terms, and with regard to questions of guilt and shame, to the prospects of repentance, reconciliation, and forgiveness? Focusing on organized rape in particular, I show how producing shame in the victims relieves the rapists of feelings of guilt. There is a struggle both to rid oneself of agency (responsibility, accountability) and to (re)claim it, trying to remain fully human even when subject to extreme humiliation and suffering. The issues of guilt, shame, and repentance arise in the course of my account of the ideology and practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’, and they take centre stage in Chapter 5, dealing with responses to collective evil. In developing a theoretical approach suited to addressing the many issues – and aspects – of human agency that force themselves upon us when studying the genocide that was carried out in the former Yugoslavia, I move back and forth between three distinct perspectives: that of perpetrators, that of directly affected victims, and that of bystanders and third parties (who come in many sorts). Neglecting one or the other would only be to the detriment of the task as I see it: to give a comprehensive account of the many ways in which the perspectives and actions of all ‘parties’

Introduction

9

(I word I dislike but cannot do without in this context) interact so as to help produce the final outcome. It has been suggested by many authors preoccupied with the issues raised here that during the last one or two decades there has been a shift from a ‘modern’ to a ‘postmodern’ understanding of suffering. This invites the question whether the Holocaust symbolizes, and perhaps also exhausts, what can be called the modern understanding, whereas ‘ethnic cleansing’ might be said to exemplify, on an empirical level, the postmodern understanding. The moral stance of judgment and condemnation taken toward brutal instances of man-made evil in the modern paradigm is today said to have been replaced by a postmodern fascination with transgression, with what appears subversive, with deviation from the norm, thus marking a strong reluctance to judge and to condemn acts of so-called evil, and so indulging instead in an attitude of playfulness, of looking for ‘all sides’ to any given phenomenon, of not ‘preaching morality’ to anyone but instead affirming the free play of differences, of language games all possessing intrinsic value. Hence evil – along with everything else – is deconstructed, and relativism abounds. My position is that, while doubtless suggestive, the indicated oneto-one relationship between, first, Holocaust and the distinctly ‘modern’ understanding of evil, and second, ‘ethnic cleansing’ and the so-called ‘postmodern’ understanding, fails to be very instructive. Otherwise put, even if I grant, with vital reservations, Bauman’s portrait of the Holocaust as a ‘window’ through which we can catch a rare glimpse of what modernity is like, I am not prepared to grant an equivalent function to ‘ethnic cleansing’ vis-a`-vis postmodernity. I am not even sure that we have made the alleged shift – in mentality, in type of society – from modernity to postmodernity. More to the point, it is true that the overall cultural climate of relativism played a part in shaping the response of leading Western countries to what unfolded before their eyes in the Balkans, and on a more massive scale in Rwanda – the response being that of hesitation, indecisiveness, and inaction, to which the perpetrators responded by proceeding with their killings. But there is nothing novel about this sort of response. Moreover, shifting focus from bystanders to the event itself, ‘ethnic cleansing’ in my understanding of it offers no clear-cut case of ‘postmodern evildoing’. Though certainly deviating from the industrial design associated with the Holocaust, the methods applied in carrying out genocide in central Europe in the alleged heyday of cultural postmodernism represent a strange mixture of premodern, modern, and postmodern elements: there is no or little hi-tech involved (knives being the preferred weapon), the staunchest supporters of the

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Introduction

‘cleansing’ ideology are poorly educated peasants; simultaneously, there is a large faction of intellectuals involved (the brains behind it), most of them fairly up-to-date with Western intellectual discourse (suffice it to mention here the nationalist ideologues Mihailo Markovic, a prominent philosophy professor and long-time editor of the internationally acclaimed humanist Marxist journal Praxis, and Radovan Karadzic, who, besides being a Sarajevo-based psychiatrist specializing in paranoid states, went to New York to take a postgraduate course in ‘creative writing’ at Columbia University in the early 1980s). And so on. All I want to say is that, for me, and for my purposes in this book, the modern/ postmodern divide is of little help when trying to identify the differences between earlier and more recent eruptions of collective evil. My own approach to evil places it in an unmistakably existential and experiential context. Evil in my view touches on certain given, irremovable, and hence non-optional conditions of human being-in-the-world – namely, dependency, vulnerability, mortality, the frailty of interpersonal relationships, and existential loneliness (Vetlesen and Sta¨nicke 1999: 304ff.). Common to these five conditions – I refer to them as basic conditions – of our existence as it is ineluctably given to us is that they point, each in separate ways, to boundaries and limits. Evil has much to do with this dimension of human existence – be it as the attempt to transcend, negate, or deny boundaries and limits, be it as a symptom of individuals’ intolerance of existential givens as such – as in evildoing that is carried out in the form of a protest against such givens; recognizing their realness for others – in the form of the ‘weakness’-inducing vulnerability of one’s victims – but denying their realness for oneself. In this perspective, evildoing is about hurting others in order to get relief from one’s own vulnerability, to gain a sense of mastery over it. Again, this is a vast subject in its own right. In the present work, the existential dimensions to evil will be treated most fully in the chapter dealing with Alford, and with the crucial part played in his theory of evil by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. My Alford-inspired thesis is that our vulnerability and dependence qua human beings play an equally fundamental part in our wishing to do evil to others and in our own susceptibility to suffering it as victims. I pointed out that our primary access to the phenomenon of evil is through experience – be it that of doing evil or that of suffering it. Philosophically, my position has much in common with that of Emmanuel Levinas. ‘All evil’, asserts Levinas (1988: 157, 158), ‘refers to suffering’; and suffering is the experience of ‘extreme passivity, impotence, abandonment and solitude’. I am not convinced, however, that Levinas’ understanding of evil – positing an absolute identity between

Introduction

11

evil and suffering – is to be looked upon as ‘postmodern’, as suggested by David Morris (2001: 60) and others. On this view, Levinas is supposed to epitomize a significant break with the ‘modern’ understanding – namely, in asserting that suffering is the source of evil, is identical to evil, rather than evil being the cause of suffering. I shall in this work be programmatically committed neither to the so-called ‘modernist’ notion of evil and suffering as intrinsically meaningless, as private and silent and so as equally beyond comprehension and language, nor to the so-called postmodern notion of evil and suffering as having their sources in social structures and cultural praxis and so as boiling down to ‘a social status that we extend or withhold’ (Morris 2001: 71). As I hope to show in Chapters 4 and 5, perpetrators (and some types of bystanders) will have good reasons to buy into the current fashion that, with evil and suffering as with everything else, nothing counts as an indisputable fact, everything is in the eyes of the beholder and thus is open to endless interpretation and manipulation. For those directly affected by individual or collective evildoing, however, matters are not that fanciful, their plight not that open-ended. In this domain, and certainly with more disastrous consequences than in many others, relativism risks siding with the ideology behind organized evildoing in that it helps ‘particularize’ the plight of victims, robbing it of moral authority – indeed, of the universal and culture-transcending thrust of the appeal emanating from the face (to make the point with Levinas). The Levinasian streak to my notion of evil as advanced in this work is most clearly betrayed in the prominent role I accord to vulnerability; that is, the ineluctably given dimension of our human existence that Levinas (1992) treats under the headings of ‘sensibility’ and ‘receptivity’. It is a weakness in us, a softness, that not only accounts for our aforementioned susceptibility to suffering, and so to evil. This vulnerability also accounts for our capacity to be affected by the affectedness of the other which I have defined as ‘empathy’ in my earlier book Perception, Empathy, and Judgment (1994). In that book I examined what I see as the major preconditions of judging and acting morally, whereas in the present one I shift focus from the positive to the negative, dealing with the psychological, sociological, and ideological preconditions for wrongdoing par excellence. Whereas my earlier thesis about the indispensable role of empathy in moral perception and judgment still stands, confronting the topic of evildoing head-on proves a tough challenge to my original view on the morality-conducive character of social settings of proximity in general and the face-to-face dyad in particular.

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Introduction

Before bringing this introduction to a close, a word of caution is required. We tend to take it for granted that better understanding of how man-made evil comes about will help us to become better at preventing its occurrence in the future. It might, but it might also be that better understanding is put to the opposite use – to get better at doing evil. Knowledge about genocide is double-edged: it is exploited and put to use by perpetrators no less than by would-be preventers. Present-day ge´nocidaires are frequently themselves intellectuals to an extent that awaits fuller recognition by us intellectuals concerned with prevention. What to do with your hard-earned historical and theoretical knowledge, considering the use Milosevic is known to have made of psychologists and social scientists, many of whom offered academic expertise for the purpose of identifying where precisely the community of Balkan Muslims is most vulnerable? The sinister truth is that, in this ‘enlightened’ world of ours, studies of collective evil risk becoming how-to manuals studied and put to use by doers. This disquieting fact adds weight to the more immanent paradoxes with which intellectual treatment of immorality in general and evil in particular is fertile. In the latter parts of this book, I shall have harsh words to say about the strategy of conducting negotiations – the fine art of compromise, of securing consent among all affected – in the face of genocide. Take Bosnia. The mismatch could not have been greater: genocide is something that is absolutely prohibited, absolutely wrong. But do we moderns or postmoderns have any grasp on absolutes, on limits in a strict, irrevocable sense? Do we recognize that not everything is eminently makeable, changeable – that some things simply, due to the intrinsic enormity of their nature, ought not to happen and can never be undone? The underlying problem is that theoretical discourses, much like diplomatic all-parties-welcome negotiations, cannot help relativizing, contextualizing, complicating their subject matter, no matter what it is in experiential terms, let alone moral ones. This is not a great worry in most cases, but in that of genocide it is a disaster. Once you start giving that ‘other side’ to it a hearing, the limit posited by the phenomenon is abolished, effaced. In this domain, relativization, comparison, complexity stop being the assets they are in purely intellectual terms and become instead a most welcome ally in the hands of the perpetrators. That is one weapon too many. The conclusion seems inevitable that preventers (of all sorts) need somehow to match the non-relative nature of the phenomenon (evil) they address. But how to achieve this without becoming – or being regarded as – moral fundamentalists? Or is that the price one must be prepared to pay?

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I shall postpone a fuller discussion of this thorny issue till the concluding chapter, where I take up the post-September 11 scenario under the heading ‘Globalization and the discontents of the self’. Suffice it to observe here that the grotesque gap that existed between what the outside world knew about genocide in Bosnia and in Rwanda just a few years ago, and what was actively done to prevent or stop it, continues to pose a stark challenge for all people concerned, at some level, with how better understanding can be made to contribute to a better – or a slightly less unjust – world.

1

The ordinariness of modern evildoers: a critique of Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust

Introduction How was the Holocaust possible? David Rousset, a survivor of the death camps, reflected that ‘normal men do not know that everything is possible’ (Arendt 1951: 436). And indeed Auschwitz has come to stand for unprecedented horror, unimaginable cruelty. This lack of comprehension, though readily recognized as intellectually disturbing, has a reassuring and, as such, comfortable effect on us: it helps side us, normal men as we take ourselves to be, against the doers, the Nazi perpetrators. The doers, we like to think, are not like us; indeed, their being unlike us is the very quality which explains that they could do what they did. Having committed atrocities so outrageous in nature and scope as to explode our faculties of comprehension, they, authors of the unthinkable, must surely be – or have been – abnormal men. To think like this – and who tends not to? – is to close oneself off against the Holocaust. It is to prevent the challenge posed by that event from being fully acknowledged; it is to help perpetuate the very conditions which made its occurrence a historical fact in the first place. Therefore, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, the first condition that must be met is to bid farewell to the twofold premise that what happened then was fundamentally abnormal, and that it took abnormal men to make it happen. Only if we let go of the defences we have built to the effect that the Holocaust was the making of monstrous men, and start questioning the premise of abnormality, can we hope to reach the declared goal of the lesson: that it never happen again. In his book Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman sets out to subject this premise to critical scrutiny. In doing so, Bauman embarks on the ‘construction of a theory of morality capable of accommodating in 14

The ordinariness of modern evildoers

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full the new knowledge generated by the study of the Holocaust’ (1989: 169). I agree with Bauman that the latter provides an extremely important yet largely neglected starting point for moral theory – largely neglected even today, more than fifteen years after the publication of Bauman’s book. In what follows I present a thoroughgoing critique of Bauman’s understanding of the Holocaust and what made it possible. Though commonly regarded as highly provocative, I consider his claims about the conditions facilitating this collective evil to be wholly in keeping with psychologist Stanley Milgram’s findings. Indeed, I shall argue that Milgram’s experiments, so crucial to Bauman, are the wrong place to look for a historically correct explanation of how the Holocaust was possible. As a consequence, Bauman’s central claim that the relationship between modern society and the Holocaust is one of continuity rather than negation will be shown to be mistaken. The relationship is far more complex, not least because the impact of proximity between perpetrator(s) and victim(s) is more ambiguous than recognized by both Milgram and Bauman. The Holocaust as modernity’s window Early in his book, Bauman writes: ‘The truth is that every ‘‘ingredient’’ of the Holocaust – all those many things that rendered it possible – was normal; ‘‘normal’’ not in the sense of the familiar . . . but in the sense of being fully in keeping with everything we know about our civilization, its guiding spirit, its priorities, its immanent vision of the world’ (1989: 8). He goes on to assert: ‘The Holocaust was not an irrational outflow of the not-yet-fully-eradicated residues of pre-modern barbarity. It was a legitimate resident in the house of modernity; indeed, one who would not be at home in any other house’ (1989: 17). However, while following Max Weber in stressing the significance of the emancipation of the political state, with its attained monopoly of the means of violence and its far-reaching engineering ambitions, Bauman seems unwilling to subscribe to the famous Frankfurt School position that instrumental rationality’s colonizing spread to all domains of life is the hallmark of modernity and the sine qua non of the Holocaust. While this is true as far as it goes, the spread of a particular type of rationality – expertly dealing with means but ignorant about ends – gives no exhaustive explanation of how the Holocaust could become a reality within modernity, and not just one possibility among others (Diner 1987, 1988). For that, we urgently need to find an answer to the question raised by Arendt (1965a: 106) in her reflections on Eichmann: how did the perpetrators of the Endlo¨sung overcome ‘the animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’?

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Arendt’s question goes to the heart of the matter. It forms a leitmotif in Bauman’s book, not least because he clearly sees that it is a first step to cease seeing the perpetrators as ‘them’. Arendt’s question shifts the perspective; it invites us to inquire how mass murder can be committed by normal – as distinct from (allegedly) abnormal – men. By calling attention to the feeling of pity that arises in the face of suffering, Arendt – albeit only by implication – points to a deep-seated morally relevant affective inhibition that had to be overcome, were the individual to take part in the killing. In other words, inhibitions such as the instinctual-affective one against directly causing and witnessing physical suffering had to be systematically eliminated at all stages if the process of killing were to be completed without psychological breakdowns (causing loss of morale) among the personnel. Bauman quotes Herbert Kelman’s finding that moral inhibitions against violent atrocities ‘tend to be eroded once three conditions are met, singly or together: the violence is authorized (by official orders coming from legally entitled quarters), actions are routinized (by rule-governed practices and exact specification of roles), and the victims of the violence are dehumanized (by ideological definitions and indoctrinations)’ (1989: 21). It is within the powers of a full-fledged modern state apparatus to produce and sustain all three conditions. There is nothing extraordinary about any one of them; they are, and remain, perfectly within reach once the central bodies of a modern state have singled out a group of people as the target for ‘special treatment’. In his authoritative work, The Destruction of the European Jews, much relied upon by Bauman, historian Raul Hilberg (1985: 999) draws up the following chart to illuminate how a destruction process in a modern society will be structured: Definition

# Dismissal of employees and expropriation of business firms

# Concentration

# Exploitation of labour and starvation measures

# Annihilation

# Confiscation of personal effects Hilberg observes that the stages are logically determined; they form a rational sequence in the sense of proving the shortest way and most efficient means to the desired end. Transformed into a technical and

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administrative task, mass destruction comes to be met with what appears the optimally rational solution. Bauman stresses that ‘the successive stages are arranged according to the logic of eviction from the realm of moral duty or . . . from the universe of obligations’ (1989: 191). Herein, then, lies the moral relevance of the sequence: each step contributes to the ‘gradual silencing of moral inhibitions’. Thus, with the accomplishment of each step in the sequence, the danger that moral inhibitions will arise, and thus possibly interfere so as to jeopardize further progression, decreases. This ensures that the moment of actual murder is unaccompanied by human inhibitions of any kind. Every step completed removes the targeted group increasingly from sight. The victims appear as elsewhere, unknown, and anonymous; they become invisible, faceless, they cease to be men and women, objects of concrete social encounters and firsthand human experience. Accordingly, dehumanization of the victims is an integral and carefully thought-out element of the very process of killing them – or, more precisely, of making killing them psychologically and morally easier for those taking part in it. Raul Hilberg aptly sums up what is at stake: Killing is not as difficult as it used to be. The modern administrative apparatus has facilities for rapid, concerted movements and for efficient massive killings. These devices not only trap a large number of victims; they also require a greater degree of specialization, and with that division of labor, the moral burden too is fragmented among the participants. The perpetrator can now kill his victims without touching them, without hearing them, without seeing them. (Hilberg 1985: 1187)

It was crucially important for the Nazis to remove the victims from sight, argues Bauman, because ‘morality did not travel that far’. Why? Because ‘morality tends to stay at home and in the present’ (1989: 190). Encountering distance, morality halts. Morality does not bridge the distance increasingly separating ego from alter. In a word, morality is at a loss to do what we – as moderns taking pride in our great Judeo-Christian tradition – have learned to expect from it, and hence from ourselves: morality does not transcend whatever distance may have come between ego and alter. When at such a distance as to be virtually ‘out of sight’, morality shows itself devoid of any intrinsic potential for disclosing alter to us, for making him matter to us. The invisible other – the other rendered invisible by mechanisms of distantiation – is a morally lost other. To appreciate Bauman’s position, we need to look closely at his use of the findings of psychologist Stanley Milgram. In his famous study, Obedience to Authority, based on a series of experiments where the subjects were told by a ‘scientist’ to administer electric shocks as part of

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a ‘learning program’, Milgram (1974: 121) reached the conclusion that ‘any force or event that is placed between the subject and the consequences of shocking the victim, will lead to a reduction of strain on the participant and thus lessen disobedience. In modern society others often stand between us and the final destructive act to which we contribute.’ Milgram described the fragmentation and, ultimately, evaporation of responsibility that is produced by the professionalized and depersonalized action-settings of modern society. Bauman speaks of ‘mediation of action’ to capture the phenomenon of ‘one’s action being performed for one by someone else, by an intermediate person, who stands between me and my action, making it impossible for me to experience it (and its final consequences) directly’ (1989: 24). To the extent that ordinary moral categories such as shame or pride are felt by the agent to apply at all, their relevance now depends on how adequately he has performed the actions requested by authority. At work here is what Milgram famously termed the agentic state, the state in which the agent finds himself once responsibility has been shifted away by his consent to the superior’s right to command. To be in an agentic state is to see oneself as carrying out another person’s wishes; it is to restrict one’s sense of responsibility to the purely technical aspects of one’s action – the efficiency and cleverness with which it is being carried out – and to leave entirely outside one’s preoccupation the ends to which one’s action in fact contributes. The plight of the objects of action is completely overshadowed by the pride- or shame-eliciting character of the how – as opposed to the to whom – of one’s performance. This means that the causal link between one’s actions and the suffering of the victims is dimmed to the point of becoming obliterated. To Milgram, this readiness to disavow responsibility for one’s own doings, once the agent regards himself as someone who ‘merely’ carries out instructions coming from someone else, reveals a propensity, indeed a ‘fatal flaw’ in man which can only fill us with grave concern (Milgram 1974: 188). Entering the agentic state means that the moral standards one subscribes to as a person come to be totally without bearing on one’s doings. Accordingly, ‘the person who, with inner conviction, loathes stealing, killing, and assault, may find himself performing these acts with relative ease when commanded by authority’ (Bauman 1989: 154). The all-important observation concerns the connection between distantiation and moral neutralization. In Bauman’s phrase, what Milgram detected is ‘the inverse ratio of readiness to cruelty and proximity to its victim’ (1989: 155). To understand the implications of this is to grasp why it was absolutely instrumental for the organizers of the Holocaust to

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subject the chosen target to various processes of abstraction. Only when the victims were turned into an invisible far-off target at the remote receiving end could the goal of killing millions be attained – this precisely because the undertaking had lost its character as downright murder. Redefined as a technical task, it was no different in nature from other such tasks for which expertise and a sophisticated division of labour are required. Distantiation is the path of abstraction. Bureaucracy and technology are the central vehicles for carrying an action from its inception to its determined end point. Bauman describes the morally relevant implications: ‘Bureaucracy’s double feat is the moralization of technology, coupled with the denial of the moral significance of non-technical issues. It is the technology of action, not its substance, which is subject to assessment as good or bad, proper or improper, right or wrong’ (1989: 160). What Bauman, following Milgram, calls a substitute conscience develops to keep effectively at bay that other ‘private’ conscience with which the individuals used to identify themselves qua morally responsible subjects – the very conscience to which they, we may expect, will return once the action-setting within which they enact the ‘agentic state’ is left behind. Bauman takes Milgram’s experiments to have demonstrated two things: first, the nature of what I term the general preconditions of moral inhibition in man (the ‘animal pity’ referred to by Arendt) and, second, the specifically ‘modern’ potential – bureaucratic, technological – for ingenious manipulation with these preconditions, so as to prevent their emergence. Focusing on what may appear to be universal features of human behaviour, Bauman spells out the meaning of the inverse ratio of readiness to cruelty and proximity to its victim: ‘It is difficult to harm a person we touch. It is somewhat easier to afflict pain upon a person we only see at a distance. It is still easier in the case of a person we only hear. It is quite easy to be cruel towards a person we neither see nor hear’ (1989: 155). The discussed increase in the physical and/or psychic distance between the act and its consequences ‘quashes the moral significance of the act and thereby pre-empts all conflict between personal standards of moral decency and immorality of the social consequences of the act’ (p. 25). Bauman concludes that ‘inhumanity is a matter of social relationships’ (p. 154). Harshly criticizing Horkheimer and Adorno’s influential study The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1950) for neglecting the extra-individual factors that induce authoritarian behaviour in people otherwise devoid of an ‘authoritarian personality’, Bauman launches his

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thesis that ‘cruelty correlates with certain patterns of social interaction much more closely than it does with personality features or other individual idiosyncrasies of the perpetrators’. Hence ‘cruelty is social in its origin much more than it is characterological’ (p. 166). Against this background, it appears astonishingly naive to believe that an explanation for the Nazi annihilation of the Jews could be found by investigating the biographies and personality traits of individuals professing anti-Semitic prejudice. Specifically, what emerges as naive is the assumption that it makes a real difference to the act of genocide just what sort of personality, and what kind of beliefs, the individuals involved may have. Bauman insists that the hallmark of the Holocaust, indeed its necessary condition, is the systematic uncoupling of large-scale evil from the vicissitudes of human psychology altogether: killing having turned abstract, the particular personality-based motives, beliefs, and feelings (aggression and hatred included) of the individual are dissociated from the process of completing the genocide. Bauman’s thesis invites comparison with Hannah Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’. Approaching the Holocaust from different theoretical angles, Bauman and Arendt concur on an idea with far-reaching implications: the idea that evil becomes banal when the motives of those involved in carrying it out become superfluous. To achieve this is the feat of bureaucratized murder. If this is true, the entire psychology of the ‘authoritarian personality’ as laid bare by Horkheimer and Adorno is superfluous as well, since these authors take for granted an assumption that has been proven invalid by twentieth-century genocide: the assumption that the personality (be it ‘authoritarian’ or not) of individuals determines their actual behaviour when performing highly specified tasks as functionaries in a bureaucratic apparatus – or, more to the point, that it makes a difference to the operations of such an apparatus just what kind of personality (and private morality, including conscience) the individual member possesses, as if the former could be accounted for by the specific features of the latter. Instead of dwelling on the character of the individual participant, one should look at the larger system within which they interact, developing a structure-oriented sociological approach to such collective evil instead of a psychologicalindividualist one. So, although personality studies may contribute to our understanding of the grassroots support for, say, fascist ideology, they are at a loss to disclose the peculiar nature of evil dissociated from human motives. One of Bauman’s ways of expressing this point is to state that ‘mass destruction was accompanied not by the uproar of emotions, but the dead silence of

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unconcern’ (p. 74). The implication is that the connection between indifference and immorality is held to be pregnant with greater, incomparably greater, disaster than that between hate (or any other feeling springing from the human capacity for aggression against others) and immorality. The destruction of the European Jews required not the mobilization of feelings of hatred but the suppression of feelings altogether. The well-organized collective evil individuals help perform here is such that their personality qua unique individuals is dissociated from it. What they do does not reflect on them morally, individually, or characterologically. Having entered the agentic state, they are content to assess their actions exclusively in view of the purely technical performance principle. We therefore have to qualify our earlier formulation and say that motives, save the purely professional and task-oriented ones, have become superfluous.

Reformulating the relationship between society and morality It is because he holds cruelty to correlate with specific patterns of social interaction that Bauman aptly calls his theory of morality a sociological one. However, he flatly rejects the assumption that has guided virtually all previous sociological accounts of morality – namely, that ‘morality’ is a product of society, that society is to be regarded as a gigantic moralityproducing plant; in short, that ‘society promotes morally regulated behaviour and marginalizes, suppresses or prevents immorality’. Bauman wages war on the deep-seated trust in social arrangements as ‘ennobling, elevating, humanizing factors’ (p. 173). The opposite is closer to the truth, if we are willing to digest the unwelcome lesson the Holocaust may teach us. What does this – self-consciously provocative – view of society and morality imply? Consider this passage from Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: Since the whole of respectable society had in one way or another succumbed to Hitler, the moral maxims which determine social behavior and the religious commandments – ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ – which guide conscience had virtually vanished. These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to abide by, under which the particular cases with which they were confronted could be subsumed. They had to decide each instance as it arose, because no rules existed for the unprecedented. (Arendt 1965a: 294f.)

Bauman praises Arendt for raising the question of ‘moral responsibility for resisting socialization’. This, and nothing less radical, is at issue, since ‘in the aftermath of the Holocaust . . . moral theory faced the

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possibility that morality may manifest itself in insubordination towards socially upheld principles, and in an action openly defying social solidarity and consensus’ (p. 177). It takes a break with the society at large, with the socially maintained and legally upheld principles, to preserve a genuine moral point of view. To think, judge, and act morally would mean to go against the grain, to break the established social rules and legal norms instead of obeying them. This may be exemplified by the infamous Nuremberg Laws, implemented by the Nazis from 1935 onward, to legalize the persecution of the Jews (robbing them of the right to set up business, the right to marry Aryans, etc.), thereby making an ordinary German citizen’s overt unwillingness to support such persecution into a blatantly illegal – and, in that positivistic sense, immoral – act. If it is the case that, even when unanimously condemned by his own group, an individual’s conduct may still be moral, and if, conversely, a course of action encouraged by the whole of society may still be immoral, the question is this: On what grounds can the individual agent know what is moral and what is not? What enables him or her to distinguish between the two, to tell right from wrong? As indicated, the premise for Bauman’s theory of morality is the bold assertion that morality is not a product of society. Rather, ‘morality is something society manipulates – exploits, re-directs, jams’ (p. 183). It follows that the human ability to tell right from wrong must be grounded in something other than – possibly, even at odds with – the conscience collective of society, to allude to Durkheim, who not coincidentally is the classic sociologist Bauman singles out for castigation. If the ability to tell right from wrong is not grounded in society, the question Bauman has to address is: In what, then? Bauman tells us that ‘Every given society faces such an ability (i.e. to tell right from wrong) ready formed, much as it faces human biological constitution, physiological needs or psychological drives’ (p. 178). Coming from a sociologist, this strikes me as a truly startling claim. We are told that the ability to tell right from wrong is ‘ready formed’; hence it is already there, a given, akin to man’s biological constitution. As such, the ability is met upon, not brought into existence, by society and the processes of socialization. Indeed, the part performed by the latter is said to consist – solely – in the ‘manipulation of moral capacity’ (p. 178). What is the nature of this ability? Let us review what (little) Bauman has to say about the matter. He writes: ‘The moral capacity that is manipulated entails not only certain principles which later become a passive object of social processing; it includes as well the ability to resist, escape and survive the processing, so

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that at the end of the day the authority and the responsibility for moral choices rest where they resided at the start: with the human person’ (p. 178). If the moral ability is to exist prior to the various processes of socialization, and so prior to the latter’s attempts at manipulation; and if the ability (i.e. its possessor) is to be accorded a capacity to resist and evade the social forces in question, the question arises: Under what circumstances is such resistance conceivable? Obviously, the individual is subject to the impact of social forces from birth; what is more, there is no point in an individual’s life after which this impact would cease. So it would seem strange indeed if Bauman – on top of it, a sociologist – were to picture the social forces in their entirety as at odds with the individual’s moral ability. Such an ability seems deprived of the very conditions of its possibility if set apart from the influences of ‘the social’ in which it is from beginning to end inescapably embedded because its carrier, the human subject, is so. To make the nature of moral ability conceivable, then, Bauman must be careful not to depict it as at odds with social impact, or environment, per se. He needs to draw a distinction not between the ability on the one hand and everything social on the other, but within the domain of what has till now been indiscriminately referred to as ‘the social’. And indeed, Bauman does take a step in this direction. ‘The factors responsible for the presence of moral capacity’, he tells us, ‘must be sought in the social, but not societal sphere. Moral behaviour is conceivable only in the context of coexistence, of ‘‘being with others’’, that is, a social context’ (p. 179). In my view, the proposed distinction between the social and the societal is a strictly required one, if Bauman is to succeed in giving moral ability a plausible grounding. The ability must be admitted its locus in something social, not outside of everything social – this much Bauman readily acknowledges. The question is whether the distinction he offers suffices to overwin the difficulties – mentioned above – associated with his notion of moral capacity. My view is that Bauman’s distinction is lacking in clarity; it never becomes clear how we are to distinguish between the social on the one hand and the societal on the other. Before discussing this problem, however, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of ‘proximity’, a category on which Bauman’s notion of moral ability crucially rests, besides being at the very centre of the argument I shall develop in this book. The many meanings of proximity Bauman argues that being close to the victim, seeing him, hearing him, makes a vital difference to the agent. In short, proximity makes a moral

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difference: it helps determine performance. Bauman postulates a direct link between proximity and responsibility. ‘Responsibility’, he asserts, ‘arises out of proximity of the other. Proximity means responsibility, and responsibility is proximity.’ Conversely, the moral attribute of social distance is lack of moral relationship, or heterophobia. ‘Responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded; it may eventually be replaced with resentment once the fellow human subject is transformed into an Other’ (p. 184). To assess Bauman’s thesis that ‘responsibility is proximity’, we desperately need to know what Bauman fails to tell us in precise terms: What is proximity? Proximity is ambiguous. On the one hand, it carries a strong spatial connotation. Broadly, this seems to be the sense of proximity illuminated in Milgram’s experiments. By manipulating space, and placing – or removing – physical barriers between subject and victim, Milgram was able to observe the difference seeing, hearing, and touching the victim made to the subject’s performance. This supports the thesis of an unequivocal correlation between spatial location and readiness to inflict pain. On the other hand – and this challenges the thesis in the straightforward form just given – I will argue that the moral significance of proximity also derives from its non-spatial dimension. I have in mind the sense in which we state that someone is ‘close’ to us. Such psychic closeness signifies a meaning of human proximity that cannot be measured in terms of spatial (co)presence/absence. And yet its performatory moral impact is beyond doubt. Would it not make a difference to the subject’s performance if she was told that the (unseen, unheard) person behind the wall was in fact someone she knew? The force yielded by this emotionally charged variable – knowing the physically non-(co)present other – would diminish the impact of the spatial variable presence/absence; it would inspire increased reluctance in the subject to go on obeying instructions to administer shocks known to be painful. If we, as seems obvious, care more for a person we know than for someone who is but an unknown anybody to us, we may be expected to act in a manner revealing that the factor of knowing the other overrides the factor of physical presence/absence. To say this is to acknowledge that a person seen can matter less to us than one out of sight. Conduct – choice – depends on perception. It depends on how that person is disclosed to us and on who he or she ‘is’ to us. The degree of psychical realness/ closeness may outweigh the degree of physical closeness, hence of proximity in its spatial sense. In perception, the spatial variable is overriden by social ones such as knowing/not knowing and extra-individual ones such

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as ideological stereotypes, intransparent bureaucracy, and advanced technology. These observations help draw attention to the various ways in which Milgram’s experiments – on which Bauman almost exclusively relies as far as empirical evidence is concerned – are lacking in complexity. It is regrettable that variables apt to highlight the possible impact of knowing as opposed to not knowing the victim, or the age of the victim (would it matter to learn it was a child instead of an adult?), or the ethnic identity (would it matter to know that the victim was a Jew, or a black person?), are not introduced, so as to enable us to assess their relative significance when measured against the simple spatial variable of having the victim present or not present when ordering the subject to administer shocks. The variables I have mentioned are highly relevant for drawing conclusions about the impact of socially exerted, and often ideologically dramatized, stereotypes – in general, prejudice – about certain categories of others; stereotypes having precisely the effect of painting that other (whose age or ethnic identity has been disclosed) in morally non-neutral colours, so that the perception – whether favourable (is it really a child in there?) or not (is it really a Jew in there?) – is henceforth shaped in a way that impacts on the subject’s readiness to inflict pain. It is indeed my view that Milgram’s experiments are poorly suited to throw light on the behavioural mechanisms which – supposedly – were operative to such disastrous effects in the case of the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Recall that in mobilizing personnel to help take part in the killings, Nazi ideology (propaganda) was utilized for all it was worth to determine the perception of the ‘others’ who were cast in the role of victims: the Jews. Hence the identity – the tendentious fashion in which it was presented as making the biggest difference in the world, that between deserving to live and deserving to die – of the person on the receiving end of the action was all over the place, as it were, influencing the choices of the agent right from the start. In contrast to this, the anonymity of the victim (not merely that he is not seen, heard, and the like – namely, the spatial variables – but that nothing bearing on his identity is being disclosed), which is so characteristic of Milgram’s experiments, in fact makes for a difference from the (pervasively ideological) context in which real-life participants in the Holocaust acted so great as to render the suitability of Milgram’s experiments for illuminating how the Holocaust could happen rather doubtful. Even if we – for the sake of the argument – accept Bauman’s Milgram-inspired premise that evildoing can be reduced to obedience to authority, such obedience, as Omer Bartov (2003: 190f.) observes, is not merely about a person coming

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to see himself as ‘the instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes’. Rather, such obedience carries a strong ideological component; it comes from ‘accepting the fundamental ideas that guide that authority and wishing to help realize them in practice’. We need to realize that both the authority and those who obey it ‘share the same prejudices, the same view of the world, the same fundamental perception of reality’. Bauman makes much of the fact that, in Milgram’s experiments, action would unite the subject with the experimenter, separating both of them from the victim. The result is that the victim is left to himself, whereas a morally non-neutral bond, conducive to a sense of solidarity and a spirit of loyal collaboration, typically evolves between the experimenter and the subject. Milgram – and, following him, Bauman – takes this to be instrumental in bringing about the subject’s shift of responsibility from himself to the authority in charge. Since this authority is regarded as legitimate, legitimacy accompanies the actions the authority orders the subject to perform. Note that all dynamics – personal, social, emotional – of possible moral import (moral in the sense of having a bearing on perception of responsibility, of legitimacy, of being entitled to do something, etc.) are situated within the dyad of subject and experimenter. Now Bauman will say that the absence – psychologically, emotionally, and morally – of the victim is precisely the point: the unwelcome message to be stomached is precisely this readiness on the part of (a large majority of) the subjects to dismiss the victim, to remove him or her from view, and to focus all one’s attention on how well one performs what one is ordered to do by the authority in charge. This shift of attention, then, constitutes the psychological underpinning of the shift of responsibility said to take place in Milgram’s agentic state. The trouble with this finding of Milgram’s, and with the use to which Bauman is eager to put it, is that the Holocaust did not happen like that. Far from the victims being faceless and anonymous, they were for years on end stigmatized on the ground of their identity as Jews. All the media of communication available to the Nazi ideologues and controlled by the Nazi regime were fully – and skilfully – exploited to brainwash the audience into accepting the negative nature and inferior status of that specific racial identity. The Jews were portrayed as radically other, as alien, as threatening, as not belonging among us, as – ultimately – not deserving to share the earth with human beings, especially not with Aryans. My objection to Bauman at this point boils down to the following. Why did the Nazis kill the Jews – meaning, emphatically, the Jews? Answer: on grounds having to do with – that is to say, actively citing – their

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Jewishness, given the absolutely negative view of the latter that is a hallmark of the Nazi Weltanschauung. True, many Nazis would cite the cliche´ that they ‘merely obeyed orders’ in doing their share to exterminate the Jews, thereby invoking the subject–authority dyad taking centre stage in Milgram’s claims about the workings of the agentic state. But the truth of the matter is that the readiness to do what these individuals did in no small measure was determined by the victims having that identity (as opposed to an alternative one). Put structurally, this means that the context in which the evil performed by the Nazis took place is an irreducibly triadic one, where the victim is not lost from view but instead remains a focus – a focus whose significance is nothing less than that of lending the evil to take place its quality as something legitimate (required, necessary) to do. I conclude that the evidence at hand does not allow us to postulate a necessary correlation between proximity and moral conduct. No moral concern for the other is inherent in proximity as spatially understood – that is to say, in the sense I take Bauman to understand it, following Milgram. I maintain that proximity interacts with a number of factors; it does not by itself bring about, let alone account for, moral conduct or lack of it. Uncoupling responsibility from reciprocity In depicting the Holocaust as an instance of institutionalized genocide, as opposed to a spontaneous, affect-based one, Bauman takes his study to substantiate his claim that morality is not a product of society – contra Durkheim and the received sociological wisdom. Bauman is convinced that ‘morality is something society manipulates – exploits, re-directs, jams’ (1989: 183). He proceeds to search for the ‘pre-societal’ sources of morality. These he finds in Emmanuel Levinas’ teaching that responsibility is the essential, primary, and fundamental structure of subjectivity and that morality is the primary structure of intersubjective relationship. Responsibility is – ineluctably, irrevocably – my affair; it is not dependent upon reciprocity. A one-way affair, responsibility is compromised once it is perceived as a product of exchange, symmetry, calculation – indeed anything that would engage us in give and take, in the all-too-familiar ‘what’s in it for me?’ The wider implication is that ‘the roots of morality reach well beneath societal arrangements – like structures of domination or culture. Societal processes start when the structure of morality (tantamount to intersubjectivity) is already there’ (p. 183). The all-important point for Bauman is that proximity and responsibility be regarded as two

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sides of the same coin. The pair proximity–responsibility contrasts sharply with social distance, the chief attribute of which is ‘lack of moral relationship, or heterophobia’. It follows that ‘responsibility is silenced once proximity is eroded’ (p. 184). Hannah Arendt, we recall, identified the most deep-seated obstacle to systematic, cold-blooded murder of people in that ‘animal pity by which all men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’. Bauman’s gloss on this is to talk about the ‘universality of human revulsion to murder, inhibition against suffering’ (p. 185). What this helps throw into sharp relief is that the accomplishment of the Nazi regime ‘consisted first and foremost in neutralizing the moral impact of the specifically human existential mode’ (p. 185). We can now appreciate why Levinas is the ethicist Bauman turns to. If my reading is correct, Bauman takes Levinas’ ethics to represent the thesis to which the Nazi practice of committing mass murder represents the antithesis. Levinas, Bauman asserts, has shown us whence responsibility springs: from proximity to the human other. The carrying out of mass murder requires that such proximity be eliminated; hence will responsibility, its corollary, be prevented from arising, from being perceived by the agent. The Holocaust was premised upon the Nazis regime’s success in ‘isolating the machinery of murder from the sphere where primeval moral drives arise and apply, of rendering such drives marginal or altogether irrelevant to the task’ (p. 188). By performatively negating Levinas’ insight into the origin and conditions of responsibility, immorality – in the form of collective evil – could take place. This is a suggestive thesis. But is it convincing? In my view, philosophical argument alone is incapable of settling the question. It is not by subjecting Levinas’ ethics to scrutiny so as to establish its consistency or lack of such that Bauman’s thesis may be vindicated. The reason is that the thesis is predominantly empirical – or, more to the point, Bauman’s application of it is. If it can be persuasively shown that the mass murder taking place in the Holocaust happened differently than postulated in Bauman’s thesis, then the thesis must be rejected. Since the use to which Bauman puts Levinas’ notion of responsibility–proximity is clearly case-oriented, the thesis is vulnerable to falsification. As far as I can see, the logical upshot of Bauman’s employment of Levinas’ notion is that we must expect other instances of mass murder in institutionalized form to be (in part) facilitated by the same performative negation of the pair responsibility–proximity that – so the thesis has it – was a sine qua non of the Holocaust. To sum up, if Levinas helps us recognize the positive inherent link between morality on the one

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hand and proximity on the other, the Holocaust serves as evidence for this in so far as it demonstrates the readiness of individuals to participate in immorality in circumstances where factors conducive to proximity have been suspended. Levinas’ philosophically posited positive link between morality and proximity would have as its corollary a historically verifiable (causally operative) link between immorality and distantiation. I have phrased Bauman’s thesis in this fashion in order to highlight the case-studying sociologist who remains precisely that even as he embraces Levinas the philosophical ethicist. Philosophical objections (of which there are many) to Levinas’ teaching have no purchase in Bauman’s use of it. The two most obvious principal dangers of responsibility cast as non-reciprocity, as non-optional and non-symmetric – first, the danger of paternalism, as in ‘I am the one to judge what is good for you’, and second, the danger that the recipient exploits the goodness of a giver unconcerned about rewards and returns – are not even mentioned by Bauman (though they are addressed in his later book Postmodern Ethics (1993)). Given Bauman’s aims in his Holocaust book, this philosophical omission is a permissible one. Bauman’s vulnerability in building upon Levinas is not so much theoretical as empirical. If it emerges that the Holocaust retained, instead of removing and suspending, a context of proximity (i.e. between perpetrator and victim) in the actual performance of the mass murder, then it follows that Bauman’s via negativa use of Levinas’ positive link to help answer the question about how the Holocaust could happen is seriously undermined. We need to consult recent historical scholarship to assess the validity of Bauman’s use of Levinas’ ethics. I start by considering Daniel Goldhagen’s account of the Holocaust. Goldhagen’s challenge Though not explicitly addressed, Bauman no doubt figures among the prominent scholars from whom Daniel J. Goldhagen goes out of his way to distance himself in his much-discussed book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. The contrast between the two explanations offered for the Holocaust could hardly have been greater. Goldhagen’s central thesis is that what he identifies as ‘racial eliminationalist antsemitism’ was a sufficient cause, a ‘sufficiently potent motivator’, to ‘lead Germans to kill Jews willingly’ (1996: 417). It was the particular content of the antiSemitic Nazi ideology that led to the ‘singularly brutal deadly German assault upon the Jews’ (p. 418). What we are dealing with in the case of the Nazis’ determination to exterminate the Jews, insists Goldhagen, is

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nothing short of a ‘cognitive-moral revolution’ which ‘reversed processes that had been shaping Europe for centuries’ (p. 456). The camp system in particular encouraged and allowed for a ‘world of unrestrained impulses and cruelty’ (p. 457). Small wonder, then, that under cicumstances where ‘eliminationalist antisemitism’ was given free rein for years on end, exempting no member of society from its ubiquitous impact, ‘ordinary Germans’ became ‘willing genocidal killers’ (p. 449). So much for Goldhagen’s emphasis on anti-Semitist ideology in accounting for how Germans could participate in the killing of defenceless Jews. For my purposes, the relevance of contrasting Goldhagen with Bauman is both theoretical and empirical. In rejecting the notion that ideological anti-Semitism played a key role in the Holocaust, Bauman goes so far as to assert an ‘almost negative correlation between the ordinary and traditional . . . anti-Jewish sentiment and the willingness to embrace the Nazi vision of total destruction and to partake of its implementation’. To support his position, Bauman refers to ‘a growing consensus among historians of the Nazi era that the perpetration of the Holocaust required the neutralization of ordinary German attitudes toward the Jews, not their mobilization’. Hence the SS in charge of the Endlo¨sung ‘guarded the job’s independence from the sentiments of the population at large’ (1989: 185). If we are to believe Bauman, the Nazi leadership, disappointed with the poor ‘spontaneous’ turnout by ordinary Germans during the Kristallnacht, was forced to realize that attempts to stir up anti-Semitic feelings ‘foundered on the popular repugnance of physical coercion, on deep-seated inhibitions against inflicting pain and physical suffering, and on stubborn human loyalty to their neighbours, to people whom one knows and has charted into one’s map of the world as persons, rather than anonymous specimens of a type’ (p. 186). On the evidence of the quotes brought here, it is difficult to believe that Bauman and Goldhagen are addressing the same issue and evaluating the same empirical material. Their conclusions are completely at loggerheads. How can that be? Goldhagen’s study represents a corrective to the thesis of abstraction that is all-important in Bauman. The corrective is twofold: it concerns both the theoretical-sociological explanation of how the Holocaust could happen and the empirical description of the way it was carried out. Focusing on Police Battalion 101’s role in the open-air killings of hunted-down Jews of both sexes and all ages in various parts of what used to be the Soviet Union from late 1941 onward, Goldhagen (drawing upon research pioneered by Christopher Browning, yet differing significantly from Browning’s – strongly Milgram-inspired – interpretation of

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the material in his monograph Ordinary Men [1992]) paints a detailed picture of killings committed by personnel aged from twenty-one to fiftyfour, with an average age of thirty-six years old, and so by men brought up in pre-Nazi Germany and old enough to have children; killings, moreover, carried out with studied humiliation and cruelty, with a high factor of volunteering and with – or rather in spite of – rich and well-known opportunities to refuse participation, to request transfer to less violent service without thereby risking serious sanctions; killings, finally, taking place in circumstances of proximity to the victims, who were indeed within eminent reach of all the senses. All of it a far cry indeed from the mechanisms of abstraction so emphasized in Bauman’s account. This is how Goldhagen describes the proximity between a perpetrator and his victim: A squad would approach the group of Jews who had just arrived, from which each member would choose his victim – a man, a woman, or a child. The Jews and Germans would then walk in parallel single file so that each killer moved in step with his victim, until they reached a clearing for the killing where they would position themselves and await the firing order from their squad leader. The walk into the woods afforded each perpetrator an opportunity for reflection. Walking side by side with his victim, he was able to imbue the human form beside him with the projections of his mind. Some of the Germans, of course, had children walking beside them. It is highly likely that, back in Germany, these men had previously walked through woods with their own children by their sides, marching gaily and inquisitively along. With what thoughts and emotions did each of these men march, gazing sidelong at the form of, say, an eight- or twelve-year-old girl, who to the unideologized mind would have looked like any other girl? In these moments, each killer had a personalized, face-to-face relationship to his victim, to his little girl. Did he see a little girl, and ask himself why he was about to kill this little, delicate human being who, if seen as a little girl by him, would normally have received his compassion, protection, and nurturance? Or did he see a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless? (Goldhagen 1996: 217f.)

Highly critical though I am of the way Goldhagen generalizes this scenario, his study does capture something that I find deeply disquieting. While Goldhagen concentrates too one-sidedly on face-to-face encounters such as the one depicted above, showing no restraint in psychologizing the perpetrator’s attitude to his victim, he does succeed in drawing our attention to a dimension largely neglected in Bauman’s account. This is precisely the widespread factual occurrence of person-to-person proximity. Thus, while Goldhagen’s tendentious and monocausal approach is in need of correction, it is sufficiently unsettling vis-a`-vis Bauman’s even if he gets only a small part of the bigger picture right. What we need to recognize is that, in certain

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circumstances, evildoing thrives in proximity. Evildoing, be it modern or postmodern, be it ideologized along racial, nationalist, religious, or ethnic lines, does not depend on distance, invisibility, or anonymity. There is another dimension to this as well, more subtle and tacit: the interplay between cognitive and emotional faculties in the perception of the other. Let me explain. Goldhagen asked if the policeman saw a little girl or if he saw ‘a Jew, a young one, but a Jew nonetheless’. He saw a Jew. His seeing a Jew meant that he, in keeping with the Nazi ideology he evidently had internalized, saw an Untermensch, a subhuman creature. His racist ideology ensures that this girl is excommunicated from the universe of shared humanity where empathy-based compassion is perceived as pertinent and so can be aroused. It is as if something has come between the policeman and the little girl. He does not appear to receive anything from the girl, from her face. Even if her face, following Levinas, may be assumed to issue an appeal – ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ – he does not experience himself as addressed by it. There is nothing in him that would resonate with her wordless appeal. What has come between the two of them is a blocking. On Goldhagen’s analysis, a blocking of this kind is something cognitive, wholly ideological in origin, form, and content; that is to say, a blocking produced by the policeman’s internalization of a specific Weltanschauung in which avid anti-Semitism is rock bottom. What is thus internalized is a structure of beliefs. Goldhagen’s analysis is marred by the cognitivistic one-sidedness of his perspective. We may realize this when we ask: What is blocked by the blocking in question? My answer is that what is blocked is not first and foremost cognitive, but affective. It is the power of the girl’s face to trigger the policeman’s ability to be affectively moved by her plight that is quashed. The ideologically determined cognitive manner in which the other – this other – is perceived thwarts the capacity for affection that springs from the faculty of empathy; it thus pre-empts the display of any affection in this case, for this girl. I use italics here to stress that such ideologically effected prevention of affection is highly selective in the way it works. So it is not as if the policeman in Goldhagen’s example is clinically incapable of affection, of empathy-based compassion. Rather, his affection is being subject to a specific channelling: some people are picked out as valid and worthy objects of affection, of care and responsibility; others are not. All cultures that we know practise some variant of teaching its individual members which objects (subjects) are entitled to what, morally speaking (Vetlesen 1994: 153–217). What is extraordinary in the case of Nazi ideology is not that it engages in drawing such a distinction, but the specific manner in which it does so.

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What holds for the policeman’s encounter with the girl probably holds for the paramilitary Serb’s encounter with his victims as well (to anticipate my case study in Chapter 4). In both cases, it apparently makes no difference, morally speaking, that the concrete context of the perpetrator–victim encounter is characterized by physical proximity. Why? Because no morally significant emotional and human proximity accompanies the physical one. The perpetrator sees, hears, touches his victim, alright. Yet he does not experience her. She leaves no impression upon him, is killed without any trace of her being left on the killer. What survives her is what was already in place in the perception of the killer prior to the event of his meeting her: his belief and conviction that she gets what she deserves. Why? Because she is one of them. And they deserve it. Dehumanization – if that is the right term for this – here works deductively, as it were: the alleged status (non-moral) of the collective determines and defines – no leeway allowed – the status of the individual (exemplar). The essence of the whole is mirrored in each part. Your group is your destiny. (I shall elaborate these vital points regarding the structure of collective evil in later chapters.) Reassessing Bauman’s thesis in the light of recent scholarship The differences between the accounts of the Holocaust given by Bauman and Goldhagen are towering. Are they studying the same phenomenon? Not really. Goldhagen concentrates on the – allegedly – overwhelming extent to which Germans of all walks of life supported, and often actively participated in, the persecution of Jews that took place partly prior to, and partly outside of, the pure extermination camps located in Poland (most of which began operating in the winter of 1942, and many for as short a period as one year). By contrast, Bauman is studying the technicalinstrumental logic that – he argues – gained ever more momentum in the course of accomplishing the Holocaust. This is the logic that directed the Nazi leaders away from the attempted ‘popular’ and ‘spontaneous’ pogroms exemplified by the November 1938 Kristallnacht (an Aktion whose never-to-be-repeated character Bauman finds truly revealing) and toward the industrialized mass killings for which the extermination camps were designed. Bauman’s claim is that, from 1942 onward, distantiation between perpetrators and victims became a sine qua non of the Holocaust. Should the different samples of empirical material upon which their studies are based bring us to conclude that Goldhagen and Bauman in fact talk past each other rather than flatly contradict each other? I suggest that, even though Goldhagen may be right that ordinary

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German men and women shared a much stronger animosity against the Jews than they are attributed at any point in Bauman’s account, Bauman’s major sociological thesis may still stand. Goldhagen’s case-oriented study fails to refute the sociological reasons Bauman presents to support his claim that the vehement hatred of Jews typical of violent street anti-Semitism is not what in actual fact made the extermination camps (where the largest number of killings took place) run – and run as smoothly as they did. The latter setting is qualitatively different from the setting in which the Police Battalions studied by Goldhagen operated (a difference ignored in Goldhagen’s penchant for sweeping generalizations). For one thing, actually permitting allegedly deep-seated and violent anti-Jewish feelings to play a lead role in the way the killings took place would prove dysfunctional within such a vast and complex institutional undertaking, considering the predictability and degree of top-down, task-related and expertiseemploying control required in this thoroughly professionalized context. The finding that modern institutions run most effectively by eliminating the impact and imprint of their individual members qua unique individuals (not least their capacity for aggression and hatred) is not, of course, a detection of Bauman’s but a commonplace of the social sciences going back to their founding fathers (Weber, To¨nnies, Durkheim, Simmel); its quintessential model is Weber’s account of bureaucracy. The task Bauman sets himself in his book is to demonstrate that this understanding of the workings of institutions in modern society remains valid even in a case where what the institutions in fact were accomplishing, on a routinized, day-to-day basis for years on end, was the murder of millions of human beings. To shift terminology, the thesis is about how form prevails over content, how technically superior methods of doing something, of reaching some specific goal, nullifies any difference that otherwise might be made by virtue of the peculiar substance or nature of the goal in question. An essential feature of Weberian purposive rationality is precisely how goals (and consequences) cease to be subject to the individual’s autonomous moral evaluation in general, and empathy-based feelings such as pity and compassion in particular; instead, rationality is a matter of the efficiency of the selected means, whose enhanced perfection becomes an end in itself. However, not only historians or political scientists such as Goldhagen, but also the parties directly involved are placed to offer counter-evidence to Bauman’s thesis about the importance of distantiation, indeed of all the mechanisms Bauman views as contributing to adiaphorization, understood as the creation of indifference towards the suffering of others.

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This is not the place to engage with the enormous number of sources documenting how participants in killings evaluate the Holocaust as firstperson experience. Suffice it to indicate the significance of such accounts as a corrective to the empirical validity of Bauman’s thesis. Franz Stangl, commandant in Sobibor and Treblinka, was asked by the brilliant writer Gitta Sereny (1974: 201): ‘Did you not experience that they [the victims] were human beings?’ Stangl answers that ‘they were cargo’. He goes on to say that he ‘seldom looked upon them as individuals’; rather, there was always an ‘enormous mass’. At first glance, comments such as these may appear to support Bauman’s claim about the indifference fostered by distantiation between perpetrator and victims. Indeed, how could one come across a more blunt expression of how distantiation leads to wholesale dehumanization of the victims on the part of a key perpetrator? Stangl personifies the technification of killing and anonymization of the victims that go hand in hand with a total lack of identification, empathy and concern with the victims in their capacity as individual human beings. I do not think Stangl represents that simple a case. In interpreting him the way we just did, we take him on his word and accept his story at face value. We uncritically affirm that his response to Sereny’s question captures the truth about Stangl’s experience of what he did. However, considering the fact that Stangl was in charge of two of the biggest extermination camps and thus a major figure in the biggest genocidal project in the twentieth century, a more questioning stance is called for. Suffice it to note that on many occasions in Sereny’s interviews with him, Stangl reveals strong evidence that he – in contradiction to the above quote – was fully aware that it was humans he killed; that he loathed the Jews and everything he associated with them; and that the smoothness sought for in performing the actual killing was undermined and interrupted again and again by obstacles deriving from the recalcitrant ‘messiness’ of the entire undertaking, reflecting the humane-ness and individuality of both killers and those to be killed. Pace Bauman, and contradicting Stangl’s ‘cargo’ metaphor, content would often prevail over form – with a vengeance, as we shall see below. The Holocaust, despite overwhelming efforts in that direction, never became a fully factory-like, cargo-transporting and cargo-eliminating undertaking along the lines suggested in Bauman’s functionalist account. To see the implications of this, recall that Bauman comes close to suggesting that society, morally speaking, almost by definition only brings out the worst in people – with the implicit corollary that, if left to themselves and allowed to meet in a context of undisturbed proximity,

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individuals will act ethically towards each other. Such simple correlations – i.e. between morality and proximity, or between immorality and distance – seldom survive empirical case studies keen on detail and attentive to the complexity of human behaviour. In real life, in the course of, say, the sequence beginning with the arrest of a particular Jew and ending with her being killed by gas in a camp, circumstances identified by Bauman as characteristic of proximity will never be completely eradicated; and, even when proximity does obtain, it will often be accompanied by cruel behaviour. There is a point beyond which the Weberian ideal types applied by Bauman to enhance our sociological understanding of how the Holocaust was possible cease to be a suitable device to let us get to grips with reality. The many merits of Bauman’s book cannot overshadow the unfortunate consequences of projecting sociological categories onto a messy reality: too much of the latter is hidden from view. Above I pointed out that Goldhagen’s study relies on material taken from different areas of action (at a different time, in different regions, by different units) than those most relevant to Bauman’s conclusions. That being so, they talk past each other. However, it is also the case that scholars whose research is much closer to Bauman’s as far as choice of focus is concerned continue to publish studies that contradict Bauman’s thesis. For example, the German sociologist Wolfgang Sofsky, in his 1993 treatise Die Ordnung des Terrors (The Order of Terror), convincingly argues that the camps were arenas for what he calls ‘absolute power’, exercised by individuals who realize absolute freedom. Like Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi before him, Sofsky emphasizes that the bestiality that characterized much of the killing in the camps was of a conspicuously excessive kind: it goes far beyond what can be deemed necessary for the killing of the victims. This bestiality becomes an end in itself; it becomes an end in itself to indulge in the destruction of humans – reduced now to pure animality, to bodies, to pieces of flesh robbed of soul, spirit, will. Levi had focused on the gratuitous cruelty he witnessed everywhere he looked in the camp; on the ‘useless suffering’ visited upon the inmates day in, day out. If Bauman looks for the effects of distantiation, Sofsky records those of closeness, zooming in on the relation between absolutely powerful agents and absolutely powerless victims: It is true that the personnel belonged to a total organization with all the mechanisms of suppression that go with it. But the camps gave the personnel a free domain of action. The executioners of the monopoly of violence could, without being punished, set aside all forms of other- and self-coercion characteristic of civilization. The perpetrator was no mere subject. He did more than he had to.

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He did what he was permitted to do, and he was permitted to do everything. This sovereignty was transferred even to the lowest-standing guard . . . Inhumanity is always a possibility for human beings. In order for it to emerge, all that is needed is absolute power over others. The piles of bodies testify to the way absolute freedom turns into the destruction of humans. (Sofsky 1993: 318, 275)

Admittedly, Sofsky is not at his most convincing when he starts extrapolating from his empirical findings what aspires to ‘universal’ truths about human nature (Sofsky 1998). In general, I urge great caution in using documentation about human behaviour under extreme circumstances to make inferences about the way humans are, deep down. The idea that the exceptional provides us with a privileged access to what is fundamental, yet ordinarily concealed, is suggestive but methodically unsound; a romantic fiction, and a dangerous one at that (Todorov 1996: 39; Clendinnen 1999: 82f.). Much of the historical material Sofsky presents speaks for itself, and it surely poses a serious challenge to Bauman’s account. Distance between perpetrator and victim was in no way the rule at every stage of the persecution ending in ‘industrialized’ killing in the camps. Even in the camps, plenty of direct physical encounters between the Nazi personnel and the inmates took place, although it is true that the SS were forbidden even to touch the bodies themselves, leaving the dirty, hands-on-victims (corpses) work to the Sonderkommandos made up of a selected group of prisoners (routinely executed every three months). The point Sofsky’s study helps us recognize is that, far from distantiation being the soughtfor rule at all stages, proximity was in many instances the preferred – meaning deliberately sustained – context of interaction; preferred, because suited to the infliction of maximum pain that was such a crucial element of the SS personnel’s behaviour toward the victims. Let me substantiate this point by pointing to the significance of performance. Bauman would have us believe that what makes for the greatest danger, morally speaking, is the technification of the agent’s performance; the ultimate perversion of conduct occurs when the agent allows himself to be turned into a means for purposes and ends of a blatantly immoral nature. However, a close look at the pride of place taken by performance among SS personnel suggests that the dramaturgical aspect often overshadows the technical. Consider the following account by Inga Clendinnen: The theatre of the Birkenau extermination complex developed its own scenarios and its own gratifications. The SS were always on show, and always dressed to kill. Their immaculate presentation contrasted, and was meant to contrast, with the

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dilapidated squalor of the lesser creatures who stumbled out of the boxcars, or the grotesques in striped pyjamas who marched into the light to take charge of baggage. There was a range of possible scripts in the anterooms to death. We see different scenarios played out and then assessed in accordance with their capacity to control and direct ‘audience response’, and achieve an orderly, brisk processing. In one model performance, the SS, playing affable and courteous guides, ushered their victims through the necessary sequence with no shouting, no goading, guns; not a word of abuse passed their lips. After a couple of reassuring speeches, the crowd of people was successfully cozened and sealed into the gas chambers with no time-consuming fuss. The SS officer in charge turned to his underlings: ‘Well, you two, have you got it now? That’s the way to do it!’ Again we have an example of that chilling Nazi perversity which combines a readiness to manipulate their victims with effecting their extermination as vermin. (Clendinnen 1999: 147f.)

Is this a case of evildoing – deliberate infliction of pain and suffering – resulting from obedience to authority? Is it a case of the actors’ entering into an agentic state, subject to various mechanisms fostering distantiation? It is no such thing. It is something for which Bauman and Milgram have not prepared us. It is a case where technical skill and theatrical show-off are blended, mutually reinforcing each other, and nourished by ideologically induced hatred of the victims. All of which combine, I suggest, to produce in the individual performer the tremendous gratifications attending successful play-acting in front of an audience made up of peers and fellow connoisseurs. In putting it like this, we enter the territory explored so magnificently by Jack Katz in his Seductions of Crime, a classic of modern criminology that owes much of its status to the author’s keen eye for the dramaturgical dimensions – and gratifications – of much group-performed criminal acts. For my purposes, the phenomenon at the heart of Katz’s study is sufficiently general to throw light on the Nazi behaviour under scrutiny no less than that of the street gangs analysed by Katz. Katz urges the scholar to appreciate ‘the authentic efficacy of sensual magic’, arguing that ‘as unattractive morally as crime may be, we must appreciate that there is a genuine experiential creativity in it as well’. Individuals specializing in crimes involving deliberate – though often misrepresented as ‘senseless’ – damage to others ‘submit to forces that transcend their subjectivity even while they tacitly control the transition’; ‘mimicking the ways of primordial gods as they kill, they proudly appear to the world as astonishingly evil’ (Katz 1988: 8, 10). Keep in mind that the violence we talk about here was planned and chosen, yet at the same time quite gratuitous; Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (1988: 83ff.) refers to it as ‘useless violence’. There is a moment of

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excess, a quality of delight, and even – on the inside of the gates of manmade hell a` la Auschwitz – exuberance. Having said this, I agree with Clendinnen that there is something about such episodes, such acts, that continues to escape final diagnosis. Even within the compelling frame of theatrical expectation, of self-reinforcing thrill and the intoxication brought by absolute power over absolute powerless people, the sort of questions that defy easy psychological answers continue to force themselves upon us. How is it possible to smash a truncheon into an old woman’s face, or to smash an infant into a wall? Let me add one more instance of empirical counter-evidence to Bauman’s account that deserves consideration: historian Jan Gross’s study Neighbors. Sparking heated controversy in Poland when it was published in 2001, the book tells a story long untold: the story of how, on one day in July 1941, half of the population of the small Polish town of Jedwabne murdered the other half – some 1,600 men, women, and children. It is the story of how civilian Poles killed their long-time neighbours. Citing the testimony of Szmul Wasersztajn, who witnessed the pogrom, Gross writes: On the morning of July 10, 1941, eight Gestapo men came to town and had a meeting with representatives of the town authorities. When the Gestapo asked what their plans were with respect to the Jews, they said, unanimously, that all Jews must be killed. When the Germans proposed to leave one Jewish family from each profession, local carpenter Bronislaw Szlezinski, who was present, answered: We have enough of our own craftsmen, we have to destroy all the Jews, none should stay alive. Mayor Karolak and everybody else agreed with his words. For this purpose Szlezinski gave his own barn, which stood nearby. After this meeting the bloodbath began . . . Local hooligans armed themselves with axes, special clubs studded with nails, and other instruments of torture and destruction and chased all the Jews into the street. As the first victims of their devilish instincts they selected seventy-five of the youngest and healthiest Jews, whom they ordered to pick up a huge monument of Lenin that the Russians had erected in the center of town. It was impossibly heavy, but under a rain of horrible blows the Jews had to do it. While carrying the monument, they also had to sing until they brought it to the designated place. There, they were ordered to dig a hole and throw the monument in. Then these Jews were butchered to death and thrown into the same hole. (Gross 2001: 18f.)

It is true that the Germans, on the day before, had issued an order that all the Jews be destroyed. But, as both Wasersztajn and Gross point out, even though the Germans gave the order, it was Polish civilians who took it up and carried it out, using the most horrible methods; after various tortures and humiliations, they burned all the Jews in the barn. Among

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the numerous incidents of unspeakable brutality, there is the fate of the girl known as the most beautiful in town, Gitele Nadolny, the youngest daughter of the melamed (kheyder teacher); she had her head cut off, and the murderers later kicked it around in the main square (2001: 96). Gross’s main point, however, is principal: he takes the fate of the Jews in Jedwabne to prove that it is simply not true – as the standard version for some fifty years has it, both in Poland and in international historiography – that Jews were murdered in Poland during the war solely by the Germans, occasionally assisted in the execution of their gruesome task by some auxiliary police formations composed primarily of Latvians, Ukrainians, or some other ‘Kalmuks’. The massacre in Jedwabne goes to show that the Nazi units in charge of the ‘final solution’ did not compel the local population to participate directly in the murder of Jews. Rather, what happened in Jedwabne was that the local population literally volunteered to carry out the killing themselves, making sure that no single Jew was spared. As if to emphasize the difference between this incident and the way in which organized evildoing typically takes place if we are to believe Milgram and Bauman, Gross states: ‘A murderer in uniform remains a state functionary acting under orders, and he might even be presumed to have mental reservations about what he has been ordered to do. Not so a civilian, killing another human being of his own free will – such an evildoer is unequivocally but a murderer’ (p. 133). Gross then asks: ‘Where did this explosive potential come from?’ There is no simple answer. Gross tells us to remember that in the background of anti-Jewish violence there always lurked ‘a suspicion of ritual murder, a conviction that Jews use for the preparation of Passover matzoh the fresh blood of innocent Christian children’; in other words, a piece of standard prejudice against the Jews (p. 123). He also directs attention to the widespread opinion among ordinary Poles that the Jews generally showed an enthusiastic response to entering Red Army units, nourishing the rumour of ‘innate’ Jewish collaboration with the Soviets during the period 1939–41. In empirical terms, this notion is simply false. On the other hand, writes Gross, it is manifest that the local nonJewish population enthusiastically greeted entering Wehrmacht units in 1941 and ‘broadly engaged in collaboration with the Germans, up to and including participation in the exterminatory war against the Jews’ (p. 155). In Jedwabne, the Germans were greeted with enthusiasm, it seems, not least because they were perceived by the local non-Jewish population as representing a green light – a ‘Go ahead, do it!’ – that the Jews could henceforth be killed with impunity. The point is made: Jedwabne does not fit into Bauman’s picture of how the Holocaust was carried out. The perpetrators were not uniformed men

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acting under orders and trapped in an ‘agentic state’; no sophisticated bureaucracy was involved, no advanced technology. Whereas Auschwitz – if only arguably, considering Sofsky’s research – may be said to serve Bauman relatively well as a model of top-down organized Gesellschaftlike collective evil, Jedwabne epitomizes the opposite model, that of Gemeinschaft-like collective evil, where features such as anonymity, depersonalization, and distantiation are conspicuous by their absence. In the case of Jedwabne, the mass murder was carried out in full proximity in every sense of the word: personal, generational, physical, and temporal. There was an absence of the entire psychology of learning by doing, of starting out reluctantly, hesitantly, only subsequently to become used to it, numb in the face of committing murder. This was no top-down thing, neither ideologically nor institutionally. Rather, it was a matter of taking recourse to primitive, ancient methods and murder weapons: stones, axes, wooden clubs, iron bars, fire, and water. In the utter brutality of the handson violence exhibited, we are more inclined to make comparisons with the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda than with the Holocaust as portrayed by Hilberg or Bauman. To return to the greater picture, there is no denying that Jedwabne was part of the historical reality designated by the term ‘the Holocaust’. An account of the latter that fails – if only by omission or neglect – to accommodate the case of Jedwabne as one among many events, many elements, making up the totality that is called ‘the Holocaust’, is seriously wanting. Again, my point is not that Bauman has got it all wrong; he has not. Whatever the historical representativeness or lack of such of Jedwabne, it did happen, in ways demonstrating that, under certain circumstances, proximity and evildoing – far from mutually exclusive – may indeed coexist, working in tandem toward the goal of killing. Therefore, to quote Gross, Jedwabne makes clear that we must approach the Holocaust as a ‘heterogeneous phenomenon’: ‘On the one hand, we have to be able to account for it as a system, which functioned according to a preconceived (though constantly evolving) plan. But, simultaneously, we must be able to see it as a mosaic composed of discrete episodes, improvised by local decision-makers, and hinging on unforced behavior, rooted in God-knows-what motivations, of all those who were near the murder scene at the time’ (p. 124). Mistaking the bureaucratic design for the reality Given the quite opposite directions in which studies such as those by Bauman, Goldhagen, Sofsky, and Gross take us, how can we reach a consensus – or at least a conclusion that is not fraught with contradictions?

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For a start, we need to dismiss the assumption that all the agents involved in the totality we refer to as ‘the Holocaust’ were driven to do what they did by the same basic sort of motivation and of self-perception. Stubbornly heterogeneous and complex, evil is a real-life phenomenon that seldom, if ever, conforms to some specific theoretical model. If I am not mistaken, this assumption is made – implicitly in Bauman and Sofsky, explicitly in Goldhagen – in all studies under consideration (save Gross, who remains agnostic). Unsurprisingly, Goldhagen is the most obvious case in point. Goldhagen holds that every action directed at the Jews in the complex process of discriminating, arresting, transporting, selecting, and killing them, ideologically as well as psychologically sprang from the same motivation – regardless of whether it, in the individual case, is a matter of physically (meaning close-up to the victims) doing one or other of these things, or of planning that it be done, or of ordering others to do it, or of supervising some of those who did it, or merely witnessing or hearing about it. In Goldhagen’s sweeping account, differences such as these are ignored. In Sofsky, it is more a matter of casting the perpetrators as persons who indulge in bestiality, who enjoy every bit of evildoing they get the chance to enact, not so much because of ideologically imbued hatred as because of the intoxication, the sheer lust, brought by absolute power over others. The force with which this impression is conveyed to the reader in Sofsky’s book is amplified by the cool, absolutely detached manner in which the author approaches his subject. Working within a functionalist paradigm and specializing in complex organizations, Sofsky is the last to stumble into the psychologistic pitfalls Goldhagen sets up for himself from page one. All the more forceful, therefore, are the findings of utmost bestiality brought to us by Sofsky. The scenes he depicts from life in the camps are not about the letting loose of hatred, of feelings otherwise disallowed. It is more disturbing than that kind of orthodox assumption. More disturbing, because the bestiality is exercised with a high degree of control: it is cool, it is deliberate down to the last detail, it is utterly calculated in its how-to’s and when-to’s. As far as evildoing is concerned, it exhibits what expertise truly amounts to: an audience-gathering peak performance, cleverly seeking out the ideal victim and skilfully directed at his weakest points. As opposed to this scenario, Bauman maintains that, to succeed in designing the ‘solution to the Jewish problem’ as a ‘rational, bureaucratic task’, the Jews had to be removed from the horizon of German daily life, ‘cut off from the network of personal intercourse, transformed in practice into exemplars of a category, of a stereotype – into the abstract concept

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of the metaphysical Jew’ (1989: 189). Actions – be it downright murder – directed at an abstract or stereotyped category proved incapable of stirring people’s moral conscience, since the latter typically relates to persons with whom one interacts on a daily basis. Since the empirical material at hand forces us to concede that proximity – person-to-person encounters – did obtain in numerous instances of the killings, a question arises concerning the plausibility that the ‘abstract and stereotyped category’ – the ‘metaphysical Jew’ – would prevail over the concrete (visible, touchable) Jew. For Bauman’s thesis to stand, mechanisms of distantiation and abstraction must have proved – perceptually and experientially – so powerful as to overshadow the circumstance that ‘individual’ victims, inevitably displaying features of a personalized kind, were in fact met upon all along the way. True, they were not encountered in such a quality in their role as the ‘object’ of discussion at, say, the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, where, under the leadership of Reinhard Heydrich, the decision to opt for the ‘total annihilation of European Jewry’ was formally taken. At this conference, to be sure, abstraction reigns, even reigns supreme. Indeed, abstraction seems to be an apt description of the manner in which most senior Nazi officials thought about the Jews, devoting themselves as they did to deskwork, hence conforming to the Weberian portrait of the modern bureaucrat that Bauman throughout subscribes to. But again, a closer look at the facts reveals that the picture is not that simple. Recent German scholarship on the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) – the organization specifically set up to accomplish the ‘final solution’, established in September 1939 and headed by Heydrich – paints a picture where the well-educated, highly ideologically motivated leaders of the notorious Einsatzgruppen moved back and forth between deskwork at the headquarters in Berlin and on-the-scene presence and direct participation in the open-air shootings on the Eastern Front. Avid Jew-haters and impeccable bureaucrats, self-styled intellectuals and charismatic leaders, keen on procedural detail and reckless performers of unprecedented cruelty against defenceless people deemed racial enemies: these are the properties combined in the leaders of the SS Einsatzgruppen. To take a telling example, on the eve of the wholesale liquidation of the huge ghetto in Minsk an order was issued from Berlin to make sure that ‘all officers take part in the executions, there being some SS-leaders who so far have not fired a single shot’ (Wildt 2003: 599). If anything, then, and as demonstrated beyond doubt in historian Michael Wildt’s magisterial study of the RSHA leadership and in his colleague Ulrich Herbert’s equally compelling biography of SS officer

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Werner Best, as a matter of principle even the cadres traditionally referred to as ‘desk-murderers’ had plenty of blood on their hands. Shifting attention to a different organization, a similar case can be made for the Wehrmacht, the German army, whose role in the murder of the declared ‘enemies of the state’ on the Eastern Front appears to have been much more malevolent than commonly assumed (I am particularly referring to Omer Bartov’s (1992) research). In my opinion, Bauman’s account suffers a considerable loss of plausibility as a consequence of this evidence. For Bauman, the Holocaust essentially reflects on modernity because of the way in which mass murder assumed a bureaucratized, impersonal, purposive-rational form, a form cancelling out the specific human and moral content of murder. But is it true that the bureaucracy worked like that in the carrying out of the Holocaust? A strong case can be made that, far from being the technicaladministrative handmaiden of Nazism in general and the accomplishment of genocide in particular, the German state bureau was itself subjected to vigorous assault by the National Socialists in their endeavour to create a totalitarian society where mass murder could take place as perfectly legal. Contra Bauman’s argument that part of what should utterly alarm us ‘moderns’ is how smoothly bureaucracy revealed itself to be a perfect vehicle for the most criminal political undertaking modernity has witnessed, the truth of the matter is that the Nazi regime parasitically and progressively transformed and (even) revolutionized the institutional apparatus it had inherited from the democratic Weimar era. As attested to by the bypassing of established procedural norms and by the blatant disregard for the rule of law, what facilitated and accompanied the extermination policies was a thoroughgoing process of de-bureaucratization. In short, there existed no natural, let alone elective, affinity between the Nazi Party and the state bureaucracy. One of several consequences of Bauman’s tendency to neglect the crucial differences between democratic and totalitarian modern states is on show in his failure to recognize that ‘totalitarian regimes have a tendency to personalize and politicize that which modern societies have sought to depersonalize and depoliticize’, as sociologist Paul du Gay (2000: 53) observes. Bureaucratic forms of depersonalization – i.e. the principle that people be treated as individual cases, apart from status and ascription; that the bureaucrat bracket his personal sympathies and antipathies, treating like cases in a like manner; and so forth – are not the natural ally, let alone prerequisite, of criminal policies and so of immorality in practice that Bauman would have us believe. In refusing to draw any distinctions between party and state,

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activist and official, the Nazi leadership ‘sought to turn bureaucrats into something else entirely: a cross between pre-modern serfs and political activists’ (du Gay 2000: 50). Far from representing the very epitome of ‘modernity’, then, the peculiar Nazi bureaucracy that evolved in the late 1930s and early 1940s increasingly assumed premodern features. Of course, division of labour and specification of tasks continued – following Weber – to characterize the organization of work within the various institutions. However, and again contrary to Bauman, we need to realize that these institutions came to be led by persons who saw themselves as revolutionaries, who set out to radically alter and politicize the mentality of the personnel as well as the methods employed and the goals to be pursued. To the considerable extent that (precisely) Weberian bureaucracy differed from the Nazi vision, the Nazis in charge eagerly and effectively changed it. As convincingly shown in Michael Wildt’s study of the RSHA, ideological zeal – often bordering on fanaticism – was at the very centre of this whole undertaking. The concept of a ka¨mpferische Verwaltung (literally, a ‘fighting bureaucracy’) aptly captures the ethos that was cultivated. The story of bureaucracy’s fate under Nazi dictatorship, then, is about procedural norms and purposive rationality being partly suppressed, partly co-opted by a hyper-ideological Weltanschauung. In essence, then, and as argued forcefully by Yehuda Bauer, ‘the Nazis turned against the state’, the lesson being that ‘a bureaucracy that becomes the slave of an elite group imbued with an anti-state ideology may be just as efficient in pursuing genocidal aims as is an ordinary state bureaucracy’ (Bauer 2002: 83). Bauer’s position is representative of much recent scholarship in arguing that bureaucracy per se cannot be linked with, and thus partly blamed for, the Holocaust. If anything, pre-Nazi-originating central bodies as well as local officialdom (especially in Poland) slowly moved toward keeping the Jews, at least those deemed ‘useful’ for pragmatic or utilitarian reasons. The point is that such ‘conservative’ bureaucratic self-understanding was considered a nuisance by the Nazis. The ideologically motivated centre – RSHA headquarters in Berlin – decided to murder all the Jews, out of principle and in utter contempt for the proceduralism as well as ‘pragmatic’ leanings of the bureaucracy. To sum up, even granted the existence of some bureaucratic contexts where abstraction did prevail, there are numerous others where it clearly did not – this being the rule not the exception. The historical evidence referred to makes us realize that Bauman commits the error of mistaking the bureaucratic design for the reality. His thesis rests upon the assumption that the abstraction-feeding design – instrumental rationality

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enjoying free rein over yet another territory ‘freed’ from the moral dynamics of personal intercourse – almost fully translated into the manner in which the killings comprising the total phenomenon – the Holocaust – were carried out. Bauman extrapolates abstraction, projects it onto every stage of the process of killing millions of human beings, implying that its triumph was virtually complete. So how does Bauman respond to the large number of sources who tell a different story? He says: The point is that for every villain of Goldhagen’s book, for every German who killed his victims with pleasure and enthusiasm, there were dozens and hundreds of Germans and non-Germans who contributed to the mass murder no less effectively without feeling anything about their victims or about the nature of the actions involved. And the point is also that while we know quite well that prejudice threatens humanity and we even know how to fight and constrain the ill intentions of people poisoned with prejudice, we know little about how to stave off the threat of a murder which masquerades as the routine and unemotional functioning of orderly society. (Bauman 2000c: 16)

Will it do for Bauman to focus attention on the issue of how many who killed without feeling anything about those being killed? I propose we turn the tables on Bauman’s manner of speaking by arguing that, for every Heydrich and Eichmann who participated in the killing without feeling anything about their victims, there were dozens and hundreds who were more than eager to do their share in the persecution of their Jewish neighbours, classmates, colleagues. Indifference, of the kind Bauman relies upon in the agents to defend his thesis, is an odd phenomenon, at least in a context such as this – indifference taken as the dominant stance toward something widely known to involve nothing less than murder, as well as toward one’s own role in the carrying out of it, ranging as that role might from active participation to passive tolerance and onlooking. True, Nazi ideology hammered home the message that good Germans remain indifferent to what happened to the Jews, even the ones one used to know, indifferent in the sense of not developing sympathy for their plight and so resistance to the Nazi policy of annihilation. But psychologically – can we speak of indifference here? I think not, and in the next chapters I shall argue that indifference – taken as a cultural phenomenon, affecting collectives – is more strongly, and disastrously, sustained among various types of bystanders (including professional third parties) than among perpetrators. Bauman’s claim is indeed that what accompanied the Holocaust was the blurring of any recognized difference between producing dead bodies

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and producing soap; that is to say, between handling things and handling humans. To postulate such eradication of distinct boundaries as a Nazi policy, as determining a ‘design’, is one thing, but to contend that it captures the fashion in which acting individuals experienced what they did is quite another, and it makes for a much more contentious claim. Moreover, Bauman’s invocation of ‘primeval moral drives’ invites the question whether there are not other drives which, though also primeval, are far from moral; and, if so, what is Bauman to make of that? One need not subscribe to Freud’s (1985) notion of an inborn death-drive (thanatos), nor to Konrad Lorenz’s (1966) claims about the primacy of an instinct of aggression, to find that Bauman’s implicit anthropology appears one-sided. In particular, and as I will later show in great detail, Bauman seems to me to overlook the peculiar dialectic at work in collective evil such as the Holocaust: how, that is, cold-blooded purposive rationality triggers and interacts with its ‘radical other’; how the rational Weberian aspects of modernity are themselves ‘the conditions which necessitate outbursts of violence such as genocide’, there being no structures in modern societies for permitting such outbursts; how, that is to say, the refusal to recognize the need for non-purposive activity ends in outbursts of affect on a grand scale; how state-sponsored licence to indulge in frenzied transgression of norms and laws allows for personal release and social revivification, to paraphrase genocide historian Dan Stone (2004), anticipating a perspective to be elaborated in later chapters. Rendering human beings superfluous If we are to believe Stanley Milgram – and Bauman does – his experiments have revealed ‘the capacity for man to abandon his humanity, indeed, the inevitability that he does so, as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures’. Milgram (1974: 188) draws the following conclusion, in the form of a warning: ‘This is a fatal flaw nature has designed into us, and which in the long run gives our species only a modest chance of survival.’ In accepting, as a sociologist, that the individual participant was but a ‘cog in the killing machine’, does not Bauman merely echo the tired cliche´ with which convicted perpetrators dismiss personal responsibility; they just acted as ordered to and, if they had refused, someone else would have replaced them and done the very same thing? On the one hand, Bauman relies on Milgram to give a diagnosis that portrays such selfunderstanding as factually correct, as capturing what social reality is like when distantiation prevails over proximity, and purposive rationality

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and instrumentality over affect and morality. On the other hand, when addressing what follows for morality, Bauman relies on Levinas’ ethics to point to the single individual as the one and only locus of responsibility. But what are the prospects enjoyed by this individual, and so by morality, given the wider environment within which Bauman the sociologist situates it? As far as I can see, Bauman stakes his only hope for moral responsibility on precisely that entity – the individual in the affirmative sense – declared to have been rendered impotent and superfluous by the very development whose sole source of prevention the individual is now said to be. So, if the thesis is correct in its empirically oriented, sociological sense, the entity appealed to in order to reverse the process in question is simply not at hand – since destroyed by the process, and so its principal casualty. This contradiction at the end of Bauman’s study should not be viewed as a theoretical error. Rather Bauman, I suspect, would point out that it is a real-life paradox, throwing the predicament of morality in modern society into sharp relief. But this is hardly satisfactory. Polarizing individual and institution (social structure) so crudely as to render them antithetical is not a promising starting point – nor, for that matter, end point – for a sociological understanding of the Holocaust. It risks missing the pivotal difference between a pluralist, dissent-encouraging modern society and a totalitarian one in which the individual’s worth is defined by – and so inseparable from – that of his group. I have indicated the price for which such polarization is bought: human individuals in their capacity as pursuing immorality, as – sometimes – desiring to do evil, and so the darker side of human agency, is lost from view; so, too, is the potential for doing good, for pursuing the welfare and safeguarding the rights of others, that is upheld both by code and in practice by a number of modern institutions, including the bureaucracy. The task with which Bauman leaves individuals – that of ‘resisting socialization’ – is seriously lacking both in the social environment in which such a capacity could be acquired and fostered, and in the guidance of sound judgment as to when and how to exercise such resistance. In a marriage that sounds odd on paper but is in fact not altogether rare in social theory, Bauman is a functionalist when studying institutions and an atomist when portraying the individual, leaving the latter without viable social arenas. These are precisely the arenas that would enable the individual to do what Bauman, following the anti-sociological ethicist par excellence Levinas, asks of him: to exercise moral responsibility for the other, whoever that other happens to be; to help arrest societal processes such as spreading

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indifference by uncoupling consequences from intentions, large-scale output from small-scale input. When everything is said and done, the evil allowed for in Bauman’s account is a collective evil (in the double sense of being performed by one collective and targeting another) that, paradoxical as it may seem, is committed by a large number of individuals who, taken singly, display but little or nothing of the malicious will to do evil – to inflict suffering on others – that we normally would expect in cases of grossly immoral action. The evil that figures in Bauman’s account is an evil residing in the consequences, not in the individual perpetrators and their motivations. That this can be so is in keeping with a characteristic of modernity per se: the link between desiring and doing is abolished, and the result is evildoing with a clean conscience in those who did it. Since the individual need not identify with what he takes part in doing, since it is a requirement of efficient performance that he actually not invest himself in any personal or existential way in what he does, since what he contributes is but a technical function, the more thoroughly he separates himself – his feelings, thoughts, wishes – from his performance, the better. Bauman violates the principle that there can never be more to the consquences than present in the cause(s). More accurately, he depsychologizes the causes – the origins – which de facto help evil to be brought about. Many of Heinrich Himmler’s comments testify to a vision that – ultimately, when all the administrative and technical means had reached perfection – the extermination of millions of human beings would proceed quasi by itself, the direct, on-the-spot participation of personnel reduced to an absolute minimum. In a word, the aim was to develop a grand perpetuum mobile, a killing machine making individual killers redundant, superfluous – thus matching, by unobserved irony, the very quality forced upon the victims, to recall Arendt’s (1951: 455) contention that what radical evil aims at is nothing less radical than the superfluousness of the human being, for which the death camps served as the laboratories. Though intriguing, I have argued that such emptying of existentially deep motivation on the part of those participating in collective evildoing is repudiated by recent historical and sociological research. To be sure, in a totalitarian state such as Nazi Germany, enormous pressure was put on individuals always to act in such a manner as to display ‘obedience to authority’. Likewise, the institutional arrangements conducive to placing individuals in the ‘agentic state’ described by Milgram were truly overwhelming, making resistance virtually impossible, at least when attempted by the single individual. These remain vital insights into vital

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mechanisms and tendencies, inseparable as they may be from modern societies in general and an institution such as bureaucracy in particular. Nevertheless, brought to bear on the Holocaust and its specific ‘how’ and ‘why’, these insights fail to produce a convincing answer, one compatible with the relevant empirical findings. I conclude that Bauman is wrong to think that the modern bureaucratic institution per se is pregnant with the sort of immorality exhibited in the Holocaust. Only by hijacking pre-existing bureaucratic structures, by altering and exploiting them ruthlessly for their own highly ideological objectives, could the Nazis turn the German state apparatus into a smooth vehicle for mass destruction. A complex interaction evolved between the ideologically nourished discourse of racial hygiene, the relevant professions (medicine, genetics, anthropology), and the institution of the concentration camp. For example, and as demonstrated by many studies, programmes of experimentation on prisoners were not usually pushed from above but developed from below by doctors who had perceived the exceptional experimental possibilities offered by the camps. In cases too numerous to list here, what happened was that the relevant professionals – frequently acting from a combination of ideological conviction and careerism – volunteered to make their small, yet indispensable contribution to the overall undertaking we identify as the Holocaust. Most famous, perhaps, is Robert Jay Lifton’s (1986) study of The Nazi Doctors, following in the footsteps of research pioneered in Germany by (doctors) Mielke and Mitscherlich, to which one could add Benno Mu¨ller-Hill’s (1988) important work on the role played by geneticists, and so on for the various professions (engineers, architects, jurists). The point against Bauman is that this symbiosis between ideology, professions, and extermination cannot be held to grow out of the institutions characteristic of modern society as such. Rather, such symbiosis occurred as the result of a constellation of highly particular factors, among which the racist Nazi ideology is absolutely instrumental, issuing as it did a licence to kill, and so helping healers to become killers with a clean conscience, to allude to Lifton’s work. However, such an ideology can only motivate people to do what they in fact do, on the condition that the ideology in question resonate deeply and existentially with psychological dispositions – needs and longings, desires and fears – to be found in the individual. Rather than collective evil resting on an uncoupling between the single individual’s beliefs and desires, and the goals pursued on a macro-level by the large institutions in which individuals perform the actions required of them, such organized evil will often occur in a situation where these individual and institutional factors meet halfway; when

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they are allowed to merge, to work in tandem in the same direction. So, if the participants in the carrying out of the Holocaust were ‘ordinary men’ partaking in extraordinary evil, their ordinariness is not of a kind with which Bauman’s largely functionalist analysis would be compatible. To investigate the more exact nature of such ordinariness among perpetrators, I shall turn to two other theorists of evil: one much admired by Bauman, the other begging to differ from him – Hannah Arendt and C. Fred Alford, respectively.

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Hannah Arendt on conscience and the ‘banality’ of evil

Introduction Although there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on evil, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt’s position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. In this chapter, I set out to examine the significance of such a connection. Conscience does not figure among the topics for which Arendt’s work is most known. One searches in vain for an essay or book of hers devoted to it. To present-day readers, Arendt is associated first of all with the notion ‘the banality of evil’, coined in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965a). Arendt’s struggle to come to terms, philosophically if not morally, with Eichmann and his kind of (doing rather than being) evil, forced her to consider again and again the interrelation between thinking, willing, and judgment, on the one hand, and evildoing, on the other. Her undertaking was to see how much light philosophy – meaning thinking as such, not the academic discipline – can throw on evil. So what about conscience? As I said, conscience is no salient topic in Arendt. However, this is not the whole truth. As soon as one starts to trace Arendt’s reflections on evil in her oeuvre, one finds that she from early on explored a connection now overshadowed by the aforementioned one between thinking and evil – namely, a connection between conscience and evil. Once we appreciate this, we realize that conscience is the thematic fellow-traveller of evil in Arendt’s work from beginning to end, so that if evil is regarded as the most constant theme in her work, conscience accompanies that theme as its inseparable, though often neglected, shadow. In this chapter, the task I set myself is to bring the significance of conscience out into the open. My thesis is not that doing so will enable us 52

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to sort out all the puzzles and dissolve all the aporias with which Arendt’s reflections on evil are ripe. My claim is weaker: that drawing systematic attention to how conscience figures in the latter will help us get a better grasp not only on her view on evil but also on the nature of Arendt’s philosophical relationship to Heidegger. The issue of evil – and, as we will see, conscience – provides us with a head-on way of assessing some crucial differences between Arendt and Heidegger – contra a provocative thesis put forward by David Luban. Beginning with her doctoral dissertation on St Augustine and ending with her posthumously published studies in The Life of the Mind (1978a, 1978b), Arendt’s oeuvre exhibits strong thematic continuity – the triad thinking–conscience–evil forms its most enduring core – a puzzling core, to be sure, in light of the controversies triggered, especially over her notion of the ‘banality of evil’. By placing the role of conscience at the very centre of Arendt’s lifelong reflections, the discussion that follows explores the influence exerted by St Augustine and Heidegger. On the reading I shall develop, in the course of her late meditations on The Life of the Mind, Arendt works out two distinct models of conscience and its link to evildoing – one associated with Socrates, the other with Heidegger. Heidegger’s conception of conscience in his massively influential Being and Time is identified as a crucial source for understanding – so my claim holds – why Arendt found Heidegger’s philosophy particularly wanting with respect to the question of evil. The role of ordinariness that was central in my above discussion of Bauman – in the paradox that extraordinarily evil acts may be committed by subjects conspicuous more by their ordinariness than by some detectable ‘evil-desiring’ personality – will again command our attention. We shall see that, whereas Arendt’s position does hold some similarity to Bauman’s, it entails the insight that the rigid polarization of individual and institution is very much part of the problem of modern evil – the upshot being that the public sphere, representing the multifaceted arena that mediates between the two, needs to be recognized as the primary arena for resisting evil. This insight helps us to fill in an important category regrettably absent in Bauman’s account of the Holocaust. However, its theoretical appreciation does not prevent Arendt from entangling herself in problems all her own, revolving in large measure around her own ambiguities over the more exact relationship between the alleged ‘banality of evil’ (as exemplified by Eichmann) and the supposed ‘ordinariness’ of those who participate in such evil.

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Assessing the influence of St Augustine Love and Saint Augustine is Arendt’s 1929 Heidelberg dissertation. Its long second part is entitled ‘Creator and Creature: The Remembered Past’. I shall quote the central passages where Arendt lays out St Augustine’s understanding of conscience: In the human world established by man, the individual no longer stands in isolated relation to his very own ‘whence’; rather, he lives in a world he has made jointly with other men. He no longer hears what he is from conscience, which is of God, but from ‘another’s tongue’ (aliena lingua). He has turned himself into a resident of this world, one who is no longer of God alone but owes what he is to this world which he helped to establish. This alien tongue determines man’s being, whether good or evil, from outside and from what man has founded. Conscience speaks in ourselves against this alien tongue, and it speaks so that the one addressed cannot escape: ‘An evil conscience cannot flee from itself; it has no place to which it may go; it pursues itself’ . . . Conscience directs man beyond this world and away from habituation. As the voice of the Creator, conscience makes man’s dependence on God clear to him. What the law commands, conscience addresses to the one who has already succumbed to the world in habit. The voice of the law summons him against what ‘habit previously entangled him in’. The estrangement from the world is essentially an estrangement from habit. While man lives in habit, he lives in view of the world and is subject to its judgment. Conscience puts him coram Deo, into the presence of God. In the testimony of conscience, God is the only possible judge of good and evil. This testimony bears witness to man’s dependence on God, which he finds in himself. The world and its judgments crumble before this inner testimony. There is no fleeing from conscience. There is no togetherness and no being at home in the world that can lessen the burdens of conscience . . . Since no part in this universe, no human life and no part of this life, can possess its own autonomous significance, there can be no ‘evil’ (malum). There are only ‘goods’ (bona) in their proper order, which may merely seem evil from the transient perspective of the individual . . . Being is for Augustine, as it was for the Greeks, the everlasting, forever lawful structure and the harmony of all the parts of the universe. The appropriate interpretation of wickedness . . . is then as follows . . . that person is wicked who tries to escape the predetermined harmony of the whole. (Arendt 1996: 84f., 60f.)

We gather from these quotes that Arendt is referring to Augustine’s mature, post-Manichean position on evil. As Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (1996: 130) remind us, ‘Augustine moved from a belief in the material reality of evil during his Manichean period (De Libero Arbitrio) toward his ‘‘mature’’ position in which evil is described as a bondage to habitual sin, a worldliness that free will is powerless to break (De Natura et Gratia).’ In City of God (1984: 480), Augustine wrote that to

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seek for the cause of evil ‘is like trying to see darkness or to hear silence’. God is ‘existence in a supreme degree’, and ‘the only contrary nature is the non-existent’ (p. 473). Hence evil, the ‘contrary nature’ to the supremely good God, ‘is not a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency; the evil will itself is not effective but defective’ (p. 479). In this way, evil is denied a specific reality to itself; ontologically, it has no standing, no facticity at all. This Augustinian notion of evil as ontologically null and void, as non-being, as sheer negativity, is unmistakably present in Arendt’s 1963 exchange with Gershom Scholem over Eichmann. Trying to explain what she meant by speaking about the ‘banality’ of evil, Arendt points out that ‘Only the good has depth and can be radical.’ Hence thought, ‘the moment it concerns itself with evil, is frustrated because there is nothing’ (Arendt 1989: 78). For my purposes, the influence on Arendt’s thought emanating from Augustine’s description of evil as ‘a bondage to habitual sin’ is particularly significant. What leads man away from God is what leads man into sin, into evil – namely, to succumb to the world in habit. The world’s language is another tongue than that of the law, of God; it is evil to the extent that it ‘determines man’s being, whether good or evil, from outside and from what man has founded’ (p. 82). Arendt quotes Augustine’s contention in his Confessions that ‘the law of sin is the force of habit’. Through habit, ‘covetousness constantly seeks to cover [man’s] real source by insisting that man is ‘‘of the world’’, thereby turning the world itself into the source. Thus man’s own nature lures him into the service of ‘‘things made’’ instead of to the service of their Maker’ (p. 82). Sin springs from insistence on our own will. Arendt cites Augustine’s central claim that ‘humankind’s inclination to value its sins is not so much due to passion itself as to habit’. To which Arendt adds, by way of summing up Augustine’s doctrine, The inclination to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself, because the world man has founded in covetousness is consolidated in habit. The creature, in the search for its own being, seeks security for its existence, and habit, by covering the utmost limit of existence itself and making today and tomorrow the same as yesterday, makes it cling to the wrong past and thus gives it the wrong security. (1989: 83)

I have dwelled on Arendt’s detailed exegesis of, and indeed affirmation of, Augustine’s understanding of the nature of evil because some recent commentators argue that her approach to Adolf Eichmann is distinctly Augustinian. The claim is that her early preoccupation with Augustine commands much more than merely historical interest. In fact, it can be

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seen to exert an enduring impact upon Arendt’s thinking. Nowhere is this more evident than in Arendt’s analysis of Eichmann, of Eichmann’s kind of evil, put to paper more than thirty years after the dissertation on Augustine. Or so the claim has it. Consider two instances of how this argument is made. In their interpretive essay accompanying the English publication of Arendt’s dissertation, editors Scott and Stark (1996: 120) suggest that it was Arendt’s renewed encounter with Augustine in the early 1960s which enriched her ‘examination of the paradox of evil which is not ‘‘radical’’ but pedestrian, bourgeois, and seemingly rooted in everydayness’. They continue: ‘Augustine’s paradigm of immobilized will entrapped in habituated worldliness could perhaps be applied to Eichmann, the routinely civilized bureaucrat incapable of the critical distance necessary for moral judgment’ (p. 121). The second instance is David Luban’s essay ‘Banal Evil and Radical Evil’. Quoting the Augustinian idea that ‘the inclination to sin springs more from habit than from passion itself’, apparently affirmed by Arendt in her discussion of it (cited above), Luban (1997: 10) draws the conclusion that this idea ‘perfectly fits Arendt’s Eichmann’. The influence beginning to loom large is not only that of Augustine but that of Martin Heidegger. Whereas Scott and Stark restrict themselves to a brief indication of the Heideggerian flavour to Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality’ of evil as applied to Eichmann, Luban makes its Heideggerian heritage into a major interpretive thesis of his. And, on an interpretive level, there is nothing far-fetched about this suggestion. Augustine’s influence on Arendt is already accounted for; moreover, I agree with Scott and Stark that Arendt in all probability ‘renewed’, perhaps even reinforced, her debt to Augustine’s (mature) views on evil at the time of her pondering over the case of Eichmann. Allowing for all this is tantamount to conceding Luban’s claim about the no less crucial – and again enduring – impact exerted by Heidegger. The bridge between these observations is the fact that Heidegger himself started out strongly influenced by Augustine. And it is well known that the young Arendt who pursued an interest in Augustine did so while still studying with Heidegger (although personal reasons would later force her to leave Marburg and take her dissertation to Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg). Luban’s thesis is twofold. First, it holds that Arendt’s dissertation presents an account of ‘the moral psychology of sin’ that, apart from drawing explicitly on Augustine, contains phrases that ‘are straight out of Being and Time’, Heidegger’s 1927 magnum opus and the preparatory lectures for which Arendt attended in the mid-1920s while a student of Heidegger in Marburg. Luban singles out two unmistakably Heideggerian

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ideas: that ‘the human creature masks ‘‘the utmost limit of existence’’ by everyday routines’, and that ‘the sinner is seeking a secure existence and that he does so by trying to make everything routine’. The second part of Luban’s thesis is that young Arendt’s Augustinian-Heideggerian account of sin ‘perfectly fits Arendt’s Eichmann’ (1997: 10), as mentioned above. I think that Luban’s thesis is partly right, partly wrong. To be sure, the chains of influence in play are beyond dispute, the Augustine–Heidegger one no less than the Heidegger–Arendt one. However, the most interesting, indeed provocative part of Luban’s thesis – i.e. that Arendt, albeit largely implicitly, found the philosophically appropriate framework for understanding Eichmann ‘the sinner’, the evildoer, in Heidegger’s Being and Time – is something I find very problematic. Why? My reasons are several. The parts of Being and Time alluded to in Luban’s thesis are to be found in that work’s famous section on ‘the They’ (das Man). Here, Heidegger introduces and explains his notions of fallenness (Verfallenheit), everydayness (Allta¨glichkeit), idle talk, ambiguity, curiosity, and – on a more existential level, by way of summing up what being immersed in these phenomena amounts to – inauthenticity (Uneigentlichkeit). Space forbids me to go further into these notions here; I must assume their familiarity, like that of Being and Time in general. What I see as decisive is this: Heidegger situates the phenomena referred to, as well as the attitude or mode of beingin-the-world of the individual Dasein they comprise, in the public sphere (O¨ffentlichkeit). Indeed, the link he establishes between the two – inauthenticity and the public sphere – is so intimate as to render them inseparable, two sides of the same coin. The question is where this leaves Arendt. Against Luban’s thesis, my claim is that Arendt leaves the reader in no doubt as to the low esteem she holds for Heidegger as a thinker of matters moral and political. Even granted that he is a great thinker, the areas of morality and politics are those in which he erred most, with the gravest consequences; the ‘greatness’ of his mistakes here holds both on a personal plane (i.e. his longstanding and never publicly regretted support for the Nazi regime) and on a theoretical and philosophical one, the latter being what matters most for my argument. ‘I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary’: the Socratic bottom line With this we may start to appreciate the irony contained in Luban’s thesis: that Heidegger, of all philosophers, is held to be the one upon

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whose account Arendt draws when she is searching for a philosophically satisfactory understanding of the evil brought by the Nazi regime in the gestalt of one of its chief perpetrators, Eichmann. For one thing, one must bear in mind that Arendt was determined that understanding such evil was no normatively neutral task; understanding would entail condemnation of the object at hand. Setting aside for once her reluctance to elaborate on methodological issues, in Arendt’s 1953 reply to Eric Voegelin’s criticisms of her study of totalitarianism, she says that she ‘quite consciously parted with the tradition of sine ira et studio’ when writing on evil. Conditions which are against the dignity of man can only be properly studied on the condition that one permits one’s indignation to interfere. The indignation she as author feels when studying man-made evil or excessive poverty is an adequate response to the ‘inherent qualities’ of the subject matter (Arendt 1994: 403). As far as I – and, I suspect, Arendt – can see, there is no trace of such a methodological stance in Heidegger, as is brought out in, say, Adorno’s complaint about Heidegger’s ‘ontologization’ of ‘merely ontic’ phenomena such as human suffering. Second, that Heidegger – of all people – should stand forward as having worked out a proper framework for the appreciation of what evil is and how it is enacted in the twentieth century, is not only ironic. It is improbable and in need of more substantiation than offered by Luban. But so is my dismissal, too. Though ironic, Luban’s thesis may still be valid. To help us see the reasons why it is not, other works of Arendt must be consulted. In the important Introduction to the first volume of her posthumously published trilogy The Life of the Mind, entitled Thinking, Arendt provides the link between her thought-provoking encounter with Eichmann and her search for a possible answer in philosophy; that is to say, by way of an inquiry into the faculties of the mind. Arendt writes: The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually ‘condition’ them against it? (The very word ‘con-science’, at any rate, points in this direction insofar as it means ‘to know with and by myself’, a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every thinking process.) And is not this hypothesis enforced by everything we know about conscience, namely, that a ‘good conscience’ is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, criminals and such, while only ‘good people’ are capable of having a bad conscience? (1978a: 5)

Late Arendt seems to echo early Arendt in at least one crucial respect: she cannot inquire into evil without simultaneously invoking the role of

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conscience. True, in her last reflections the presence of Socrates overshadows that of Augustine. But this shift of explicit debt should not mislead us as far as her substantial approach to evil is concerned. To see this, consider the following passage: Because thought’s quest is a kind of desirous love, the objects of thought can only be lovable things – beauty, wisdom, justice, and so on. Ugliness and evil are almost by definition excluded from the thinking concern. They may turn up as deficiencies, ugliness consisting in lack of beauty, evil, kakia, in lack of the good. As such, they have no roots of their own, no essence that thought could get hold of. If thinking dissolves positive concepts into their original meaning, then the same process must dissolve these ‘negative’ concepts into their original meaninglessness, that is, into nothing for the thinking ego. That is why Socrates believed no one could do evil voluntarily – because of, as we would say, its ontological status: it consists in an absence, in something that is not . . . It looks as though Socrates had nothing more to say about the connection between evil and lack of thought than that people who are not in love with beauty, justice, and wisdom are incapable of thought, just as, conversely, those who are in love with examining and thus ‘do philosophy’ would be incapable of doing evil. (1978a: 179)

Dealing with Socrates rather than Augustine, the point highlighted by Arendt is one on which the two concur: evil possesses no positive ontological status, only a negative one. However, the overall thrust of Arendt’s reflections is clearly more inspired by Socrates than by Augustine. Arendt concentrates on the – initially only hypothesized – connection between thinking and evil, whereas Augustine, more traditionally, focuses on the connection between willing and evil. A brief reminder is in place. After witnessing Eichmann during the court proceedings in Jerusalem in 1961, Arendt was – and forever remained – ‘struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer . . . was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous’ (1978a: 4). This reasoning, based on her impressions of Eichmann’s conduct, led Arendt to the idea that ‘the only notable characteristic’ of his was ‘something entirely negative’: it was ‘not stupidity but thoughtlessness’ (p. 4). Hence the characteristically Augustinian path to exploring man-made evil, that of willing evil, of doing it as a voluntary, chosen act (recall his Confessions VIII: 5, 12: ‘It was by [the mind’s] will that it slipped into the habit’), is not embarked upon in the course of Arendt’s philosophical struggle with the case of Eichmann. Her reason for deciding against this path seems, at least at first, to be of an ad hoc nature: it became decisive for her choice of strategy that Eichmann, seemingly so

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indifferent, so mediocre, so unaffected by any ‘deeper’ inner motives, appeared more driven by something negative than by something positive: by thoughtlessness rather than by a strong will (be it a wicked one). Before I proceed, four brief observations. First, it is probably correct to say that Arendt, the thinker, never entertained the thought that thinking – emphatically per se – could lead to evil: that thinking may actively side with, or even produce, evil. That is to say, she never pondered the hypothesis that there might exist – and indeed might be exemplified by Eichmann – a positive connection between thinking and evildoing. She built into her idea of thinking the unscrutinized axiom (a philosopher’s predilection, to be sure) that thinking is good – if and when morally assesssed. As against this, one could suggest (as do Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester (2001)) that Eichmann was an exemplarily thoughtful man, though I would add that his thoughtfulness was one constrained by the demands of purposive rationality: it was suited to technical tasks such as organizing the most efficient means to attaining a given end, instead of questioning or determining that end as such. Hence, if it was because Eichmann was so rational that he could be such an effective executor of evil (Bauman), the rationality implied is the restricted one of instrumental reason (an important reminder, lest we throw the baby out with the bath water). Secondly, it must be said that Arendt from beginning to end inquired along an overly intellectualist path, with no attention being given to the alternative hypothesis that Eichmann’s failure may have been one of lack of feeling (empathy) rather than lack of thinking (Vetlesen 1994): Eichmann was, I believe, insensitive, his failure being on the (judgment-preceding) level of moral perception and demonstrating an impaired capacity for empathy with others – if not with all others, than evidently with certain categories of others (notably non-Aryans, devoid as they are of moral standing, according to Nazi ideology). Hardness against others as well as against oneself was a prime virtue, rendering its absence – betrayed in moments or acts of ‘softness’ – a vice to be avoided at all costs. Moreover, in noting the peculiar remoteness of Eichmann’s personality, Arendt would have done well to consider the possibility that it might testify to a thwarted ability to ‘live with others’, to find one’s place within humankind and thus identify with one’s fellow man. Eichmann’s failure to relate to others – save for in the depersonalized manner characteristic of a bureaucratic setting – can perhaps be traced back to his earliest experiences of living with others, much as Auschwitz’s Kommandant Rudolf Ho¨ss’ (1963) autobiography reveals a lack of emotional attachment to his parents and, particularly, the ethic of unconditional obedience to authority conveyed to the child

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by a cold father. In this respect, both Eichmann and Ho¨ss exemplify the ‘black pedagogics’ Alice Miller (1987) sees as widespread in this generation of German (and Austrian) men, instilling in them from early childhood the teaching that unconditional obedience to superiors represents the supreme moral virtue, that spontaneous emotional reactions and needs are neither to be trusted nor freely displayed, since they would only betray one’s ‘weakness’ and likewise one’s receptivity to that of others. Finally, the ‘banality’ Arendt speaks of in connection with the evil associated with the Holocaust does not mean that the evil committed here is banal, but that men with banal motives (loyalty, careerism) as distinct from deep-seated and monstrous ones (hatred, wickedness) may commit it. Hence the pair banality–evil is not meant to be an equation; it lacks the symmetry expected of equations. Rather, what I take to have puzzled Arendt is the blatant dissymmetry between the deed and the doers. Banal men, men with banal motives, can perfectly well commit radical evil. Though perhaps surprising, even shocking, this is, strictly speaking, no paradox, as Luban observes at the end of his essay. (I return to this issue below.) So much for Arendt’s choice to inquire into thinking, as opposed to willing, when reflecting upon evil a` la Eichmann. Yet this does not mean that Arendt follows in Socrates’ footsteps without qualifications. Though arguably criticizing Plato more than Socrates (telling the difference is notoriously hard), Arendt hastens to add the following to the passage quoted above: ‘If there is anything in thinking that can prevent men from doing evil, it must be some property inherent in the activity itself, regardless of its objects’ (1978a: 180). Return now to our main concern, Arendt’s understanding of how exactly the relevance of conscience to evil is to be appreciated. To approach the heart of the matter, Arendt takes us back to Socrates’ teaching in Gorgias, where according to her we come across the only instance in his many dialogues where we are justified in speaking of a teaching in the positive sense: The two positive Socratic propositions read as follows: ‘It is better to be wronged than to do wrong’. The second: ‘It would be better for me that . . . multitudes of men should disagree with me rather than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict me’ . . . It would be a serious mistake, I believe, to understand these statements as the results of some cogitation about morality; they are insights, to be sure, but insights of experience, arising out of the thinking experience as such. (1978a: 181, 183)

Arendt goes on to remind us that ‘the only criterion of Socratic thinking is agreement, to be consistent with oneself; its opposite, to be in

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contradiction with oneself, actually means becoming one’s own adversary’ (p. 186). The principle behind this criterion is explicated in Aristotle’s formulation of the famous axiom of contradiction. It is deemed axiomatic in that ‘we must necessarily believe it because . . . it is addressed not to the outward word [exo logos, that is, to the spoken word addressed to someone else, an interlocutor who may be either friend or adversary] but to the discourse within the soul, and though we can always raise objections to the outward word, to the inward discourse we cannot always object’ (p. 186), because here the partner is oneself, and I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary. This insight is won from the factual experience of the thinking ego. Thinking, then, is that peculiar soundless dialogue between me and myself that I am, referred to by Socrates as my ‘being one’, and which highlights the even more peculiar fact that I can think only by way of being, indeed enacting (my) ‘two-in-one’. In thinking, I always return to myself, since I am my own partner. To repeat, the Socratic bottom line is that ‘I cannot possibly want to become my own adversary’: this is Socrates’ experientally won insight into a peculiarly normative feature of the human existential predicament. Whatever I do, in the external world where actions are performed, the – ineliminable and unchosen – fact is that I am forever condemned to returning to myself, to live with myself. And that is precisely what I must will, so to speak: I must will to live with myself, reconciled with myself and the acts I have done, which define me, who I am, who I aspire to be, as opposed to living against myself. The bottom line is that if I choose to commit murder, I condemn myself to living in the company of a murderer for the rest of my life – and who can possibly will such a fate? Before inquiring into her response to this question, a critical observation must be made. As I indicated above, Arendt’s preparedness to take over the intellectualism inherent in Socrates’ framing of the question leads her to fail to explore the connection between a person’s conscience and his or her emotional make-up. Lene Auestad puts this objection to Arendt as follows: Socrates’ statement about not wanting to live together with a murderer is valid only to the person who already stands in a certain kind of relation to other people. It is inherent in the concept of ‘a murderer’ that the person has murdered some other person, and the fact that one would strongly dislike being a murderer is based on a feeling of concern for the (real or imagined) murdered person. Thus Socrates’ position takes something for granted, namely that I bother about the other people to whom I am related. Therefore, one could say that it is not really an argument, but rather something like a gesture which points towards a moral intuition. The

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answer that someone would give to the question whether it is preferable to suffer or to do evil depends to a larger degree on that person’s emotional characteristics than on his or her capacity to think. (Auestad 2001: 103)

I only wish to add that the moral intuition Auestad refers to be understood as experience-based, as deriving from the person’s living-withothers as distinct from his or her being-with-himself (herself), the latter being Arendt’s focus no less than it was Socrates’ in matters regarding conscience. Having pointed out the problematic intellectualism common to Socrates and Arendt, I shall proceed with a more immanent critique.

Conscience and temptation Conscience is what links up with thinking as just understood. Arendt writes: Later times have given the fellow who awaits Socrates in his home the name of ‘conscience’ . . . Conscience, as we understand it in moral or legal matters, is supposedly always present within us, just like consciousness. And this conscience is also supposed to tell us what to do and what to repent; before it became the lumen naturale or Kant’s practical reason, it was the voice of God. Unlike this everpresent conscience, the fellow Socrates is talking about has been left at home; he fears him, as the murderers in [Shakespeare’s] Richard III fear conscience – as something that is absent. Here conscience appears as an after-thought, roused either by a crime, as in Richard’s own case, or by unexamined opinions, as in the case of Socrates . . . What causes a man to fear it is the anticipation of the presence of a witness who awaits him only if and when he goes home. Shakespeare’s murderer says: ‘Every man that means to live well endeavours . . . to live without [thinking]’, never go home and examine things. This is not a matter of wickedness or goodness, as it is not a matter of intelligence or stupidity. A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment. Bad people – Aristotle to the contrary notwithstanding – are not ‘full of regrets’ . . . Everybody may come to shun that intercourse with oneself whose feasibility and importance Socrates first discovered . . . A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence – it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers . . . Conscience’s criterion for action will not be the usual rules, recognized by multitudes and agreed upon by society, but whether I shall be able to live with myself in peace when the time has come to think about my deeds and words. Conscience is the anticipation of the fellow who awaits you if and when you come home. (1978a: 191)

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In display here is Arendt’s acute awareness of the precariousness of the thinking process, and so of the authority yielded by conscience understood as premised upon the thinking activity as such. As Arendt notes, ‘Socrates’ presupposition is of course: if you are in love with wisdom and philosophizing; if you know what it means to examine’ (p. 182; my italics). Though man is the thinking animal, to engage in thinking, in the strong sense of letting thinking take its own course, without being able to tell, let alone control where that course will eventually end, is not something every individual is likely to do. Socrates detected a peculiarly normative feature of his human existence because he engaged in thinking; through thinking, he discovered an unchosen feature of his existence: the need to remain one’s own friend, the imperative that one not become one’s own adversary. But, although what he discovered is prior to what is optional, that by which he discovered it – thinking – is something it is possible to shun. Not that Arendt wants to restrict thinking to a small elite, be it philosophers or intellectuals. She is not an elitist in this respect. What she is getting at is a lesson learned by hard-earned experience: in committing oneself to thinking, in committing oneself to being loyal to what conscience, the by-product of thinking, upholds as right and wrong, the individual takes it upon himself to think, judge, and act according to his own standard only. This is one reason why Socrates remains the towering historical example: in thinking, in following what it takes to judge and act so as to remain friends with oneself, the individual must be prepared to carry the all-too-likely consequence: that he or she runs into severe conflict with society. To sum up, thinking is extremely demanding and utterly precarious; a life without it is not only possible, but more common than we like to think (sic). Conscience, the by-product of the activity of thinking, likewise is utterly demanding and uncompromising, and yet utterly precarious; to disavow its authority is only too tempting, especially at times when society all around unanimously articulates a message that contradicts the silent inner voice of conscience. This, of course, marks Eichmann’s proper entry into the picture. As for his conscience, Arendt does not have much to say in her Eichmann in Jerusalem. Yet what she does say is head-on: Eichmann’s conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which ‘good society’ everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to ‘close his ears to the voice of conscience’, as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a ‘respectable voice’, with the voice of respectable society around him. That there were no voices from the outside to arouse his conscience was one of Eichmann’s points . . . (1965a: 126)

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One of the disquieting lessons to be learned from Eichmann, Arendt tells us, is that it is perfectly possible for conscience to be so co-opted, so corrupted by society that it completely ceases to yield the kind of subversive authority ascribed to it in the Socratic model Arendt subscribes to. Her depiction of how this happened in Nazi Germany is a classic: And just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody ‘Thou shalt not kill’, even though man’s natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler’s land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: ‘Thou shalt kill’, although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it – the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom . . . But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation. (1965a: 150)

I think that this passage reveals at least one major shortcoming in Arendt’s approach. On the positive side, Arendt demonstrates her grasp of the dramatic shift in the way evil comes about that is so crucial to understanding the Holocaust. What I have in mind is the societal normalization, the making into routine along so many dimensions and within so many institutions, of the multitude of decisions and actions that in sum facilitated the implementation of the ‘final solution’. In so many ways, the tables are being turned: instead of the murder counting as socially, legally, and morally illicit, instead of the murderer appearing as a breaker of expectations, rules, and laws, what we find is murder being given a different status altogether: as socially upheld, as legally sanctioned and sometimes outright demanded – in short, as praiseworthy. Conversely, we find that deciding not to murder becomes the conspicuous stance, the one for which the individual carries the entire burden of argument. The non-murderer by choice, by conviction, is suddenly the odd one out. To be sure, few have captured the enormity of the shift so clearsightedly as Arendt. Indeed, she spent her entire post-Holocaust life wrestling with the consequences – politically, morally, philosophically. As indicated, however, the passage cited is also one where we may start recognizing the limitations to Arendt’s approach. Her reasoning is crucially based on the notion of temptation. Evil having become routine, the novel normalcy, a matter of run-of-the-mill as opposed to something outrageous, something subverting the integration of society and posing a severe threat to the well-entrenched sociopolitical goals of order, predictability, Parsonian pattern-maintenance, and the like, evil instead has so

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thoroughly taken hold in the entire fabric of society as to start permeating and corrupting it to the core. In short, evil as normality means that evil loses its characteristic quality of temptation. Supposedly the attraction exerted by (doing) evil lay precisely in its quality as something forbidden and dangerous. Hence being forbidden can no longer be the lure of evil. With the tables turned, temptation would have to shift object, as it were: it would move from murder to not-murder, the latter now representing the socially forbidden act. But this temptation is the one a majority of modern individuals – evidently – has learned to resist, at least in a totalitarian society. The steps in Arendt’s reasoning appear logical enough. My question is whether she, in invoking the role of temptation at both sides of the shift (before as well as after), is not losing track of a vital insight. My first claim is that temptation is not a necessary or indispensable part of (doing or not-doing) evil. In a sense, to say this is to repeat Arendt’s own finding. What remains problematic, however, is her hermeneutic prejudice that temptation is apt to lead us to where evil is. My trouble is not with her finding as such – i.e. that we may, exception-like, come across evil without finding temptation as its corollary – but with her surprise at it. My suggestion is that the prejudice she brings to bear on evil Nazi (Eichmann) style is part of a heritage from Augustine: a moral psychology of evil (or ‘sin’) centred on how the human individual, due to a more or less sinful nature, due to every individual’s ‘natural’ desires and inclinations, is constitutionally susceptible to a temptation to do wrong (evil), meaning to break the law as laid down by God, to turn away from God, to set up and cherish his own world, neglecting that created by God. In a word, the Fall, and what follows in its wake. In phrasing it thus, we are landed in Heideggerian territory, not only an Augustinian one: the Fall as the world permeated and levelled by idle talk, shallowness and flight; or – post Heidegger’s Kehre (turn) – a world eaten up by techne (skill) and Wille zur Macht (will to power) run amok. But let us try to take one point at a time; we shall return to Heidegger in due course. It is tempting (sic) to suggest that Arendt’s expectation to find that where there is evil there will invariably, due to man’s nature, also be temptation is an expectation of Christian origin, manifest in Augustine. Arendt should not be so surprised that the evil orchestrated by the Nazis, and by Eichmann in particular – representing the form evil may assume in a modern, secular society, as ideologically inspired by a secular Weltanschauung – turns out to be an evil unaccompanied by the quality of temptation. When the latter is not found, this is so because the expectation to find it belongs within a religious outlook – and society – now dated.

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But this does not take us very far. It suggests that the evil Eichmann participated in is secular evil, and that such evil may be performed without temptation. Thus put, the suggestion is wholly negative. It holds temptation to be absent; it leaves the obvious question – What made them do it if temptation did not? – unanswered. Although Arendt did not pose the question in this way, she makes some observations that help illuminate it. To her, Eichmann was a conformist. His conformity with the demands made upon him by his social environment was to persist no matter how extreme that with which he conformed. Indeed, his undiminished preparedness to go along with, even overdo, the most outrageous of orders, in my opinion betrays Eichmann’s fanaticism, though Arendt refuses to use the word. Eichmann elevated the laws of the Party and the words of the Fu¨hrer to the status of law, a law standing above all other moral or legal authorities, be they religious or secular. He lived according to the dictum that Fu¨hrerworte haben Gesetzeskraft, that is, ‘The words of the Fu¨hrer posit the law.’ Needless to say, this conformism is part of the reason why Eichmann appeared so ‘terrifyingly normal’, to quote Arendt’s phrase. Commenting on Eichmann’s stubborn determination to proceed at all costs with the implementation of the Endlo¨sung in the late autumn of 1944, thereby disobeying the order from his superior Himmler that he (Eichmann) stop the killings, Arendt concludes the following from Eichmann’s unfailing loyalty to Hitler: ‘The very uncomfortable truth of the matter probably was that it was not his fanaticism but his very conscience that prompted him to adopt his uncompromising attitude during the last year of the war’ (1965a: 146). Even when tempted by Himmler to take part in finding a way out, a way (perhaps) to save himself in the face of the imminent defeat of the Third Reich, Eichmann demonstrated what in his view amounted to his untainted and unfailing moral character. No ordeal was to prove too demanding for him, no ‘temptation’ to make him yield and become a detractor. As Arendt puts it, ‘No exceptions – this was the proof that he had always acted against his ‘‘inclinations’’, whether they were sentimental or inspired by interest, that he had always done his ‘‘duty’’’ (p. 137). According to Dana Villa (1999: 45), what primarily interested Arendt in Eichmann ‘was not the absence of conscience; rather it was the fact that Eichmann’s conscience did not function in the expected manner since it was based on a conflation of morality with legality. As a result, he was troubled only by the temptation to do good, that is, to disregard his duty under the laws of a criminal regime and ‘‘be soft’’.’

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Villa’s articulation of Arendt’s position helps us spot its shortcomings. It is not clear to me from the documentation available about Eichmann’s personality and conduct that ‘doing good’ in any meaningful, and biographically correct, way represented a ‘temptation’ to him. Besides, Villa’s use of ‘good’ is question-begging. To imply that non-participation in the extermination of the Jews would amount to doing good, not only by ‘our’ current standards, but on the understanding of Eichmann himself, is to implicitly ascribe to Eichmann the belief that what he did do was ‘bad’ and what he did not do was (would be) morally right. But this is to presuppose that the standard by reference to which Eichmann distinguished right from wrong is the very same standard that we – his critics – use in our very act of condemning his actions. My counter-claim here goes in the opposite direction from Villa’s. If we are at all to employ the term – the psychological category – of temptation to Eichmann’s behaviour, we would have to bend it to the other side, as it were. What ‘tempted’ Eichmann in a manner visible in his behaviour seems to have been this: to excel, to do even more than expected and demanded of him by his superiors. I take this to demonstrate Eichmann’s perverted version of the phenomenon known as supererogation: Eichmann was constantly seeking to go beyond the call of duty. But he was never tempted to go in the opposite direction, the one with which Villa associates temptation – namely, to do something that would amount to opposing the call of duty, as he understood it. Eichmann in my view exemplifies a coinciding of what is strictly opposed in Kant (and also in Arendt, I believe); namely, his inclinations on the one hand, and the commands of the (Nazified, not Kantian) law on the other. The Kantian dichotomy of duty and desire, portraying the two as antagonistic, as standing in essential opposition to each other, does not appear to hold here. Rather, in Eichmann impulses of power and improper ambition, a boundless lust for power, a vanity and a craving for praise from superiors – in short, impulses which would have been condemned by a traditional, Kantian superego – go hand in hand with a superego which is perverted. In Freudian terms, opposition between the id and the superego is replaced by an alliance: desire and duty pull in the same direction, mutually validating each other in Eichmann’s self-understanding. In this sense, Eichmann was two-in-one (Socrates), only the two were not in conflict but were allied forces, seeing to it that he never wavered from his course once he embarked upon it. Hence, no remorse, no pangs of conscience, no struggle inwards, no opposition outwards. In that sense, he was a fanatic, a person seemingly at one with himself. (I return to these aspects of Eichmann’s personality in a later section.)

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Did Eichmann have a conscience? The fundamental question to ask is whether Arendt is consistent when she attributes a conscience to Eichmann. In her important 1971 lecture ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Arendt raises the same set of questions that I quoted above from her ‘Introduction’ to Thinking. Immediately preceding her often-cited question ‘Could the activity of thinking as such . . . be of such a nature that it ‘‘conditions’’ men against evil-doing?’, she formulates a no less crucial question, regrettably neglected in her later work – ‘Do the inability to think and a disastrous failure of what we commonly call conscience coincide?’ (Arendt 1971: 418). Where does this lead us as regards my question whether Arendt is consistent in presuming a conscience in Eichmann? Recall her central claim: Eichmann was thoughtless; ‘mere thoughtlessness’, as opposed to wickedness of heart, in her view turns out to be at the core of his evildoing. The ‘banality’ of evil as epitomized by Eichmann follows from this judgment. Return to my question. If thinking and conscience are interdependent to the point of coinciding – if, in other words, conscience is the byproduct of thinking – then it seems to follow that the absence of the one must imply the absence of the other. Applied to Eichmann, when Arendt holds him to be thoughtless, to not-engage in the soundless inner dialogue called thinking, then she is logically compelled to hold that he has no conscience, that no authority of the type termed ‘conscience’ is operative in him. If this is correct, it appears that Arendt (and later Villa) is contradicting herself when she attributes his depicted uncompromising attitude to ‘his very conscience’. Her own premise – that is, her understanding of the intimate connection between thinking and conscience – disallows her (and everyone desiring to follow her) presupposing that he had a conscience. Hence Villa gets it plain wrong: absence of conscience is what we must assume in Eichmann, if we are to follow through on Arendt’s own logic. But, though logically consistent in this Arendtian sense, is not the notion suggested here – that Eichmann lacked conscience, and that this lack perhaps signifies the core of his moral failure – implausible? Does not every individual have a conscience – a conscience of some sort, that is, be it a courageous and oppositional one (Socrates springs to mind), be it a corrupt and conformist one (Mitla¨ufer, ‘fellow-travellers’ of all kinds spring to mind)? In this vein, Villa’s conclusion is that ‘Eichmann’s case

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demonstrated how conscience . . . is perverted: it no longer tells individuals what is right and what is wrong. But neither is it totally silenced, for it continues to tell people like Eichmann what their ‘‘duty’’ is’ (Villa 1999: 45) – the trouble being that the duty in question entails participating in deeds that are outrageously immoral, and that the conscience assumed to be operative in Eichmann is unable to identify them as immoral (again, when judged by our standards). Let us examine the common assumption hinted at; that we expect conscience to sanction against evil, never to condone evil, let alone encourage or even demand participation in it. Articulated like this, the assumption strikes us as historically naive: it has been proven wrong again and again, and so is devoid of plausibility. Indeed, in recent history the tendency to view conscience as less than heroic, and instead as the moral authority typically adhered to by those lacking in courage, resolve, and life-affirming vitality, is famously inaugurated by Nietzsche’s account of slave (as opposed to master) morality. Nietzsche’s contempt of conscience is matched by Hitler’s; Hitler who repeatedly said that conscience is a Jewish invention, that it advocates pity and softness where hardness is called for, elevating the latter to a salient Nazi virtue, as noted above. Now Freud, in linking the peculiar authority of conscience with the superego, which he understood as the individual’s internalization of the (normative) standards of behaviour laid down in his or her society and as typically transmitted to the child by the parents, formulated what is probably the most widespread notion of conscience in modern secular society. More recently, a host of authors working within a psychoanalytic tradition have been only too eager to apply this notion of Freud’s to the case of Nazi immorality. Thus, in their important book The Inability to Mourn, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich speak of the Fu¨hrer as the ‘externalized superego’ and the immensely idealized object of the loyal Nazi. Although such an externalized superego can succeed in guiding the individual’s innermost thoughts and aspirations only in so far as it is being internalized, what is thus internalized, speaking as it were ‘within’ the individual with the voice of conscience, is a law whose origin is heteronomous not autonomous, to employ the Kantian distinction. The commands the individual obeys are not of his own making; they are the commands addressed to the individual from without – i.e. the Fu¨hrer as a factually existing authority and law-maker. By investing all their moral energies into the Fu¨hrer, and by seeking to overcome their impotency by merging with the omnipotency of the Fu¨hrer, the individual is ‘nothing’ without him, just like the Fu¨hrer is nothing without his chosen people.

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Recently Slavoj Zizek has taken this model a step further. Zizek speaks of the Fu¨hrer as a master onto whom the individual deposits his conscience-cum-superego. This radicalizes the notion of relief on which the Mitscherlichs’ study, as well as Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom before it, was premised. When conscience – its origins as well as its substantive content, its whence as well as its specific demands – is deposited in the fashion proposed by Zizek, the individual is its recipient in the radically passive manner of seeing him- or herself as its mere executioner. There is less of a need here to identify, to the point of identity-blurring symbiosis, with the Fu¨hrer. Rather, what is psychically in play is the desire of the individual to be the obedient instrument of the desire (Lacan’s jouissance) of someone else, i.e. the master. On Zizek’s analysis, the attractiveness of totalitarianism consists in precisely this motif: the Fu¨hrer, in commanding evildoing, often of a kind involving self-sacrifice, offers the individual a perfectly legal, positively sanctioned space for a peculiar sadism – the sadism of experiencing joy by enhancing the joy of the master whose elected victims are now having inflicted pain upon them by his loyal followers-cum-instruments. Choosing to take up a position as a mere instrument for the will of the Big Other is termed the ‘truly perverse attitude’ by Zizek (1997: 222); it entails the Sartrean bad faith that ‘it’s not me doing what comes to pass; it’s none of my responsibility’. According to Zizek, this self-inflicted loss of autonomy is precisely what is strictly forbidden within Kantian ethics, thus vindicating the integrity of the latter in the face of what might be called heteronomy-driven evildoing. In this scenario, the voice of conscience is effectively that of the master, its internalized external source. More radically than in the Mitscherlich model, assumption of personal responsibility for the conscience obeyed is altogether shunned. This individual is a mere instrument from beginning to end, never aspiring to any ‘higher’ status. Such is the crucial consequence of submitting to the temptation to deposit and delegate conscience, as if conscience were a thing-like entity the individual could freely choose to get rid of, to place on to others so as to obey it as emanating from something wholly external and as it were contingent (inessential) to one’s being as a human person. The notion of conscience in Heidegger’s Being and Time My claim is that this psychoanalytically inspired analysis is entirely compatible with observations made by Arendt (despite her well-known misgivings about Freud). I wish to bring this out by focusing on three points in particular.

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As noted above, the conscience we are dealing with is proof of the individual’s heteronomy not autonomy. It inverts the Kantian notion of conscience in the further respect of portraying the individual as a mere means (to ends posited by others). In making the ends of a master into his own ends, the individual allows himself to turn into a mere means in his persecution and eventual killing of persons who are regarded not as (Kantian) ends in themselves but as mere means. What results is a double dehumanization. To appreciate how close this is to Arendt’s own analysis, consider her account of the murder of the moral person in man in The Origins of Totalitarianism: The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous . . . robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life . . . This attack on the moral person might still have been opposed by man’s conscience which tells him that it is better to die a victim than to live as a bureaucrat of murder. Totalitarian terror achieved its most terrible triumph when it succeeded in cutting the moral person off from the individualist escape and in making the decisions of conscience absolutely questionable and equivocal. When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family – how is he to decide? The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. Who could solve the moral dilemma of the Greek mother, who was allowed by the Nazis to choose which of her three children should be killed? Through the creation of conditions under which conscience ceases to be adequate and to do good becomes utterly impossible, the consciously organized complicity of all men in the crimes of totalitarian regimes is extended to the victims and thus made really total. The point is not only that hatred is diverted from those who are guilty (the capos were more hated than the SS), but that the distinguishing line between persecutor and persecuted, between the murderer and his victim, is constantly blurred. (Arendt 1951: 452f.)

Note the radicalness of what is asserted: it belongs to the very logic of totalitarian terror that today’s executioner may become tomorrow’s elected victim. No one, regardless of sides taken so far, of loyalties demonstrated and sacrifices carried out, shall feel safe. Arendt calls this the utmost proof of the ‘superfluousness of man’. The second point is closely related to the first. In Willing, the second volume of The Life of the Mind, Arendt notes that willing was sometimes understood as the principium individuationis, the source of the person’s specific identity. In her 1971 lecture as well as in Thinking, Arendt singles out Socrates as the philosopher par excellence to exemplify that

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conscience – that is, Socrates’ daimon – can function as the person’s principium individuationis. In staying loyal to what his daimon told him, come what may, Socrates has gone down in history as someone who epitomizes conscience as an authority standing above – and thus, in times of conflict, defying – what society all around him hold as right and wrong. But in Willing Arendt points to another philosopher who, on the face of it, attributed much the same significance to conscience as did Socrates. This is Heidegger, and the work in question is Being and Time. Arendt stresses how the self, in that work, ‘becomes manifest in the ‘‘voice of conscience’’ (‘‘Ruf des Gewissens’’), which calls man back from his everyday entanglement in the ‘‘They’’ and what conscience, in its call, discloses as human ‘‘guilt’’, a word (‘‘Schuld’’) that in German means both being guilty of (responsible for) some deed and having debts in the sense of owing somebody something’ (1978b: 184). Arendt explains: The main point in Heidegger’s ‘idea of guilt’ is that human existence is guilty to the extent that it ‘factually exists’; it does not ‘need to become guilty of something through omissions or commissions; [it is only called upon] to actualize authentically the ‘‘guiltiness’’ which it is anyhow’ . . . The concept of ‘being thrown into the world’ already implies that human existence owes its existence to something that it is not itself; by virtue of its very existence it is indebted: Dasein – human existence inasmuch as it is – ‘has been thrown; it is there, but not brought into the there (‘‘da’’) by itself ’. (1978b: 184)

What conscience demands, then, according to Heidegger, is that the individual accept his ‘indebtedness’. He who defies the call of conscience is in effect he who takes himself to be the source of his existence. In actuality, however, existence is given, is thrown at each individual in a non-optional manner. Of whom does this remind us, if not Augustine? What we encounter here is what I shall call Heidegger’s secularized Augustianism. To Heidegger, defying and denying man’s indebtedness on the fundamental level of existence, of man’s very being-in-the-world, is not the upshot of hubris, or of the free will man is endowed with (as argued by Augustine). Instead, inauthenticity (‘Uneigentlichkeit’) is what causes the individual to ‘forget’ Being and to remain distracted by the superabundance of mere entities. Inauthenticity as the characteristic sign of what it means to not-hear the ‘cry of conscience’ points to das Man, the ‘They’, in two directions: first, inauthenticity is nourished and reinforced by the individual’s membership in, and everyday partaking of, das Man; second, inauthenticity means that das Man is turned into what is

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conceived as the only way to be in the world and to understand one’s being-in-the-world. The individual exists only in the manner of das Man; das Man determines his every manner of conceiving his own being – including the whence, the ontological source – of that existence, which is held to be neither some transcendent source (say, a creator God, as in Augustine) nor the individual himself (which would entail a completely mundane ontology a` la early Sartre). Rather, what constitutes the individual according to das Man is something vague, impersonal, and anonymous. Heidegger’s notion of inauthenticity as the individual Dasein’s abandonment to das Man can be regarded as his (again secular) equivalent to the innerworldly phenomena and modes of conduct Augustine designated by the word ‘habit’. Now, whereas in Augustine the life of habit presupposes and thus manifests the will – the will as precisely a will free to defy the law of God, man’s creator – in Heidegger the inauthenticity tantamount to a life in habit reveals not the individual’s capacity for strong and defiant resolve, but the opposite: a decision such that the one who makes it conceals its status as a decision, since to identify with das Man is to enact das Man – i.e. (a) nobody as distinguished from a somebody in particular. More important than the differences from Augustine are those from Socrates. For the fact is that Arendt finds only Socrates, and not Heidegger, to present a valid model of conscience as a principium individuationis. Why? Arendt states her reason in the following parenthesis in Willing: ‘It apparently never occurred to Heidegger that by making all men who listen to the ‘‘call of conscience’’ equally guilty, he was actually proclaiming universal innocence: where everybody is guilty, nobody is’ (1978b: 184). On the face of it, this objection, principal as it is, can easily be made to target Augustine as well as Heidegger. This is so in the sense that it takes issue with every model of conscience – and, by the same token, of guilt – which introduces and situates ‘guiltiness’ at so basic a level of man’s existence as to originate in the sheer fact of human existence as such. Put more simply, if ‘being guilty’ is a predicate of ‘factually existing in the world’, then every human individual who ever lives, regardless of what he or she thinks and does, must be deemed equally guilty. Such guilt is clearly unsuited to function as a principium individuationis, especially in a morally and politically relevant manner. In Being and Time, Heidegger reinforces this impression when he focuses on the cry of conscience and on anxiety as experiences which ‘we ourselves have neither planned nor prepared for nor voluntarily

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performed, nor have we ever done so’ (Heidegger 1962: 320; 1979: 275), but which, for all that, are the experiences without which insight into the crucial ‘Schuldigsein (being guilty) des Daseins’ would be impossible. The cry of conscience is the privileged access to appreciating one’s Dasein’s original guilt, understood as the ‘Nichtma¨chtigkeit gegenu¨ber dem eigenen Sein’ (Merker 1988: 189), i.e. ‘the lack of power with regard to one’s own being’. In starting out with guiltiness, with guilt as part of man’s essence, Heidegger’s scenario is that of the world after the Fall; that is to say, a world in which authenticity can be attained only by negating what is given. The cry of conscience thus has the function of awakening individual Dasein from its factual inauthenticity, as if from a deep sleep. So, instead of inauthenticity prevailing as the result of authenticity having been negated, it is the other way round. Though there may have been a haven-like universal innocence prior to this all-pervading guilt and inauthenticity in which we are now trapped (das Man as Heidegger’s secularized post-Fall human condition), such a state is only in abstracto, a kind of ‘Ursprungsmythos’ without existential relevance. What counts is that authenticity requires a conversion from what is, meaning from what everyone equally is. But there is more. Arendt’s terse yet sharp remark that ‘where everybody is guilty, nobody is’ is worth dwelling upon – particularly in the context of discussing Heidegger. For this is the remark Arendt was to reiterate again and again when commenting on the crimes of the Nazi regime – crimes for which Heidegger, the long-standing Nazi Party member, never articulated a single word of apology or regret (Wolin 1993). To those who proclaimed that all Germans – or, less crudely, all Nazis – were equally guilty, she objected that in that case nobody is. To her, collective guilt is a non-starter when it comes to understanding, not to mention punishing, the crimes in question. However, her objection cuts deeper. Arendt was convinced that in holding (all members of ) a collective to be guilty, those eager to condemn totalitarian crimes unwittingly echo the logic producing those crimes in the first place. As we shall see in Chapters 4 and 5 below, I propose to analyse this (genocidal) logic in terms of collectivizing the notion of human agency, including the notions of responsibility and guilt. The basic fault with the offered reasoning consists in locating the category of guilt on a level preceding individually made decisions and actions. According to Nazi (or Stalinist) logic, all Jews (or kulaks) are equally guilty. Guilt here designates collectively as opposed to individually, be it by reference to race or class (or, today, ethnicity). What is effaced here in theory is only too likely to be later effaced spiritually and physically: the distinctiveness associated by

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Arendt with every human being’s natality, that is, the capacity to begin something new in the world. One could respond that there is a place for genuine individuality in Heidegger’s notion of conscience. Individuality in its emphatic quality is manifested in the how – that is to say, in the particular way in which an individual, as distinct from others, chooses to relate to a guilt that is common to all individuals because located on a generic level (the level of existence pure and simple). Indeed, in putting it like this we may identify a notion of individuality, as well as authenticity, shared by religious and secular (or outspokenly atheistic) philosophies alike: in Kierkegaard, each individual will relate to his indebtedness to God in his own distinct manner; in Sartre, each individual will relate to his predicament as a being whose ‘existence precedes its essence’. While doubtless true, this rejoinder will not satisfy Arendt. The individuality she is after is not to be confined to the level – or area – of relatingto – i.e. to something given, and given in the same basic way to each and everyone, at that. For Arendt, not only the how but also the what of that which guilt is taken to be about, to refer back to, has to be something truly of the single individual’s own making; something he or she has brought about him- or herself, as opposed to something given; something that could have been otherwise, but which is brought into the world by way of the human capacity for action. When it comes to what constitutes individuality, what makes it into a morally relevant category, there is no prior or deeper level – say, an ontological one – to that constituted by Aristotelian-Arendtian praxis. To put it a bit too simply, whereas Heidegger locates individuality, and indeed freedom, on the level of being, Arendt locates these notions on the level of action. The difference is seminal. When Dana Villa, in his important book Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, argues that Heidegger’s advocacy of ‘thinking freedom existentially and ontologically’, that is, ‘as a ‘‘mode of being’’ rather than as a capacity of the subject’, is part of what Arendt took over from Heidegger, I think he is wrong (Villa 1996: 118f.). Freedom – as well as the series of capacities flowing from it, judging and acting in particular – is a capacity of the subject on Arendt’s view, with the Hegelian qualification that the subject be seen as constituted from the very first by its partaking of intersubjective relations. This takes us to the third point I wish to make. Once we assume the existence of guilt in some individual, we implicitly assume a conscience. A ‘bad conscience’ is the paradigm, so to speak, of declared guilt; the latter is facilitated by the former. I take this to hold for both religious and secular/atheistic metaphysical outlooks; conscience and guilt are not the prerogatives of the former.

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Arendt’s advocacy of the Socratic model of conscience Let us turn to the specific feature of Socrates’ model anticipated above. In Thinking, Arendt makes a distinction between two types of conscience. She observes that ‘It took language a long time to separate the word ‘‘consciousness’’ from ‘‘conscience’’ . . . Conscience, as we understand it in moral or legal matters, is supposedly always present within us, just like consciousness’ (1978a: 190). She continues: ‘Unlike this ever-present conscience, the fellow Socrates is talking about has been left at home; he fears him . . . as something that is absent . . . This conscience, unlike the voice of God within us or the lumen naturale, gives no positive prescriptions (even the Socratic daimon, his divine voice, only tells him what not to do); in Shakespeare’s words ‘‘it fills a man full of obstacles’’’ (p. 190). The Socratic type of conscience is noteworthy for the crucial characteristic it shares with what Arendt elsewhere underlines about thinking: its sheer negativity, its posing a not, a Neinsagen, instead of issuing positive prescriptions that tell us what to do. ‘Thinking as such’ is ‘out of order’, writes Arendt in her 1971 lecture, citing Heidegger (1971: 424). Thinking is resultless by nature. The consequence is that ‘thinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat in morals and ethics’ (1971: 434). Instead of guiding our action, thinking paralyses it; as the saying has it, we stop and think, thinking being so demanding, so transcending of what is at hand and present thanks to our senses, as to effectively interrupt all other activities and question all certainties. Though quite possible, a life without thinking ‘is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like sleepwalkers’ (1978a: 191). This remark takes us back to Eichmann. What Eichmann lacked beyond a shade of doubt is conscience of the type epitomized in Socrates. His lack of such conscience dovetails with his lack of thinking; the two are inseparable. Thus it is that Arendt, true to these premises, was so struck in the Jerusalem court with Eichmann’s lack of spontaneity, of being real and alive in a basic human sense. It is as though his entire life had been lived devoid of the quality of negativity in the sense Arendt associates with thinking and conscience. His had been a life framed by positivity, dominated by loyalty to positivity. Unlike the Kantian moral law, which in the standard Hegelian critique is castigated for its ‘formalism’, its emptiness and indeterminacy, the laws, rules, and instructions by which Eichmann lived and to which he continued clinging long after

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doing so became dysfunctional, were always of a kind telling him what to do. Hence the laws by which Eichmann lived disallowed for phronesis, the act of judgment by which the agent endeavours to judge with a sensitivity for particulars so as to do justice to the situation at hand. In the Nazi universe such mediation-by-judgment is foreclosed. The subversive power of negation, of doubting and questioning, is sought eliminated. In Arendtian terms, the faculty of judgment is inoperative because the individuals its exercise would presuppose are non-existent. Judgment is exposed as a precarious faculty, whose flourishing in the individual depends crucially on his or her wider sociocultural environment. Not only the moral virtues, but – no less crucially – the basic faculties of cognition and emotion are, in dramatic manner, revealed to be utterly fragile capacities, no longer to be taken for granted as simply – irremovably – part of every human person’s make-up. Admittedly, if our conclusion after such a long discussion is only that Eichmann was a man without conscience in the Socratic sense, disappointment may arise. Is this all there is to it? Does not this conclusion only confirm what we expected right from the start? There is more to it. To see what, we need to return to Heidegger. David Luban’s thesis, we recall, is that Eichmann is a figure ‘straight out of Being and Time’. Eichmann, ‘wrapped in his protective shell of bureaucratic euphemism and jargon’, confirms the idea – found in Augustine and then in Heidegger – that ‘sin arises from habit rather than passion’ (Luban 1997: 10). Eichmann exemplifies what it means to ‘seek security’ for his existence by devoting himself – or abandoning himself – so thoroughly to ‘everyday routines’ that he never starts to conceive and enact his possibilities of being-in-the-world in an authentic way. On the basis of my discussion above, I do not find this part of Luban’s thesis invalid. What I question is his twofold implication that Arendt may have been inspired by Heidegger’s analysis of das Man and of the public sphere no less than by Augustine’s explanation of evil as springing from habit rather than from passion (Arendt’s ‘wickedness of heart’), and that Arendt would agree with him (Luban) that Heidegger’s analysis in Being and Time is to be regarded as a valid understanding of how evildoing comes about. I grant that Heidegger may have exerted as powerful an influence upon Arendt in the relevant parts of her dissertation as did its explicit topic, the thought of Augustine. However, the issue I wish to take with Luban’s thesis is not primarily concerned with this interpretative matter. Rather, it concerns whether Heidegger can possibly be held to have offered what

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in Arendt’s view is a valid analysis of the conditions under which evildoing takes place. (It is worth noting here that Heidegger, in Being and Time, nowhere talks about evil as such; the connection made here between habit and what Heidegger might have said about evil rests upon an interpretative extrapolation on Luban’s part. That said, Heidegger’s non-addressing evil is very much part of Arendt’s enduring problem with him.) I have already mentioned one reason for holding Luban to be mistaken. This is Arendt’s observation that it is fundamentally wrong-headed – indeed, politically and legally dangerous – to speak of guilt in a generic (collectivized) sense, as opposed to regarding guilt as a matter of a distinct individual’s doing something he ought not to have done (or not doing something he ought to have done). Clearly the notion of guilt developed in Being and Time, invoking man’s indebtedness to his very existence as something given prior to any act flowing from his intentionality and so volition, is a notion of guilt on what Arendt would deem a pre-individual level, prior to or ‘deeper’ than ethics, morals, and politics. The latter, of course, are precisely what matters for Arendt. This difference between the two philosophers’ perspectives is often overlooked by Arendt’s critics. For instance, in Richard Wolin’s otherwise instructive discussion in his book Heidegger’s Children, he – in my opinion mistakenly – writes that ‘As a result of their shared mistrust of the political capacities of average men and women, the political thought of both remains profoundly elitist and undemocratic’ (Wolin 2001: 67). Someone may retort that Heidegger, especially the early one primarily intended in Luban’s thesis, is an existentialist, and that, as part of that outlook, what he has to say about ‘care’ (Sorge) and ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit) and the like must be understood in an emphatically individualist manner (Granberg 2004). My answer is that this does not help. To the extent that it is true, interpretatively speaking, the individualism referred to in early Heidegger is of a kind Arendt unequivocally disagrees with. When we realize this, we are much closer to seeing why – on my reading – Heidegger’s analysis of das Man and the public sphere on Arendt’s view leads us astray when it comes to understanding the nature of evil and evildoing. The book by Arendt that is most relevant here is The Origins of Totalitarianism. She writes: Just as terror, even in its pre-total, merely tyrannical form ruins all relationships between men, so the self-compulsion of ideological thinking ruins all relationships

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with reality. The preparation has succeeded when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought . . . All thinking . . . is done in solitude and is a dialogue between me and myself; but this dialogue of the two-inone does not lose contact with the world of my fellow men because they are represented in the self with whom I lead the dialogue of thought. The problem of solitude is that this two-in-one needs the others in order to become one again: one unchangeable individual whose identity can never be mistaken for that of any other. For the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely upon other people; and it is the great saving grace of companionship for solitary men that it makes them ‘whole’ again, saves them from the dialogue of thought in which one remains always equivocal, restores the identity which makes them speak with the single voice of one unexchangeable person. (1951: 474, 476)

Two statements in particular are decisive for my argument. First, ideological thinking of the kind chacteristic of totalitarian Nazism or Stalinism is held by Arendt to succeed ‘when people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them; for together with these contacts, men lose the capacity of both experience and thought’ (1951: 474). In a totalitarian society, permeated by a terror which makes everyone insecure, experience and thinking are undermined to such a degree as to become well nigh impossible. For want of these faculties, and by implication of conscience a` la Socrates as a by-product of the inner dialogue of thinking, individuals become incapable of thinking, judging, and acting for themselves, in a fashion expressing their unique individuality and manifesting their natality, their quality as beginners in the world. As Arendt stresses, man’s spontaneity is the crux of what totalitarian domination endeavours to eliminate. This comes to pass when ‘people have lost contact with their fellow men as well as the reality around them’ (p. 474). There are two ways of designating the two objects of this contact in Arendt: most of the time, she locates it in the public sphere, understood as the social arena where individuals come forward before an audience to be recognized in their uniqueness, to have their words remembered and their deeds retold after the speaker and actor him- or herself has passed away. The historic model Arendt alludes to is that of the polis, of course. However, notably in The Human Condition, Arendt develops a somewhat different model to make much of the same point. In that work she speaks about ‘the common world’, the peculiarly human world set up ‘between’ men and nature, as it were, as that intermediate realm which comprises the spiritual as well as artefactual products of men’s activities in the world. The always-already-begun and always-continuing process

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whereby the multitudes of human beings contribute to erecting and maintaining a common world between them is a process in which what is in reality an ‘artificial’ (meaning thoroughly man-made) world gains permanence and cognitive solidity and objectivity. The common world is indispensable for man’s ability to orient himself in his existence; from it, every individual will draw the resources by means of which he or she creates his or her meaning, values, beliefs: ‘Being seen and heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position’; ‘the destruction of the common world is usually preceded by the destruction of the many aspects in which it presents itself to a human plurality’ (Arendt 1958: 57, 58). I find it vital to point out the importance of Arendt’s notions of the public world and the common world as the two principal places in her thinking where she fleshes out her assertion that ‘for the confirmation of my identity I depend entirely upon other people’ (1951: 476). This is the second statement that I find unmistakably Hegelian in spirit. These statements testify to Arendt’s version of intersubjectivist theory of selfhood and identity, indeed even of thinking and judgment. The latter two, as well as conscience, are not faculties of the mind which belong to each and every human being independently of historical circumstance; rather, these are precarious faculties, operative in the individual only when historic and sociopolitical conditions permit them to develop – as was brought out so dramatically in the event of totalitarianism. Nor are the faculties in question to be conceived of in an individualist manner, as belonging to the individual as such, presupposing only that he or she, in existentialist manner, is ready to listen to the call of conscience so as to view and enact his or her possibilities of being-in-the-world emphatically, meaning authentically, as his or her own – that is to say, as received from and formulated by no one else, especially not das Man. My allusion to Heidegger explicates the point I am driving at: what in Heidegger is presented as the arena where habit flourishes, where inauthenticity reigns, and where evildoing finds its social basis (Luban’s thesis), is in Arendt the exact opposite – namely, the sphere where individuals are constituted as individuals at all capable of thinking and judging, thus of developing and displaying the faculties required for resisting and opposing evildoing. Of course, the issue is more complicated. Arendt was struck by Eichmann’s apparent craving for a ‘secure existence’ and by his trying, to the point of obsession and at the cost of appearing ridiculous to others, ‘to make everything routine’, to cite the features Luban points to in

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Heidegger’s account of das Man. At this point, however, caution is called for. Categorial levels and conceptual differences are involved that need to be separated, but which tend to be blurred in Luban. The chief mistake is to render Heidegger’s notions of das Man and ¨ Offentlichkeit identical with the public sphere, with the social arena where individuals meet, talk, and interact. The second mistake – also encouraged by Heidegger himself – is to view the inauthentic mode of Dasein’s being-in-the-world as the mode of being that, by conceptual definition, characterizes the activities located within the public sphere. Put in concrete terms with respect to Eichmann, Eichmann did exemplify a craving for a secure existence, an obsessional clinging to routines, and the like. Yet his having done evil does not mean – or prove – that precisely these features of his behaviour are what made him do evil, are what in some causal sense help explain his doing so. Furthermore, the features in question do not necessarily refer us to the public sphere. True, the features may be fostered in some type of public sphere, for instance that formed by Eichmann’s Nazi colleagues, in this type of environment and at this specific point in history, in Germany, but not in the public sphere as such. There are many public spheres, many arenas of social exchange and Mitsein (being-with-others), some of which may foster inauthenticity among their participants, others not. The connection made by Heidegger and unquestioned at this point of Luban’s thesis, namely between public sphere and (absence of) authenticity, is not a necessary one; it is made by conceptual fiat by Heidegger, presumably as part of his conservative Kulturkritik of contemporary mass society. Contra Richard Wolin, Arendt does not embrace this aspect of Heidegger’s thought. On my reading, her position entails a claim that Heidegger errs on two sides, as it were. On the negative side, Heidegger is wrong to associate or even identify inauthenticity with das Man, and das Man with what in Being and Time is left standing as the public sphere per se, for lack of alternative notions of public sphere and social exchange, ones with which an authentic mode of Dasein, and of Mitsein, may be associated. On the positive side, Heidegger is wrong to associate or even identify the path to an authentic mode of being Dasein with the individual’s resolve to renounce the entire series of social phenomena, values, and opinions – dismissively summed up by Heidegger as the ‘idle talk’ typical of das Man – that he associates with the public sphere. Even when viewed on its more immanent premises, the notion of care as Dasein’s worry or concern with itself, as taking care of itself in an authentic manner, especially in the face of death, is too restrictedly individualist (privatistic) to satisfy Arendt; it conceives only of responsibility for

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oneself, not for others, and therefore fails to address the truly moral – interpersonal – dimension of human existence. In conclusion, then, Heidegger’s two mistakes appear as complementary: he has failed to successfully identify where and why the threat to authenticity arises; and he has failed to successfully identify where and why the conditions fostering authenticity arise. If Heidegger is (doubly) mistaken, what would it take to get the connections right? To make a long answer into a very short one, the view I see advocated by Arendt is that the basic error consists in framing the issue as one of an either/or. Either one wholly affirms the solitary path, that of developing authenticity, responsibility, and the like by way of leaving the mass and its noise behind (in more or less Nietzschean, elitist style); or one discards the model of solitariness altogether and affirms a mode of existence that is social, meaning intersubjectively structured (Hegel) from beginning to end. The remarkable thing about Arendt is that she rejects both alternatives. For her, no such either/or is involved. Instead, what is required of the individual is that he or she, by trial and error, develop his or her peculiar modus vivendi between the two – that is to say, the optimal balance to be attained in a life of going back and forth, again and again, between the silence of the inner dialogue, and where the voice of Socratic conscience has a prospect of being heard and being heeded, and the noise emanating from the public(s) formed by the plurality of individuals, i.e. those others, representing so many different perspectives, necessary for each individual’s ability to know who he or she is. That is precisely what no one can accomplish by relying only on purely inner or subjective (re)sources. Standing up against evil – even the evil agreed to and carried out by all of society around one – is something the single individual does, or fails to do. Yet it takes social resources in general and an intersubjectively formed identity in particular to become someone capable of standing up for what one stands for. To those who may hold that the solitariness of Socrates, Arendt’s positive model for a conscience capable of resisting evil, is echoed in the solitariness of the authentic Dasein of Heidegger’s, so that a striking similarity is found where my argument would disallow it, it must be recalled that Socrates’ path to finding out what he stood for, though at the end of the day ending in a solitary gesture of defiance of society around him, was from beginning to end a path finding its direction by way of endless encounters and profound dialogues with others. If anything, it was a social, dialogical path to what wound up as a solitary position. Though impressive beyond comparison as a historic model, the

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precisely historic example of Socrates should not tempt us to draw false philosophical conclusions. Socrates’ ought not to be taken to represent a necessary predicament. The almost complete corruption of society, of the many, which Heidegger, without argument (and in that sense unphilosophically), makes into a philosophical axiom about society and the many, spelling the ‘Fall’ of das Man, should instead be understood as a historical and contingent matter, determined by the actions of many individual actors, in the affirmative Arendtian plural. Sometimes the individual commits evil, and is in conflict with surrounding society on the grounds of that evil. And sometimes the individual resists evil, and is in conflict with society on the grounds of that resistance. There is no conceptual, let alone a priori one-to-one, connection between society on the one hand and evildoing on the other, but instead only a contingent one, varying from one case and one set of circumstances to another. Since this is so, the burden of finding out whether fighting evil is tantamount to going along with a line of action advocated by one’s society, or vigorously opposing it, rests squarely on the shoulders of the individual agent. Double dehumanization and human agency Having completed the task I set myself at the start of this chapter, namely to trace the development of Arendt’s thoughts on evil by examining how they were influenced by her responses to Augustine and Heidegger, an impression lurks that something important has been left unsaid. What can it be? It has to do with the question addressed in my discussion of Bauman in Chapter 1. How are we to explain, and so hopefully to understand, the abyss that apparently exists between the nature of the crime (i.e. the Holocaust) and the nature of the perpetrators, taken as so many individual agents? Bauman, employing the general insights into the workings of modernity and, in particular, bureaucracy, reached in Weber-inspired sociology, sought to resolve this paradox by pointing out that it is a chief characteristic of institutions of modern society to effect a division – in the radical sense of uncoupling – between the subjective intentionality of the individuals working within them and the accumulated totality of their output. The result is alienation: the individual participant is at a loss to recognize his particular authorship in the ultimate outcome. Much lamented on the grounds of loss of subjective freedom and authenticity, this development – gaining momentum and coming into its own with industrial capitalism – is part and parcel of the ever-growing complexity typical of modern institutional structures. This captures why Bauman

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holds the Holocaust to be such a peculiarly modern accomplishment: it was a matter of mobilizing, for an admittedly extraordinary purpose, the entire series of institutional bodies and formal procedures that comprise a modern society. On the grounds of the division-cum-uncoupling referred to, the ‘inner’ morality of the single participant in these institutions was powerless to prevail over, or to effectively interfere with, the immorality of the undertaking as a whole. By industrializing murder, by rendering it a technical task and occluding its human-moral dimension, the genocide could be completed with no obstacles in its way save technical and administrative ones, for which there would always be a solution. Despite the points of convergence between Bauman’s and Arendt’s accounts, there is no full agreement between them. Arendt resists the sociological Weberianism that Bauman relies on. The central issue is human agency, and so responsibility. We saw that Bauman, rather abruptly, shifts from a Weberian to a Levinasian perspective once he tries to come to terms with the question of where the Holocaust, understood as systemic, leaves the individual and the place of his or her responsibility. I shall not repeat why this shift leaves a lot to be desired. What is Arendt’s position? We are raising one of the most recurrent issues in her entire oeuvre, one she never ceased struggling with. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, and in line with her earlier study of totalitarianism, Arendt observes that ‘the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them’. She goes on to say that modern psychology and sociology tend to ‘explain away the responsibility of the doer for his deed in terms of this or that determinism’. However, and significantly, ‘no judicial procedure would be possible on the basis of such explanations’ (1965a: 289f.). On the one hand, the court must concede that a crime such as the Holocaust could be committed only by ‘a giant bureaucracy using the resources of government’. Indeed, as Mark Osiel (2002: 180) observes, modern atrocity ‘derives precisely from the nature of social organization, especially military organization, not from its collapse. It reflects the workings of such organization in strength, rather than in dissolution.’ As we have seen, this ‘Baumanian’ insight is borne out in Arendt’s critique of the doctrine of manifest illegality – in her contention that in cases of large-scale state brutality there are ‘distinctive circumstances that make it wrong to presume that any acts truly carry their illegality on their face, however transparently heinous they may seem to us in retrospect’ (Osiel 2002: 150). Deliberately construed appearances of legality, Osiel continues,

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‘surely make it impossible to say that the illegality of these official regulations was manifest to all’ (p. 148). On the other hand, however, we find Arendt insisting that ‘insofar as it remains a crime – and that, of course, is the premise for a trial – all the cogs in the machinery, no matter how insignificant, are in court forthwith transformed back into perpetrators, that is to say, into human beings’ (1965a: 289; my italics). Arendt’s view, then, is that, while it is correct to speak of men being made into cogs in the machinery as part of a description of the undeniable bureaucratic shape this crime assumed, it would be a serious mistake to infer from this that the category of – meaning the concrete ascription of – human agency, and so individual responsibility, no longer applies. In other words, the ‘circumstances of the crime’ may change – and indeed they have, dramatically at that – in the case of crimes which in fact are ‘administrative massacres organized by the state apparatus’ (p. 294). But again, this factual change does nothing to alter the conventional assumption of individual responsibility, hence of being found guilty and punishable for one’s specific activity as a ‘cog in the machine’. This is not a compelling response. As Arendt remarks, Eichmann acted fully within the framework of the kind of judgment required of him: ‘he acted in accordance with the rule, examined the order issued to him for its ‘‘manifest’’ legality, namely regularity’ (p. 293). In other places Arendt goes as far as saying that Eichmann had no way of knowing that what he did was morally wrong; he acted in accordance with ‘all of respectable society around him’ (p. 295). His, then, is the case of a defendant who has committed ‘legal’ crimes, entailing that he (in the period of Nazi legal rule) would have been considered, and punished, as a criminal if he had not taken part in carrying out mass murder when ordered to do so. In this sense, the relationship between what morality-cum-responsibility requires, on the one hand, and what in fact represents immorality, on the other, is effectively reversed under Nazi rulership, as compared with our inherited standards for understanding these notions. Against the background of ‘legal’ crimes, Arendt’s assertion that the ‘cogs in the machinery’ be translated back into individual perpetrators, meaning responsible human agents, simultaneously expresses a moral (and juridical) necessity and a requirement that strikes us as oddly, and gravely, out of tune with the pertinent facts; that is to say, with the factual circumstances of the crime and so of any one defendant’s actions. However striking this tension, I will not leave it at that. I do not think this manner of presenting the issue succeeds in making us recognize the truth about the ‘Eichmann case’, nor, for that sake, about the deeper problems involved.

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Robert Fine, in a perceptive essay on Arendt, addresses the issue I have in mind by stating that ‘Such perpetrators are human beings, not cogs in a machine, yet they conceive of themselves as if they were cogs in a machine. It is this ‘‘as if . . . ’’ quality that is so difficult to comprehend’ (Fine 2000: 28). Indeed. Regrettably, Fine does not quite follow through on his own tentative insight. Instead, he concentrates on how Arendt endeavoured to repudiate, and to come up with a constructive alternative to, positivistic social sciences which claim that ‘modern bureaucratic rationality has in fact deprived the perpetrators of all moral awareness’, the implication being that these sciences ‘merely mirror the illusions of the world they purport to explain’ (p. 28). Though agreeing with Fine’s point that we must prevent a situation where the notion of personal responsibility ‘would be a mere legal fiction if it were imposed upon a recalcitrant social reality in which responsibility had no factual existence’ (2000: 29), I find that he leaves undeveloped a vital insight implicit in the first quotation; namely, that the perpetrators conceive of themselves as if they were cogs in a machine. Recall Arendt’s observation that the essence of totalitarian government is to make ‘mere cogs in the machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them’ (1965a: 289). If the notion of personal responsibility is to be applied here (and Arendt ends by insisting it does apply), its validity must entail that the individual subject to dehumanization resist it. Personal responsibility can only assert itself, can only remain intact and operative, as long as it is being enacted. And to become dehumanized would mean precisely to suffer a loss of responsibility or, better put, a loss of the capacity to enact responsibility. Responsibility is not first and foremost a moral and juridical notion; it has primarily to do with agency, agency as lived, as exercised, by a concrete individual who claims for himself an authorship for his decisions, choices, and actions in the world. Since responsibility is null and void if it does not reside in agency, part of the requirement that responsibility addresses to its human bearer is that he or she endeavour to keep intact the powers of agency (of judging, choosing, and acting). In my view, Eichmann is to be held responsible on two counts of dehumanization: he permitted himself to be dehumanized (in that he started behaving as if those responsible for the consequences of the orders he carried out were his superiors only, and not himself), and he took part in an ideology-based dehumanization of whole groups of others. Morally speaking, permitting oneself to be dehumanized, to be robbed of one’s autonomy (Kant), is in itself no lesser sin than participating in the dehumanization of others; it entails permitting oneself to

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become but an instrument in the realization of ends posited by others. That said, one may ask if the former functions here as a condition for the latter. Can I actively dehumanize others (deny them their standing as human beings with the kind of inviolability that goes with being a human person) without at the same time dehumanizing myself? Or is this to miss the mark? Is it rather the opposite – that to actively dehumanize others rests upon, and in that sense betrays, a capacity for making judgment, for deciding something about certain others, and thereupon to act upon that decision so as to confirm it, to help make it ‘come true’ in practice – much like the Nazis endeavoured to create conditions so detrimental to leading a human existence as to render the Jews, in the regressed appearance they ultimately took on in the camps, Untermenschen, less-than-human? Yes, I very much believe this was the case. I take this to demonstrate that scepticism is called for with regard to claims about how the ‘cogs in the machine’ scenario was de facto realized, becoming as it were a predominant social reality, in the course of Nazi rule in Germany. It also needs to be said (and no ethicist has said it better than Emmanuel Levinas) that the counter-factual quality of personal responsibility alluded to above is always one of its trademarks – though the concrete societal circumstances will vary significantly in how effectively they quell the voice of responsibility. From this derives the obstinacy, the social-communal unwantedness of many an individual’s insistence on enacting, on never letting go of, his responsibility as emphatically his, as something not to be handed over to or controlled by some other person (superior) or by the organization as such. From the point of view of the modern organization – or ‘organizational power’, as C. Fred Alford terms it – the individual whose conduct is guided by his sense of responsibility, by his concern for the total consequences of what he is helping bring about, will always be a most unpopular creature – hence the affinity between resistance to evil and becoming a whistleblower. In both cases – say, in refusing an order to kill, and in telling the world that one’s organization is guilty of immoral acts – the protest is enacted by an individual who practises the Socratic ‘two-in-one’. Individuality in this Arendtian sense is ‘thought in action, an inner dialogue that makes a difference in what one does, as well as who one is’; hence it is the whistleblower’s – or refusenik’s – ‘inability not to talk to himself’ about what he is doing that explains, if anything can, why he blows the whistle or says, ‘no, I will not do it’ (Alford 2001: 12f.). As Alford found in his study of whistleblowers, such individuals are not so much loyal to principles as to ideal selves who embody specific principles, such as: an imagination for consequences; a sense of historical moment, of the

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significance of one’s stance; identification with the victim, coupled with refusal to identify with the aggressor, who is usually in a position of authority; ‘not very good at doubling’, in the sense of compartmentalizing one’s various roles and actions; a susceptibility to shame, including the failure of others to be moral, even being ashamed for the human race, that such evil comes to pass (2001: 85). However, when Alford claims that ‘every organization is dedicated to the destruction of its members’ individuality’, remarking that Arendt ‘knows’ this (2001: 116f.), I think he is transforming what for her was an empirical issue into an ontological one, and so blurring the distinction between totalitarian and democratic organizations that remained crucial to Arendt but tends to be lost in Bauman no less than in Foucault (clearly Alford’s inspiration in this analysis). Let us return to Robert Fine’s observation. I believe that the deeper dimension to the issue is psychological. I suggest that Eichmann and others like him behaved toward their victims as if they were less-thanhuman. Right from the start, they knew perfectly well that they were not; they knew that they were human beings. The ideologically concocted ascription as subhumans was one that had to be forced upon the victims: it was a blatant lie, striving to grow big enough to be taken for the truth – in the spirit of Hitler’s famous definition of the task of propaganda, if you repeat a lie often enough, people will start accepting it as the truth; and the bigger the lie, the more they are likely to hold onto it. At this point, caution is needed. What is categorically lost from view when we stay content with theorizing the agent–institution dyad is the relationship between agent and victim. And to lose the latter relationship from view would mean to repeat the loss of the very dimension that the perpetrators for their part went to such pains to remove when they committed the crime. Echoing the discussion in Chapter 1, we shall see that the removal did not succeed completely. Lessons of an unforeseen proximity: Eichmann meets Storfer Encounters between a perpetrator and an individual victim signify precisely the kind of relationship, the kind of interpersonal proximity, that the crime Eichmann took part in was designed to bypass altogether (at least if we are to believe Bauman). However, as soon as one investigates a specific case, exceptions from this policy-imposed rule emerge: proximity is never totally prevented or eliminated, however ‘large-scale’ the operational design of the evildoing. A case in point is Eichmann’s relationship with Kommerzialrat Bertold Storfer, a high-ranking representative of the Jewish community

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in Vienna. The story was related by Eichmann himself at his trial, and is reported in some detail by Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem. It goes like this. Rudolf Ho¨ss, commandant of Auschwitz, informed Eichmann that Storfer had arrived at the camp and requested to see Eichmann. And off he went, saying to himself, ‘O.K., this man has always behaved well, that is worth my while . . . I’ll go there myself and see what is the matter with him.’ Told by Ho¨ss that Storfer was in one of the labour gangs, Eichmann went to talk with him under four eyes. He explains: With Storfer afterward, well it was normal and human, we had a normal, human encounter. He told me all his grief and sorrow. I said: ‘Well, my dear old friend [Ja, mein lieber guter Storfer], we certainly got it! What rotten luck!’ And I also said: ‘Look I really cannot help you, because according to orders from the Reichsfu¨hrer nobody can get out. I can’t get you out . . . I hear you made a mistake, that you went into hiding or wanted to bolt, which, after all, you did not need to do’ [Eichmann thought that Storfer, as a Jewish functionary, had immunity from deportation] . . . And then I asked him how he was. And he said he wondered if he couldn’t be let off work, it was heavy work. And then I said to Ho¨ss: ‘Storfer won’t have to work!’ But Ho¨ss said: ‘Everyone works here.’ So I said: ‘I’ll make out a chit to the effect that Storfer has to keep the gravel paths in order with a broom . . . and that he has the right to sit down with his broom on one of the benches.’ To Storfer I said: ‘Will that be all right, Mr. Storfer? Will that suit you?’ Whereupon he was very pleased, and we shook hands, and then he was given the broom and sat down on his bench. It was a great inner joy to me that I could at least see the man with whom I had worked for so many long years, and that we could speak with each other. (Arendt 1965a: 50f.)

To which Arendt acidly adds: ‘Six weeks after this normal human encounter, Storfer was dead – not gassed, apparently, but shot’ (p. 50). With good reason, Arendt poses the question, ‘Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity? Or is it simply the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal . . . who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it?’ (p. 51f.). Arendt’s answer is that Eichmann was a man who liked to recall the past, mainly because ‘he and the world he lived in had once been in perfect harmony’; indeed, ‘that German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become ingrained in Eichmann’s mentality’ (p. 52). His mentality apparently was shaped in this manner till his death, more than sixteen years after the collapse of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, Arendt’s interpretation fails to explore in depth what significance the incident with Storfer holds for assessing Eichmann – not only psychologically, but also morally.

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I find Eichmann’s story about his ‘normal, human encounter’ with Storfer very revealing. The lack of an appropriate sense of reality inadvertently demonstrated by Eichmann at each and every stage of his story is astonishing. Eichmann is determined to safeguard the ‘normality’ of the situation. This means many things: it means choosing to focus attention on the opposition between following and violating the rules (i.e. pointing out, patronizingly, to Storfer that he (Storfer) was responsible for winding up in Auschwitz – a death camp – because he broke the rules in so far as he had tried to escape); it means at no stage to reflect for a second on the more fundamental reasons for Storfer’s status as a victim, as a member of a group doomed to death, that is to say, to reflect on who in actual fact was responsible for creating a situation where someone like Storfer was persecuted in the first place. Eichmann is busy undertaking so many reversals: everything of importance as far as creating, and altering, Storfer’s lot is concerned, is being bracketed. Conversely, everything to do with the ‘little things’ in life is elevated to supreme importance. It is a question of finding out what little one can do, of never asking for much, of staying realistic in one’s expectations, of seeking comfort in changes (improvements) within one’s reach: a broom in one’s hand, some precious minutes of rest before resuming work; a meeting with an old friend, bringing reassurance that, even in difficult circumstances, the ‘normal’ quality of a ‘human’ encounter is kept intact. Notice how rapidly, and with what ease, Eichmann confers a quality of reciprocity and symmetry upon the relationship he has with Storfer. He depicts the encounter as if these were two men ‘in the same boat’, cast in different roles, to be sure, but sharing the same interest in looking for what realistically can be done to mitigate the hardships suffered, as in Eichmann’s exclamation, ‘We certainly got it! What rotten luck!’ As if the two of them pursued the same goals, shared the same values; as if they had both been cast in their admittedly different roles by powers totally beyond their reach, indeed equally behind the influence of both, in a sense also beyond the reach of any one person, perhaps with the sole exception of the Reichsfu¨hrer, but then again, even Himmler, as chief of the SS, had his orders, and as for the very top of the hierarchy, Hitler, the Fu¨hrer himself, also took orders in a way, in the quasi-metaphysical sense of a leader who (to paraphrase the Nazi cliche´) merely carries out on the social and political plane what nature herself has determined, according to the principle guiding all life on earth; namely, that only the strong will survive and the weak shall perish. The implication is that executioners and victims are both passively positioned in their respective

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roles. The only place for the enactment of human agency, therefore, is the modest and restricted one of trying to make the best of the situation, whose objective constraints one must conform to; the situation just ‘is’ like it is, it cannot be changed. What a person can do, however, is try to help himself and, chances permitting, his friend to cope with the givens of the situation in the best subjective manner possible. This latter arena, this ‘small world’ within the much bigger one beyond the reach of what a person – any person – can aspire to influence, is the proper locus, then, for the virtues that count so much: asking your friend how he is, trying to do something – it does not matter how minor, since in the end what matters morally and humanly is the inclination, the attempt – to show that one is there with one’s fellow man, to show that one understands. What about Storfer? Short of his version, we can only speculate. It is possible that he, realizing that, once in Auschwitz he would never leave alive, did his bit to co-operate with Eichmann’s endeavour to create an atmosphere of ordinariness in the midst of the extraordinary – to maintain a human touch, a remnant of the world outside the camp, so as to prove that inhumanity does not reign supreme, that even in the darkest hour, and from the ‘opposite’ side, one will find some sympathy, someone who, if only for a moment, makes oneself feel less alone, less afraid. We can imagine a shared sense of a symmetry of sorts: Eichmann epitomizing the exception from the rule in the mind of Storfer: a decent (Himmler’s favourite word, again) German officer, a high-ranking representative of the political apparatus hell-bent on destroying one’s own people, to be sure, but nonetheless, on a human level, when encountered as a person, someone evidently not lacking in virtues one esteems. And conversely, Storfer epitomizing the exception from the rule in the mind of Eichmann: a well-educated, decent man, a Jew, to be sure, and as such a representative of a people one is working long hours every day to wipe out from the European continent, but nonetheless, on a human level, when encountered as a person, someone reciprocating one’s warm feelings, never giving up on a relationship that, professionally, had always run well, someone evidently willing to let the feelings of friendship prevail, no matter the urgency of the situation in which both now, due to circumstances largely beyond control, find themselves. Indeed, precisely because the other’s plight seems beyond repair, there is valuable relief in preserving a sense that some friendships survive everything, that the gulf between different parties can be bridged, without grudges on either side: no tears, no grievances, nothing said or done that would cause discomfort to the other.

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So what? Have we learned anything of importance about Eichmann here, or more generally about the ‘new’ type of criminal Arendt takes him to exemplify? It is tempting to reply that the episode with Storfer helps validate Arendt’s statement that, contrary to expectations, Eichmann was no monster. If anything, his vice was not a wicked heart, it was ‘remoteness from reality’ and ‘thoughtlessness’, the lesson being that the latter can wreak more havoc than the former. So much for Arendt’s attempt at a conclusion. My own response departs from Arendt’s. From my perspective, the most intriguing aspect of the Storfer episode is Eichmann’s attempt not to dehumanize the encountered victim-in-person. To appreciate why this is important, recall that the perpetrator’s dehumanization of the victims is a chief premise in scholarly accounts of the Holocaust – dehumanization as the operative sine qua non of this large-scale evil – to which is sometimes added (as I just did myself) the dehumanization the perpetrator engages in toward himself, making himself into a mere instrument and eschewing any sense of responsibility for his actions. Once acted out, dehumanization cannot but cut both ways. The consequence of double dehumanization is that human agency – the fundamental precondition for the assumption of personal responsibility – is doubly denied; and it is denied in oneself no less than in the other. This is a path to the outright denial of morality as an effective force in the world: robbed of the presupposition of human agency, hence of the assumption (imputation) of responsibility for what comes to pass as a result of one’s doings, morality is not a real force in the world. I am the last to hold that such double dehumanization is not part of the big picture comprising the Holocaust – the way it happened and the way those who did it saw themselves when doing it. Moreover, it is a notion that squares rather well – too well – with pleading ‘Not guilty, I only received orders; and in any case, someone else would have stepped in and done the very same; to refuse would come to naught.’ What I am getting at is that to point out that, and how, dehumanization was double – comprising the doers no less than their victims – is not to confront the perpetrators with a notion that would shock them, or force them to reconsider events and their role in them. Rather, it is a notion common among the perpetrators, one much heeded and only reluctantly given up. Why? Because it boils down to a message that lets them off the hook of personal responsibility. Admittedly, we may not seem to make much headway. Arendt is the first to subscribe to the point just made. Are we not simply reproducing the opposition between the responsible individual on the one hand and

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the cog in the machine on the other, leaving us with the task pronounced by Arendt, namely to translate the latter back into the former? No. There is more to the episode with Storfer. True, double dehumanization is a central ingredient of Nazi ideology, the stronger internalized in the single individual, it may be expected, the more he or she is involved in carrying out mass murder and other atrocities. Being told, and coming to believe, that one is an instrument in some grand historical scheme, contributing to some purported ‘good’ (a society without Jews, a world without classes, etc.), must be comforting indeed, holding the promise that, if the struggle turns out otherwise and one winds up losing, one can always take recourse in the assertion that instruments are devoid of responsibility and guilt. Is this borne out in Eichmann’s meeting with Storfer? Once posed, the question helps us realize that the Storfer episode is a complex and ambiguous one – especially in light of the premise of double dehumanization referred to above – a commonplace in literature on the Holocaust and one subscribed to on a purely descriptive level (as ascribed to the selfunderstanding of the Nazi perpetrators, not least the bureaucrats), by Arendt as well – with her vital qualification that the defendants’ claim about not being morally responsible be declared unacceptable, lest the enactment of law become impossible. Acceptance of the notion would carry too high a moral price. Hence Arendt’s dismissal. My suggestion is that what is descriptively asserted in this notion is contradicted rather than confirmed in Eichmann’s behaviour toward Storfer. If anything, Eichmann, in relating the meeting, shows himself as a man at pains to come across as a human being, indeed as a decent person who upholds a non-dehumanizing attitude to the other, doing so even in circumstances that, objectively speaking, are truly dehumanizing – the circumstances are precisely those resulting from a deliberate policy of dehumanization. Yet Eichmann immerses himself in preserving an island of (shared, intact) humanity in a sea of inhumanity. That he does so, in spite of everything that points in the opposite direction, attests to his ‘deep’ humanity. It seems to me that he would like others to see him in this way. Part of the complexity of the scene lies in the way in which Eichmann reverses the objective relationship between the human and the inhuman. As we saw, everything in the situation that serves as a reminder of the objective, factual inhumanity of the situation – more to the point, Storfer’s situation (lest we repeat an element of Eichmann’s denial) – is being bracketed. It simply does not exist and, if it still makes itself felt, there is nothing to be done about it. In short, the point of the scene,

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humanly and morally, is subject to derealization on Eichmann’s part. Conversely, everything in the encounter that serves to highlight its ‘human’ qualities is exaggerated to impress its defining mark on the scene as such, in its entirety, as if exhausting its real nature: seeing Storfer in Auschwitz is ‘really’ about meeting with an old friend; the message of the episode is that of proving a rare personal ability to preserve one’s humanity, one’s decency as a moral person, caring for others (be it, unfortunately, in the most ‘difficult’ of circumstances); but then again, the more regrettable the given circumstances, the more impressive the human and moral stance of the persons involved. So this is the notorious Adolf Eichmann – named by many a commentator as the ‘architect of the Final Solution’ – casting himself here, in court, as nothing less than the in-flesh epitomization of human decency. A ridiculous show-off? Plain stupidity? Remoteness from reality? Thoughtlessness? Shrewd play-acting? A cynical and self-conscious attempt to take the court for a ride, to come across as someone simply not to be reconciled with the kind of person implied in the grave charges being brought? It is complex even here. Even if Eichmann was, say, plain stupid, the question is when? Do we mean in the meeting with Storfer, or nearly twenty years later in front of the court in Jerusalem? Or is the stupidity betrayed in his narrative, in the way he presents the story, rather than in the behaviour it sets out to depict? Moreover, is he out to fool others, his audience (first Storfer, later the court), or himself – or both? My impression is that, despite Eichmann’s assurances to the contrary, his ‘human’ concern for Storfer is but a masquerade. He is not really involved with the other; he is only involved with himself. This holds in a twofold sense: in the original scene with Storfer, Eichmann – so my claim has it – is so preoccupied with his self-conceived project of presenting himself as ‘human’, of having his ‘decency’ affirmed by Storfer, that the reality of Storfer’s situation totally escapes his attention; he has no place for it. Put differently, in terms of the concreteness of interpersonal face-toface encounter, once proximity prevails, inviting a negation of the dehumanizing and depersonalizing stance toward the other – this other, a thou – Eichmann the perpetrator goes out of his way to turn himself into a human being too, acting toward the other as if that is all there is to him. The ideologically induced as if of dehumanization and depersonalization – ‘as if’ because the objective truth that the victim is a human being (too) is suppressed by the ideological lie that he is a subhuman – is here, in Eichmann’s performance, substituted by the as if of being the other’s fellow human being, of there existing a symmetry between them, instead

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of the abyss factually brought about by the putting into practice of the ideological axioms in question. Shall we conclude that Eichmann, arguably an ‘other-directed’ individual in Riesman et al.’s sense (1950), is always and everywhere – oblivious, as it were, to the dramatic shift in setting, in audience – out simply to please others, to ‘do well’ in the eyes of those present to form an opinion about him? It is a tempting conclusion, but I think it misses the point, besides being premature; for it directs attention in the wrong direction. Rather, Eichmann strikes me as eager to please himself; eager to act in a manner compatible with the desire to be always able to ‘live in harmony with oneself’, to allude to the Socratic pronouncement of this desire. However, the only possible way for Eichmann to be at peace with himself is by way of boundless self-deception. Eichmann’s failure – to put it in terms of human capabilities – is a failure to relate to others; more specifically, to do so in a fashion admitting the other to prevail over concern with himself. To repeat, far from regarding such a failure as primarily a cognitive one, one attesting to thoughtlessness (Arendt), I interpret it as an emotional failure, in part a widespread generational product of the ‘black pedagogy’ that induced fathers to beat their sons in order to make men of them, in part a product of the Nazi teaching that sensitivity to the suffering of others equals ‘softness’ and is worthy only of contempt, so that feelings arising from empathy become suppressed should they ever be engendered, in oneself as in others. Instead of compassion with the other, with a victim carrying a face and bearing a name, what Eichmann shows is only pity for himself. Irmtrud Wojak puts it damningly in her recent study Eichmanns Memoiren, concluding that, ‘He revelled in self-pity and sentimentality’; till the very end, he maintained that he throughout had acted as an ‘idealist’ (Wojak 2004: 73, 175). In this, Eichmann surely was typical of the ‘heroic realism’ that RSHA chief Heydrich and SS chief Himmler set out to instil in their men, taking pride in seeing themselves as the chosen elite within the elite race. These men, writes historian Ulrich Herbert, are convinced that they act in the name of ‘laws of life’, always doing what is ‘objectively necessary’, and even when the resulting policies are truly horrorful they will be carried out without damage to the ‘human decency’ of the individuals involved. When mass murder is dictated by the ‘higher laws’ cited by the ‘total’ and uncompromising world-view to which the elite of the Nazis adhered, the implication is that murder was committed ‘without the individual persecutors harbouring motives or feelings of a personal, disapproving sort towards the victims’ (Herbert 2001: 319f., 524). Since the killing was said to be dictated by nature itself, as the expression

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of impersonal, suprahuman laws, feelings of hate, say, would be out of place and so illegitimate; they would only confuse the personal with the law-like, a subjective motivation with an objective state of affairs. Accordingly, the task consisted in viewing one’s actions as ‘above’ private motives in general and personal feelings in particular; the pettiness or – precisely – banality of the latter would not be worthy of the task at hand and the stature of the men chosen (and deserving) to fulfil it. Due to its wholly ‘objective’ nature, the undertaking – genocide so as to rid Europe of Jews – called for a wholly ‘objective’ and ‘unbiased’ attitude, corresponding to the impeccable and ‘unselfish’ professionalism required by the personnel on all levels. To betray ‘personal’ feelings would be a source of shame; it would evoke suspicion that one acted for one’s own sake rather than for the higher sake of one’s blood, one’s race, one’s Fatherland – in a word, what was deemed generic and collective as opposed to optional and individual. Does this serve to sum up Eichmann, then? Yes and no. In some respects, Eichmann does seem a case in point, lending flesh to the kind of self-understanding Herbert applies collectively to a whole generation of SS and RSHA top officers – ‘the generation of the unconditional’ for which no limits exist and everything is possible. But some signs of individuality should be allowed for, lest we permit Herbert’s explanation to repeat the individuality-erasing mechanism it so persuasively demonstrates is part and parcel of the Nazi ideology under scrutiny. Recall that Israeli psychiatrists did find Eichmann to be ‘a man obsessed with a dangerous and insatiable urge to kill’, ‘a perverted, sadistic personality’ – a finding Arendt (1965a: 26) mentions only in passing, ill-fitting as it is with her portrait of him as one who was no monster, but ‘merely thoughtless’. My point is that the two descriptions are not be taken to be mutually exclusive: Eichmann did cite ‘higher laws’ and he never stopped practising the jargon of ‘objectivity’; at the same time, he was intensely anti-Semitic, a fanatic persecutor of conviction – U¨berzeugungsta¨ter, not desk-murderer – who devoted his life to the killing of persons for whose plight he never showed the slightest moral concern, let alone empathy-based compassion. I see him as someone who combines the professionalism stressed by Herbert and strongly felt antipathy toward his victims. The fact that he did not admit, let alone put on public display, the latter motivational component but kept insisting on the exclusiveness of the former, must be properly understood: as Eichmann’s attempt – in the Jerusalem courtroom just like in the Berlin headquarters – to strike his audience as a dedicated professional ‘above’ personal motives, as someone unfailingly acting solely for the sake of ‘higher’ ideals.

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The attraction of superfluousness Arendt, Bauman, and many other authors of studies of the Holocaust – and collective evil more generally – have done a good job in directing attention to the twofold character of dehumanization and depersonalization. My complaint, however, is that the latter are too often presented as constituting a reality. It is as if what starts out as an idea is translated into (psycho-socio-political) practice in such a successful manner that the end result is, in fact, a condition where dehumanization dominates completely. In saying this, I particularly have in mind Arendt’s early reflections on evil as ‘radical’ (in The Origins of Totalitarianism), in contrast to her later ones (triggered by the Eichmann trial), where evildoing is theorized in terms of ‘banality’. In her early writings Arendt was looking for something deep down in human beings, in their ‘nature’, that would resist totalitarianism’s claim that ‘everything is possible’, that, ultimately, all human beings are equally superfluous, so that, finally, the organized attempt to ‘eradicate the concept of the human being’ might succeed and get the last word. In Origins, where Arendt was speaking of ‘radical evil’, she struggled with the ‘unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice’. Evil of this unprecedented, truly novel sort is linked by Arendt with the ‘invention of a system in which all men are equally superfluous’. And then she adds: ‘The manipulators of this system believe in their own superfluousness as much as in that of all others, and the totalitarian murderers are all the more dangerous because they do not care if they themselves are alive or dead, if they ever lived or never were born’ (Arendt, quoted in Bernstein 1996: 140). In assuming that most of our actions are of a utilitarian nature and that our evil deeds spring from some exaggeration of self-interest – in short, in holding that ‘the most evil things human beings can do arise from the vice of selfishness’ – the Western tradition of philosophy shows itself fatally ill-prepared to grasp the nature of this novel sort of evil. Even Kant, Arendt found, who made an honest attempt to think radically about evil, based his analysis on the conventional presupposition that there are comprehensible motives that can explain radical evil – specifically, putting selfinterest and self-love above the categorical imperative never to treat others as means only. As Richard Bernstein points out, however, this is precisely the presupposition that Arendt is calling into question (1996: 143; 2002: ch. 8).

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Return to Eichmann’s meeting with Storfer. Is Arendt’s criticism of the traditional approach to evil, viewing it in terms of self-interest going too far, validated here? My answer is neither a plain yes nor a plain no. As we will have ample opportunity to see in more detail in later chapters, I do believe that Arendt hints at an invaluable insight into (certain forms of) evil when she uncouples evildoing from the motive of self-interest (selfishness). Especially in cases of large-scale evil, typically a collective project and targeting another collective, we shall see that the individual perpetrator subscribes to an ideology and a self-understanding where sacrifice – the readiness to abandon self-interest in its prosaic sense – is elevated into the key virtue, purporting to dominate his or her behaviour. On this descriptive and collective level, then, Arendt’s departure from the tradition strikes me as warranted. However, even participants in well-organized collective evil are so many individual human beings. I mean this to remind us that, despite the doubtless novelty of the criminal system in which they operate, and of the crimes they help commit, they are not that special or ‘novel’ considered as human beings. To be sure, the most radical aspect of Arendt’s reflections is her suggestion (never fully elaborated) that superfluousness represents a temptation: it holds the promise of an existence devoid of (enacted) human agency, hence free of the burdens of responsibility and guilt, as well as hurt and loss. This is provocative in that it turns the tables on the conventional view that superfluousness will strike individuals as a threat; as a condition imposed upon them, top-down; as part of a totalitarian horror scenario most, if not all, individuals are expected to fear. As against this, Arendt emphasizes the sheer attraction becoming superfluous – faceless, disposable, exchangeable, initiating nothing in the world, leaving nothing behind – holds for many people in modern mass society. Indeed, this is a persuasive theme throughout Arendt’s writings, and it should not be brushed aside by labelling it elitist. Is Eichmann a case in point? In some ways, yes. He is eager to hide behind the system, the bureaucracy, his superiors. But on the other hand, he is – remains – human, all-too-human. And this is where the proposed alternatives ‘banality’ and ‘radicalness’ enter again. When Arendt listed the evil motives of self-interest, she included greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice. I find that several of these are clearly present in Eichmann’s behaviour toward Storfer. Moreover, these motives are not ‘banal’ in Arendt’s sense of the term. So, when Arendt writes that ‘Except from an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all’, thereby

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intending to capture the ‘banality’ of evil exemplified by Eichmann, I think she is mistaken. She makes Eichmann too one-dimensional; she flattens his personality and his mentality. He clearly acted cowardly when meeting one of his victims face-to-face. He clearly felt, and was driven by, a lust for power, as demonstrated in his endeavour to go beyond the call of duty; to overdo it so as to excel all the more visibly – not only in the eyes of his superiors, but (perhaps primarily) in his own. He was clearly vain and conceited, a man desperate to be praised. And I suspect – last but not least – that he was driven by resentment, and even deeper down by envy. This is a motive nowhere pondered by Arendt, who thereby ignores what I consider a major motivational force in many instances of evildoing (I return to envy in later chapters). In sum, therefore, I find that selfishness (or self-interest, though not identical), in some undeniable, appropriate sense of the term as it is commonly understood, did surface in Eichmann – the more so, the more scrupulously we examine a single episode, such as the one with Storfer. This is not to say that I take this one episode to demonstrate the whole truth about Eichmann. I am not even making the claim that the not-sobanal, selfishness-related motives and traits surfacing here total up to an adequate explanation of Eichmann’s participation in evildoing (the criteria for ever attaining such an explanation of anybody’s behaviour being an extremely complex philosophical issue). What I am suggesting, however, and indeed in disagreement with Arendt’s talk about the ‘banality’ of evil she meant to see in Eichmann, is that the link between selfishness and evildoing is rarely completely abolished (absent) – provided one engages in depth with concrete individual cases. In my view this has to do with collective evil never becoming completely systemic, i.e. a perfectly anonymous, depersonalized undertaking on the part of the perpetrators. The question forcing itself upon us, in view of my analysis of Eichmann, is this: If there is (still, some) selfishness here, is it the selfishness of a strong or a weak will? The answer in keeping with my above analysis is that it is the selfishness (disguised, to be sure, as a kind of altruism – ‘heroic realism’ – on behalf of his people) of a weak self: a precarious and insecure one, clinging to certainty, safety, and power as soon as the latter are being promised by some superior authority (the Fu¨hrer, the Party, the Nation-‘Motherland’). My above interpretation of the Storfer episode goes to show that, when a setting of proximity is allowed to prevail over distantiation, humanity – or at least a flicker of humanity – cuts through: Eichmann proved himself unable to uphold the dehumanization of the victims that his endorsement of the Nazi ideology makes us expect from him. Dehumanization,

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precisely on grounds of its remaining a chosen human (social) undertaking, proves itself precarious, as it were; it transpires here as threatened with breakdown once conditions of proximity prevail. Proximity possesses power to call the bluff of dehumanization, presumably also of similar devices of evildoing. In a word, morality – the virtues of responsibility and concern that go with it – is seen to side with proximity. They are two sides of the same coin – precisely as asserted by Bauman, following Levinas’ ethics. But are they? Is this the lesson of the Storfer episode – that the nowfamiliar thesis of the interconnection between morality/responsibility and proximity is borne out? If so, it would seem we have learned nothing that we did not know at the outset. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth about what has been demonstrated. The most we can say is that, once proximity prevailed and he found himself face-to-face with an individual victim, a thou, Eichmann sensed a kind of constraint, a kind of expectation coming at him from the situation per se, following the inherent logic of such situations – face-toface ones, proximity ones – to the effect that gestures of shared humanity were called for. And Eichmann, ever the obedient one, obeyed. He acted according to expectations. Now, concomitant with this, this thesis holds, is a moral stance: with proximity in place, the stance taken by the persons involved will be an ethical one, based on the enactment of responsibility and concern. But, needless to say by now, on Eichmann’s part it was all fake. He tried to face up to the humanity and the concern that the situation, i.e. the dyad, expected from him – only he failed. His other-concern is but facade; behind it there is only self-concern to be found. Thus Eichmann’s encounter with Storfer reinforces a point made when discussing the Socratic model of conscience that Arendt subscribes to: as against this model’s privileging of the subject’s relationship with himself, with retaining a sense of inner balance, of being at one with oneself, we see that Eichmann’s moral failure is instead to be located in his relations-withothers; his preoccupation with his self-image so dominates his perception and judgment as to exclude genuine concern for the concrete other, for Storfer. Consequently, Storfer is of no interest to Eichmann qua Storfer; talking to (rather than with) Storfer provides Eichmann with just another opportunity to keep on being busy impressing himself. Instead of any genuine other-directed feelings, then, there is only sentimentality, and if there is pity, only self-pity (what Sereny (1974) found in Franz Stangl and what Herbert (2001) found in Werner Best). Although I am not committed to a ‘one size fits all’ theory about evildoers – I insist they come

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in many kinds, forming a heterogeneous group and acting from different motives – a common finding when studying the biographies of prominent Nazi criminals is that concern with the other is totally eclipsed by concern with self – a self, paradoxically, priding itself not on autonomy or genuine ego-strength but on what psychologists would label ego-weakness; that is, working on oneself to become more and more like a mere instrument in the service of ends set by others, whereby these others and these ends are viewed, significantly, as fit not for the large majority of humankind but for the privileged elite one sees oneself as belonging to. But then again, even working on oneself with the purported objective of rendering this self a radically non-autonomous one remains a sort of activity, presupposing and reflecting on a minimal sense of agency even in the very act of seeking to deny that there is (still) such a thing. Put in Sartrean terms, complete dehumanization of oneself is an impossible and futile project, one undertaken in bad faith: it cannot but presuppose what it tries to deny. This is a main reason why I consider it unsound to take dehumanization at face value as an accomplished reality. Instead of looking upon dehumanization as a finished product or end-state, we need to inquire into its dynamics – psychological, sociological, and moral – as a complex and multi-layered process (I shall return to this important point in later chapters). This goes to show that proximity, at most, invites responsibility and concern with the encountered other. Eichmann’s response is to fake what is expected from him. And as for evil – evil as precluded by proximity, or at least as something more ‘difficult’ to perform, given that proximity defines the context of action? Well, my answer is that Eichmann demonstrated his wickedness in a particularly revealing manner in the encounter with Storfer, in part because his behaviour took place in a setting of proximity. Responsibility in a sense worthy of the name would mean for Eichmann to express his part in (his responsibility for) bringing about the very circumstances which define his ‘friend’s’ plight – in killing him, bluntly put. He instead opts for the opposite: in indicating that they are ‘in it together’, he is staging a symmetry and solidarity where there is no such thing. The meeting with a direct victim of his policies could have been seized upon as a ‘moment of truth’. Dodging that challenge, shunning every sign that he is a perpetrator and as such responsible for Storfer’s imminent death, Eichmann turns the scene instead into one shot through with falsity and deceit. In doing so in a type of human situation where morality and other-related pity are in the cards, so to speak, Eichmann allows us a rare glimpse into a profound cruelty. This conclusion is of systematic importance as far as my purpose in subsequent chapters is concerned. We have seen that Bauman works with

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a dichotomy of proximity versus distantiation, and Arendt with one of radical evil versus banality of evil (of depth versus shallowness in evildoers), and, moreover, that both wrestle with the moral requirement of transforming ‘cogs’ back into so many punishable perpetrators – a requirement problematized, we have seen, by the ‘systemic’ (Bauman) or ‘legal’ (Arendt) nature of the crimes in question. In contrast to this, though more as a matter of complementing and enlarging their perspectives than completely departing from them, I propose in what follows to theorize evil by focusing in particular on the self-understanding of evildoers (whereby mechanisms of denial and deception are crucial); on the relationship between an individual perpetrator and an individual victim (hence the lasting importance of the Storfer episode); and on the reasons thereby produced to put into question the pairing of morality (responsibility) with proximity and, correspondingly, the pairing of immorality (evildoing) with distance that we have seen to be so influential in contemporary studies of evil – not least due to Bauman and Levinas, in sociology and in philosophical ethics respectively.

3

The psycho-logic of wanting to hurt others: An assessment of C. Fred Alford’s work on evil

Introduction I now turn to a theoretical approach to evil quite different from those considered so far. In several books, the American philosopher C. Fred Alford engages with the phenomenon of evil. Alford’s contribution makes for a fresh start: by focusing on evildoing as performed in a faceto-face, more or less ‘private’ context, Alford directs attention at the social micro-level on which evil takes place most of the time, being a personal and emotionally charged affair. This micro-oriented approach sharply contrasts with the macro-sociological analysis of organized evil given by Bauman; it also differs from Arendt’s philosophical reflections, centring on the Holocaust and on Eichmann. Alford’s point of departure is not informed by such conspicuous embodiments of evil. Instead, his focus is on evil in its existential dimension, as a theme confronted and (somehow) tackled in every human individual’s life. Sociologically, this makes for a bottom-up approach, in Alford’s case thoroughly informed by psychoanalytic theory, in particular concepts and insights developed by Melanie Klein. I shall argue that this type of approach partly puts into question and partly supplements those of Bauman and Arendt. My distinction between individual and collective evil will be theorized in a novel manner. Though interesting in its own right, Alford’s largely Klein-inspired take on the relationship between individual and group will be of special usefulness when we turn to the evildoing characteristic of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the next two chapters. In his book What Evil Means to Us, Alford invites his readers to take a fresh look at Milgram’s famous experiment. To recall, the ‘teachers’ were instructed to deliver electrical shocks to a ‘learner’ (actually a confederate of Milgram’s) when he failed to memorize word pairs. Contrary to all 104

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predictions, it turned out that as many as 62 per cent of the teachers delivered the full battery of shocks. Alford points out that Milgram, shocked by his findings, never seriously considered the possibility that the subjects (‘teachers’) might have enjoyed shocking the victim; neither, he adds, do the contributors to a 1995 edition of the Journal of Social Issues devoted to assessing the famous study more than three decades after Milgram conducted it. In other words, there is a persistent consensus that the experiment ‘has nothing to do with sadism and everything with obedience’. What is displayed, then, is obedience of a sort teaching us a terrifying lesson about man’s ‘potential for slavish groupishness’ (Alford 1997a: 26). Alford begs to differ. Take a second look at the film of the experiment, and you will be struck by something else – ‘the grotesque nervous laughter, the giggling fits at the shock generator’ – whereupon Alford launches the following interpretation: ‘What if these men are giggling in embarrassed pleasure at being given permission to inflict pain and suffering on an innocent and vulnerable man? Milgram rejects this interpretation but offers no reason’ (p. 26). Alford means to state the big unsaid in Milgram’s most shocking finding: what is unsaid by those actually delivering the severe shocks, thus knowingly causing great pain in another person; and what is unsaid, nearly forty years on, by the thousands of psychologists and social scientists who have commented upon the study. It is the suggestion that ‘what the teachers really want, what they long for, what satisfies, is permission to hurt someone’. Alford explains: Permission does not just mean someone’s saying, ‘Go ahead. It’s okay.’ The teachers have a conscience; they know it is not. They have to be virtually forced to do it, compelled by authority. But not really. The structure of the Milgram experiment protects them from knowledge of their own sadism, while allowing them to express it . . . It is a situation (actually a defense) reinforced by the assertion of the experimenter that he will assume all consequences for any harm to the learner, thus helping the teachers deny not only their motivation but also its consequences. In this light we should consider whether much of what passes as the result of leaders’ orders is actually leaders’ granting permission to their followers to do what they want to do anyway but are too guilty and embarrassed to know it. Could it be the psychological function of leaders to provide plausible psychological deniability to their followers, as well as to shelter them from the consequences of their desires? (1997a: 26f.)

Here a number of claims are put forward, some relevant for my own notion of ‘individual evil’, some relevant for ‘collective evil’. Most important is that Alford takes a first, tentative step toward connecting the two, making us recognize how collective evil (evildoing as organized top-down

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and as sanctioned by some authority, be it a person or an institution or the state) is carried out not by bypassing (Bauman), but by exploiting, the motivation that is present in single individuals, present in the sense of resonating with deep existential concerns and conditions lived – and needing to be tackled – by every human being. In flatly contradicting Milgram, the initiator of the still hegemonic understanding of evil, Alford by implication challenges the approach taken by Bauman and Arendt as well, although it will be a task for later sections to explore the exact nature of the disagreement. American sociologist Thomas Cushman formulates the target of Alford’s attack well when he writes that ‘if evil appears at all in mainstream sociological theory, it does so as a ‘‘falling away’’ from the good’. Accordingly, ‘social notions of evil, badness, negativity are explored only as patterned departures from normatively regulated conduct’. For Durkheim, for example, evil is theorized as ‘the absence of the good instead of the presence of something unto itself’ (Cushman 2001: 80f.). Hence, when an agent does something that is clearly bad or harmful to others, the inclination of the social scientist is to interpret the act as a ‘failure’ to do what is good, what is expected, what is socially and morally endorsed. It is never – or very rarely, provided the case is extreme – a matter of looking upon the act as a successful carrying-out of some purpose on the part of the agent – namely, the intention to ‘inflict pain and suffering on someone else’, to recall my definition of evil. I have wanted to set out this larger theoretical background before discussing Alford’s understanding of evil. It is vital to bear in mind the provocation intended by that understanding, and by launching it now. ‘Evil is pleasure in hurting and lack of remorse’ What Alford proposes is that evil be conceived as intimately connected with sadism. Evil in general and sadism in particular are about the relief sought in placing the sense of vulnerability and the fear of dread onto another person, so as to be rid of it and be able to control it ‘out there’, in the other; it is the attempt to make external what originates as internal. Psychological relief from existential burden is what is being sought. Alford observes that ‘what distinguishes sadism from aggression is not the sexualization of domination and destruction but the sadist’s intense identification with his victim’. Sadism is the joy of avoiding victimhood, though this is putting it too passively, missing out on the sheer activity, or initiative, at work. Better to say that ‘sadism is the joy of having taken control of the experience of victimhood by inflicting it upon another’

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(1997a: 27f.). Sadism is about seeking relief from the existentially given condition that as a human person one is vulnerable, exposed to pain, suffering, loss, anxiety, dread. Relief is sought actively; rather than a mere mental matter of denial, of ‘hiding’ this condition from oneself, unwanted as it is, intolerable as it is found, one tries to overcome it by projecting it onto another, by placing it there as something thing-like, disposable and transportable, and, having placed it there, subjecting it to control, manipulating it according to one’s wishes and as proof of one’s vitality, of one’s capacity to do something onto others. Thus placed onto another, what is intolerable in life is got rid of. The path upon which sadism – the pleasure felt when causing another’s pain – takes the agent is one ultimately ending in murder. The killing of another person is the logical end point of the undertaking. This idea is known from the works of Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, and Elias Canetti. It is that man (and the examples go to show that the male is intended) kills in order to feel alive; in killing, he cheats his own mortality and vulnerability. Ernest Becker explains its intellectual context: In his confrontation of Le Bon and Trotter, the early theorists of ‘mental contagion’ and the ‘herd mind’, Freud asked the question, Why the contagion from the herd? And he found the motive in the person and not in the character of the herd . . . Freud had explained how the mob identifies with the leader. But beyond that we also saw that man brings his motives in with him when he identifies with power figures. He is suggestible and submissive because he is waiting for the magical helper. He gives in to the magic transformation of the group because he wants relief of conflict and guilt. He follows the leader’s initiatory act because he needs priority magic so that he can delight in holy aggression. He moves in to kill the sacrificial scapegoat with the wave of the crowd, not because he is carried along by the wave, but because he likes the psychological barter of another life for his own: ‘You die, not me.’ The motives and the needs are in men and not in situations or surroundings. (Becker 1975: 138f.)

In a later passage in Escape from Evil, Becker continues his argument: ‘It is true that most men will not usually kill unless it is under the banner of some kind of fight against evil; in which case one is tempted, like Koestler, to blame the banner, the propaganda and artificial belief system, and not the men. But banners don’t wrap themselves around men: men invent banners and clutch at them; they hunger for believable words that dress life in convincing meaning’ (1975: 141f.). Becker also comments on Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil: The ease and remoteness of modern killing by bespectacled, colorless men seem to make it a disinterested bureaucratic matter, but evil is not as banal as Arendt

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claimed: evil rests on the passionate person motive to perpetuate oneself, and for each individual this is literally a life-and-death matter for which any sacrifice is not too great, provided it is the sacrifice of someone else and provided that the leader of the group approve of it. (1975: 122)

The intellectual debt of Becker’s understanding of evil is to Otto Rank and Elias Canetti. Rank observed that ‘the death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed’ (Rank, quoted in Becker 1975: 108). Taking his lead from Rank, Becker states that ‘all wars are conducted as ‘‘holy’’ wars and that all ideology is about one’s qualification for eternity’; and ‘so are all disputes about who really is dirty’; ‘the target of one’s righteous hatred is always called ‘‘dirt’’’ (p. 108). From Canetti, Becker appropriates the view that ‘what each person wants is to be a survivor, to cheat death and to remain standing no matter how many others have fallen around him’ (p. 132). In his Crowds and Power, Canetti puts it as follows: Fortunate and favoured, the survivor stands in the midst of the fallen. For him there is one tremendous fact; while countless others have died, many of them his comrades, he is still alive. The dead lie helpless; he stands upright amongst them, and it is as though the battle had been fought in order for him to survive it . . . All man’s designs on immortality contain something of this design for survival. He does not only want to exist for always, but to exist when others are no longer there. (Canetti 1973: 265f.)

As we gather from these quotations, opposed to the paradigm that sees evil as a situational attribute (launched in Milgram’s study, and endorsed by Bauman), there is a tradition (in a very loose sense) that theorizes evil as a profoundly existential issue. Although Alford can hardly be said to embrace the sweeping claims about evil put forward by Ernest Becker, he explicitly positions himself in the same camp. A difference between Alford and Becker is the former’s strong emphasis on dread, viewed by Alford as rooted more in fear of life than in fear of death. Moreover, Alford is not primarily concerned with killing but with ‘the thousand ways evil aims to sacrifice the soul of another’ (Alford 1997a: 10). If one is struck by the reference to the World War I Fronterlebnis conveyed in the image of the survivor in the quote from Canetti, inviting comparison with authors such as Ernst Ju¨nger, who romanticizes the one who remains alive when all others (comrades and foes alike, since existentially speaking the distinction ceases to matter) lie dead around one, it must be said that Alford is far from such valorizing of the experience of killing. Essentially, what Alford retains from this position is the individual-oriented, existential approach to evil,

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inviting his readers to scenes where evil is something experiential: not a ‘problem’ for thinking, for judgment, to clarify and resolve, but evil understood as pointing to, even constituting a dimension of experience, of our being-in-the-world that is so integral to our existence as to help define us. It is not that evil is what we (all) are; it is not a matter of being evil, in the sense of actually carrying out acts that intentionally make others suffer. Rather, on the existential and experiential level intended, the thesis is that to be a human being entails being in a relationship with evil: with the impulse to hurt others, with thoughts, images, and fantasies about what such hurting would mean in terms of attaining relief from the burden of being human and so vulnerable. Before asking whether such relief can be attained, let us dwell on the basic urge to find it, in order to understand why it arises in the first place. Above I mentioned the role of projection in sadism the way Alford understands it. Evil has to do with the attempt on the part of an individual to ‘flee his doom’, his sense of dread, his anxiety over being exposed to hurt, by way of targeting another individual so as to make him or her suffer. It is a matter of doing unto another what one is most afraid of experiencing oneself. In that sense the impulse to do evil is devoid of innocence: it is an act that knows what it is doing. This is not simply to maintain the act’s quality as intentional, as deliberate. More strongly, it is to assert that the actor devotes his entire energies to inflicting pain upon the other. And this fits well with the common view of the sadist: in making another person suffer, he applies his human understanding as someone who knows what pain is, who knows what pains the most, to the ‘object’ – i.e. other person – at hand, viewing the sweat, screams, and gestures there displayed as so many proofs that this knowledge is now exploited to maximum effect. The crucial point here is that the ‘object’ of evil – evil conceived psychologically as the attempt to get relief from vulnerability-induced dread by placing vulnerability to suffering in another and so outside of oneself – is, and must be, another human being. The humanity shared with the targeted object is recognized throughout. Only such objects as are (co-) subjects will do. Why emphasize this? Because influential theoretical discussions of evil tend to suggest that dehumanization of the victim is a necessary condition of evildoing, albeit rarely a sufficient one. The very psycho-logic of performing evil is held to be intimately connected with factors which render the victim less-than-human; and this diminished – or outright denied – moral standing of the victim is said to be crucial to explaining that evildoing could take place: it was possible for the agent to do what he did ‘because’ he had come to regard the victim as not a

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member of a shared humanity, as unlike himself with respect to human and moral standing. On my reading, the existential dimension to Alford’s notion of evil is closely connected with his claim that it is precisely the fact the sought-out victim is recognized as fully human in all relevant existential and experiential respects of being a human being (too) that marks the suitability of the other as the chosen target of the relief-seeking project that evildoing basically is. If the chosen target were not the kind of object in the world that is exposed to affliction, hurt, suffering, and so to fearing all of these, then it would be wholly unfit to meet any desire to achieve relief from the burdens following from this fact. This is a provocative claim, rich in both theoretical and empirical implications. Let me try to explain what is involved here in several steps. Alford’s book What Evil Means to Us is partly based on empirical investigations. Alford conducted interviews on the topic of evil with a number of inmates in an American prison. These would be persons who were convicted for murder, rape, and other severe atrocities. In a manner of speaking typical for the group as a whole, Matt C., for instance, said, ‘I felt evil.’ Does this mean that he felt that he was evil, or that he felt that evil was around him? This question, so pertinent to the academic, makes no sense to Matt. His experience, Alford suggests, was ‘prior to such normal, wide-awake distinctions as subject and object, man and world. It is an experience that will be called precategorical, prior to the categories by which we normally know the world’ (1997a: 10f.). The experience of dread, which so many of the inmates Alford interviewed would return to, stems from what psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden calls the ‘formless dread’ of our presymbolic, preverbal experience: the autistic-contiguous position, the fear that the self is dissolving, that there are no boundaries, no solid demarcation, by which ‘self’ and ‘world’, ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, ‘feelings’ and ‘reality’ would be robustly separated from each other. Doing evil is about inflicting this dread – springing from formlessness, from being caught up in the experiential mode that suffering such formlessness assumes – on others. But it is not only that. Doing evil, says Alford, is also ‘an attempt to shortcut our access to the autistic-contiguous position, a dimension of experience that is a source not only of dread but also a source of vitality and meaning in life. In doing evil, the evildoer seeks vitalizing contact with the autistic-contiguous dimension of experience while avoiding its price, an awareness of human pain, vulnerability, and death’ (p. 9f.). If evil is a project, can it succeed? Alford’s answer is categorical: evil is not something that sometimes succeeds, sometimes fails. No, it fails.

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Period. Why? Because evil is cheating. It is an attempt to have one’s cake and eat it too. Fundamentally, evil is cheating because it involves the agent in an attempt to retain life qua vitality while denying life qua mortality – namely, by seeking to absolutize the former so as to cancel out the latter. The truth thus denied is that as humans we are both: vitality and mortality. These are the basic conditions that define us, ineluctably so. Since we cannot get rid of this state of affairs, what we can – and should do – is to try to live with it, to cope with it without engaging in evil. Alford’s book reads like so many variations on this theme. He mentions the fascination shown for knives and razor blades by many of the prisoners he interviewed. He uses this to liken evil to cutting, remarking that evil is a version of cutting: ‘In evil we cut another rather than ourselves. We may do it literally or figuratively, as in a cutting remark, but the goal is the same: to implant our dread within another, and so define its boundaries, its limits, containing the uncontainable in the form of another so we might live’ (p. 101). ‘. . . so we might live’. Exactly. At its core, evil is about keeping the positive in life – in a word, our vitality and everything that flows from it – by means of putting it to use in such a manner as to tackle the negative in life by transferring it onto another, so as to deposit it there and thus be rid of it. Only this ‘thus’ is false; it is a flawed inference or, less logically and more existentially put, a self-deception on the part of the agent undertaking the project. It is not only that we, as agents here, presuppose the very thing we wish to deny in the very act of denying it; it is also that we reify, render thing-like and eminently physical – hence transportable, mobile, removable – something not possessing that quality at all because psychic and therefore open only to symbolic transfer or trafficking. Since evil springs from dread, and dread springs from our vulnerability and mortality, our anxiety over being such radically unwelcome and discomforting conditions, evil cannot be tackled by means of excommunication but only by symbolic communication. This leaves two alternatives for trying to tackle the dread in question. Evil occurs – or, rather, is enacted (stressing the active over the passive, the deliberate over the coerced) – when one alternative is pursued at the expense of the other. In real life, of course, actions never conform to the purity of such theoretical demarcations. But the point remains. A person who tries to get rid of the sources of existential discomfort by placing them in another person is one who attempts to transform the physical separation between himself and his victim into a psychic one – now that I have seen to it that all you feel is pain, all you are is suffering, I myself am (no longer, or – anyway – right now, as long as I make this last) nothing of

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the sort: by forcing you to be A, I liberate myself from everything to do with being A; that is, I effectively, psychically, make myself not-A. You are the one who suffers, who has the origin of mortality in you; you are the very embodiment of vulnerability to suffering. By stark contrast, I, being the one who makes you suffer, exhibit my vitality, my capacity to negate mortality: me subject, you object; me alive, you sensing life dwindle; me controlling the whole process, you being controlled by it to the point of losing control over yourself altogether: you eventually merge with your pain, your body-in-pain, whereas I am wholly mind over body, activity over passivity, life over death – to recall Alford’s debt to Becker, Rank, and Canetti. However, and importantly, Alford goes beyond this perspective. He downplays the boundary-drawing between self and other, making it appear less real, even less a desired outcome. Alford takes this step when he emphasizes that the sadism he speaks of is best understood as sadomasochism, since identification with the victim is so central to the act of hurting as to be pointless without it. He explains: ‘Imposing one’s pain on another so as to control it there is the flip side of embracing one’s suffering, making it grand and glorious so as to master it. ‘‘Flip side’’, because one flips over to become the other so readily, the reason analysts call it sadomasochism’ (p. 127). The logic of sadomasochism is such that idealization of one’s own suffering translates into the idealization of inflicting suffering on others. There is an obsession with control of suffering, with its locus alternating between self and other and back again; the proof of control lies in the locus of suffering. For the sadist, there is only this absolute either–or: either I bear the suffering myself, or I force you to bear it ‘for me’, in my place. The premise is that all pain that I do not inflict upon others I am doomed to carry myself. Readers familiar with Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom will recognize many of Alford’s claims, though Fromm is not referred to. Discussing sadism and masochism, Fromm argues that ‘both tendencies are the outcomes of one basic need, springing from the inability to bear the isolation and weakness of one’s own self’. Accordingly, ‘the sadistic person needs his object just as much as the masochistic one needs his. Only instead of seeking security by being swallowed, he gains it by swallowing somebody else’; both are instances of an unconscious longing for symbiosis. However, Fromm’s (1960: 136, 131) central thesis – that sadistic and masochistic strivings have one aim: ‘to get rid of the individual self, to lose oneself; to get rid of the burden of freedom’ – on my reading marks an important difference: whereas Fromm identifies the ‘unbearable’ condition of individual freedom as the deepest source from

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which the urge to hurt (and totally control) others stems, Alford points to the less ‘moral’ condition arising from our exposedness to pain (in a rich psychological sense). If evil is cheating, if one can never successfully eradicate the mortality and vulnerability that one is, by way of placing and manipulating these features in others, what is the cost? The cost, Alford states philosophically, is ‘life itself’. It means to try, deceptively, to rid oneself of a dimension of human existence that in fact is not open to removal; and the more one tries to deny the reality of what is found intolerable, the greater the vengeance with which it will return; and it does so with all the pent-up force of the repressed (to allude to Freud’s remark about the unconscious). The cost of engaging in evil as a method for coming to terms with being human, then, is to be trapped in splitting. It is to be committed to the belief that the only way I can handle my pain is by causing pain to another so that pain becomes exclusively an attribute of you. It is to engage in a zero-sum-game: the more you experience of what I find intolerable, the less of it I will have to bear myself. ‘Bear’ is an apt word; it metaphorically catches the overwhelmingly bodily concrete fashion in which evil is conceived by persons who seek to get rid of pain by producing it in others. The freedom enjoyed by way of condemning the other to suffering, hence to unfreedom, is the freedom achieved by someone who believes himself ‘above’ the bodily predicament. It is as if this person says to his victim: you are your body now. You are ‘heavy’ because I have forced you to carry my pain, to physically merge with it, to be overburdened by it and so brought to stumble and fall under the burden I have laid on you. Since I am not you, and you are wholly body, wholly susceptibility to suffering, I am not body, nor am I constrained by anything bodily, by anything limiting my powers. In putting it like this, I anticipate themes to come: narcissism of a primitive kind, and the fantasy of omnipotence that goes with it; the fantasy of having the power and the right to manipulate any object (including human subjects) as if they were only there to conform to one’s narcissistic aims. Klein’s positions of experience But what about the other path to be taken in order to deal with existential conditions found intolerable? Since Alford argues that the bodily concrete fashion of tackling existential pain (transferring it onto another so as to get rid of it) is what is behind much evildoing – rather than trying to get rid of one’s freedom, as Fromm argues – it is crucial to see how such pain can be dealt with in an alternative way.

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Discussing evil with the inmates, Alford was soon struck by their symbolic poverty. Most of them seemed to lack words, metaphors, pictures, and stories to communicate their associations – but also, significantly, to allow them to imagine evil (both causing it and suffering it), in their own minds, as part of their communication with themselves. It is tempting to comment that these are persons who do their evil, they don’t just fancy it, fantasize its being done. Alford seizes upon this to launch his central thesis that ‘the ability to imagine evil, giving it symbolic form, is an alternative to doing it’ (1997a: 12). If the impulse to do evil is the impulse to inflict our dread on others rather than to know it in ourselves, and if this impulse as such cannot be eliminated (it is bound to arise anew), then the crucial issue becomes: How can we live with it? Alford’s answer is that we can live with it by giving it symbolic form. The inmates he interviewed were badly lacking in the abilities to let their dread assume symbolic form; their capacity to symbolize is restricted to the body, their crime – resorting to violence – is a physical acting-out of their dread. In Alford’s opinion, ‘if we can learn to express our evil more abstractly, in stories and pictures, we shall be less likely to do it. It is the task of culture to provide symbolic forms by which we may contain and express our evil in ways that do not inflict it on others’ (p. 12). Thomas Ogden’s autistic-contiguous position is employed by Alford to clarify his thesis. This position is a presymbolic state; in it, bodily experience takes the place of symbols. The language of the autistic-contiguous position is mimesis, ‘living out one’s ineffable experiences in and on the body of another’. For lack of symbolic abilities – and available cultural resources – to give form to what is sensed as formless, as the loss of context, meaning, and containment, the anxiety springing from the autistic-contiguous state is sought overcome by forcing form onto the world, onto others: in directing the desire to erect boundaries where none are felt, or are felt as ‘real’, as solid, as possessing facticity, the body of the other appears to allow a visible, touchable, and so undeniable point of fixation – the more eminently physical the better, because less evasive. The anxiety in question is expressed by Ogden as ‘a feeling of entrapment in a world of sensation that is almost completely unmediated and undefined by symbols’; it consists of ‘an unspeakable terror of the dissolution of boundedness resulting in feelings of leaking, falling, or dissolving into endless, shapeless space’ (Ogden 1989: 80, 81). The point is not that the autistic-contiguous position is all bad, something to be left behind once and for all. It is misunderstood if seen as pathological. ‘Position’ must be understood the way Melanie Klein did. Unlike sequential stages of development, marking the journey from a

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primitive beginning of maturity, the positions Klein (and, following her, Ogden and Alford) speaks of are positions of experience; as such they are never outgrown, and so the events characterized by a position may be contemporaneous with those associated with other positions. What is rightly considered a problem, then, in terms of psychopathology and of propensity for evildoing, is the collapse of positions, whereby one position dominates all the others. Ogden’s autistic-contiguous position is a third position, supplementing the two famously set out in Klein’s writings, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. To allow us to appreciate the great importance of Klein’s positions for Alford’s theory about evil – which, as we shall see, is also a theory of culture – it is useful to present them in some detail (cf. Alford 1988: 29ff.). The paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by splitting, projection, and introjection. These are the first defence mechanisms employed by the infant. Rejecting Freud’s view that the ego is a later outgrowth of the id, Klein asserts that the ego is present at birth. However, the nascent ego is terribly weak and unintegrated; it easily fragments and disintegrates through anxiety. To Klein, fear of disintegration is the deepest human fear, staying with us all our lives. Klein holds that the infant experiences a vast conflict between its life and death drives from the beginning of life. A central theme is how the infant is to cope with the anxiety generated by its own aggression. It does so by splitting: the world is split into what Klein terms the good breast and the bad breast. To lessen anxiety and to stabilize itself as an entity not risking dissolution, the infantile ego seeks to introject and identify with the good breast (good object), while keeping the devouring persecuting bad objects at bay. This allows the good breast to become the core of the ego: the good object is felt to be whole and intact, while the bad object is perceived as fragmented. However, once the good object is introjected, anxiety arises that persecutors will destroy it and thereby undermine the achieved, yet precarious sense of wholeness and permanence of the ego. Important for my purposes is Klein’s claim that everything perceived to threaten the ego and the goodness with which it has started to identify is taken to come from without. In a word, aggression and persecution, everything that would jeopardize wholeness and goodness, is held to be external to the ego, thus denying the intrapsychic origins of aggression altogether. By way of what Klein calls projective identification, the bad breast is experienced as not merely withholding what is precious for the infant, what it in fact depends upon for its very existence; it is also experienced as a breast that bites, penetrates, and soils the infant.

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Denying that anything bad stems from oneself, from within, the infant projects onto the bad breast not only its rage but also those bodily parts (i.e. parts of the ego) capable of expressing aggression. There are three aspects to projective identification: first, one makes the other a holder, or container, of parts of ourselves; second, one cannot project impulses without projecting parts of the ego, in the strong invading sense of forcing parts of the ego into the other in order to take over its contents or to control it; and third, impulses do not just vanish when projected – they go into the object (the other), and they distort the perception of the object (Hinshelwood 1989: 182; Alford 1989: 30f.). Though terrifying, the paranoidschizoid position is a necessary developmental stage, one the person needs to be in contact with throughout his or her life. However, it must be checked by another position of experience. The depressive position commences when the infant realizes that the good and the bad breast in fact are one: they belong to an integrated object, its mother. It becomes clear to the infant that it has engaged in projection when it sensed that everything aggressive and bad threatening its wholeness and goodness was being directed at it from without, from some source wholly external to it. Recognizing that such impulses stem from within itself fills the infant with guilt at having placed them in an outside object – in fact, the very object that is the source of goodness, providing what the infant crucially depends on for its survival, psychically no less than physically. Realizing this, the infant not only regrets and feels guilty about its capacity for aggression; it also fears it, precisely because it stems from within. On the other hand, feelings of loss also emerge, fed by the recognition that the source of goodness is outside the infant’s self and so beyond its craving for omnipotent control. The depressive position, then, is about lost illusions. It facilitates the working through of guilt and loss. Crucially, it gives rise to the wish to make reparation to the object, to make it whole again, after having murderously destroyed it in fantasy a thousand times. The depressive position is the path to wholeness, the wholeness of oneself and the wholeness of others, and this in two crucial respects: the infant now recognizes that, omipotence being an illusion, a mere fantasy, one bringing much destruction at that, it is in fact separate from all other objects. Correspondingly, other objects (mother, father) are entities in their own right, not only existing independently from the infant but possessing desires, thoughts, feelings all their own, however out of tune they occasionally might be in light of the infant’s needs. The second, strongly related respect in which wholeness is achieved here is that it is seen to include both what is good and what is bad: to be a separate, independent

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entity in the world is to contain within oneself the ability to give and to do good onto others as well as the ability to withhold the good and to do bad onto others; this both–and, replacing the either–or, black-and-white, allor-nothing of the paranoid-schizoid position, goes for oneself as well as for others. Such advanced, twofold recognition presupposes a relatively integrated ego; and, while Klein is criticized by many for positing it much too early in life (at three months of age), it is readily agreed that it is a lifelong process. The persistence of the positions, we recall, is precisely a major claim of hers. I find it worthwhile to dwell upon some implications of Klein’s theory not elaborated by Alford. If we inquire about the conditions necessary to foster the capacity to feel guilt for one’s acts, an important condition is the individual’s readiness to acknowledge his or her own aggression. The ability to concede the existence of aggressive urges and to relate to their manifestation – in oneself as well as in others – as representing an undeniable part of human life is vital to the development of moral-emotional capacities. Following developmental psychology in general and object relations theory (Klein, Fairbairn, Winnicott, Kohut) in particular, the decisive context for acquiring such capacities is the interaction between the infant (child) and its most significant others (mother, father). On this relational view of how moral capacities are being developed – namely, by way of interaction, and as heavily influenced (coloured) by the specific psychic-emotional quality of that interaction – the empathic caregiver is not only a person who displays recognition of the child by giving it love and affection, but the fully empathic person is also a person who readily acknowledges, as opposed to denies (or ignores), the child’s aggressive impulses as part of its (as well as one’s own) psychic-emotional repertoire. The caregiver’s capacity for empathy is thus required to direct itself to the child, not only as someone capable of loving but also as someone capable of hating, of wishing to hurt and destroy. If the existence of such aggression is disallowed, if it is invariably met with all-out disapproval and so thoroughly repressed in the child (conforming to the message conveyed to it that aggression is unwanted and forbidden), this child is likely to grow up with a diminished ability to face and come to grips with outbursts of hatred, rage, and cruelty. Having been met with what is at best a selective, because aggression-tabooing, empathy in its human environment, such a child will perceive him- or herself as having to suppress, hide, and censor the entire not-loving, badness-betraying part of his or her psychic and affective experience, including as it does fantasies as well as actual feelings.

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The self-directed acknowledgement of aggression therefore needs to be supported by close others’ recognition of it in its outward-directed form. The child who experiences being left alone by mother, and who is forced to face the painful fact that it is not the sole focus of mother’s attention, is shattered by separation anxiety. Rage and jealousy, even hatred, are the child’s natural reaction to being abandoned. However, if mother meets these negative feelings in the child, if she addresses their reality (‘OK, I understand that’s how you feel about my leaving you alone’) and confirms their experiential validity (‘Yes, I see that you regard me as having done you very bad, as having been really cruel to you’), the child is permitted to experience that it is loved and cared for even though it may feel – and openly express – hatred. Having communicated this, mother (of course) needs to go on to explain to the child that, although the feelings expressed are understandable, given the situation in which they arose, to act on them so as to physically hurt their human object is not allowed; the demarcation between thinking and feeling ‘bad’ on the one hand and physically doing it on the other must be clearly communicated. This is a truly precious experience. It allows the destructive impulses to appear less threatening; it helps to show that such impulses are ‘possible to live with’, that they can be handled, even forgiven, and thus do not spell disaster. Expressing pain and bad feelings about someone is not tantamount to destroying the relationship. This is so because the child here experiences that the person – and so also the dyadic relationship – at whom these violent feelings are directed in fact survives them (Winnicott 1980: 101ff.). We need to investigate the connection between Klein’s position and the propensity to evildoing. Evildoing as such is no topic in Klein. Nonetheless, her theoretical work – based on her clinical work with children as young as two years of age – is tremendously rich in clinical illustrations as well as theoretical reflections on the pivotal role of aggression in human life; and there is a limit to how long we can theorize about evil without taking up the issue of aggression. To say this is not to suggest that evil reduces to aggression, or is exhausted in acts springing from aggression. Yet evildoing and aggression are phenomena possessing some mutual affinity, experientially speaking. It is tempting to say that aggression is part of the ‘unsaid’ in Milgram’s interpretation of his experiments, with Bauman following suit in that in his Holocaust book he mentions aggression only to deny it any significant motivational role. The connection between Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position and evil is plain. In this position, we fear for ourselves and all that is valuable to us at the hands of what is seen as malevolent external persecutors intent on

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destroying us. Klein stresses that these persecutors are our own making, only we are unprepared to admit it; they are our own projections, our rage, jealousy, and envy come back to haunt us, spelling, Alford remarks, the psycho-logic of lex talionis, in which we ‘fear everything we would have done to others’ (Alford 1997a: 40). We realize how readily evil may be enacted out of paranoid-schizoid anxiety: ‘If one experiences the world as the source of perpetual attack, the best defense may be to attack first’ (p. 40). Alford has elucidated this in greater detail in The Self in Social Theory, proclaiming Thomas Hobbes the philosopher who best describes this logic, showing (in Leviathan) how pre-emptive attack is the best defence in the state of nature. In this scenario, the fundamental fear is not fear of death but rather fear of narcissistic injury, nourished as it is by an extreme vulnerability to invasion and appropriation, a vulnerability, moreover, not easily overcome since there is no clear (robust) distinction between self and world; it is as though ‘the whole world were but a mirror of one’s own passions’, the world being perceived only in terms of how it makes us feel (Alford 1991: 94ff.). What is lacking here is a well-established experiencing self capable of mediating symbol and reality. Take this away and the paranoid-schizoid position is characterized by what Klein’s associate Hanna Segal (1986) calls the ‘symbolic equation’, in which symbol and reality are one. Accordingly, the absence of symbolization is not as total here as it is in the autistic-contiguous position theorized by Ogden. The problem is serious enough, however – it is that symbol and reality are likely to become confused. When we move to the depressive position, the connection to evil is no longer direct. Instead it is a matter of attaining a ground enabling one to imagine what is more or less completely – for lack of non-concrete, nonphysical alternatives – left to being enacted in the autistic-contiguous and paranoid-schizoid positions. The depressive position is the realm of genuine symbolization. In it, a robust and integrated self – acknowledging its separateness from other objects (i.e. from other human subjects) as well as its (and others’) containing both good and bad, love and aggression – mediates in non-rigid fashion between symbol and symbolized, recognizing the difference between them. It is only in this position that ambiguity, as well as ambivalence, is tolerated. Perceiving something or someone as ‘absolute evil’, all bad, and the like, then, are not depressive constructs, but paranoid-schizoid ones. Drawing on Klein and Ogden, Alford suggests that ‘evil is a paranoidschizoid attempt to evacuate the formless dread by giving it form via violent intrusion into another, the other’s body giving presymbolic form

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to the dread that is evacuated there’ (1997a: 43). A dense formulation, yet one we should be able to comprehend. Imagining evil as the alternative to doing it: the role of culture I now turn to Alford’s position on how evil can be avoided. Avoiding evil, he says, ‘depends on the ability to symbolize dread’; it presupposes finding a form to express it ‘that does not involve using the body or mind of another in order to contain it’ (1997a: 44). Enter culture. Culture is the sum total of the symbolic resources a given society provides for its individual members to provide them with access to so many ways conducive to giving form to what is otherwise threatening to remain formless, uncontrollable, destructive; what Alford, following Ogden, terms ‘dread’. Culture in the sense intended here is no conceptual innovation on Alford’s part. Its theoretical source is the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. In fact we have been in Winnicottian territory for some time. My sketch above, aiming to stress the irreducibly intersubjective character of the process of coming to acknowledge one’s own aggression as one’s own, and as not tantamount to destruction of all that is good in the world (be it in oneself, be it in others), owes much to Winnicott. ‘Culture’ in Winnicott’s sense comprises experiences that are made in the open space between the individual and his or her environment. For Winnicott, this entails that cultural experience is in direct continuity with the child’s play. Culture is conceived of as a transitional object (a technical term of Winnicott’s); it exists ‘somewhere’ in the domain that stretches out between self and world, belonging to neither. Cultural experience occurs in the medium of symbols. Symbols – pictures, icons, stories; music; paintings; books, films – constitute the cultural reservoir we draw upon whenever we imagine the kind of things that are associated with our strongest fear, anxiety, loss, and the like – be it in ourselves, in others, or in life as such. This is also the very stuff that (sometimes) causes the strongest impulse to do evil, to hurt and cause pain for the sake of that pain or, more indirectly, for the relief doing so is thought (hoped) to bring. Psychoanalyst Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel puts the point like this: ‘Symbol formation derives from the need of the child to protect his object, or parts of the object, from the effects of its attacks’ (quoted in Alford 1997a: 113). As Hanna Segal (1986: 55) observes, symbols are required to move aggression away from the original object, so that feelings of guilt are reduced to the extent that the object escapes the aggression. As human beings, we feel rage, envy, and hate; we experience

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ourselves as insecure and persecuted; and we perceive others as dangerous and as harbouring evil objectives. All of this is part of being a human being. But equally human is the need to find – better, actively, to create, to construct – symbolic substitutes for our fear and rage. This is the partly Kleinian, partly Winnicottian insight that Alford radicalizes when he sets out to show its relevance for evildoing. ‘The ability to imagine evil, to give it symbolic form, is an alternative to doing it’ (1997a: 12), we remember him observing – to which we now add that, as his investigation comes to an end, this ability stands out as our only alternative to doing evil. Rarely has culture been accorded a more crucial role in human life and society. Culture allows us to sense, imagine, enter into non-physical contact with, the basic dimensions to our humanness. Culture offers forms and modes through which we may relate ourselves affirmatively to all aspects (including the darkest and most dangerous) of our repertoire as humans – not in the sense of approving of what certain such aspects may spur us to do, but in the sense of validating the reality quality of even the most discomforting affects and thoughts. In creativity by cultural-symbolic means, ‘a voice is given the creature for its woe’. Thus understood, culture is itself psyche. Through cycles of projective identification with gods and other cultural ideals and artefacts, and their reintrojection in the human projectors, a given culture begins to assume the form of a psyche, albeit frequently in a distorted fashion. This does not mean that the culture lives its own life, that it acts like a group-self. As Alford argues in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy, ‘cultural forces are psychological forces, becoming such via projection and introjection’; ‘culture as psychological defense will reflect, often in exaggerated form, the modal, and generally the most intense, psychic conflicts and defenses of its members’ (1992: 63). But what if culture fails to fulfil this function? The result may be an acting-out of psychic-affective content precluded from symbols-deploying mediation and presentation, that is, from being given shape by nonconcrete means. A typical way in which culture may fail is by offering individuals narratives and images of evil which are too concrete, in the sense that evil is being imitated and thus, as it were, repeated within the symbolic medium, instead of being given an abstract, and so mediated, form. Says Alford: ‘The verbal and imagistic reenactment of evil in all its graphic, bloody detail is not the symbolic containment of evil. It is the imitation of evil, not the same thing’ (1997a: 13). Alford’s Kleinian point is that the richer and more elastic the internal images of destructiveness in an individual, the lesser will be the need to act out destructive impulses against concrete others. Klein’s premise is that knowledge of an outside world

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stems from the symbolic equation of a fantasied internal object with an external one. The symbolic equation originally assumes the form of A (an object in the internal world) ¼ B (an aspect of mother’s body). In the early phases of life, the infant’s relating to the outside world will occur through symbolism in this rigid, mirroring, one-to-one sense. It is by finding a symbolic expression for its unconscious fantasy that the child – and later the adult – learns how relate to and explore the world. As we said, at the start the symbolic relationship is extremely concrete: inner A ¼ outer B. However, gradually, as fantasy is modified by contact with outer reality – by what Winnicott terms use, i.e. trying to destroy, to test the solidity, durability, recalcitrance of what is thereby (namely, by surviving the attempt to destroy it) still intact and thus proved to exist in its own right, as possessing a reality as well as specific properties independently of the child’s fantasies about them – symbolism will become looser, increasingly abstract. Not only an outer B (mother’s body), but also an outer C, D, and so forth (that is, other, additional aspects of the world), are now allowed to represent, in the sense of symbolically standing for, an inner A, and vice versa. The looser the symbolic equation becomes, the more important will be the relation between symbols with respect to the designating (denotative) relationship between symbol and external reality (Klein 1988b: 232; Alford 1989: 146f.). If this sounds too technical, the point worth noting is that, in persons who are lacking in ability – and/or available cultural resources – to engage in Kleinian loose symbolization, the attempt to handle, to give some form to, impulses to destruction will be connected to the body. The body becomes the over-concrete instrument for coping with the need to hurt, bodily (violent) out-acting being the result – be it turned inwards (as in self-infliction) or outwards (targeting others). To sum up, the poorer the inner symbolic universe, the shorter will be the path to bodily action, understood as a physical externalization of impulses for which no room was found in an inner world of imagination. Fantasy and creativity are not only capacities in the single individual, more developed in some than in others. Such abilities evolve thanks to the stimulation provided by the symbols-using culture outside the subject, and which inhabits the space between the individual’s psychic inner life and the external world. Artistic thematizations of evil, of the fears evil partly stems from, partly produces, render more abstract the sense of intolerability at being oneself a source of the impulse to do evil; the impulse becomes easier to live with because the urge to hurt and destroy can be reintrojected in us in a controlled manner in so far as we have allowed it to ‘go visiting’ (Arendt’s phrase) to symbolic objects which qua

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symbolic give form to an urge to destroy that in its origin is raw and formless. Persons with well-developed abilities to use symbolic objects – the objects which constitute the output of culture – so as to play out, modify, and reintroject their destructive impulses, will have little inclination to direct the latter against actually existing objects. The impulse to hurt so as to flee one’s own pain will never cease to be an aspect of the human individual’s psyche. But culture permits this impulse to remain within a world consisting of fantasies and images; to remain a merely imagined potentiality as opposed to an acted-out actuality. Again, Alford’s thesis can be explicated by invoking Klein’s notion of ‘loose’ symbolization. What is vital is that the destructive impulses be uncoupled from concrete, specific persons (objects), situations, and actions; the less concretistic an individual’s handling of its own potential for aggression, the larger – more flexible and elastic – will be the space in which it comes to terms with this potential by means of fantasies and images. Since the impulses do not appear as object-bound (for example, as directly – without any mediation, any detour – tied to mother, to one’s rival, to the ‘Jew’, to the ‘Muslim’, etc.), but instead as open and flexible, as allowing for a manifold of possible objects, whereby these are symbolic rather than physical-real, the impulse as such will no longer trigger fears that the object does not tolerate them or, for that matter, provide grounds for the defence mechanism according to which one’s own aggression invariably is perceived as that of (certain) others, such as is the case in the ‘false projection’ that Horkheimer and Adorno (1979: 201ff.) view as a major psychological force in anti-Semitism. The social relevance of the individual-psychological insights of Klein and Winnicott drawn upon by Alford can now be fully appreciated. Winnicott puts it with characteristic density: ‘If society is threatened, it is so not because of humans’ aggressiveness, but rather because of the suppression of the individuals’ personal aggressiveness’ (quoted in Storr 1995: 23f.). As Anthony Storr explains, it is only when personal aggressiveness is suppressed that it becomes transformed into societal destructiveness and violence. The two main alternatives carry paramount significance with respect to the fate of human society: either the individuals comprising society have developed an ability to recognize that aggression is something that stems from within, having its origin in each and every one of us; or the individuals place aggression as such out in the world, perceiving it as always coming from without and having its origin in others, only to cite this alleged fact to justify one’s own subsequent evil. I mentioned Horkheimer and Adorno’s discussion of anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment. There is a Kleinian flavour to their analysis

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that merits emphasis. Horkheimer and Adorno’s claim is that the renunciation demanded by modern forms of social life may easily become the breeding ground for explosions of rage against anyone in a society who appears – if only in the delusions of the attacker, the projector – to have somehow escaped such demands. To appear as different is to be at risk – this holds for entire groups no less than for the single individual who for some reason stands out from the rest as conspicuous. This risk is made into a lethal one in fascism: ‘Fascism’, they tell us, ‘is also totalitarian in that it seeks to make the rebellion of suppressed nature against domination directly useful to domination’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1979: 185). Evil as envy One phenomenon of paramount importance when discussing the psychological grounds from which evil may spring has yet to be examined: envy. Klein asserts nothing less – envy is the root of all evil. She considers envy as the desire to destroy what is perceived as good. The perceived fact that there exists outside the self something or someone that is good – ultimately, the sheer fact that there is goodness in the world – is what is sought destroyed, because it is experienced as intolerable, as something that should not be allowed to be, let alone flourish and speak its name. In terms of logic, to envy someone implies (or, more accurately, presupposes) a recognition. The experience, however, entails that this other is someone who is something, or has something, or does something, that I myself am not, do not have, or have not done; and since I lack this, I do not want anybody else to have it either. In other words, envy involves the agent in a comparison with something or someone that is perceived as different, with the result that the one who makes the comparison emerges as inferior, as lacking in some quality that is deemed valuable. Envy is rarely admitted – more rarely, for example, than is jealousy. Jealousy by definition involves a triad: aggression is directed against what is perceived as a threat from some other person against one’s relationship with a loved or cherished object (person). By contrast, in envy no triad is necessarily involved; nor is love or some relationship perceived as precious. Envy thematizes the elemental relationship between a person and the world. Initially, envy relies on a positive evaluation of some quality in the other, even though this recognitionbased evaluation is not expressed, but stubbornly denied. The type of evil that most typically springs from envy entails devaluing, denigrating, and ridiculing the features in the other which arouse envy in the first place. This may happen in four ways, progressively serious in moral terms:

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either the features in question are silenced in the sense that they are ignored; or one acts as if they are non-existent; or they are ridiculed, humiliated, or condemned (think of children bullying someone); or they are subject to a more or less overt attempt to remove them, making them disappear altogether, even denying that they ever existed. As a result, the targeted person (or group, as we shall see later) emerges as someone who has nothing positive, admirable, and worthwhile to show for himself or herself, in short, nothing that would merit the affirmation of others and so justify the existence of the otherness in question. On the other hand, envy-based evil that seeks to deny all positive otherness in the other may take the form of mistreatment – initially psychically, later also physically – whose goal it is to bring the other into a condition that is claimed to expose his ‘real’ character. We know that the Nazis spent considerable energy placing the Jews in circumstances designed to force them to regress to a non-human, animal-like level. When SS officers pointed at starved, naked, freezing Jews squatting around at some railway station en route to the death camps, excreting in full view of an audience of people, only to exclaim, as if triumphantly, ‘See, these are not human beings (like us), but animals; it’s clear as the light of day’, this is an instance of evildoing as self-fulfilling prophecy. The aim is to deny everything about the victim that would serve to falsify the ideological assertions about him or her. Every trait, down to the very last remnant, in the victims that would be a reminder, a proof, of what is worthy of recognition in them, such as to highlight their partaking in a common humanity, must be removed. In the end, when the process of humiliation is complete, the ‘Jew’ observed will ‘be’ just like the ideology asserts he is; appearance will correspond to underlying essence. The empirical is forcefully, compulsively brought into unison with the theory; the encountered Jew will be indistinguishable from the constructed stereotype ‘Jew’. By means of physical violence, symbolic violence becomes total and unfalsifiable. Admittedly, I have departed from the way in which Klein (and, following her, Alford) writes about envy. Although the illustration is mine, as is the direct manner in which it connects envy with evildoing, Klein herself minces no words in pronouncing the utter danger envy represents: There are very pertinent psychological reasons why envy ranks among the seven ‘deadly sins’. I would even suggest that it is unconsciously felt to be the greatest sin of all, because it spoils and harms the good object which is the source of life. This view is consistent with the view described by Chaucer in The Parson’s Tale: ‘It is certain that envy is the worst sin there is; for all other sins are sins only against one virtue, whereas envy is against all virtue and against all goodness.’ (Klein 1988a: 189)

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Klein points out that the very envious person is insatiable; ‘he can never be satisfied because his envy stems from within and therefore always finds an object to focus on’ (1988a: 182). It is not that the envious person is lacking in goodness in a moral sense. More to the point, his is a failure to build up a good object in the first place, to develop a sense that there is something within him that matches and so helps protect the goodness encountered in the outside world. As Klein says, ‘full identification with a good object goes with a feeling of the self possessing goodness of its own’ (p. 192). The envious person’s self is grandiose but empty. Hence the radicalness of evil when compared to jealousy and greed. Envy is the desire to destroy goodness for its own sake, because it is good; because, that is, the very existence of goodness outside the self is an intolerable insult, dealing a tremendous narcissistic blow to a self that is haunted by inferiority. Greed, on the other hand, while very dangerous and destructive, too, is an insatiable craving, exceeding what the subject needs and what the object is able and willing to give. Greed is about being the winner and taking it all; it is about ensuring that no one else gets access to the good, that the good is completely had for oneself only, sucking it dry, devouring it. In envy, by contrast, the subject not only seeks to rob in this way, but also to put badness (bad parts of itself) into the (good) object in order to spoil it, thus depriving it of its goodness and so making sure that the world is emptied of goodness altogether – which of course is very different from the egoism at work in greed, where goodness remains affirmed as something positive and worthy of existing, only here one desires having it so much that others are prevented from sharing it. Greed is bound up with introjection, envy with projection. And finally, in jealousy, as indicated earlier, goodness – in the form of love and affection – is not sought destroyed; it is merely felt to be endangered through some rival out to snatch away what is one’s due. A central feature of evil is the absence of feelings of guilt. Envy recoils from good itself. Goodness being no standard in light of which to assess oneself, the direction of aggressive impulses at the good-bad object – that is, the object is deemed bad because it possesses goodness – does not trigger guilt or loss. It follows that envy is a serious barrier to the working through characteristic of the depressive position. Here, the recognition that one is the source of aggressive impulses against others, even (indeed, especially) loved others – that is, those we love and hate because they mean so much to us, and therefore may disappoint and ‘destroy’ us, turning our dependence upon their goodness against us – goes hand in hand with wishes to make reparation to the thus targeted object. In wishing to make reparation, to restore the object to a state of wholeness

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and goodness, there is a concomitant admission of guilt and so of responsibility: of having done something one should rather not have done, and of blaming no one else for the harm done to others. Since envy, more than any other particular feeling (or attitude) that is part of our repertoire, is the feeling that is most deprived of capacity for guilt, reparation, and responsibility, it follows that envy enjoys a particularly close relationship with evil, with the inclination to hurt. Envy as understood by Klein helps radicalize our understanding of evil, too. We realize that wanting to do evil is not to engage in a negation of what is good but rather to want the destruction of the good. The difference is seminal. Let me elaborate by suggesting a continuum: from evil understood as fighting what is bad, over evil as a negation of the good, to evil as destruction of the good. First, then, a form in which evildoing frequently comes, and which captures what is commonly viewed as defining evil, is evildoing that seeks to negate, or even destroy, what is deemed bad by the agent. The alleged ‘badness’ of the object targeted is commonly cited as both explanation (by observers) and justification (by the agent) for the evil committed. And indeed, on the face of, it sounds reasonable that someone who deliberately hurts or even kills another does so because he looks upon that other as in some respect bad, as representing some badness without which the world would be a better place. Feindbilder (portraits of the enemy) of the kind produced by ideologies and, for that matter, more personal views about the victim as articulated by the evildoer, are all about such badness, are they not? Psychologically, it seems the only logical account: if that which is intentionally hurt, damaged, removed, or destroyed is not deemed bad (i.e. threatening, ugly, unworthy, filthy, evil), why want to target it in the first place? This commonsensical notion of what evildoing is and what spurs it only touches the surface of the phenomenon. I am not saying that evil is never like that. But it is not within miles of capturing evil in its radicalness. Kant probed deeper when he spoke of ‘radical evil’ (1960). His notion is a great improvement over the simplistic one just discussed in that he focuses on the agent’s insistence that what he does is ‘good’, is justified, even though it may appear that way only thanks to efforts to deceive oneself about the – morally questionable – character of the action done. Kant does his best to look evil in the eye without blinking, reluctantly conceding that the propensity to do evil is a very deep-seated one in human nature, a propensity (‘Hang zum Bo¨sen’) that has fatefully been laid down in us and that is virtually ineradicable from our make-up as

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human agents. In a nutshell, evil is about making morality a servant of desire. The deception hinted at consists in presenting to oneself the ‘morality’ in the service of one’s desires, hence one’s self-interest, as superior to the morality posited by the categorical imperative, commanding us as it does to treat others as ends in themselves and never merely as means. Self-deception here aims at a reversal: the principle of self-interest is made trump over any other principle. The result is that ‘morality’ is instrumentalized for, or by, the desires flowing from self-interest, so that what is ‘good’ to do and what enhances one’s self-interest come to be but two sides of the same coin, thus denying the conflict between the two – going back as it does, in Kant, to the dualism that we are, namely between autonomy (freedom) and heteronomy (determinedness) – that essentially defines our predicament as human and moral agents. But, as Alford remarks, Kant’s concept of radical evil is not radical enough. Evil is more than just the negation of the good or, more precisely (bearing Kant in mind), the attempt to make what is really morally bad look good so as to be able to do wrong with a good conscience. Though not entertained by Kant, what is even more radical than the negation of the good is the destruction of the good because it is good – that is, without there being any attempt (be it one involving self-deception and pretence) to deny or in any way detract from the goodness of what is deliberately sought destroyed. This is the quality of evil Klein helps us recognize. As Alford puts her insight, ‘evil is not just the devaluation of otherness because otherness is scary and bad. Evil is the destruction of the other because the other is good’ (1997a: 71). Colin McGinn (1997: 82), though defending a much too hedonistic-utilitarian general notion of evil, takes this point further when he states that, in the purest of all cases of evil, ‘the agent seeks the other’s pain simply for what it does to the other, not for any spin-off for the agent’: the badness of the act, of destroying what is good, provides the very reason for performing the act. The lack of any demonstrable positive spin-off for the evildoing agent is a remarkable feature of evildoing at its most evil – yet frequently overlooked in studies of evil, tending as they do to be wedded to the premise that actions – even evil ones – flow from self-interest. Problems with Alford’s theory To be sure, if this is a correct hypothesis, it lands us in a very difficult situation. For how are we now to prevent and avoid evil? It will not do to convince perpetrators (or would-be ones) that the people they are targeting are ‘really’ good, not bad. Nor will it do for the

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victims themselves to make efforts to demonstrate, beyond dispute, that they are good and possess traits worthy of recognition. Far from solving the problem, evidence of goodness would in fact only reinforce it, rendering the danger that evildoing will ensue even more imminent. In a Kleinian perspective, to cite the goodness of the object would only serve to whet the appetite of the perpetrator. Nor, finally, will it do to transform evil into a problem of political correctness, preaching tolerance of difference, of the ‘irreducible otherness of the other’ as the solution. As Alford writes, ‘It will do no good to implore people not to demonize others. People demonize the other not out of ignorance or intolerance but to protect their own threatened goodness. Demonization of the other is a defense against doom. That the doom is self-inflicted, the aura of one’s own aggression, makes this defense more poignant but no less destructive’ (1997a: 71f.). Add to this the following thought, articulated in Alford’s book on Levinas, and anticipating a central concern of later parts of my discussion: ‘What if the human problem were really our terrible dependence on others? Not ‘‘I want my place in the sun’’, but ‘‘I need you in order to be me’’. If this were the human problem, we might even treat others worse’ (Alford 2002: 22). These are only so many negative answers. Perhaps we should take this as a hint that the question has not been raised in the most appropriate manner. True, some strategies must be judged better than others to minimize the danger that evildoing come to pass. But Alford, following Klein, seems to hold that developing more positive, informed, or tolerant perceptions of the other is an ill-conceived strategy from the very start. His Kleinian approach to evil, theorizing it via the different positions of experience, and putting special emphasis on the urge to flee dread, tends in the end to present evil as a problem both in and for the self. Extraindividual sources and causes of evildoing are not taken into consideration. Alford is remarkably silent about the role of historical, social, economic, etc. factors in contributing to induce concrete individuals to perform evil; his silence in fact comprises ideational factors such as the impact of ideology (e.g. nationalism, racism, sexism) and religion as well. As I see it, this omission in Alford’s theoretical framework marks a limit to his theory’s potential to throw light upon instances of evildoing comprising whole groups of individuals. But it also poses a problem for the dyadic person-to-person evildoing that from beginning to end is at the centre of Alford’s analysis. Alford is vulnerable to an objection often directed at existential philosophy: that too much emphasis is placed on the single individual, to the detriment of factors in his wider environment over which she has little or no control.

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In a word, the individual as depicted in Alford’s book is insufficiently situated; the individual forms a kind of world unto itself, concerned to the point of obsession with existential matters of life and death. To be sure, the nakedness of the individual and the rawness of its deepest concerns is part of the Kleinian heritage Alford self-consciously draws upon. In a footnote in The Self in Social Theory, Alford aptly describes the contrast between a Kleinian and a Kohutian (that is, self-psychological) perspective: ‘Projective identification emphasizes the way in which our fears and desires make the environment. Kohut, on the other hand, pays more attention to the effect of the environment on the self’ (1991: 196 n. 26). I would say that, in choosing Klein over Kohut, Alford makes a sound choice as far as exploring the intrasubjective and intrapsychic origins of evil is concerned. But the price he pays in his monograph on evil is that extra-individual, environmental factors tend to disappear from sight altogether. To work out a comprehensive framework for the study of evil, the interaction between intrasubjective origins and extra-individual forces and influences needs to be properly addressed: there is no either–or. Indeed, as I argued in my critique of Bauman in Chapter 1, historical experience has taught us that evil often results from a particularly explosive mixture of individual desires and needs on the one hand and institutional commands on the other: in situations where the existential psycho-logic and the organizational socio-logic meet halfway, where individual and system mutually reinforce each other in the pursuit of a common target for persecution and destruction. A related problem with Alford’s book is that the other recedes into the background. As we saw, Alford holds that trying to avoid evildoing is not primarily about coming to see the other in a more favourable light. Evil, Alford never lets us forget, is an ‘intense object relationship’; it consists in seeking ‘a hot, intense connection of power and control to manage the cold, isolated dread within’ (1997a: 119). If I am not mistaken, the upshot is that, whereas evil is intersubjective in its extension, necessarily involving the agent with another subject and hence engaging the agent with the world outside him, if only to exploit the human ‘objects’ encountered there for purposes all its own, evil is intrasubjective in its origin. It is so because the entire existential problematic that gives rise to doing evil – that is, to act in the world, making a difference and carrying consequences that are real for real others – is a problematic within each single human subject: in speaking of doom, dread, anxiety, and fear, attention is directed at psychic and affective states that stem from within, exerting a pressure upon us such that cannot be rooted out or silenced by being discharged against objects in the outside world. What originates within

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must be dealt with there: this is the Kleinian petitio principii that Alford never brings out into the open to address as such. In fairness to Alford, this is not the whole story. Alford transcends Klein’s restricted focus on intrapsychic dynamics as soon as he starts employing Winnicott’s notion of culture as a ‘transitional object’. In other words, the Kleinian perspective, concentrating almost exclusively on the intrapsychic dramas Klein takes to be present in the infant (reading her ‘positions’ back into very early phases of psychological development – much too early ones, her many critics on this point claim), is evidently regarded by Alford as the most appropriate one in disclosing the sources from which evil springs. Yet, as soon as we widen our concerns and wish to explore how best to tackle the discomfort located within us, as part of what and who we are, Winnicott is drawn upon to help us recognize that the dramas originating within us must be sought thematized – ‘imagined’ is Alford’s word – outside us, namely in the domain set up by culture, by the traffic of symbols, between psychic and physical reality. Such existential discomfort can only be coped with by way of engaging with symbols that are not of our individual making but communally available to us. We must go visiting to cultural sources outside ourselves in order to live with pressures arising within ourselves – sources that, strictly speaking, are neither to be located in our inner or in the outer world but instead occupy the space between them, ruling out a simple answer to the misleadingly simple question of where they come from in the first place. Fantasy and imagination in particular, Winnicott (1980: 1–30) maintains, actually depend upon the existence of this admittedly evasive in-between. So much for the synthesis of Klein and Winnicott attempted by Alford. What we need to hear more about, though, is what sort of cultural objects, or symbols (including narratives), Alford regards as conducive to the task he grants culture in enabling us to cope with our inner demons. The urgency of this question is born of the obvious fact that not any version of culture will do. Alas, Alford is less helpful here than one would have hoped. It is not that he has nothing to offer; what he offers is reasonable enough, but insufficient. I mentioned that Alford warns against symbols-using thematizations of evil and the series of dread-related feelings giving rise to it becoming overly concrete: symbols-using imitations of real-life evildoing are no suitable device against the inclination to go out and do it oneself. Alford deploys his Winnicottian concept of what culture should do for its members, in a way allowing for Kulturkritik: taking a look at current tendencies, especially in (US-dominated) popular culture, Alford’s

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verdict is that ours is not for the time being a culture that comes anywhere near to fulfilling its positive mission. When vampires replace Satan in one narrative (book, film, video) after the other, there is no longer a balanced struggle between good and evil (recall that Satan supposedly only makes sense as a figure set against some goodness-representing counterpart, whereby the outcome of their struggle remains open). Rather, the tendency is for some evil persecutor to take full control of the action and to threaten everyone coming in his way with being devoured (literally sucked dry), crushed, or otherwise done away with. The implicit message in such narratives, where goodness is conspicuous by its absence, is that vulnerability and dependence are conveyed to the reader, listener, or viewer as even more threatening and dangerous than before. If anything, these aspects of one’s existence now count as tantamount to weakness, to something that makes one exposed to all sorts of dangers that are likely to lurk behind every corner in the outside world. The message is that it is a jungle out there. I think it important to observe that this, if expressing a correct diagnosis, most likely will exacerbate the creation of ‘weak’ selves, as captured in Christopher Lasch’s (1984) talk of the ‘minimal’ self characteristic of contemporary society: a self that has lost faith in the outside world as a safe place, bent on withdrawing into itself and to engage as little as possible in projects transcending its largely self-preoccupied, defensive pursuits. A major consequence is that the need to get rid of such unwished-for weaknesses within oneself becomes ever more precarious, taking on ever more direct (i.e. concrete, bodily, physical) forms. The end point of this tendency is action movies functioning as a more or less sophisticated user’s manual for the audience; as so many how-to tips on the level of doing, of acting-out. A far cry indeed from the mediated, indirect, abstract fashion of learning to come to terms with inner sources of exposedness advocated in Winnicott’s and Alford’s notion of the task of culture. This is fine as far as it goes but the problem is, there are other ways of employing symbols for a given culture to engage in; ways, that is, in which the images and narratives employed fulfil Alford’s criterion of being abstract, while – importantly – not fulfilling his further criterion of containing (Klein) or holding (Winnicott) the individual members’ inner demons in such a manner as to preclude their being directed outwards, against all-too-real and vulnerable others. Images and narratives thematizing the existential anxieties prone to give rise to evildoing can be abstract, subtle, fantasy-stimulating, and the like, and nonetheless prove dangerous for specific others, be they individuals or whole

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groups – contra the claims about the positive ethical potential of narratives in general and literature (novels) in particular made by such an influential philosopher as Martha Nussbaum (1990). What I am getting at is that the degree of abstraction – the more or less sophisticated use of symbols and images – is a flawed criterion by which to judge this danger. Abstraction may even in some cases lend itself to exploitation by charismatic leaders, especially when these are eager to stir the melting pot of a given group’s collective history, collective memory, and (last but not least) collective suffering (victimization) so as to mobilize by means of symbols (narratives) for subsequent misdeeds using violence. Of course, Alford is perfectly right that symbolically primitive and concretistic presentations are more fitted to violence-applying exploitation, whereby actual others are targeted, than are presentations of existential motifs which employ loose symbolization in Klein’s sense, uncoupling inner A from outer B. In other words, the conviction that the only adequate way to tackle inner A is by resorting to violent attack against outer B (standing here for a specific individual or group) is doubtless conveyed in its most direct form when symbolization is rigid and static. I have no quarrel with Alford as to the danger this implies. But Feindbilder are sometimes (literally) fantastic, to the point of the unbelievable, incredible; or they are gross distortions of the true nature of the phenomena and entities they purport to portray, thus easily falsified once measured against their concrete referents in real life; or they rely on lies so big as to retain no resemblance whatsoever with the persons or events they pretend to designate. The point is that the very looseness or elasticity of fantasy-fed and fantasy-feeding Feindbilder may make them susceptible to all sorts of arbitrary – meaning reality-distorting or reality-denying – exploitation; and all of a sudden, along comes someone who connects these fantasies with named and very specific others, making it seem that now ‘everything falls into place’, that ambiguities and doubts will be finally overcome, and that the world can be acted upon so as to conform to some grand vision or scheme, one settling all the old scores and promising a vigorous future for the in-group whose narcissistic injuries will henceforth be healed. To be sure, this is the territory inhabited by ideologies. Since such ideologies have been instrumental in helping to bring about so much evildoing in recent history, their relevance for Alford’s topic is beyond dispute. It is therefore a pity that he neglects discussing them (just as does Bauman, with whom he otherwise disagrees), concentrating instead on culture in its most general aspects. Especially in light of the discussion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the next chapters, Alford’s silence must be regarded as regrettable. Suffice it to say here that the central architects of this collective

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evil often are intellectuals, society’s professional symbols-users, individuals holding leading positions in the media, in academic institutions, and political parties. To be sure, the affinity between intellectuality (intellectuals) and evil is an old story. However, this historical fact – epitomized by numerous Nazi professors and doctoral degrees held by SS officers, by Sorbonne-educated Pol Pot, and psychiatrist and poet Radovan Karadzic, to pick a few examples – is not mentioned, let alone accounted for, in Alford’s analysis: they do not seem to fit there. Instead, he focuses rather one-sidedly – tendentiously? in keeping with a philosopher’s prejudice? – on the ‘symbolic poverty’ he encountered in most of the prisoners he interviewed. Though not disputing this finding, I find it unfortunate that it leaves the impression that a highly developed capacity for symbolsemploying abstract thinking counts unequivocally as a prerequisite against evildoing, knowing as we do only too well how enthusiastically intellectuals – rich in symbolic repertoire – may take the lead in mobilizing for evildoing that, if anything, is eminently concrete in its consequences. Alford should not let intellectuals – his likely readers – that easily off the hook. I suspect that this omission, this lack of fine distinctions within the overarching concept of culture, is connected with another feature of Alford’s theory that strikes me as wanting. Alford, we have seen, conceives the inclination to do evil as the inclination to seek discharge for one’s inner anxieties and conflicts. This outward-directed discharge immediately assumes the form of bodily, hence physical, action against some concrete other, so as to hurt him or her. What are curiously left out of Alford’s picture are the multiple ways in which we can do evil to each other by non-bodily, non-physical means: ‘symbolic violence’ may be seen as an appropriate label for the phenomenon I have in mind, contradicting rather directly Alford’s endeavour to set symbols and violence apart, and so dichotomizing them. In all fairness, it must be said that at times Alford does talk about evil in this sense, for example when he states that a ‘cutting’ remark represents a way to hurt others. But he does not dwell upon this non-physical dimension to evil as a vital dimension of it in its own right. In my view, evil spans a much wider human-experiential territory than that specifically involving being victim to physical violence and bodily abuse, or – correspondingly – wishing to do such abuse. The affinity between the thousand inventive ways in which people hurt each other by humiliation, on the one hand, and evil, on the other, is not paid enough attention to by Alford. His analysis prematurely moves from the inner to the outer, failing to dwell on the psychic – frequently, spoken – expressions of evil, hurting others psychically instead of physically, yet

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for all that hurting them no less badly. Indeed, the point can be reinforced: Is not deliberate non-action or non-engagement towards another person – ignoring someone, refusing to take notice, to be bothered – a form that our wish to hurt often takes, producing psychic and emotional scars no less real and damaging for their entirely non-physical nature? Identifying with Eichmann One of the questions Alford put to those he interviewed was: Was Eichmann evil? Much to Alford’s surprise, it soon transpired that nearly everybody asked to reflect on the question identified with Eichmann – a finding that holds not only among the prisoners (themselves ‘doers’, and so perhaps naturally inclined to identify with the agent in the example), but also among the free informers Alford talked with (1997a: 74ff.). In both groups, then, Alford was confronted with a strong urge to put into question the notion that Eichmann was evil. Likewise, there was a deep reluctance to make – or accept – any attempt to judge Eichmann’s actions from a moral point of view. In both groups, the replies would take the following form: ‘Before we eventually judge Eichmann, we must bear in mind that he was acting within a hierarchical organization, receiving orders from his superiors; and surely he would have been killed if he had refused to do these things that others now call bad’ (let me add: in fact, he would not). And then, to offer a final thought – actually, an angry counter-question – ‘Who among us can really be sure what we would have done in his place?’ This response merits thorough examination and reflection. To begin with, it is striking that, to the degree that the persons interviewed are at all willing to identify with someone when pondering the evil Eichmann exemplifies, they choose to identify with Eichmann in a manner marking very little – if any – distance to him. The refrain frequently repeated is that I possibly could have done the same thing. At first glance this way of looking at it may appear sympathetic, not least in a moral perspective. Such an attitude attests to a capacity for self-knowledge, to imagine oneself in Eichmann’s situation, and in effect to realize one’s own imperfection with respect to doing what is morally right. On this reading, there is something humble, a kind of moral modesty, a sympathetic counterpart to hubris, in this readiness to make oneself so ‘alike’ an agent who did what Eichmann did. But this impression risks focusing only on the surface. Let us ask what went unaddressed in the replies given; what was taken for granted. For a start, it is as though Alford’s question – Was Eichmann evil? – may be

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adequately answered by reflecting about and referring to Eichmann alone. It is as though the question posed involves but this one person, the agent – as though it does not essentially involve Eichmann’s victims, that is to say, the basic fact that the evil one is asked to reflect about comprises a party beyond the named agent, namely the party who suffers the evil done. In short, the responses immediately and exclusively address the agent – hence they leave his victims completely aside; they just do not figure. The one party commanding attention is the party who exercised power; parties merely subject to power are left in the dark (that is, where the power once exercised by the persecutor left them); their invisibility is effectively perpetuated. It is as though present-day individuals have nothing to add to the silence the original deed forced upon the victims. The stance taken by imaginatively putting oneself in the shoes of the persecutor is retained throughout, so as to mark, and delimit, the entire mental space for reflection over evil. This, at least, is the way I interpret it. I have highlighted my own reading of Alford’s finding rather than Alford’s. This is because his material is particularly suited to throw light upon a later topic: shame. Let me put it like this. What I find conspicuous in Alford’s material is the implicit view that evil can be reflected upon and sought judged from one’s own factual viewpoint and in combination with a counter-factual ‘imagining’ of the viewpoint of the agent. The position occupied by the victims is conspicuous by absence. Those who experience the evil done form an unnameable party, they are mute, and no attempt is undertaken to give them a voice. Those who already have been forced into silence shall remain silent. Now, what strikes me the most, is the apparently total absence of shame. To bring the points together: the absence of shame coincides with the absence of the victims, of their perspective. If this formulation is correct, it is so because it rests upon the presupposition, however tacit in those offering their replies, that for there to be shame, there must be victims; only via the perspective of the victims will shame appear and lay claim to becoming an issue for reflection. When shame does not become a topic in the reflection over whether Eichmann was evil, I take this to be closely related to the fact that the reflection fails to take the victims into account. The intriguing question provoked by this is why focusing upon the agent (the evildoer) should be tantamount to ignoring all aspects having to do with shame. Otherwise put: Why do Alford’s respondents tacitly presuppose that shame is something that becomes a theme only when (if) victims become a theme; that shame, as it were naturally and obviously, is linked with the victims, not the perpetrator? Is it not – or should it not

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be – the other way around: that shame is found in the person who causes suffering, not in those who suffer? Is shame not a prerogative of the guilty one, not the victims? These are questions too big to settle here. I shall take them up at length in Chapter 4 and 5. My present purpose is only that we appreciate that, as illustrated in Alford’s material, an evidently common propensity to identify with the evildoer – and so ignore the victims – goes hand in hand with ignoring shame – shame, significantly, and on the face of it counter-intuitively and mysteriously, having implicitly been shifted from doer to victim. Suffice it to comment here on the way the shift is viewed from Alford’s perspective. A major premise in the outlook articulated by the majority of Alford’s prisoner informers (apparently shared to a large degree by his free informants as well) is that we live in a world of ‘war of all against all’. Contemporary Western society is experienced not as the well-ordered society Rawls talks about, but in categories reminding one of the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. Be that as it may, the important feature in this outlook is that informants have great difficulty finding a third path (option) between that of executioner and victim, domination and submission. In the perpetual war that ‘is’ society these days, there are no innocents, only victims and executioners. This, then, is the background against which Alford proposes that, when so many people answer the question whether Eichmann was evil by identifying with him, often also vehemently defending him, they do so not because they want to but because there is only one alternative to identifying with the doer and that alternative is even worse: it is to identify with the victims. Why worse? Because it is taken for granted, as a simple fact about how things are, that being a victim is meaningless. It is tantamount to utter powerlessness – and this is a destiny too terrible to contemplate, since ours is a world where power is the only currency. Ultimately, being a victim is no different from never having existed at all. Being a persecutor at least confirms some power of agency, some capacity to choose, to make a difference in the world, and possibly to receive recognition from others, to be seen, to be existentially (if not ethically) validated. By contrast, to be in the role of the victim is considered as tantamount to being nobody, to being devoid of agency, indeed of anything that would induce respect from others. But what about pity? Well, who wants to be pitied these days? And who wants to show it? Who wants to openly identify with the source from which the need for pity is taken to arise – namely weakness and vulnerability, the very dimension about us that marks the limit of our self-sufficiency and that makes us so utterly dependent beings, dependent

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upon others, upon their capacity for identification, empathy, and concern? On either side, it does not exactly strike contemporary individuals as a priority. Alford invokes Primo Levi to substantiate his harsh judgment. Levi is a survivor of Auschwitz who wrote books about what he experienced there; his was a life which had meaning only as long as people wished to remember, to be reminded about the plight of victims. Levi had said that he would take his life if he no longer felt this to be the case; and kill himself he eventually did. Alford proceeds to declare that The problem is not the failure of memory per se. It is the failure of the culture to preserve those categories of experience which make victimhood meaningful, so that the meaning might be available to make the memory meaningful. It is how MacIntyre should be interpreted in After Virtue. What the culture has lost is not just a narrative unity that makes sense of values. It has lost the narrative resources to make sense of the experience of victimhood, above all the dread of what it is to be truly human. It has, in other words, lost the sense of tragedy. We are all victims, victims of life and death. It is against the victimhood of being merely human that evil is dedicated. (1997a: 80)

Alford is aware that his diagnosis invites the counter-argument that ours is – precisely – a culture of ‘victimhood’ these days. But he argues, I think convincingly, that the phenomenon thus alluded to, identity politics, with groups competing with another for public sympathy to compensate for some specific suffering, is different in kind from the experience of individual victimhood that forms his focus. That this is so is aptly captured in a statement made by one of Alford’s informants: ‘Don’t call me a crime victim! I’m a survivor; that’s what we call ourselves these days’ (p. 80). As we shall see in the next chapters, the mentality expressed by Alford’s informants highlights the trend of individualization that in recent years has been thematized by sociologists such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Richard Sennett. A precursor to this discussion is Christopher Lasch’s books The Culture of Narcissism and The Minimal Self. The self held to be characteristic of contemporary society is preoccupied to the point of obsession with surviving in a hostile world. Why has sheer survival become such a paramount issue in the individual’s life? While there are many aspects to this question, a central one certainly has to do with current tendencies to transform societal (macrolevel, systemic) contradictions into (so many) individual-biographical problems: the individual is affected, victimized, by developments and problems not of his making, yet he is affected by them alone, as it were,

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all on his own. He has to fend for himself in struggling to cope with them, and if he fails to meet the currently valid standards of ‘success’ – success now being almost synonymous with individual success – he has only himself to blame, having proven too inept, lazy, or otherwise disabled to make the best of his options. I mention this in the context of Alford’s theory because it provides a sorely needed sociological background to Alford’s overwhelmingly psychological perspective, and a strongly individualistic one at that. If the leading sociologists just referred to are right in their diagnosis about ‘weak’ and narcissistic selves suffering from lack of belief in safe, stable, and good (Klein) objects outside themselves, objects to rely upon and to be nourished by in building a self daring to venture outside itself so as to both encounter and help create goodness there, then it is only to be expected that ‘evil’ comes to stand for something terrible, although it would appear more terrible to be victim to it than to do it oneself. Passivity is what such individuals drift toward, and at the same time what they fear succumbing to and detest when encountering it in others. Being the victim of evil is associated with utter passivity, to the point of paralysis; with being crushed by forces against which one is completely helpless, doomed to suffer such victimhood alone, expecting nobody else to stand up for one. It goes without saying, it seems, that ours is a world without pity – pity understood as ‘a sheltering sky that keeps inhuman otherness out, so humans might care for each other for a little while’; pity as at work in responding to the other’s exposed vulnerability by declaring, ‘I am in pain for you: I am in sorrow for your pain’, to paraphrase Neoptolemus (Alford 2002: 140f.). The only option left, in order to at least make some attempt at ‘tackling’ the phenomenon of evil, therefore, is that of making sure that one positions oneself at the executing rather than receiving end of it. Better to do it and survive than suffer it and die, or survive it only to bear the stigma of the victim in a society where people supposedly only want to hear about winners, survivors. For it goes without saying that ending up as a victim is somehow to be a loser. If one is respected in that role by no one else, how can one respect oneself in it? Again, as Alford observes, no third alternative is regarded as available. Is not this once again to do with Alford’s approach to evil being too individualistic? Holding evil to be a relational concept, the only relationship Alford seems to concentrate on is the person-to-person, face-to-face one. Small wonder, therefore, that his portrait of evildoing differs so radically from that of, say, Bauman. The mechanisms of distantiation so stressed by Bauman do not figure at all in Alford’s account.

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There is some truth to the objection that Alford’s approach is excessively individualistic. But it is not completely so. Although Alford has little to say about large-scale, collective evil, his perspective nevertheless allows him to briefly explain it ‘by the conjunction of human maliciousness with the failure of cultural containment, as well as by the ability of society to draw upon and use people deficient in symbolic resources of their own but not so crazy as to be unable to use the culture’s scapegoats as their own’ (1997a: 143). To make his point, Alford picks a well-known example: what turned the infamous Josef Mengele into ‘Dr Auschwitz’ was ‘the conjunction of his uncontained dread with a culture that was no longer able to contain it either, a culture regressed to providing directions for the obliteration of scapegoats under the ideology of a medical procedure’ (p. 143). Even more to the point, perhaps, is the German philosopher Ru¨diger Safranski’s description of the conjunction at work in the case of Hitler: Hitler’s rhetorical talent and the general Zeitstimmung combined to make his private lunacy into an exponent of collective madness . . . Normally the madness of a distinct individual will serve to separate him from his environment, to isolate him. What is exceptional in the case of Hitler, however, is that he overcame the isolation of his madness by successfully socializing it: he succeeded, that is, in his attempt to make a truth out of his mad ideas, by realizing them on a social level, by shaping reality according to his ideas about it, by verifying what started out as expressions of personal lunacy. (Safranski 1999: 276, 283).

The ‘perfect fit’ between Fu¨hrer and Volk of which Hitler boasted is not mere fiction, then. Rather, it exemplifies with particular force the explosive quality that, given optimal social circumstances, may obtain in historical instances of the conjunction proposed by Alford. In this perspective, the formula for collective evil is the conjunction of the two elements placed at the centre of Alford’s analysis: the conjunction of individuals whose dread is uncontained with a culture that, at the time and given the circumstances, is unable to help contain it (or ‘hold’ it, in Winnicott’s sense), or, in the extreme case, is in fact bent on preventing any effective containment of the inner dread of its individual members. In the chapter to follow, devoted to ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, we shall explore what this amounts to.

The limitations of Alford’s approach A more valid criticism is that Alford locates evil on too fundamental a level. In holding that ‘evil is a refusal to submit to the conditions of being

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human’ (1997a: 119), Alford risks making evil such a deep-seated and elemental dimension in human existence as to render it inseparate from being human. The implication is that evil becomes something that is, if not exactly inevitable, then at least omnipresent in human life. Let me make the point by way of comparison with Bauman: if Bauman risks neglecting the deep-seated existential basis from which evildoing springs, Alford risks eternalizing evil in as much as he views it sub specie aeternitatis, as a feature of the human condition as such, thereby ignoring the structural and situational conditions of specific instances of evil (especially collective evil) where in-group pressure and the request for obedience, control, and predictability often necessitate a neutralization of the individual-existential twist to partaking in evil that Alford takes as his principal focus. At other times, however, precisely this existential dimension will be systematically invoked, cultivated, and exploited for all it is worth by the prevailing extra-individual power structures, allowing individual and system to meet halfway and work in tandem to strike out against a common enemy, as I demonstrated in my discussion of Bauman. Due to the heterogeneous nature of the phenomenon – evildoing – different theoretical approaches are called for, one illuminating what another ignores. In particular, the heterogeneity of psychological motives in the agent must be recognized. Thus, to take an example, it is not obvious that a person who participates in organized mass rapes does so for the individual-psychological reasons highlighted in Alford’s Kleininspired approach; it might be that such a case has much more to do with feeling forced to display ‘strength’ before an audience of (male) co-persecutors than it has to do with a sadistic desire to hurt the victim in question as a kind of existential goal in its own right. In saying this, we get a sense of the importance of distinguishing between evil of which the doer is himself the initiator, evil as a genuine ‘individual’ project, if you like; and evil of which the doer is one among many, evil as an undertaking launched, or ordered, by others, thus robbing the performance of the existential quality with which Alford so emphatically associates it from the very beginning. Accordingly, I think that Alford’s emphasis on an individual evildoer’s presupposing and sustaining the shared humanity (vulnerability, mortality) of his selected victim, though philosophically provocative and empirically fruitful, runs into difficulties as soon as one concentrates on instances of evildoing where processes of dehumanization indisputably do occur, transforming the victim into precisely the ‘mere means’ Kant viewed as a salient feature in evil, explicitly (since ideologically) excluding the victim(s) from a shared human and moral

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universe. Although Kant was wrong to hold such reduction to mere means to be what evil essentially boils down to, Alford is just as wrong in denying dehumanization as a major component in many cases of evil. As we shall see in great detail in Chapters 4 and 5, in empirical terms evil is such a manifold and heterogeneous phenomenon in social life as to frustrate various theoretical attempts (not only Alford’s, to be sure) to let one ‘form’ or one feature speak for all. Indeed, even such an established category of collective evil as genocide may come in many – quite distinct – forms. Alford is eager to contradict the tendency in current social sciences to marginalize evil as a sociocultural as well as an individual issue; to regard it as a wholly derivative phenomenon, with only secondary ontological status, namely as non-elemental, as non sui generis, as emerging only when something generically or logically prior to it falters, consequently ending up regarding evildoing as but welldoing gone wrong, hence as happening only – or almost only – by default, as it were. While I agree with Alford’s opposition to such trivialization and underestimation of the reality (ontologically, as well as motivationally) of evil in social life, he must be cautious not to err in the opposite direction and end up presenting evil as the single most powerful force in our life. Alford has yet to devote a book to goodness; and one may wonder whether it would produce a thick or a slim volume. This is not to suggest that he is too grim: the issue is not optimism versus pessimism, much like it is not altruism versus egoism; both goodness and evil are more complex phenomena than that, empirically seldom emerging without ambiguity, without some mixing with its ‘other’. As we shall see in the next chapter, frequently a ‘tempered’ egoism is a better barrier against evildoing than is altruism (altruism, that is to say, in the form of communal self-sacrifice and various forms of martyrdom for the sake of a religious faith, a nation, an ethnic group, etc.). Despite my earlier complaint about the neglect of extra-individual factors, I insist that the really vital insight to be retained from Alford’s work is that evil is a major existential issue: evil is about something within ourselves, it is about inner forces, anxieties, conflicts that we have to come to terms with. The first step is to acknowledge this inner (intrasubjective) origin of what spurs – or may spur – evildoing as a reality. Evil in this sense comprises a dimension of what we are, who we are, not merely – or even primarily – of what we do. When we proceed to do evil, it has to do with a lack of ability, or willingness, to tackle what we are – beings for whom being vulnerable triggers dread – in a manner not hurting others.

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What is curious in Alford is his quick move from individual to culture, or from individual to organization (striking in his book Whistleblowers). It reminds me of Bauman’s largely unmediated move from (atomized, lonely) individual to society at large. Culture, in Alford’s Winnicottian sense of a transitional object, would seem to provide the missing link from which Bauman’s account suffers: a link, that is, mediating between the single individual and the entire outside world. Culture thus understood fulfils the function, so crucial for the individual, of providing the general symbolic resources required to create – and sustain – meaning in one’s life, meaning pointing to an existential quest for which the individual is not self-sufficient. This is fine as far as it goes. Culture does provide Alford with an intermediate category absent in Bauman; it does go some way toward explaining both how evil comes to occur, qua acts in the outside world (as opposed to evil thoughts, fantasies, etc.), and, conversely, what it takes to make sure that evildoing does not occur. In a nutshell, culture represents, or better facilitates, the alternative to doing evil. While I have no quarrel with this – it is a truly vital insight – there is nonetheless a sense in which Alford moves too quickly here: he fails to dwell on the significance of interpersonal relationships, especially the dyadic one. On Alford’s account, the human other is someone that is either acted against (as in the existential ‘relief’ sought by hurting, in evildoing) or someone protected against such action thanks to the employment of symbols made accessible by culture. What is absent is the other as someone to interact with, a co-subject in the world, one sharing one’s own anxieties and concerns, one with whom sharing them will facilitate a non-damaging relief from the inner demons in question, a communicatively attained relief that is not the work of the single individual who successfully employs the required cultural resources at hand, but is instead a collaborative effort by two individuals in which culture functions as a go-between, as what is drawn upon communicatively. Since Alford’s framework is a crude dichotomic one – human individual juxtaposed with outer reality (following Klein) – the category of communication is conspicuously missing in Alford’s account. Communication with the other who commands a space ‘between’ inner reality and public culture (Winnicott), or the outside world as such (Klein), is nowhere properly thematized. Alford too onesidedly focuses on the either–or of individual and culture (whereby evil is contained) and individual and human other (whereby evil is uncontained and the other is targeted). Indeed, when Alford singles out Emmanuel Levinas for a surprisingly vehement critique in his recent book Levinas, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalysis, asserting that freedom-with and

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sharing are categories as well as perspectives largely missing in Levinas’ ethics, I cannot help thinking that a similar objection can be levelled against Alford himself – meaning his book on evil. I suspect that this neglect of intersubjective relationships in general, and intersubjective communication in particular, is to do with Alford’s enormous intellectual debt to Melanie Klein. An objection often raised against Klein is that she makes ‘inner reality’ tantamount to all the reality there is, that psychologically counts, that is, thus losing sight of outside reality and external objects. Klein, of course, has her own psychoanalytic rejoinder to this. She will say that what is ‘outer’ and ‘external’ possesses no psychological significance in its own right; that is to say, external objects (be it persons, be it events) only gain significance in so far as they are introjected by the subject, thus permitted to make a difference within his or her ‘inner reality’, the latter being the psychic-affective basis from which we conduct any affairs with whatever is deemed external to us. Klein’s point is a valid one, to be sure; it captures the basis from which object-relations theory springs – nothing less. But it led her to downplay real-life others and their specific role in modifying both the introjections developed by the concrete individual and his or her characteristic manner of perceiving and treating these introjections (that is, from a paranoidschizoid or from a depressive position). My impression is that Alford, albeit in a different context and addressing a different topic, commits the same kind of downplaying. In an earlier book, Alford mentions this tendency of Klein’s to ignore the reality of relationships (or, more specifically, to ignore actual responses of parents). It certainly sounds like a serious criticism against a psychoanalytic theory, doesn’t it? Alford’s reaction is twofold: first he concedes the validity of the criticism; then he lets Klein have the last word against her theoretical rivals. ‘There is’, says Alford (1992: 173), ‘much to be said for a psychoanalytic perspective that places responsibility for negative emotions and experiences directly on the shoulders of the analysand.’ In this, Klein and Alford are right.

4

The logic and practice of collective evil: ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia

Introduction In relation to the three preceding chapters, this chapter marks a twofold shift. It shifts the emphasis from the theoretical to the empirical, concentrating on specific historical cases; and it shifts the emphasis from individual to collective evil. However, these shifts should not be understood in an absolute sense. Just as I have been drawing on empirical material (mainly from the Holocaust) to develop my criticisms of Zygmunt Bauman’s and Hannah Arendt’s positions, I shall in the present chapter, as well as in the next, analyse the historical events referred to by drawing on theoretical work on evil. Theory and practice mutually illuminate each other – and I intend them to mutually question each other too, in a truly critical fashion. In the two historically oriented chapters now following, I shall make use of the insights gained in the chapters where I assessed the contributions of Bauman, Arendt, and Alford. But I shall not do so in a pedantic manner. I am not interested in bringing all three positions to bear on all – or nearly all – the issues thrown up by the historical material at hand. Instead I will employ concepts and insights developed earlier in the book for the chief purpose of illuminating the issues that will prove to be the singularly most challenging, and disturbing, ones. Among these, the issue of proximity will occupy centre stage. Bauman in particular, it will be recalled, postulates a link between moral conduct and proximity, and correspondingly between immoral conduct and distantiation. In my vocabulary this amounts to claiming that evil requires distantiation; and conversely, that once (or as long as) proximity is allowed to prevail over the various processes and mechanisms of distantiation between an 145

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agent and his victim(s), the expected consequence will be that evildoing (the intentional infliction of suffering on another and against his or her will) ceases to thrive, that it, simply put, becomes less likely. To anticipate one of my most important findings in the two chapters following, this Bauman-inspired – and I would think commonsensical – claim does not stand up to closer scrutiny. I have had occasion to suggest as much already, both as part of my critique of Bauman’s rather general sociological theory and in my exposition of blind spots in Arendt’s reflections on Eichmann. In this and the next chapter, the suggestive assumption of a positive link between proximity and moral conduct will be questioned in a less abstract manner, one highlighting the collective psycho-logic in play. In particular, I shall further explore the dynamics of group-think that we looked at in Chapter 3 on Alford. I hope to show that collective evil of the kind carried out in Bosnia combines – indeed exploits – elements of both proximity and distantiation, thereby representing a truly unexpected and puzzling novelty as compared with Bauman’s perspective: collective evil thriving in conditions of proximity, perverting the latter so as to make them into an ally of extreme wrongdoing. Programmatically, the perspective I develop can be described as arguing the case for a synthesis between intentionalist and functionalist approaches to, and understandings of, how evildoing comes about and which specific elements of human agency committing evil partly presuppose and partly suppress and deny. While the answer to the latter question differs in cases of individual and collective evildoing, my position is that it differs less than often thought, not least because there is a strong inclination to disavow and downright deny agency in general and responsibility in particular in both types of evildoing. Not that this should come as a big surprise. We must keep in mind that even massive collective evildoing consists of so many acts performed by distinct individuals – meaning morally and legally accountable individuals – though, as we shall see in great detail, their desire as well as psychological ability to actually experience themselves as distinct separate actors when committing the collective evil tend to be lacking or at least considerably hampered in situ. Indeed, were it not, the evildoing in question would prove much more difficult – psychologically as well as morally – to take part in. I will show that suppressing and bracketing individual agency when performing collective evil is both a crucial psychological precondition and a ‘lived’ consequence of such evildoing, operative in both respects to the extent that the acting individual starts behaving as though he is not responsible for what he does, having internalized the ideological notion that the

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individual’s agency-based freedom counts for nothing, and his or her collective identity-cum-destiny for everything, whereby (collective) evil is made out to be imperative and necessary, not optional and avoidable (to allude to Eichmann, as well as to Ulrich Herbert’s (2001) study of Heydrich’s deputy Werner Best, discussed in Chapter 1). This is surely a most complex issue, calling for subtle analysis in so far as we need both – so I argue – to recognize the evident persuasiveness of the notion that one is not ‘personally’ responsible for the evil done against ideologically selected others as well as to go beyond it, calling it into question in each concrete instance the way I did with regard to Eichmann above. Having established the continuity between the first three and the last two chapters of this book, we turn to my choice of historical case: the collective evil that was performed in Bosnia in the first half of the 1990s. The most basic question to be raised concerns what kind of light the ideology and practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ sheds on our understanding of evil (I have decided to put this notion in scare quotes whenever employed, to remind us that it is a conceptual innovation on the part of the perpetrators and so a reflection of their ominous ideology). To explore this question it will be necessary to elaborate the notion of collective evil in more detail. This requires the elaboration of a group perspective, suited to identifying the basic dynamics at work in evil carried out by one group against another, thus shifting the perspective from the individualoriented one advanced by C. Fred Alford, and discussed in the previous chapter. Genocide provides us with the most severe and challenging instance of large-scale evil as performed by a collective. The central question is: In what ways and for what reasons do individual evil and collective evil differ? I shall discuss this question in the light of three distinct viewpoints: that of the perpetrators, that of the victims, and that of the bystanders. Different notions of human agency will form the core of this discussion, particularly with respect to the categories of responsibility, guilt, and shame. I shall start by setting out a broad historical and cultural context for the events that took place in the 1990s in (what is now the former) Yugoslavia. My premise is that evil never takes place in a cultural vacuum; rather – and this holds even more for collective evil than for individual evil – deliberate evildoing must be regarded as the conjunction of human maliciousness with the failure of cultural containment (to allude to a central conclusion reached in the discussion above) or, more to the point, with the deliberate and systematic production of conditions which undermine whatever positive cultural containment is in place. This is especially true about top-down orchestrated instances of collective evil,

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genocide in Bosnia being a case in point. Having established its wider context, I will examine the specific elements of this particular case. Special attention will be given to the absolutely essential function of organized mass rape, referred to as ‘genocidal rape’. Approaches to ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the former Yugoslavia Let me begin, Bauman-like, by asking: How does this recent catastrophe reflect on modernity? The answer depends on what we understand by modernity. If we take modernity to denote an historical epoch, and if we take this epoch to be the present one, it follows that everything that takes place now is part of modernity and thus reflects on it. According to this simple logic, the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of recent years is in some sense a product of modernity and thus a problem for it. One could, however, take a very different approach. Yugoslavia, it may be argued, is the soil of a ‘Balkan’ mentality characterized by primitive and deep-seated hatreds, being the psychological product as it were of many centuries of antagonism – ‘ancient hatreds’ – between different groups, be they defined according to national, religious, or ethnic criteria. The aggression unleashed in ‘ethnic cleansing’, then, has a long prehistory that is characteristically part of the Balkans’ history, not Europe’s history. And, as for the role of modernity, the historical fact is that we are talking about a region where the political ideals on which modernity prides itself – democracy, pluralism, tolerance – have never really taken hold in the population’s mentality. Hence, when genocide emerges in this particular part of Europe, this event cannot be taken to be a genuine product of modernity. The effect of this approach, it would seem, is to let modernity off the hook as far as complicity is concerned. Rejecting that modernity as defined above is suitable to explaining genocide in the former Yugoslavia, the view I have described resembles the Sonderweg theory about the Nazi genocide against the Jews. According to this theory, the causes explaining the latter will be specifically German causes; it will suffice, that is, to inquire into the particularities of German history in order to identify the factors that, in sum, produced genocide German style. Indeed, the better the grasp one succeeds in getting on these particular German factors, the more one will come to recognize how specifically German this genocide was. The logical implication of this version of the Sonderweg theory is unequivocal. If Germany’s deviation from the evolutionary path of modernity of the rest of Europe helped facilitate genocide German

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style, one may suppose that if Germany – ex hypothesi – had been more thoroughly penetrated by the ideals of political modernity, it would have had a political culture resistant to a totalitarian regime and its proclaimed genocidal objectives. To sum up, if one wants to speak of a connection between the Holocaust and political modernity, the connection is a purely negative one. It is tempting to apply the same approach to genocide Yugoslavian (or rather Serbian) style. Indeed, the material at hand confirming the Sonderweg thesis with respect to Yugoslavia seems overwhelming. Specifically, the so-called Memorandum is a key document in the ideological preparation for the campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Let us consider in some detail the role and content of this much-cited document. Although the Memorandum was conceived under the aegis of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts (SANU), its status is that of a non-official plea for the safeguarding of Serbian autonomy and integrity in times of crisis, regionalization, and disintegration in post-Tito (post1980) Yugoslavia. Under the charismatic leadership of the famous novelistpolitician Dobrica Cosic, the document was drawn up by sixteen (mostly Belgrade-based) academics, including economists, scientists, and historians. Work on the text began in June 1985. On 25 September 1986 the Belgrade newspaper Vecernje Novosti leaked extracts of the unfinished Memorandum, causing what has been described by journalists as a ‘political earthquake’ in the whole of Yugoslavia. Reading this fifty-page document today, it is difficult to understand why it has attained such a legendary status. The tenor of the text is that of a conservative, disillusioned, and pessimistic Zeitdiagnose. The first two sentences read as follows: ‘There has been a growing concern in our country over the stagnation of social development, economic difficulties, the growth of social tensions and open ethnic conflicts. Not only the political and economic system, but the entire public order of the country has come into a deep crisis’ (Covic 1993: 289). The text ends on this note: ‘The Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, on this occasion, too, expresses its readiness to give its whole-hearted best and devote all its strength to these fateful and historic tasks of our generation’ (p. 337). What were these tasks? The major complaint expressed by the intellectuals behind the Memorandum concerns the fate of the Serbian people under the 1974 Constitution of Yugoslavia. The Constitution had made Yugoslavia into a federation consisting of eight quasi-autonomous provinces. The complaint is that this ‘weakening of the unity of the Yugoslav nation’ has proved particularly damaging for the Serbian people within the different parts of the country: ‘Not all nations are equal: the Serbian nation, for

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example, did not gain the right to its own state. Parts of the Serbian people, who in considerable numbers live in the other republics, do not have the right, unlike the national minorities, to use their own language and alphabet, to get politically and culturally organized, to develop the unique culture of their nation’ (p. 313). The authors repeatedly return to the fate of the Serbs living in Kosovo, exploiting it to strike their grim warning about all Serbs living in diasporas, as a persecuted and vulnerable minority in the various republics: ‘It is not just that the last of the remnants of the Serbian nation are leaving their homes at an unabated rate, but according to all evidence, faced with a physical, moral and psychological reign of terror, they seem to be preparing for their final exodus’ (p. 326). A direct line is drawn from the migrations led by Patriarch Arsenije in 1690 to the present, and the Memorandum proceeds to declare: ‘The physical, political, legal and cultural genocide of the Serbian population in Kosovo and Metohija is the worst defeat in the battles for liberation that Serbia waged from 1804 (Orasac) until the revolution in 1941’ (p. 324). In this situation, where (according to the census of 1981) 24 per cent of Serbs lived outside Serbia and 40.3 per cent outside ‘inner’ (read, the Republic of) Serbia, ‘the Serbian people cannot idly stand by and wait for the future in such a state of uncertainty . . . Naturally, Serbia must not be passive and wait and see what the others will say, as it has done so often in the past’ (p. 336). Taking an alleged Albanian (Tirana-led) plan to create an ‘ethnically cleansed’ and nationally homogeneous Kosovo as their prime example (i.e. a Kosovo that would be part of a ‘Great-Albania’ rid of Serbs), the central message of the Memorandum is that Serbs are everywhere threatened by a hostile and powerful anti-Serbian environment. The response advocated by the authors is the achievement of a ‘territorial unity’ in the form of a sovereign Serb nation-state, or what has come to be called a ‘Greater Serbia’. This is the only viable solution in the face of the genocide (as we saw, that is precisely the word used) they see as threatening Serb minorities everywhere with virtual extinction. The impression evoked in the reader is that what is contended here about the historical fate of the Serbs is similar in kind to what the Nazis used to claim about the Germans. The propaganda utilized in constructing the enemy portrait is structurally similar in the two cases. In pursuing a genocidal aim, it appears to make only a minor difference whether the ideology underpinning the genocidal project is of a racist, nationalist, or ethnicist nature. In all cases of genocide in the twentieth century, the action taken by one’s own group typically assumes the character of selfdefence. To the extent that aggression is exhibited, it is presented in the

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propaganda as but a mirror of the aggression once performed – or now about to be unleashed – by the chosen target group. The will to genocide is accompanied by a sense of historical and moral entitlement to what is secured for one’s own group. If there is a mentality characteristic of genocidal perpetrators, it is that of self-righteousness. Granted that the form and content of the ideologies preparing for genocide are so similar, what follows for the Sonderweg perspective I have stuck to this far in order to grasp the ideologies in question? The difficulty is this. Starting out from premises advocated by the Sonderweg approach, what we find when comparing the propaganda material produced by, say, German Nazis in the 1930s and extremist nationalist Serbs in the late 1980s and early 1990s is that the two pieces of ideological material are essentially similar. In both cases, we note an obsession with external and internal enemies (or one prime enemy, be it the Jews or the Muslims), with defeats suffered in the remote or recent past (World War I or the battle at Kosovo Polje in 1389, respectively), with imminent threats in the present (Jews about to take over German financial interests, or about to contaminate the purity of Aryan blood; Muslims about to wipe out Serbian culture by partly mixing with, partly outnumbering the ‘genuine’ Slavic people, or about to take Serbian girls and women captive into harems), alongside obsession with the strength, solidarity, and moral determination required of the entire population in the historic confrontation with its arch-enemy that is now to take place and to decide its destiny. What we find is the same all-or-nothing, us-or-them scenario, the same Manicheism fostered by fanatical ideologues and carried over into practice in the form of launching genocide against the selected enemy. In psychological terms, as we shall explore below, this manner of perceiving the self/other, or rather in-group/out-group, relationship demonstrates many of the features characteristic of the paranoid-schizoid position worked out by Melanie Klein: experiences are split between wholly good ones with all-good objects and wholly bad experiences with allbad objects. The ‘badness’ of the other causes persecutory anxiety and is used as a constant reference point to justify extreme measures against the threat that comes from without, including both retrospective vengeance (righting previous wrongs) and pre-emptive aggression (preventing future attacks). In the case of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, the charge of genocide became a signal to begin genocide. As for the logic set in motion here, this is highly telling. In 1992, notes Michael Sells in his book The Bridge Betrayed, witnesses began to notice a pattern in the atrocities by Serbian forces: ‘A massacre would take place in a village immediately after the

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local news announced that the Croats and Muslims were about to exterminate Serbs’ (Sells 1996: 6). The logic according to which the present aggressor portrays himself as the original victim, and the present victim as the original aggressor, is aptly captured by Sells: In justifying the atrocities in Bosnia, Serb nationalists would point to atrocities by Croatian army forces in World War II or in the 1991 Serb–Croat war. When it was pointed out that the largely Muslim population selected for extermination had nothing to do with the Croat army and indeed had been attacked by the Croat army in 1993, Serb nationalists would shift to blaming all Muslims for the acts of those who fought with the Ustashe in World War II. When it was pointed out that many of the families who suffered worst in the Serb army onslaught in Bosnia were families of World War II Partisans who fought against the Ustashe, Serb nationalists would shift to claims of Ottoman depravity and treat the Muslims as Turks. When it was pointed out that the Slavic Muslims were just as indigenous to the religion as Orthodox Christians or Catholics, the discussion would then shift to allegations that the Bosnian Muslims were fundamentalists and that Serbia was defending the West against the fundamentalist threat of radical Islam. When it was pointed out that most Bosnian Muslims were antifundamentalist by tradition and character, the Serb nationalist would move to the final fallback position: that this was a civil war in which all sides were guilty, there were no angels, and the world should allow the people involved to solve their own problems. (Sells 1996: 66f.)

I mentioned that Western diplomats and commentators would typically refer to the atrocities taking place in Bosnia as the discharge of mutual ‘ancient hatreds’ between the three groups in question (for instance, then-President Bill Clinton would base his policies on Bosnia on a book he read by Robert Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts), a powerful advocate of this view). This perspective may be termed ‘Balkanism’ in that it portrays the people of Bosnia as Balkan tribal haters outside the realm of reason and civilization. The impression given is that the people affected by ‘ethnic cleansing’ need not concern us because they are ‘other’, strikingly different from our Western civilized ways. Balkanism relies upon the domestic audience’s prejudices against non-Christians in general and Muslims in particular; it expresses and helps reinforce both anti-Balkan and anti-Islamic sentiments in a Western population largely ignorant about the history of Yugoslavia and its different ethnic and religious groups; ignorant, that is to say, about Bosnia’s history as a multiethnic and multi-religious society. In effect, Balkanism is ‘the distorted depiction of the people of south-eastern Europe as barbaric with the implication that violence, even genocide, is inevitable there and part of the local culture’ (Sells 1996: 125). The message of Balkanism as paid lip service to by Western political leaders and top diplomatic envoys is plain: as

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Westerners and people of the civilized world, we can only feel alienation when confronted with the blood-letting in the Balkans. ‘Until these folks get tired of killing each other’, President Clinton said in a statement representative of Western politicians, ‘bad things will continue to happen’ (Sells 1996: 127). Within the perspective I have referred to as Balkanism, one can distinguish between the component of Orientalism and that of Europeanization. Orientalism represents the Muslim as an alien ‘other’. Extremist Bosnian Serbs charged that Bosnians were Islamists plotting to recreate the Ottoman rule over Bosnia. Bosnian Muslims were accused of desiring a state based on Islamic religious law (sharia), of plotting to steal Serb women for their harems (in fact, Bosnian Muslims do not take more than one wife), and of drawing up lists of viziers (ministers in the Ottoman Sultanate) to rule the country. But the full impact of this crude Orientalism can only be appreciated when we observe the way it was connected to Europeanization. Sells explains: As Croatian President Franjo Tudjman noted, he had taken his mission to Europeanize Bosnian Muslims from the expressed desires of Western European leaders. Serb President Slobodan Milosevic was equally desperate to play up to Western leaders and be accepted by them. In his 1989 Kosovo speech Milosevic stated that Prince Lazar’s battle six hundred years before had been a battle to defend Europe from Islam, that Serbia was the bastion of European culture and religion, and that Serbia’s future actions would demonstrate that now as in the past, Serbia was always a part of Europe. Tudjman and Milosevic felt a duty as Europeans to destroy the Bosnian Muslims and felt that doing so would facilitate their acceptance by Europe. (Sells 1996: 122)

The appeal by Tudjman and Milosevic to the values of Europe, meaning to Christianity, to modernity, to Civilization with a capital C, exploits Orientalist stereotypes and helps to amplify the Balkanism widespread in Western governments. In a manner reminiscent of the influential American political scientist Samuel Huntington, the common strategy of Tudjman and Milosevic in this case is to partly postulate, partly radicalize, a polarization between ‘the West’ and ‘Europe’ on the one hand and Islam on the other; or, put differently, between modernity and fundamentalism. It must have come as a piece of powerful evidence of the success of the two presidents’ strategy when no less an authority than Henry Kissinger, in the autumn of 1995, proclaimed that ‘there is no Bosnian culture’. To imply that Bosnia is a kind of ‘artificial’ political entity fit only for dissolution into its putatively elemental parts flies in the

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face of the truth, about which most of Kissinger’s audience will be ignorant: the truth is that, unlike Yugoslavia, which existed for about seventy years, Bosnia has enjoyed an uninterrupted existence as a political entity since the tenth century, except for the 1929–45 period (Anzulovic 1999: 172). This being so, the statement ‘there is no Bosnian culture’ is true only to the extent, yet precisely to the extent, that the campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ succeeds in making it into an empirical truth. In this case as in others, much too numerous to be cited, words pronounced by a top-level expert in the Western world in a bafflingly accurate way mirror the reality forcefully created by ongoing genocide. (How it came to be that leading diplomats and intellectuals accepted the Serbian definition of reality at face value and converted it into academic discourse is an important issue in its own right, to which I will return in Chapter 5.) What is genocide? Before I discuss, as now I must, the precise nature of genocide, a final logical observation regarding the Sonderweg perspective is called for. If the different Sonderwege in form and content as far as the practice of genocide is concerned can be seen to exhibit more similarities than differences, the special nature this approach started out by claiming for each case under consideration begins to evaporate. True, there may still be particularly German reasons why the Nazis exterminated Jews, and likewise particularly Serbian reasons why extremist Serbs exterminated Muslims. Be this as it may, the accumulated effect is that so many Sonderwege can be seen to have led to one and the same thing: genocide. At the end of the day, then, what strikes us is what the instances of genocide on European soil in this century have in common. But this logical point is only of minor importance compared with the effect of the Sonderweg approach in terms of alienation. I briefly anticipated this effect above when talking about Balkanism. Balkanism, I suggest, is true to the Sonderweg approach in its penchant for listing the many particularities, if not idiosyncrasies, of the groups and group leaders involved in the so-called ‘civil war’ in the Balkans. I do not deny that there may be sound historical reasons for focusing upon such particularities. Still, I want to warn against focusing too one-sidedly upon what makes ‘them’ ‘out there’ so special – so special as to place them beyond the reach of comprehension, compassion, and concerted intervention. The fact is that focusing upon peculiarity is apt to foster alienation: instead of coming to see ourselves as sharing a common

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humanity and common human aspirations with people affected by genocide, we come to see them not as unique individuals at all, but as so many representatives of a collective defined by purely extrinsic criteria. By accepting, if only on the level of description, such extrinsic criteria, we, as bystanders to the atrocities unfolding, accept a vital element of genocidal logic: namely, that collective identity counts for everything and individual identity for nothing. Genocide is this generic attribution made into an ideology and then turned into a practice. According to the formulation adopted in the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Gutman and Rieff 1999: 154).

As pointed out by Raphael Lemkin, the Polish legal scholar who, as recently as in the late 1930s, coined the phrase ‘genocide’ and inaugurated its present use, genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. Lemkin fashioned the term from the Greek word genos, meaning ‘race’ or ‘tribe’, and the Latin term for killing, cide. He made the important observation that a group did not have to be physically eliminated to suffer genocide. They could be stripped of all cultural traces of their identity – whereby identity goes much deeper than, say, the nationality in question. ‘Genocide can destroy a culture instantly, like fire can destroy a building in an hour’ (Lemkin, quoted in Power 2002: 43). In addition to the crime of genocide itself, the 1948 Convention provides that the following acts shall be punishable: conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempts to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. The Genocide Convention imposes a general duty on states that are parties to the Convention ‘to prevent and to punish’ genocide. In addition to individual criminal responsibility for genocide, the Convention also establishes state responsibility, i.e. international legal responsibility of the state itself for breaching its obligations under the Convention. It is crucial to bear in mind that the main criterion of genocide is that it is directed at individuals ‘not in

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their capacities as individuals but as members of the national [or ethnic, racial, or religious] group’ (Power 2002: 62). The imposition of the national – or more widely and deeply, cultural – pattern of the oppressor that Lemkin talks about may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. Since our present context is genocide in the former Yugoslavia, I shall briefly note the problems created for nations of a genuinely multinational and multi-religious kind by the conceptual nationalist bias implicit in the Lemkin-inspired Genocide Convention. In a state such as Bosnia, there is not one – homogeneous – national group that is being threatened. As David Campbell argues, because a ‘national’ group has to be ethnically, racially, or religiously specific to have status according to the Convention, a multicultural state, in order to protect itself from partition, would have to ‘submit itself to the very identity politics and territorial division it is seeking to resist’ (Campbell 1998: 108). What the bias in favour of the homogeneous, exclusivist identity built into the very premises of the Genocide Convention cannot properly accommodate, then, are threats to a hybrid, multicultural polity, one where each person is the carrier of multiple identities, thus defying any one-criterion identity mark. In my opinion, doing justice to this latter circumstance in Bosnia raises a conceptual challenge. For in describing the individuals associated with the different groups living in Bosnia as ‘Bosnian Serbs’, or ‘Bosnian Croats’, or ‘Bosnian Muslims’, one reproduces (and so terminologically subscribes to) the kind of one-criterion, quasi-exclusivist identity classification practised in words and deeds in ‘ethnic cleansing’; in short, one suggests three mutually ‘exclusive’ homogeneous identities (corresponding to three groups/collectivities), set apart from each other along an ‘ethnonationalist’ dimension, where there is no such thing; or, better put, where there is rather a lifeworld consisting of and upheld by individuals perceiving themselves as Bosniaks first and foremost – that is, as carriers of a hybrid, multiple, and so non-homogeneous identity. I admit being unable to solve this problem in a satisfactory manner. I cannot, that is, give sociologically valid descriptions of how ‘ethnic cleansing’ was conceived and carried out without myself using the onecriterion identity classification that is part and parcel of it – yet which I desire to resist. This being so, I maintain that what ‘ethnic cleansing’ imposes, in acknowledging no Bosniaks but instead only so many (stereotypically depicted) Serbs, Croats, and Muslims within the same state, is

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an ideologically concocted construct, a separation-enforcing identity that, precisely on grounds of not being already recognized and acted upon by the real-life individual members of the state, had to be imposed upon them by violence – initially symbolic, later eminently physical. Indeed, as we shall explore below, it is this very lack of ‘natural’, clear-cut, and already-at-hand fit between identity as constructed by the (genocidal) ideology (i.e. as homogeneous and exclusivist) and identity as lived by a majority of the Bosnian population (i.e. as heterogeneous and hybrid; as not primarily a matter of, say, blood-based descent) that forced the practitioners of ‘ethnic cleansing’ to go to such extremes in order to remove the nearly ubiquitous signs that their version of identity politics in fact flew in the face of the reality at hand. It is an old truth that, whenever ideology (in the strong sense intended here, inspired by Arendt) and reality clash, it is to the cost of the latter. If need be, the given reality will be completely altered so as to conform to ideological axioms. For my purposes, it is crucial that we realize exactly how the issue of collective identity came to play such an instrumental role in the genocide that took place in former Yugoslavia; how, that is to say, people were pinned to the wall of nationhood and so robbed of alternative ways of identifying themselves and others – knowing as we do that how we identify people shapes our perception of them and, accordingly, the way we act towards them. Tone Bringa, an anthropologist who in 1987–8 and in 1993 did field work in a mixed Muslim/Catholic Bosnian village, relates being told by people in Belgrade that ‘The Muslims will not tell you this, but they are really Serbs, they just say they are Muslims.’ When visiting Zagreb, she would typically be told that ‘They claim they are Muslims, but they are really Croats’ (Bringa 1995: 30). Bringa helps us see why both claims are misleading: For the Muslims with whom I lived it was not a question of not wanting to admit who they really were – they knew very well who they were – but rather that a myth of origins was neither a part of, nor necessary to, knowing one’s identity. This is where the nation-state-aspiring, ethnically focused Serbs and Croats differed from the Bosnian Muslims. Among the latter, shared collective identity was not perceived through the idiom of shared blood and a myth of common origins, which is so often invoked in discourses on ethnic or national identity by other European peoples. The symbol of blood referring to common descent is, for example, used by Bosnian Serbs. By contrast, the Muslims referred to their collective identity in an idiom which de-emphasized descent (‘ethnicity’) and focused instead on a shared environment, cultural practices, a shared sentiment, and common experiences. (1995: 30)

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According to Bringa, this means that Bosnian Muslims, as far as their self-understanding is concerned, were partly foreign to, partly excluded from the ethnonationalist discourse which revolves around descent understood as common blood. The Muslims of Bosnia, then, form an ethnic community where kin relationships through blood (along patrilineal lines) give way to religious-cultural factors, the latter being ‘loose’, multiplex, and open to change in a way deeply contrasting with the fixed, static, and inflexible conception of collective identity – as ‘ethnic identity’ – espoused by nationalist Serbs and Croats since the late 1980s. Having established the precise meaning of genocide as well as that of collective identity in the present context, we can now begin to see more clearly the danger entailed in accepting, or in simply failing to question, what I shall call the logic of generic attribution. What generic attribution does is to collectivize agency and its various properties and dimensions – be they moral, legal, or spatiotemporal. When the murder of a five-yearold Bosnian Muslim child is legitimized by reference to harms Muslims allegedly did to Serbs some six hundred years ago, the logic employed is one according to which an individual’s destiny is predetermined: it makes no difference what a particular individual (be it a child) says, feels, or means; what makes a difference – in terms of categories such as friend or enemy, fit for life or not so – is purely collective, extra-individual factors wholly extrinsic to the individual in question. When human agency is thoroughly collectivized, in-group differences evaporate and inter-group differences are polarized in the extreme. Once collectivized, human agency is conceived in such a way that the individual is compelled to answer for everything ‘his’ group does, has done, or is said to be about to do; conversely, the group is made to answer for everything a single individual member of it has done, does, or is said to contemplate doing. The consequence of collectivizing agency is that the distinction between individual and group is blurred to the point of being obliterated. The guilt of one group and the victimhood of the other are both eternalized; they are placed beyond the reach of individuals who choose freely and in their capacity as individuals acting on their own behalf as distinct from that of ‘their’ particular group, be it defined by national, religious, or ethnic criteria. Such eternalization of victimhood goes hand in hand with the essentialization of identity that is a salient feature of genocidal ideologies. Genocide is a collective action. It is contemplated, planned, organized, and carried out by a specific organized collective, by a group. The defined target of genocide is another group. Typically, the perpetrator group will

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define itself by reference to the individual members’ common identity, be it defined by reference to nation, race, ethnicity, religion, or sex. The target group will be defined by the perpetrator group by the same set of (collectivist, often essentialist) criteria. The antagonism that is produced by this type of identificatory reference takes the form of a one-to-one relationship: if the perpetrator group focuses its identificatory attention upon the race identity of the target group, the ideological message conveyed is that the race identity of one’s own group is what is first and foremost threatened by the other group. This, of course, is what occurred in Nazism. In ‘ethnic cleansing’, the allegedly threatened purity of the ethnic identity constituted the ideological focus. Let us appreciate the difference. The explosive dialectic of individualization and collectivism Although the one-to-one relationship applies to this latter case as well, the shift of identificatory focus from race to ethnicity has important consequences: it entails a shift from the relative ‘hardness’ of biology to the relative ‘softness’ of culture, and with that from a feature allegedly being of a strict genetic nature (a ‘given’ not open to modification by means of the will or actions of its human carrier) to features of an undeniable cultural kind, features that ‘are’ what they are, indeed have come into being and are reproduced, thanks to the creative and interpretative activities of members of concrete communities. The typically cited ‘common descent’ of members of an ethnic group points to common place(s) and history, yet what truly matters in ideological terms is the ‘characteristic’ cultural praxis of the group in question, encompassing faith, mores, clothing – everything that symbolizes it as a ‘tradition’ and way of life to distinguish it from others. I shall not attempt to settle whether ‘ethnic cleansing’ is genocide ‘postmodern’ rather than ‘modern’ style, since I find these labels of little help. Instead, I wish to suggest that ‘ethnic cleansing’ is identity politics against a sociohistorical background where identity – be it that of the single individual or of a collective – has become a deeply existential issue, indeed a highly precarious task, a project, where the point is precisely that the generic-hereditary element of identity is being radically downplayed as far as its significance as a marker, as a filler of content, is concerned, and so the part played by the past. In keeping with what I take to be the dominant mentality today, identity is something that has to get started without givens, without anything that is fixed and substantial at the same time (think of Hitler’s emphasis on Blut und Boden, ‘blood and soil’, to grasp the difference). Instead, everything to do with identity is to do with

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its building, with its active, perpetual, and open-ended construction, since the understanding of identity now takes as its key premise that identity is thoroughly future-oriented, whereby the abandonment of everything past is what is striven for, as opposed to clinging to it in some belief that it has power to (pre)determine the present and the future. True enough, this current understanding of identity is taken to apply first and foremost to contemporary (Western) individuals, as elaborated most famously by Anthony Giddens (1991) and Ulrich Beck (1986) under the heading ‘individualization’. A fortiori, however, it comes to play a major role in how such individuals are likely to interpret and assess the identity that they can be said to develop as members of larger groups – ethnic groups being a case in point. For my present purposes, pointing out this difference between ideologies focusing on race and those focusing on ethnicity is to call attention to the enormous amount of cultural (and, in that sense, symbolic) work required nowadays for ethnicity to mark a supposedly unequivocal and exhaustive identity of individuals and whole groups. The central normative task before us consists in breaking the vicious, indeed lethal, circle of generic attribution. A human individual ‘is’ not his or her collective. The specific sort of group identity an individual is born into – be it, again, a national, religious, ethnic, or sexual one – in no way determines the worth (the moral, legal, or political standing) of that individual. The worth of a human individual is not derived from the particular collective it is born as a member of. To accept such a view would imply that the worth of the individual is made directly dependent on membership, and from this there is but a short path to the view that membership of some collective(s) makes for more worth than membership of others. Indeed, in my opinion the major weakness of present-day communitarianism consists precisely in the tendency to derive the worth and standing of individuals from their actual and recognized belongingness to a collective of some specific kind, thus leaving individuals morally and politically unprotected once they, for some reason often beyond the single individual’s control, are excluded from and so come to stand outside of such a collective (MacIntyre 1981). Pointing out – correctly – that actual acts of recognition of the individual’s worth typically occur within a community is one thing. Quite another is to infer, from this Hegelinspired insight into the intersubjective nature of recognition, that the community in question is the source of the moral worth of the individual member. There is a short step from holding that the moral standing of an individual derives from his or her community to the notion that some communities possess more worth than others, the implication being that so do some individuals too, as a function of which community or group they

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belong to. In opposing such a view, my position is not, say, that worth is a matter of merit, of individual achievement, so that some individuals attain greater moral worth than others. Rather my point is that the category of moral worth as applied to human individuals does not allow of hierarchy – be it construed collectively (as in nationalist or ethnicist ideologies) or individually (as in libertarian meritocracy). This general point exposes a weakness not only in communitarianism but in its philosophical rival liberalism as well. Whereas communitarianism, at least up to a point, represents a justified critique of the individualism or even atomism of much liberal thought and practice, it pays the price of failing to appreciate the positive value of the differences between individuals, by which I have in mind in-group as well as out-group individuals. On the other hand, liberalism, in espousing the opposite primacy, namely that of the individual over any community or collective he or she may belong to (viewing belongingness as contingent rather than essential), tends to recognize plurality of identities as something that obtains – and indeed ought to obtain – between groups only, thus neglecting the intra-individual dimension. What needs to be recognized, therefore, is that each human individual is a carrier of multiple identities, thus defying any one-criterion identity mark. The normative implication consists in holding that every human individual be allowed to express this multiplicity – to express it freely and openly. The (extreme) alternative notion is the one identified above, in discussing essentializing ideologies: here, what carries normative weight is the demand that the individual yield to social pressures to withhold, or deny, or efface, such intrasubjective multiplicity, since it is deemed a threat to the ideal of homogeneity. Unfortunately, liberalism stops short of recognizing the extent to which differences between same-group individuals help to create and sustain differences within each one of them, thus pluralizing their commitments and loyalties and so freeing the latter from any strong normative link to one particular community or group that the individual may belong to. Consequently, liberalism underplays what communitarianism exaggerates: the significance of others in the development of individual identities. So, albeit for opposite reasons, both communitarianism and liberalism have difficulties appreciating the peculiar kind of multi-identity that is threatened both communally and individually in cases where homogenization of identity, by way of fusing type of identity with degree of worth (moral status), is made into a practical-political objective – the former Yugoslavia being a case in point. The crucial lesson is that belonging to a particular community (be it religious, national, racial, or ethnic) cannot be made into a condition of

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possessing moral worth. Although existing communities do play an indispensable role in enacting recognition towards individual members, thus instilling in each child-cum-adult member a sense of self-esteem indispensable to the building of non-abusive social relationships, the worth as such is not a property of the community but something inherent in every individual. Such worth is absolute, not gradual; universal to mankind, not a prerogative of particular groups. What light does this discussion throw on the connection between modernity and genocide? It is a commonplace that a major difference between premodern and modern (or postmodern) society is that of identity as derived (given) and identity as chosen. In a word, the identity of the modern individual has become an object of choice. The two instances of genocide on European soil in the twentieth century under discussion here can be regarded as protests against and negations of the development of political modernity in which identity is rendered optional for each individual. Such optionalization of identity implies its individualization: the issue of identity is taken out of the powers of tradition, history, and communality and placed instead, existentialistlike, as a task and burden on the shoulders of the single individual. The social control over the individual exerted in industrial society by way of class, family, gender roles, and so on is rapidly declining. Though in many respects ‘liberating’ the individual member of society, the waning hold of traditional forms of social control means that the individual becomes increasingly vulnerable in the face of social change. Deprived of the certainties provided by a stable family (kin in a wide sense), a stable neighbourhood, and a stable workplace, the individual thus ‘free’ to stake out a life-course all by his or her own choosing is in fact all the more ruthlessly affected by macro-social forces (especially economic ones in the wake of globalization) he or she is dramatically dependent upon. In present-day detraditionalized life-forms there emerges a new kind of immediacy between individual and society, an immediacy of crisis and pathology in the sense that societal crises appear and are suffered as individual ones; the societal character of the crises is experienced only in a very indirect and vague manner. An example is the problem of mass unemployment, which ceases to be perceived as a political-societal problem and instead is conceived of as a problem for the individuals affected; a problem each and every one has to sort out for him- or herself, compelled to develop what may hopefully prove the most adequate coping strategies. Here, others affected by the same systemic problem are not perceived as natural allies in a solidary struggle against, say, the commanding heights of the economy, but instead as so many competitors for goods

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growing scarce and demanding optimal willingness to adjust, in short ‘flexibility’ as the most-favoured capacity on the part of the individual. Sociologist Ulrich Beck talks about how ‘external causes are transformed into personal failure, systemic problems into personal shortcomings’ (Beck 1986: 150). The attempt to find a ‘biographical solution to systemic contradictions’ (Beck) means that individuals now try to fight back the unprepossessing consequences of global processes by local means and with local resources – ultimately with utterly private ones. In reality, however, this new individualized private existence is becoming more and more dependent upon processes and conditions which evade the individual’s range of influence. The shift to individualized society is accompanied by a distinct and increasingly widespread (culturally globalized) ideology contending that the identities – indeed, life-choices in general – that matter are individually chosen, not derived; a reflection of individuality not collectivity. As Beck puts it, for Homo optionis, ‘life, death, gender, corporeality, identity, religion, marriage, parenthood, social ties – all are becoming decidable down to the small print; once fragmented into options, everything must be decided’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 1996: 31). Since the individual is overburdened and at a loss to constantly make decisions and choose anew in a world where change is the only permanent feature and everything is up for grabs, a huge market is created for the answer factories, the psycho-boom, the advice literature, and (partly by way of compensation and relief) for identity politics of a communal, collectivist kind, promising the overburdened individual clear answers to all his qualms and a firm place of belonging. The more confused, alone, and weak the individual, the more attractive will be the quasi-organic belongingness, directedness, and mission or vision of a collective movement led by charismatic leaders. In times of rapid change and crisis, survival can swiftly be transformed from a dominant concern of the powerless individual to the predominant issue of a whole society (or collective), claimed to be taken care of by the leaders in charge, so that the more comprehensive their powers, the better. National, religious, and ethnicist ideologies pursuing genocidal aims join company in rejecting wholesale such optionalization-cumindividualization of identity. What is rendered dynamic, a matter of changeability, in the modern notion is instead maintained as static and given once and for all in the anti-modern notion. For anti-modern this latter notion of identity clearly is. The differences making a difference in moral terms between individuals are not individual differences, in the sense of individually authored differences; instead they are

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differences awaiting the individual upon his or her birth into some specific collective. We should beware of conceiving the two notions as simply contradicting and mutually excluding each other. The relationship between them is precisely not static, but dynamic. What does this mean? There is a dialectic between individualization and collectivism, between optionalism and essentialism at work in various phases of epochal modernity. The idea I have in mind should be familiar. Take Hannah Arendt’s, or Erich Fromm’s, attempt to understand the triumph of totalitarian fascism and Nazism. Their claim is that the atomism of modern secularized mass society reaches a point where the isolated and alienated individuals long for a sense of belonging to some sort of organic community in which they will be relieved of the burden of having to create all meaning, identity, and moral values out of themselves in their sheer capacity as unique individuals. Put differently, as soon as the existentialist individual portrayed by early Sartre and Camus starts to be perceived as a historic reality, with all the metaphysical loneliness that goes with such a development, it is only a question of time before a reversal sets in: feeling overburdened, such atomized individuals start craving for the return to what they increasingly feel deprived of; namely, a community which would furnish each member with a substantial package of ready-to-use meaning, identity, and moral values. Individuals liberated from the shackles of tradition arrive at a point where they stop cherishing their newly attained freedom and start fearing it instead; the fear of freedom leads in its turn to the attempt – at first individually longed for, then collectively undertaken – to escape from freedom, to allude to Fromm’s famous book title. The rest is history: along comes a charismatic leader claiming to represent an organic Volksgemeinschaft of some version or the other; no longer feeling isolated, impotent, and confused, the individuals are offered a unitary direction in which they may collectively march, being many, yet feeling as one. My claim is that the dialectic between individualization and collectivism needs to be recognized as acutely relevant if we wish to understand the situation in the USA and in western Europe as well as in former Yugoslavia and countries that until recently were controlled by Soviet communism. In extremely market-driven and individualized societies, the lure of ‘deep’, ‘organic’, and exclusivist ideologies pitting the pure against the impure, the cherished in-group against the loathed out-group, scapegoating the latter, is not to be underestimated, responding as such ideologies and their leaders do to undernourished longings for

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belongingness and meaning, indeed for something to live and (if need be) die for, among millions of individuals in the Western world feeling alone, scared, and valueless. The wholesale marketization which modern or postmodern societies are currently pervaded by, outsourcing, downsizing, and deskilling the ordinary workforce, places the individual man and woman at the mercy of all-powerful forces of change (Klein 2000). As sociologist Richard Sennett (1998) points out, the trend towards increasing mobility and flexibility in globalized capitalism leaves the question ‘Who needs me?’ without a clear answer. As a consequence of the destruction of the past, the uprooting of what used to be lasting ties and long-standing solidarities, and the erosion of that continuity in personal and professional relationships upon which trust so profoundly depends, a ‘corrosion of character’ (Sennett) begins to take its toll among the younger generations. Especially relevant to our concern with genocide is Sennett’s indication of a connection between the processes of economic globalization and the recent emergence of aggressive nationalism, fuelling civil or rather uncivil wars of nearly unprecedented vehemence. Sennett’s general observation is that, ‘As the shifting institutions of the economy diminish the experience of belonging somewhere special at work, people’s commitments increase to geographic places like nations, cities and localities’ (Sennett, quoted in Bauman 1999: 14). If the admittedly crude sociological diagnosis put forward here is correct, it follows that fertile soil for ideologies promising to provide remedies for the discontents of (post)modern individuals is created in the most ‘advanced’ Western societies, not only – or even primarily – in ‘backward-looking’ ones. (In analysing the case of former Yugoslavia in greater detail below, I shall therefore concentrate on other factors than those characteristic of the ‘market-driven’ societies on which sociologists such as Beck and Sennett mainly focus.) One reason why this is becoming such an urgent problem is that neither communitarianism nor liberalism offers a satisfactory response to it. Communitarianism is good at laying bare the emptiness of the present-day self and at pointing to the dangers of ‘freeing’ it completely from the commitments and duties that necessarily go with being attributed a role and a place within larger sociocultural structures and communal networks. Its warnings against the hollowness of the victory thought to be won by ideologically rejecting and politically eroding such structures are entirely justified. But communitarianism has so far been less sensitive to the opposite danger – that of cultivating tradition for its own sake. By advocating a notion as well as existential function of tradition that strikes many a (post)modern individual as

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backward-looking, nostalgic, and even reactionary, communitarians such as MacIntyre risk that most present-day individuals feel alienated by such normative emphasis on tradition, and so are at a loss to benefit from it in their search for identity and meaning. Liberalism hardly fares any better. Over the past decades, it has had little to offer by way of countering the general trends which nourish a hunger for ‘organic’ we-identities: the trend toward a wholesale reduction of agent to consumer, the trend toward the sovereignty of market metaphors in every corner of social and cultural life, and toward seeing the self as nothing but an abstract consuming machine (Williams 2000: 31–52). Today’s liberalism lacks proper recognition of the fact that the self itself is learned and evolved, not a given, fixed system of needs and desires which for their part exist only for the sake of being ‘addressed’ and ‘met’ by what is offered on the marketplace. In short, present-day liberalism lacks resources to put into question the idea that identity is something that can be purchased and discarded, something that is open to an endless series of modifications as both facilitated and communicated to others by means of consumer choices. Making identity into a commodity just like any other is part of the triumph of free-market capitalism over the more ‘traditional’ and static type of society favoured by communitarianism. But it is the failure of current liberalism to take seriously the extent to which longings for collective identity now evolve in individuals frustrated or made into losers by neoliberalism’s brutal roll-back of the welfare state and the kinds of securities it upheld – a policy that produces an enormous amount of social suffering, of humiliation and powerlessness, and that can indeed be deemed evil to the extent that this suffering is both predictable and preventable (Bourdieu et al. 1999). That is to say, liberalism has so far largely neglected the costs of the societal transition to which ‘identity’ has been subject; the costs of identity having ceased to be a matter largely predetermined by one’s community and becoming instead something optional and truly individualized. The overall societal swing in the individualist direction today has reached a point where the attractions of the other extreme – collectivism in essentialistic and xenophobic versions – are felt by a growing number of people. As I see it, the growth of such longings for collective identity now provides populist and nationalist ‘protest movements’ with many of their foot soldiers, promising as they do to offer people something deeper, something richer in commitment and meaning, than the consuming brands that otherwise appear to be the favoured identity markers offered in globalized capitalism. (I return to this in Chapter 6.)

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‘Ethnic cleansing’ as a case of securitization The perspective just offered is meant to be of a most general kind. Due to this generality, one may question how far such a ‘dialectic’ between individualization and collectivism can be made to apply to what took place in former Yugoslavia. And to be sure, in this case other factors than those referred to played (and continue to play) an important role. For one thing, this is not a country where, say, Beck’s cultural diagnosis – stressing individualization as promoted by consumerism and marketization – appears valid. Having said this, the nationalism of a leader such as Slobodan Milosevic should be put in scare quotes. It is but mere pretence, a card he repeatedly found it useful to play – not, as it were, for the sake of the collective he claims to be intent on protecting, but rather for the sake of his own concern with retaining power at all costs. On the other hand, the undeniable popular success with which he played the nationalist card – be it as anti-Croat, anti-Muslim, or anti-Kosovo-Albanian nationalism – highlights the vast political potential collectivism-qua-nationalism appears to carry in the Balkans. Highlighted in the events in former Yugoslavia is a ‘reevaluation of communal identity as national, and of national identity as congruent with that of a state’ (Allen 1996: 133). Moreover, the identities rendered all-important in these events function as categories for the mobilization for action – always portrayed as warranted self-defence, regardless of the degree of aggression directed at the target group in question – and as categories for the distribution of fear, whereby the genocidal frenzy is fed by one identity fearing annihilation by another. The sheer existence, or co-presence, of alien identity is pictured as a threat. In what follows, the leader role assumed by Milosevic will be examined in the context of securitization. My analysis will draw upon a theoretical perspective developed by the so-called Copenhagen School in security studies. The Copenhagen School’s notion of ‘securitization’ is of great help to understand how a particular object is presented as threatened and how extraordinary measures are justified to defend it. The assertion that a particularly significant object is threatened can be put forward in different ways, depending on whether the assertion is made on behalf of the state (in which case, its sovereignty typically will be said to be in jeopardy), or the nation (threatened community), or the religion (threatened worship), or the global market economy (threatened freedom of establishment). The assertion that the object is threatened takes the form of an appeal; this appeal in turn triggers different dynamics and paths of action

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depending on the properties of the referent object. The issue of the destiny of a selected and particularly significant (meaning both symbolladen and indispensable) object is made into an existential issue whose resolution will be decisive for the destiny of all those in the group (the national community, the religious community, etc.) who are associated with the object. Since the alleged threat is existential, it will be necessary to implement extraordinary measures in order to protect it. Declaring something a ‘security issue’ in this sense entails that a specific issue is lifted above ordinary political discourse; it is elevated to a higher plane, reflecting its importance and urgency, in keeping with the action-compelling logic according to which ‘if not dealt with in time, it will be too late’. Hence all other concerns must be put aside; those charged with dealing with the issue must be granted unlimited powers, and their measures will appear as legitimate in light of the utmost seriousness of their task. Security is here a self-referential practice; it is by labelling something a security issue that it becomes one. The Danish political scientists Carsten Bagge Laustsen and Ole Wæver write: ‘Securitization is the intersubjective establishment of an existential threat with a saliency sufficient to have substantial political effects’ (Bagge Laustsen and Wæver 2000: 708). Ideologies exemplify this. Following Slavoj Zizek, ideologies anchor being and constitute identity. For instance, the ideology of National Socialism is identity-constitutive for its followers in an all-comprehensive, existential sense; ideology is what anchors the individuals in being, it is what determines and confirms their essence, their who, their whence, their what, and their why. Ideologies stimulate fantasies in the sense of scenarios that construct objects of desire. Such desires are different from needs; whereas a need can be fulfilled, and accordingly wanes or disappears when satisfied, a desire remains unfulfilled. To take an example, we may ask: Why desire the relics of Lazar? The answer is: Because they contain the essence of being Serb. The decisive feature of ideologies in the sense intended here is that they create illusive fantasies of ‘full’ or perfect being, thus differing from religion, which typically emphasizes that there is something ‘higher’ (transcendent, extramundane) that the human subject by default stands opposed to. By contrast, ideologies articulate the promise that full and perfect being is attainable in mundane existence; hence they ‘flatten out’ what in an inalterable manner is presented as transcendent in religious discourse. Religious objects are viewed as mediators, while ideological objects are seen as the thing itself. In ideology no transcendence is involved, only distance qua projection. The appropriation and protection/preservation of the sublime object designated as such by an ideology is the path to security and safety.

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In psychoanalytic terms, the desired object is regarded as a substitute for the primordially lost object. The point is that individuals (not singly, but communally and collectively, in rituals and by means of narratives and symbols employed for the task by the ideology) project what they lack – what they are not, but desire to be – onto objects, creating illusive fantasies of (re)gaining them. In accordance with the articulation cultivated by ideology, these objects are perceived as a filler that can heal the subject, make it whole, unite it with its essence. To construct and present an object as threatened is the paramount example of how this is done. In short, ideologies work through securitization. They revolve around and exploit the security/insecurity distinction, turning the distinction into a potent source for political mobilization – mobilization, that is, with the parallel aims of protecting the precious object and fighting those said to pose a threat to it. Whatever aggression is unleashed against the latter will be considered legitimate, as dictated by self-defence. We can easily see how this logic may function as a recipe for escalation: the higher the stakes – the more precious the object under threat, the more mighty the forces said to be intent on its destruction – the more extreme will the counter-measures be, and the more justified. What does this have to do with collective evil? I have proposed that collective evil such as genocide be understood as a sophisticated and highly organized undertaking. A common finding in well-documented twentieth-century instances – beginning with what the Turks did against the Armenians in 1915, and ending with what Hutus did against Tutsis and ‘moderate’ Hutus in Rwanda in 1994 – is that ‘a war of words precedes a war of bodies’. Genocide does not occur without preparation (most often, meticulous preparation spanning many years prior to the action taken), by which I mean not only practical, logistical, strategic preparation, but primarily ideological preparation. The chief objective of the latter is to mobilize support for the action that will ensue. This includes first and foremost support among members of the in-group, in which some people will be direct participants in the event and others passive (Mitla¨ufer of various strands) and more or less distant bystanders. The ideological preparation often also aims at gathering support from the outside world and thus from among the audience of the bystanders in the ordinary sense of the word as non-party, outsiders, to the event. The crucial part played by ideological preparation is captured in Article III of the 1948 Geneva Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Here, it is stated that ‘direct and public incitement to commit genocide’ is punishable. I shall show below that intellectuals form an absolutely crucial group in the activities amounting to such incitement. In virtue of the popular impact exerted by

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prominent academics and writers of various kinds (including television and radio journalists – a group that proved to be particularly instrumental in mobilizing for the genocide in Rwanda), they carry a major responsibility for creating what may be deemed a genocidal atmosphere – i.e. an atmosphere pervaded by fear, hatred, distrust, contempt, and the like, of the group singled out for destruction in so many articles, books, movies, speeches, and conversations. The drumming up of such an atmosphere is a sine qua non for the atrocities to follow, so that the more strongly individuals are involved in these ideological activities, the greater is their complicity in the consequences that follow for those targeted. Using Melanie Klein’s notion (explained in Chapter 3), the atmosphere thus deliberately brought about bears many of the features of the paranoidschizoid position; in particular, the sense that everything that is ‘good’ and worthy of protection is coming under severe threat from hostile forces in the outside world, creating a psychological condition of persecutory anxiety simultaneously based on and perpetuating a rigid and obsessive splitting between all that is deemed ‘bad’ and all that is deemed ‘good’, whereby everything associated with badness (including these very parts of the projector him- or herself) is projected onto the out-group and everything associated with goodness is viewed as the prerogative of one’s own group (Klein 1988b). Indeed, I suggest that cultivating these features of the paranoid-schizoid position is a central element in what I label genocidal ideologies – i.e. ideologies systematically pursuing destruction of large numbers of individuals, each of whom is identified and targeted by virtue of group membership. The creation of a genocidal atmosphere – one in which the actual translation of words into deeds comes to be perceived as only a matter of time, as inevitable and ‘waiting to happen’ – depends upon rendering common and deeply, existentially, shared the splitting and persecutory anxiety Klein originally had introduced intrasubjectively, with respect to a distinct individual. To propose that Klein’s key notions are crucially relevant to explore the nature of collective evil such as genocide is to bring up the issue of the relationship between individual and group. A big issue in its own right, I shall now try to explain more precisely my understanding of this relationship, hoping thereby to clarify the so far largely implicit distinction between individual and collective evildoing. The differences between individual and collective evil Significantly, as we shall see in rich empirical detail below, the tremendous mobilizing force of the (genocidal) ideology under discussion here,

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employing the method of securitization as well as that of allocating guilt by means of scapegoating – that is, by selecting certain ‘surrogate victims’ so as to combat the allegedly imminent danger of ‘impurity’ (see below) – must be understood as due to the ability of this ideology to speak directly to the individual, to his or her concerns and insecurities over identity, belongingness, and survival in times of societal change and upheaval. Hence, for my purposes in what follows, I shall proceed in concurrence with Freud’s position that individual and group psychology cannot be absolutely differentiated, because the psychology of the individual is itself a function of the relationship between one person and another. As observed by Wilfred Bion (1989: 168), ‘the individual is, and has always been, a member of a group’, so that ‘no individual, however isolated in time and space, should be regarded as outside a group or lacking in active manifestations of group psychology’. On these grounds, Bion endorses Freud’s rejection of the idea of a ‘herd instinct’ and of various other theories which hold that a group is more than the sum of its members. This is not to deny that, when feeling, experiencing, and acting emphatically in his capacity as a group member, i.e. when taking part in various forms of collective action, the individual will exhibit features that otherwise will remain hidden or simply lie dormant. A case in point is the loss of individual distinctiveness so frequently remarked upon by group members and commentators alike; another is the tendency for an individual’s emotions to become extraordinarily intensified in a group, while his intellectual ability – the ability to ‘think for himself’ – is significantly reduced. As far as the distinction between individual and collective evil is concerned, then, the former is about a concrete individual that chooses to hurt a particular other person as a decision made and an action taken for emphatically his or her reasons, reasons not involving group membership and group identity either as applying to oneself as actor or to the other as victim. Individual evil in the sense intended is proximity-based, in the full psychological-emotional, as well as physical and spatiotemporal, meaning of proximity discussed in Chapter 1. Hurting someone known qua individual, and so someone with whom the agent has some sort of established relationship, is to be viewed as the typical case. Such person-toperson evildoing, being relatively independent vis-a`-vis ideological influences and group-related concerns, is at the centre of Alford’s approach to evil in What Evil Means to Us. It is aptly captured in his remark that ‘the most relative thing about evil is that it is frequently committed by relatives’, reminding us that ‘love is no stranger to evil’ (Alford 1997a: 9).

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Collective evil, by contrast, is what we deal with in cases of evildoing where the individual agent from the very start sees himself as acting on behalf of his group, and so genuinely in his capacity as a group member (or, alternatively, acting as he does so as to qualify – prove himself – as a fully fledged member of some group). In most cases – this is meant empirically, as distinct from by definition – this stance of the agent will correspond to his targeting his victim (that particular person) in her capacity as a representative of her group. Here, the agent’s reasons for acting are not emphatically personal reasons (reasons touching on him alone, and correspondingly seen as involving that one other person only) but instead reasons shared with others, i.e. the fellow members of the group. The collective action at work in collective evil typically identifies the victims by ideological (symbolic, narrative) means, concentrating on what they have done or are about to do against us. As mere representatives of their respective groups or collectivities, the persons occupying the roles of perpetrator and victim are essentially anonymous to each other, bracketing the kind of ‘special personality traits’ and idiosyncrasies of unique individuals that play such a major role in many instances of person-to-person aggression and are frequently cited as the personbound reasons for the attack. As Bion (1989: 149) found in his pioneering work with groups, projective identification, though introduced by Klein on the level of the individual, is a mechanism that plays a very important role in groups. Projective identification, we recall, is an unconscious process in which part of the self is attributed to an object (other). Thus part of the ego – a mental state, for instance, such as unwelcome anger, hatred, or other bad feeling – is seen in another person (or group) and quite disowned (denied). Indeed, the crucial role of projective identification in both individual and collective evil serves as a valuable reminder of the considerable extent to which evildoing is propelled by unconscious forces. Hence collective evil owes much of its vehemence to the skilful manner in which a charismatic leader exploits and channels unconscious psychic material in his followers. In this perspective, and again in agreement with Bion, I find Klein’s positions (paranoid-schizoid and depressive) to be of great value in shedding light on the behaviour of individuals who act in their capacity (and self-understanding) as members of groups. Let me exemplify what this implies. To say, in the spirit of Bion, that the group is psychologically vital for the individual because it, say, helps defend against anxiety (especially persecutory anxiety) of a paranoidschizoid character could mean at least two different things: the group helps the individual against his own paranoid-schizoid fears, much as the mother helps the child defend against its paranoid-schizoid fears through

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her love and concern; and there are anxieties of a paranoid-schizoid nature that the individual has only as a member of a group, such as persecutory anxiety about the welfare of his group vis-a`-vis other groups. As Alford, who suggests we make this distinction, states, the fact is that the group helps the individual defend against both kinds of anxiety. Specifically, ‘by transforming private anxieties into shared ones, the group helps the individual project his anxiety outward, where it may be confronted as an objective threat to the goodness of the group’ (Alford 1989: 58). The premise of ideology is that the individual internalizes the values and beliefs of the group, using them to build his own psychological defences. In methodological terms, this way of understanding groups and their behaviour can adhere to the principle of methodological individualism, since it sees the anxieties and fantasies organized and given shape and meaning by the group – or rather by the group’s distinct ideology, or culture (in Winnicott’s sense, explained in Chapter 3) – as the anxieties and fantasies of the individual members, as coming from within, as it were (Klein), and hence as not created by the group’s ideology/culture but always as seized upon by it, exploited by it, channelled by it; or alternatively – to point to the positive potential, that of reducing the likelihood that physical evildoing will ensue, as opposed to actively promoting it – as a troublesome psychic material that, in an anxiety-reducing manner employing symbols and discouraging actingout, is experienced by its individual carriers as being held and so appropriately contained by the group’s shared culture (Winnicott 1980). A further difference between individual and collective evil must be noted. In individual evil, there is, as far as I can see, no conspicuous formula or logic of self-understanding and justification that would be valid across the whole spectrum of individual acts. In this category of individual-initiated and individual-performed evil, the reasons for hurting other(s) will vary in accordance with the concrete personality of the doer and the specific nature of his or her relationship with the other person. Individuals come in more stubbornly different forms than do organized groups; hence the logic peculiar to the latter is more easily conceptualized. In contrast to the genuine empirical manifold characteristic of emphatically individual behaviour, my claim is that, when we turn to instances of collective evil, the agent thinks, feels, and acts in a manner giving primacy to his relationship (bond) with his co-actors over his relationship with his victims. To put it simply, for such an agent the only relationship that he recognizes as placing demands upon him (not least moral ones: duties, obligations, entitlements) is his relationship with

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fellow group members. The implication is that the agent’s relationship with his victims is perceived as devoid of moral import. It is so because the other party to this dyadic relationship – the individual victim – is regarded as in him- or herself devoid of moral status, of the power to issue moral demands of a sort the agent would see himself as entitled to respond to, meaning as addressed by in Levinas’ sense of the face issuing the demand, ‘Thou shalt not kill!’ Therefore, it would be putting it too mildly to say that the agent’s relationship with his fellow group members gains the upper hand over his de facto relationship with his victims. Nay, the truth of the matter is much starker, more absolute: it is that the former relationship prevails to such an extent as to effectively cancel out the latter, render it null and void as far as morality is concerned. The ‘logic’ at work in such absolutizing of the one relationship to the complete detriment of the other is captured with great precision in Heinrich Himmler’s message to the personnel assigned with the carrying out of the extermination of the Jews (Sereny 2000: 295). In his speech to SS leaders on 6 October 1943 in Posen (Poland), Himmler made it clear that, whereas it was their moral duty – a duty toward their Vaterland and their Fu¨hrer – to contribute to the elimination of their common enemy, it likewise was their duty to make sure that nobody among them (not a single one, a single time) succumb to the temptation to steal as much as a single cigarette (or any other item) from those to be murdered, since these belongings in toto were regarded as the legitimate collective property of the Reich. In other words, to the extent that ‘moral’ attitudes, values, and principles – ranging from solidarity, over unselfishness (the altruism of putting always the group’s survival above one’s personal well-being) to a sense of ‘distributive justice’ – are at all invoked within the perspective of the perpetrator group (and indeed, as we have seen, a hallmark of this perspective’s self-understanding is precisely that it subscribes to a morality of sorts), they are seen as the unquestionable, quasi-inherent prerogative of this group only. ‘Morality’ in the emphatic, affirmative sense is held to be as ‘naturally’ inherent to the perpetrator group alone as it is simultaneously seen as totally absent in and non-applicable to the group formed by the victims. Morality is exclusively an intra-group phenomenon. This is the logical corollary to my thesis that collective evil typically portrays itself (its deeds) not as bad, or as morally neutral, but as essentially ‘good’ and legitimate. That the deeds are not so for the victims is, within this perspective, profoundly and completely irrelevant. It is the ‘one thought too many’ for the perpetrator, and so – apparently – in most cases never entertained for even the flicker of a second (Cohen 2001; Herbert 2001).

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Genocidal logic and the collectivization of agency Having clarified the distinction between individual and collective evil along general lines, I will now address the more specific features of genocidal logic. By genocidal logic I understand a type of socio-logic that, while feeding on more or less unconscious feelings, beliefs, and fantasies of concrete individuals, aims to construct, represent, and put into action this ‘individual’ material as constituting the total perspective on the world (and particularly on the us/them distinction) shared within a specific group or collective. Above I pointed out that genocide is not something spontaneous. Rather, genocide is reactive. In most cases, it even self-consciously presents itself as reactive in the strong and direct sense of imitation (I say this with respect to ideological presentation, not empirical history). If there is one Gedankenfigur that is common to most well-known instances of genocidal logic, it is this: the perpetrator group does exactly what it castigates the target for having done (in some remote or recent past) or for being now about to do against one’s own group. To imitate here means to legitimize – as I indicated earlier, when the focus of attention is on past wrongs caused by the target group, justification for the action now taken assumes the form of retaliation; when the selected focus is on the wrongs (allegedly) planned and about to be performed by the target group, justification assumes the form of pre-emption. In both cases, the ideologically produced message is that the action to be taken has the character of self-defence. Self-defence provides a most-favoured – most-cited – moral justification for acts of organized aggression; it is invoked as a licence to hunt down and kill precisely those deserving, for purportedly objective and indisputable reasons, to be killed. Doing unto the other what one holds the other to have done, or contemplate doing, unto oneself – this is the core of the logic of imitation characteristic of genocide. I noted that genocide is not spontaneous: it never occurs in a social, cultural, or historical vacuum. This is a vital point. In particular, the historical past is manipulated so as to become thoroughly mythologized. Thus gestalted, the past is transformed into an arena of collective, as distinguished from individual, agency. An example we shall return to below is that of the Muslims living in Bosnia in the 1980s and 1990s. They are deemed guilty for what their forefathers are said to have done some 600 years ago, given that Serbian ideologues have picked the battle against the Ottomans (Turks) at Kosovo Polje in 1389 as their ‘chosen trauma’. Central to the notion of collectivizing agency I propose here is that the categories of agency, including guilt and

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complicity, are freed not only from the uniqueness and particularity of the actual individual agents (to allude to Arendt’s preoccupation with the totalitarian elimination of human individuality and spontaneity). More comprehensively still, these categories are altogether abstracted from the original (factual) contextuality of events and made to travel as though freely through the centuries that have passed. The obsession with historical sites and dates noteworthy in leading ideologues and in the grand narratives they indulge in must not be misunderstood: historical sites and dates are not significant per se, with respect to their particularities; they are only attributed symbolic (heavily emotions-laden) significance in as much as they serve as markers of essence: a date, for instance, carries significance for the group in question only in so far as it is seen to mark the beginning (birth), or alternatively the end (death), or the paramount ordeal, of the essence of the group, of what constitutes the group’s core identity, whereby identity is regarded as transcending the particularities of time (history) and space (geography). Once collectivized, human agency in all its (moral as well as spatiotemporal) dimensions is conceived of in such a way that the individual is compelled to answer for everything ‘his’ group does, has done, or is held to be about to do; conversely, the group is made to answer for everything ‘his’ group does, has done, or is alleged to be about to do. Collectivizing human agency in the manner typical of genocidal ideologies is tantamount to obliterating the morally and legally crucial distinction between individual and group. In a word, it creates a logic that severely undermines the enactment of law. For law to be enacted, disaggregation is required so as to reinstall agency as a property of individuals as distinct from collectivities (more on this aspect in Chapter 5). For these reasons, deriving as they do from the crucial role played by ideological preparation, the individual perpetrator of collective evil as defined here will not perceive himself (yes, it is in the vast majority of cases a man, not a female) as an evildoer, as someone who commits wrong. Evil, once talk about it starts, is persistently perceived to be elsewhere, the property of (certain) others: they are evil (meaning the enemy – other ethnic, national, religious, political, etc. groups). Ideologically thought-out and collectively enacted evil conceives of itself not as evil, but as good; not as immoral, but as moral. Such evil invariably pursues a proclaimed goal: to remove something deemed malevolent, threatening, impure, and unworthy of life, so as to protect something benevolent, good, pure, and worthy. Notice again that these are not (logically or practically) separate matters; rather they are two-in-one, matters inextricably linked, so that the ‘protection’ part cannot be accomplished without the ‘destruction’ part. This is a seminal point.

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I am well aware that some historical instances of collective evil (especially the Holocaust) are often looked upon as ‘evil for evil’s sake’, as destruction that has become an end in itself. Although I agree with Arendt’s (early) thesis about the unprecedented and truly radical nature of the Nazi genocide against the Jews, I nonetheless believe that popular support as well as active participation among millions of Germans could not have been mobilized like it was, were it not for the element of purported ‘protection’ of the ‘good’ essence of the Aryan race (leaving aside for now the extent to which this element was conceived of in ‘bad faith’ and so as a form of self-deception among leaders as well as ordinary followers of the ideology). The point I wish to stress is that, for a common enemy to be fought tooth and nail, come what may in utilitarian terms, the enemy needs to come across as a threat against something perceived as especially good, precious, and worthy – as meriting the extreme measures taken against the threat, and so also as justifying them in a moral perspective. My claim is that, in some version (allowing room for the complexity inherent in individuals’ individuality), the self-understanding of the average perpetrator is closely linked to the notion of warranted self-defence, making the destruction of the enemy primarily into a means for this end. Accordingly, to participate on the ‘right’ side in such a lifeand-death struggle is perceived as honourable, worthy of admiration, and deserving protection from penalty; it entails feeling pride in what is one’s own, rather than guilt, shame, or remorse with regard to those who are to be killed. Habermas offers a good formulation: ‘Evil is not pure aggression as such, but an aggression the perpetrator views as justified. Evil is thus the obverse side of [the] good’ (Habermas 1998: 56). Speaking about the typical Serbian militia man, journalist David Rieff remarks, ‘What animated him was fear, and what made him able to respect himself was the belief that everything he had done had been in self-defense’ (Rieff 1995: 111). Irrespective of specific ideological content, the key aim of ideological manipulation is always the same: to make sure that in the actor’s eyes he is on the right side of the boundary – on the side of defensive, as opposed to malignant, aggression, to invoke a distinction made by Erich Fromm (1977). The original guilt, the original responsibility for any atrocities committed is placed squarely on the victim. ‘Blaming the victim’ means that the aggressor is self-perceived as victim and, conversely, perceives the victim as the (original) aggressor. Such role reversal emerges as perhaps the lowest common denominator for genocides in the twentieth century. The reversal within the aggressor– victim relationship is psychologically most efficient when an all-pervasive and ubiquitous atmosphere of fear and insecurity has been created – and,

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once in place, is sustained by all means at the disposal of the regime in power, since the latter typically will perceive such an atmosphere as its raison d’eˆtre. This – pointing as it does once more to the crucial function of ideology – holds for passive bystanders as well as for the militia men directly involved in atrocities. The young Serbs serving under the notorious paramilitary leader Arkan in the ‘Tigers’ and under Vojislav Seselj in the ‘White Eagles’ were fed for years on Milosevic-controlled television broadcasts, no less than were their non-fighting but enthusiastically supportive parents, wives, and children back home, thanking God that their menfolk were fighting for Serbian survival and had the courage to stand up against the lethal danger posed by ‘fundamentalist Muslims’, and to a somewhat lesser degree by nationalist Croats, nicknamed ‘Ustasha’ to allude to the Croats’ role as ally to Hitler (Cohen 1996; Judah 1997). In this situation, Serbophobia was explicitly made into an anti-Semitism for Serbs to highlight their sorry plight as innocent victims of aggression throughout history. The respected writer Dobrica Cosic could thus claim: ‘We Serbs feel today as the Jews did in Hitler’s day. We are a people who are considered guilty. Today, Serbophobia in Europe is a concept and an attitude with the same ideological motivation and fury as anti-Semitism had during the Nazi era’ (Cosic, quoted in MacDonald 2002: 83). It was exactly this atmosphere of fear and insecurity that was created top-down by leading Serbian politicians, generals, and intellectuals who composed memos, wrote newspaper articles, and drew up plans for genocide while convening in Belgrade from 1986 onwards. Only later did the ethnonationalist ideology propagated by Radovan Karadzic in the Serbian parliament in Pale emerge. The more stereotypical and frightening the portrait of the enemy, the more imminent the enemy’s alleged plans to remove and destroy all that one holds dear, the greater the psychological readiness to take part in assaults represented as acts of self-defence. It is a matter of pre-emptively averting the (mis)deed the enemy is about to enact by instead enacting it oneself. For this reason, this type of collective evil is self-righteousness par excellence. In this guise – orchestrated genocide in the wake of propaganda that reaps the ideological harvest it has taken such efforts to sow among the population – evil never asks for forgiveness; instead, it is self-congratulatory, the perpetrators taking pride in the killing of the ‘original’ sinners. The concept of securitization introduced above allows us to recognize the strategy deployed by Slobodan Milosevic to build his base of power. It is generally agreed that Milosevic made the most crucial and farreaching move of his entire political career while on a visit to Kosovo

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in April 1987. At that time a mere 10 per cent of the population were Serbs; the vast majority, then as now, were Albanian Muslims. During the meeting a crowd of Serbs tried to force themselves into the building. While the police attempted to stop them, Milosevic decided to go to see them; he ended up spending the whole night talking with them, listening to their worries about being a threatened minority in a Kosovo allegedly turning more and more into a wholesale Muslim society. There were stories and anecdotes about violent beatings and all sorts of oppression. According to Vamik Volkan, this experience made a huge impression on Milosevic: it helped turn him into a Serb nationalist (Varvin 1997: 78). Struck by the Kosovar Serbs’ description of their situation, he saw it as his task to ensure that the shame, humiliation, and helplessness be reversed. In his famous speech at Kosovo Polje on 24 April 1987, Milosevic made public his decisive move: he used the tensions in Kosovo to effect a transformation of his own identity from a dull communist apparatchik to nationalist ‘saviour of the Serbian people’. He assured his almost 1-million-strong audience that Serbs in Kosovo are not a minority because ‘Kosovo is Serbia and will always remain Serbia’. In a highly potent fashion, Milosevic engaged in an articulation of Serbian history as that of centuries-long victimization, a victimization that emerges through the long period of domination of foreign peoples by enemies of all ideological stripes and that continues to the present, most recently embodied in the nascent movements for autonomy taking place in other parts of Yugoslavia. In keeping with our theoretical considerations above, what Milosevic did, and with undeniable skill, was to exploit, intensify, and channel these long-standing worries about the very survival of the Serbs, of their culture as a people and their identity as individuals spread throughout territories where they were (and for centuries had been) in danger of extinction at the hands of various non-Serb ethnic groups. The crux of the grand narrative articulated by Milosevic ‘on behalf’ of his people is the way in which present-day Albanians, or alternatively Bosnian Muslims, are looked upon as ‘Turk-surrogates’, that is, as symbolic stand-ins for the real Turks (Ottomans) who defeated (Serb) Prince Lazar 600 years ago in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo. Volkan aptly describes the battle, and loss, at Kosovo Polje in 1389 as the Serbs’ chosen trauma. Milosevic and other prominent politicians and self-made ideologues, such as Karadzic and Seselj, seized upon the memory of the collective traumatization at Kosovo Polje and transformed it into a ‘sacred sorrow’ at the heart of Serb nationalist rhetoric. The absolutely central message from Milosevic to ‘his’ people is his declaration, ‘You will not be beaten again.’ In this and a series of related

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declarations, Milosevic plays the card of securitization. Recalling our above analysis, we can see how, in one swift strike, he points to something as threatened (i.e. to be Serbian, Serb-essence now being mythologically elevated to the simultaneously all-important and precarious status of sublime object), a place where the entity (object) now threatened faces its possible destruction, and someone who stands behind this grave threat, and against whom it will be necessary to implement extraordinary measures. All the key elements introduced above are brought together in Milosevic’s speech act, which, significantly, is a performative one: What he does, or rather effects in virtue of what he says, consists in a securitization of a threatened object, a pointing to a threatening group, and an indication of what type of ‘defensive’ measures must be taken to protect what is threatened. In his speech on this occasion, Milosevic fleshed out the major motifs that were to legitimate the war soon to follow: the Serbs are never aggressors (though a hostile environment all around them is hell-bent on presenting them that way); they are ‘liberators’ who do whatever they can to help their brethren (wherever they are) and who are thwarted in this by the hostility of those others. Serbs in their history have never conquered or exploited others. Through two world wars, they have liberated themselves and, when they could, they also helped others to liberate themselves . . . The Kosovo heroism does not allow us to forget that at one time we were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated . . . Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet. (Milosevic, quoted in Cushman 2001: 89).

Though at first sight surprising, a defeat is much more potent as an object of ideological-mythological mobilization than victory (recall Hitler’s successful exploitation of Germany’s defeat in World War I and of the humiliation of the Versailles peace treaty). A collective trauma of the kind represented by a major defeat against an alleged arch-enemy still around to perpetuate the oppression of Serb culture and identity is a trauma that lingers on; it is transferred through the generations as a core experience that marks, even guarantees, their fellow-feeling and hence self-identity qua collective. By being the object of massive symbolic attention, by being ritualized and memorized again and again, the trauma is actively made into the ‘difference that makes a difference’ between all Serbs that have ever lived and their ‘others’. In particular, the mythic status accorded to Prince Lazar in Serbian culture was exploited to lend meaning to a serious of historic defeats and setbacks suffered through the centuries, while at the same time providing a

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collective basis for the desire to ‘turn the tables’, to reverse the roles of aggressor and victim by way of launching a plan to let the centuries-old dream of a ‘Greater Serbia’ come true; a safe haven for everything and everyone associated with the essence of being Serb. It is easy to recognize how potent this chosen collective trauma is for securing in-group unity and solidarity and a solid, self-conscious stance toward out-groups viewed as hostile. In the psychoanalytic approach of Vamik Volkan, the potency of focusing on a chosen collective trauma is explained in terms of his central claim that people need their enemies as much as their allies. Working from a Kleinian perspective, Volkan argues that the young child develops mental images of himself and the world in a bipolar fashion, so that he originally experiences himself as virtually a different person when sad and hungry than when happy and fulfilled. Emotional development is about putting these opposite experiences together: realizing that both are me, much in the spirit of passing from Klein’s paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position; only in the latter is splitting of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ into different objects overcome, giving way to acknowledgement that all objects (including the self, including others) are both good and bad. Volkan’s Kleinian point is that this developmental task is never completed. In order to avoid inner conflict, the child will put experiences that remain unintegrated into ‘reservoirs’ in the real world. Starting out as private and idiosyncratic, these reservoirs will later be something the child shares with others, what Volkan calls ‘suitable targets of externalization’. Examples of suitable targets for bad feelings, for fears and anxieties, would be an alien religion, the smells of foreign cooking, families and individuals that look and act differently (an example that springs to mind is Hitler’s depiction in Mein Kampf of how encountering orthodox Jews in Vienna had a tremendous emotional impact upon him; a kind of shock henceforth providing him with a suitable target for externalizing all ‘badness’ and all fears inside him). As pointed out by Alford, suitable targets are targets shared by a given collective; never something ‘given’ or ‘objective’, always socioculturally constructed, interpreted, and assessed, they form part of a culture that in effect says to the individual, ‘Put your unintegrated and intolerable fear and hate into this group, that symbol. This will relieve your anxiety by allowing you to disown bad parts of yourself, while at the same time allowing you to bond more securely with the good group that is us.’ Alford stresses that shared targets bind groups; they constitute their glue. ‘It is these suitable targets’, says Volkan, ‘that bridge the distance between individual and group psychology.’ In fact, Volkan goes so far as to suggest that without

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external enemies in the form of shared targets, the group would fall apart into warring tribes, and the members would go crazy. Indeed, insanity may be defined as the individual’s inability to use shared targets of externalization (Alford 1994: 41). Girard’s theory of the surrogate victim A theoretical framework suited to understanding the basic principles of group behaviour in connection with collective evil would be incomplete without mention of Rene Girard’s seminal work Violence and the Sacred. I shall confine my discussion to the aspects of Girard’s (very general) theory which I find most pertinent in illuminating the perpetrator group that engages in ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the kind witnessed in former Yugoslavia. Girard sets out to show how it is that organized acts of violence play an indispensable role in the birth and maintenance of communities. The atmosphere is such that outbursts of violence seem imminent; there thus arises a need to channel the urge to violence beyond the boundaries of community, since within it violence is prohibited. So, instead of representing a threat against the group’s future, violence is ‘recycled’ into the chief weapon defending the unity of the group. According to Girard, there is a dialectic between threatening internal violence and sacrificial rites. The danger of outbursts of internal violence derives from all the rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony within the community and to reinforce integration: the group is confirmed as unison and homogeneous, the identity of the members is confirmed as unequivocally linked with the group. Existence outside the group or otherwise in defiance of the group appears impossible, an inaccessible and non-desirable option. The continued unity of the group is made into an existential concern for everyone within the group. In such a context, ritual sacrifices have the aim of preserving the memory of the group’s unity and precariousness; it is precisely the circumstance that the unity of the group is not obvious and cannot be taken for granted – that is, its perpetual and recurrently reactualized precariousness – that makes violence an indispensable mechanism of integration. In order to achieve this, it is necessary that the sacrifice – or, more precisely, the surrogate victim – be selected in the right manner. In order to be regarded as suitable to be sacrificed, the potential object must ‘bear a sharp resemblance to the human categories excluded from the ranks of

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the ‘‘sacrificeable’’ [i.e. the humans assumed to be the insiders of the community] while still maintaining a degree of difference that forbids all possible confusion’ (Girard 1988: 12). As we shall see below, the principle identified by Girard – that the surrogate victim be one whose relationship to the community is neither too close nor too distant – is crucially important for understanding the peculiar vehemence of collective evil qua ‘ethnic cleansing’ in a multiethnic and multi-religious society such as Bosnia-Herzegovina. Girard’s thesis is that the surrogate victim is ‘suitable’ to the task set for it if, and only if, it serves to prevent confusion about who belongs where. The human candidate for the sacrifice that is regarded as symbolizing the (continued, intact) unity of the community is encountered and selected outside its ranks – though not completely or unambiguously so, Girard hastens to add. Like many before him, Girard is struck by the historical fact that ritual victims tend to be drawn from categories that are neither – unambiguously – outside nor inside the community, but marginal to it, observing that ‘this marginal quality is crucial to the proper functioning of the sacrifice’. Girard merits quoting on this point: If the victim is to polarize the aggressive tendencies of the community and effect their transfer to himself, continuity must be maintained. There must be a ‘metonymic’ relationship between members of the community and ritual victims. There must also be discontinuity. The victim must be neither too familiar to the community nor too foreign to it. This ambiguity is essential to the cathartic functioning of the sacrifice . . . The marginal categories from which these victims are generally drawn . . . provide the least unsatisfactory compromise. Situated as they are between the inside and the outside, they can perhaps be said to belong to both the interior and the exterior of the community. (1988: 271f.)

To sum up, in generative violence a single victim is substituted for all the members of the community; it is essential that this victim be drawn from outside the community. What Girard terms the only ‘strictly’ ritualistic substitution is that of a victim for the surrogate victim; and the latter is a member of the community, says Girard – with the significant proviso mentioned above about the crucial role of ambiguity. Moreover, in order to fulfil its integrative function the candidate surrogate victim needs to appear as possessing a semblance with subversive or erosive elements within the community, a semblance that is of precisely appropriate degree to serve as a warning, thus ensuring that these elements ‘take the hint’ and remain at their proper place within the community. In this way, each and everyone ‘inside’ can prove their belongingness for all to see by joining in the violent ritual sacrifices directed at specific objects

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outside the community. Since the objects chosen will enjoy no established relationships with the ‘legitimate’ members of the community, the violence can be enacted with impunity and without risk of retaliation. The sacrificial acts are seen as successful when what remain in their wake are tight and intransgressible boundaries between the community’s inside and outside. It should be clear from what has been said that the victim is a scapegoat. The premise in Girard’s theory is that the surrogate victim is an ‘object’ that assumes ‘the very real (though often hidden) hostilities that all the members of the community feel for one another’; in other words, ‘the source of the evil is the community itself ’ (1988: 99). Sacrificial substitution, then, is about protecting all the members of the community from their respective violence – always through the intermediary of the surrogate victim. Girard’s overarching argument – perhaps at first sight surprising – is that the rite’s essential orientation is peaceful: ‘Even the most violent rites are specifically designed to abolish violence. To see these rites as expressions of man’s pathological morbidity is to miss the point’ (1988: 103). Thus Girard and Klein/Alford concur in the view that aggression (understood as the urge to destruction) in an elementary manner comes from within. In both cases – that of the single individual (Klein) as well as that of a given community (Girard) – the same objective is sought in violent behaviour against a chosen human victim: that of finding relief for inner (intrasubjective or intracommunal) anxieties and conflicts by way of channelling them against objects outside the self (community), hoping to get rid of the sources of ‘badness’ by first externalizing them and thereupon destroying them by violently targeting their presumed human carrier(s). Invoking Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position, we can appreciate the extent to which that position of experience is at the heart of violent ritual sacrifice as theorized by Girard. In Kleinian language, such rituals have the task of being limited to an attack on the ‘bad’ and concomitantly of not becoming so extreme (by escalation into the uncontrolled and unpredicted) as to spill over onto the ‘good’ and contaminate (and thus spoil) precisely what is most precious and precarious. Alford succinctly depicts the ritual in this perspective: The participants in the ritual seem to say, ‘The violence we have committed or observed (or merely imagined) threatens to destroy the entire community and all that we care about. Let us reenact this violence in a highly circumscribed fashion, so that we may convince ourselves that it can be contained within limits. In particular, we shall focus upon, and control, the spilling of blood, that symbol of the contained

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becoming uncontained. In letting the blood fall onto the altars, and even onto ourselves, we shall demonstrate to ourselves that what is apparently uncontained and unstructured is actually controlled by the ritual itself.’ In a word, ritual reinforces psychological defenses aimed at reestablishing firm, paranoid-schizoid defenses against violence, rage, and hatred that threaten to spill over to contaminate the good. (Alford 1992: 74)

As Alford notes, the two most acclaimed studies of rituals of purification in the anthropological literature – Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1969) and Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger (1966) – both support the conclusions just expressed in Kleinian terminology. Turner argues that, in spite of the reversal and confusion associated with ritual (one thinks here also of Bakhtin’s analysis of the reversal of ‘high’ and ‘low’), its goal is to establish firmer boundaries between things that should be held separate. And Douglas argues that pollution punishes a symbolic breaking of what should be joined, or a symbolic joining of what should be separate. Conversely, ritual seeks to preserve order, structure, and boundaries, even if doing so requires disorder, even reversal. In my opinion, there are two closely related points to stress here, and also to bear in mind when I shortly turn to empirical material from ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia. I take both points to be of a general nature; hence I do not consider them tailor-made to illuminate my particular selection of historical material. The first point is that communally enacted, collective evil, to the extent that it comes to the fore in Girard’s analysis, is always seen to be a deliberate action carried out for the sake of protecting some superior yet threatened ‘good’ – i.e. the unity and cohesion of the group, especially at times of crisis for the group, a crisis often sensed as – or rather, by group leaders presented as – putting the sheer survival of the group into question. As we shall see in greater detail below, as soon as survival has been elevated to the main issue (or even to the only issue) at stake for the group as such, readiness among its members to go to extreme measures in ensuring its existence as against the (alleged) imminent threats to it posed by another group will be rapidly growing, in effect making the effort displayed in fighting to defend the group (the ‘good’ that the group – its essence, its identity – represents a sign of supreme morality, of altruism on behalf of the well-being of one’s collectivity). Evildoing as unleashed in violent assaults against specific others never emerges qua evil, meaning qua bad, or immoral; instead it is dressed up as done for the sake of protecting the good. The second point is that organized communal violence (Girard) – a species of collective evil in my parlance – is performed as occurring for the

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sake of retaining some order or structure that is presented as being under threat. Premeditated rather than spontaneous, the violence occurs as parcelled out, since there is always a danger that things get out of hand. We shall see that the drawing and maintenance of boundaries such as pertain to identity is of paramount importance here. It would be tempting, given my distinction between individual and group, to suggest that the ‘identity’ issue assumes distinct forms, depending on whether identity is held to be a property of individual or group. But, in what follows, the point is precisely that the identity issue is turned into the paramount communal issue – entailing that there is no identity to be had for the single individual apart from that bestowed and secured by a given community and, in times of upheaval and conflict, endangered by some given other community. In short, the identity of the individual is a chief concern for the community with which he or she is associated; it is not an issue that can be dealt with – i.e. something that can be developed, changed, abandoned, or lost – by the individual as such. For all that, identity continues to be a profoundly existential issue, only now the high stakes of this existential concern come to permeate the fabric – indeed, the very being – of the group or collective as such. The perceived threat against identity is the core of the prospect for survival; to protect identity (as pure, uncontaminated) and to survive qua group become but two sides of the same coin, admitting only of ‘analytic’ distinction. In real life, they amount to one and the same thing – or so the claim has it, the claim whence a large potential for violence derives. If this line of argument is granted, ritual as anthropologically understood and the paranoid-schizoid position introduced in Kleinian psychoanalysis have a common core: they both deal with the contamination of good by bad, of love by hate, of the pure by the impure. Ritual is a cultural group’s attempt to re-establish firm boundaries between polarities, generally by reinforcing paranoid-schizoid distinctions. Hence pollution may be described as a form of paranoid-schizoid anxiety over breaching the distinction between good and bad, or pure and impure. More accurately still, pollution is contamination of such polarities. Ritual responds to this anxiety by aiming to restore the breached or threatened boundary (Alford 1992: 67). My claim is that, in ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia, deep-seated collective anxieties over contamination-cum-pollution – that is, the danger that something good and pure be spoiled by something bad and impure – were psychologically activated by being linked (by group leaders, by ideology) with the existential issue of identity, understood as the question of one’s ‘essence’ as member of a specific group (as defined by a highly

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idiosyncratic mix of nationalist, religious, and ethnic criteria, a mix reflecting the complexity, indeed the ambiguities, of establishing identity in a ‘multi-culti’ society such as the Yugoslavia of the late 1980s and early 1990s). Identity (seen as non-optional, as reflecting quasi-ahistorical ‘essence’) was singled out as that which is threatened with contamination, with being spoiled and destroyed. The individual’s future was made one with the future and destiny of his or her group; and this future and destiny was made into the issue of identity in such an existentially dramatized manner that the identity issue became identical with the issue of sheer survival: when identity is endangered, ultimately life itself is. Such are the stakes. We now need to explore the exact relevance of Girard’s notion of the ‘surrogate victim’ that is such a crucial element in his theory of ritual sacrifice. There are two questions here. The first question is whether the selected victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ (in Bosnia in particular) satisfy Girard’s criteria for the status of ‘surrogate victims’. I think they do, as far as the ideological function of symbolically and violently targeting them is concerned. Girard makes two observations that support my view. First, he stresses the marginality of the suitable surrogate victim: only by being neither too close nor too distant can such a victim permit the community to relieve its burden of violence and so effect its purification (Girard’s term). I find the affinity between ‘cleansing’ on the one hand and ‘purification’ on the other indisputable. Indeed, the ideologically deliberate, and so in no way arbitrary, choice of designating the campaign against non-Serbs one of ‘cleansing’ to my mind is a conceptual demonstration of the extent to which the violence promoted is presented as being carried out in the service of preventing contamination-cum-pollution. On these grounds, ‘ethnic cleansing’ is clearly an historical instance of the motives Girard claims inform ritual sacrifice. As for the issue of the chosen ‘surrogate victims’, in Bosnia these were evidently close enough to pose a plausible threat against the goodness and purity of Serbian identity/essence, yet distant enough to permit them to be identified and located in a manner just unambiguous enough to send an effective message to both friend and foe as to who belongs where. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that Girard ascribes plenty of flexibility to the actual methods for selecting the suitable victim – most notably between that of making appear more foreign a victim who is too much a part of the community, and that of reintegrating into the community a victim who is too foreign to it (1988: 272). In both instances, the principal function of finding a surrogate victim is fulfilled – namely, to find someone who can draw to his person

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all the community’s inner tensions, all its accumulated bitterness and hatred. In fact, the pertinence of Girard’s analysis becomes most horrifying at one specific point – namely, where he states that ‘the surrogate victim is fundamentally a member of the community, a neighbour of those destined to kill him’ (1988: 278; my italics). The atrocities in Bosnia bore this out with extreme horror. The second question that needs to be addressed is whether the violence performed by the groups engaged in ‘ethnic cleansing’ can appropriately be called ritual violence, and one crucially involving ‘sacrifice’ at that. There are two aspects to this. The first is already attended to: there is no doubt that the ‘cleansing’ performed had as one of its major aims the destruction of the ‘elements’ within the Yugoslav community that, though close and indeed located within it, were alleged to threaten its (ethnic) purity with contamination, this being a sufficient reason why they had to be subjected to the violent measures of ‘cleansing’. Again, as far as the status of the chosen victims is concerned, there can be no doubt as to the empirical validity of Girard’s findings. But this leaves unaddressed the question of whether these atrocities inhabit a ritual character in the rigorous social-anthropological sense. Though admittedly more difficult to settle than the earlier questions, I do think that the documentation of the ways in which the atrocities were most typically carried out does confirm their ‘ritual’ character, if only in a somewhat looser sense than found in most rituals studied in anthropology. As we shall see in detail below, the rape and the killings are typically carried out in a highly premeditated, organized, and controlled manner; they are also multiple and endlessly repeated (to allude to Girard’s criteria). In other words, although the precise (empirical) manner may differ somewhat, the ideological and communal functions of these organized atrocities do seem to be of the same kind as claimed for them in Girard’s theory. The design of genocide as ‘ethnic cleansing’ Having established the key categories of a framework intended to help us understand the nature of the collective evil carried out in Bosnia, it is time to turn more directly to some central empirical aspects. A key to the particular manner in which the collective evil of ‘ethnic cleansing’ was carried out in Bosnia is the so-called Ram Plan (dating back to August 1991), later referred to as the Brana Plan. Headed by General Blagoje Adzic (formerly commander-in-chief of the Yugoslav army and chief of military security, and a long-time close associate of

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Milosevic), the plan was drawn up in secrecy in a closed meeting in Belgrade; in this it invites comparison with the Wannsee Conference chaired by Reinhard Heydrich in Berlin in January 1942, where the decision about an Endlo¨sung der Judenfrage by means of physical extermination in death camps was formally endorsed, following verbal instructions from Hitler and Himmler. A central passage of the Ram Plan is worth quoting at length: Our analysis of the behavior of the Muslim communities demonstrates that the morale, will, and bellicose nature of their groups can be undermined only if we aim our action at the point where the religious and social structure is most fragile. We refer to the women, especially adolescents, and to the children. Decisive intervention on these social figures would spread confusion among the communities, thus causing first of all fear and then panic, leading to a probable [Muslim] retreat from the territories involved in war activity. In this case, we must add a wide propaganda campaign to our well-organized, incisive actions so that panic will increase. We have determined that the coordination between decisive interventions and a wellplanned information campaign can provoke the spontaneous flight of many communities. (Allen 1996: 57)

This passage is, verbatim, as close to a blueprint for genocide as a document of this type may come. The actions planned clearly fall within the 1948 Genocide Convention; Article II, it will be recalled, refers to ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. We know that mass rape from early on formed a crucial and meticulously thought-out part of ‘ethnic cleansing’. A letter from the commander of the third battalion of the Serb army, Milan Dedic, to the chief of the secret police in Belgrade, Mihajlo Kertes, contains the following information: Sixteen hundred and eighty Muslim women of ages ranging from twelve to sixty years are now gathered in the centers for displaced persons within our territory. A large number of these are pregnant, especially those ranging in age from fifteen to thirty years. In the estimation of Bosko Kelevic and Smiljan Geric, the psychological effect is strong, and therefore we must continue [the practice of genocidal rape]. (Allen 1996: 59f.)

Extremist Serbs, in making mass rape a programmatic goal and a systematic part of their genocide (and precisely not a by-product of it), appear to have sought a prolongation of the suffering they brought upon their victims. They made sure that the enforced pregnancies of their victims were brought to completion, ensuring that the raped women were forced to give birth to what this ideology designated as a Serb son or daughter – that is, to suffer the utmost humiliation of giving birth to

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and thus sustaining their tormentors, whereby, illogically, the identity of the mother that marked her as a victim – an ethnic alien – in the first place is effaced, reducing her to a mere sexual container by way of absolutizing the male’s (father’s) genetic contribution so as to completely cancel out that of the child’s mother (Allen 1996: 97ff.). This aspect of genocide as ‘ethnic cleansing’, pointing to its sexist character (in practice scarcely less crucial than the emphasis on ethnicity), may represent a novelty when compared with other recent instances of genocide. I shall not go into the details of the atrocities committed in particular – but not only – by Serb forces – recall that the CIA concluded that 90 per cent of the atrocities committed during the three-and-a-half-year war were the handiwork of Serb military and paramilitary forces (Power 2002: 310). A few observations must suffice. To begin with, the genocide that took place in Bosnia was not hi-tech, it did not rely on mechanisms setting perpetrator and victim apart and increasing the distance between them in so many senses of that word. Hence two of Zygmunt Bauman’s proposed characteristics of genocide modern style are conspicuously absent: technological tools (‘as necessary for mass murder as they are indispensable for mass industrial production’; Bauman 2000b: 37) and scientific management as embodied in the bureaucratic organization (‘the ability to co-ordinate actions of a great number of people and make the overall result independent of the personal idiosyncrasies, convictions, beliefs and emotions of individual performers’; p. 37). To the contrary, this violence was close up, as were all the links that till then had connected killer and victim with one another. The relationships from which such links emerged would typically be those of long-standing neighbours, recent colleagues, one-time classmates, former close friends, members of one’s family, and even lovers. The atrocities performed as part of ‘ethnic cleansing’ took place in a setting of physical as well as psychic proximity between perpetrator and victim: the former wanted to be seen and heard by the latter, the more up-front, the better. It is telling that when the survivors of rape camps began to reach Zagreb from the hinterlands of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the spring of 1992, one of them made it very clear that ‘we have fled not from bombs and bullets but from rape and the knife’ (Allen 1996: 81f.). ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is not about killing at a distance, it is not about killing persons never met, never known. Rather it is about killing neighbours, colleagues, friends, lovers, family members. How can this happen? Whence the intensity of such person-to-person violence? Does this intensity emerge despite the closeness between perpetrator and victim, or because of it?

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Perhaps the latter – and this is precisely what is so shocking, even perverse, and in desperate need of explanation. The ‘otherness’ of the enemy needs to be asserted, nay displayed and quasi proven more vehemently in cases where at the start the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are hard to spot. Demarcation then has to be established and maintained all the more visibly and violently: the so-called impure must prove his or her purity by renouncing that in him- or herself which points to impurity, even if, in cases not rare in a multiethnic and multi-religious society such as Bosnia, this meant being prepared to kill members of one’s own family, or lovers, friends, or neighbours. This phenomenon has been perceptively theorized by Freud, who coined for it the phrase ‘the narcissism of small differences’ (Freud 1985: 305). The political scientist Espen Barth Eide explains: By killing a member of the other group, one may kill a small part of oneself, but what will emerge is a purer, more whole person, more worthy not only of the respect of others in one’s ‘own’ group but also more worthy of self-respect. One has actively drawn a line in blood, not only between two groups, but in oneself – and in an irrevocable manner. (Eide 1998: 35)

Analysts of genocide tend to say that distantiation (be it by way of technology, bureaucracy, or ideology) produces dehumanization, and this in turn insensitivity to the suffering of the victims and so a readiness to take part in causing it (Vetlesen 1994: ch. 5). I take this to express a widely held view, one not exclusive to, say, the functionalist approach of Raul Hilberg (1985). But does the emphasis on distantiation hold for Bosnia? To ask this question is to ponder whether it is plausible that individuals with whom one for years, or a lifetime, has been close in all the sociological senses of that word, all of a sudden come to be seen as depersonalized ‘representatives’ of a group now said to pose a deadly threat to one’s own. Can we really believe that stereotypes of the crudest sort in almost no time at all reigned supreme and effaced all dimensions of longrecognized human individuality and uniqueness, so that a Serb would only perceive a Muslim, ‘one of them’, not his former classmate Amira or his brother-in-law Ramiz? Or is the real horror of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that the known individuality of the victim at hand remained acknowledged, giving a truly personal twist to the atrocities, whereas in the case of the Nazi genocide we have been used to thinking that the murder had (double) depersonalization – of perpetrator no less than victim – as a crucial condition? I find it difficult to answer these questions, having struggled with them for years. I note that, though undoubtedly highly

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ideologized from above (meaning top-down), the genocide that took place in former Yugoslavia was highly personalized on the ground. Hence, notoriously, Arkan’s ‘Tigers’ approached their victims clad in impeccable militia uniforms, the kalashnikovs and knives (knives were preferred over guns) eager for action, their faces half-heartedly covered. What they in any case could not successfully hide was their voices, eliciting shocks of recognition in their victims: ‘So it’s you!’ This violence took the form of merciless, well-thought-out raids against villages in particular, zooming in on its victims: unarmed civilian non-Serbs of all ages and both sexes suddenly became ‘Islamic fundamentalists’, illegitimately ‘occupying’ land which ‘historically’ belonged to the Serbs and which will henceforth be ‘cleansed’ of ‘alien’ elements so as to be ‘liberated’ for those truly entitled to it. As General Ratko Mladic used to tell Western journalists: ‘I have not conquered anything in this war. I only liberated that which was always Serbian.’ David Rieff, American journalist covering the so-called war, writes: The Bosnian Serb forces tailored their tactics to the kind of area in which they were operating. It was one thing to lay siege to Sarajevo, but in the ethnically mixed villages of Bosnia, the fighters could not pursue ethnic cleansing successfully on their own. They had to transform these local Serbs who were either still undecided about joining the fight or frankly opposed to it into their accomplices. The natural impulse for self preservation was the fighters’ greatest ally, provided they could summon up the necessary ruthlessness. One common method used was for a group of Serb fighters to enter a village, go to a Serb house, and order the man living there to come with them to the house of his Muslim neighbour. As the other villagers watched, he was marched over and the Muslim brought out. Then the Serb would be handed a Kalashnikov assault rifle or a knife – knives were better – and ordered to kill the Muslim. If he did so, he had taken that step across the line the Chetniks [the Serb forces] had been aiming for. But if he refused, as many did, the solution was simple. You shot him on the spot. Then you repeated the process with the next Serb householder. If he refused, you shot him. The Chetniks rarely had to kill a third Serb. (Rieff 1995: 110)

It is a general finding that Serbs who refused to participate in the persecution of Muslims – regardless of the closeness of their links with them – were killed. As reported by Michael Sells, in a Serb-army-occupied area of Sarajevo, Serb militants killed a Serb officer who objected to atrocities against cilivilans; they left his body on the street for over a week as an object lesson. In Zvornik, Serb militia men slit the throat of a seventeen-year-old Serbian girl who protested the shooting of Muslim civilians (Sells 1996: 73). To spread complicity was a deliberate goal of the ‘cleansing’; it was made an integral feature of the methods used, not

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only in that most violent of senses mentioned by Rieff above, but also in the domain of material goods. Every town and village ‘cleansed’ meant the availability of cars, appliances, stereo and television equipment. Though innocent in comparison with the method of forcing reluctant Serbs to become killers, the far-reaching psychological and moral effects of taking part in the distribution of stolen and abandoned goods should not be underestimated. As Sells points out, ‘Once a family had in their home something that had belonged to a neighbor, they were less likely to object to ‘‘ethnic cleansing’’’ (1996: 73). Members of such a family now had a vested interest in a policy whose principal aim was the complete removal (partly by enforced expulsion, partly by direct killings) of the original owners of the flats, cars, and various other goods they had acquired for themselves. In short, the one-day return of their Muslim neighbours would be of a personal disadvantage to them; and the fact that they often would have known these persons for many years gives rise to guilt and embarrassment, feelings held in check, however, as long as the people in question are deprived of any chance to return. Making the possible return of their onetime neighbours into a personal disadvantage and a source of moral discomfort is a feat of this complicity-building aspect of ‘ethnic cleansing’. It is testimony to the subtle psycho-logic of the latter. To restrict myself to just one illustration of the atmosphere being created, consider Washington Post journalist Peter Maass’ account of a conversation he had with two Serbian women who had moved into a ‘vacant’ (read formerly Muslim-owned) flat in the city Banja Luka in the wake of its ‘liberation’ in 1992: I asked out of politeness whether the fighting in the village was heavy. ‘Why, no, there was no fighting between Muslims and Serbs in the village’, she said. ‘Then why were the Muslims arrested?’ ‘Because they were planning to take over the village. They had already drawn up lists with the names of the Serb women who were to be taken into harems for the Muslim men.’ ‘Harems?’ ‘Yes, harems. Their Bible says men can have harems, and that’s what they were planning to do once they had killed our men. Thank God they were arrested first.’ She wiped her brow. ‘How do you know they were planning to kill the Serb men and create harems for themselves?’ ‘It was on the radio. Our military had uncovered their plans. It was announced on the radio.’ ‘How do you know the radio was telling the truth?’, I asked. ‘Why’, she demanded to know, ‘would the radio lie?’ ‘Did any of the Muslims in the village harm you?’, I asked, softly. ‘No.’ ‘Did any Muslim ever do anything bad to you?’ ‘No.’ She seemed offended. ‘My relations with Muslims in the village were always very good. They were very nice people.’ (Maass 1996: 113f.)

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One is reminded of Arendt’s question apropos Eichmann’s account of his meeting with Storfer in Auschwitz, discussed in Chapter 2: ‘Is this a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity?’ (Arendt 1965a: 51). Despite the vital differences between these peasant Serb women and the infamous SS officer, in both cases one is struck by the great care taken to point out that, in personal terms, one has no unfinished antagonistic business with those directly concerned (expelled or downright murdered) on the ‘other side’ by the policies pursued by one’s own side and from which one is presently reaping the harvest. The gullibility (if that is what it is) of the women cited by Maass is the result of years on end with propaganda that broadcasts an image of Muslim Bosnian civilians harbouring plans for a ‘Serb-free’ fundamentalist Islamic state, complete (as we heard) with harems for which Serb women of all ages would be taken captive. Returning to the main discussion, the peculiar character of collective evil in the guise of ‘ethnic cleansing’ can be put into relief by a crude comparison with the carrying out of the Holocaust. Granting that scholars such as Hilberg and Bauman have succeeded in capturing the main picture, the Nazi genocide of the Jews carried out in the extermination camps in Poland methodically shunned proximity and, whenever proximity was met upon, replaced it with mechanisms of distantiation so as to reduce it to a minimum (for the twofold reason of efficiency of killing and the methods used being ‘humane’ for the Nazi personnel most directly involved). Robbed of all traces of individuality, perpetrator and victim ended up as equally alienated and exchangeable (recall Arendt’s argument, discussed in Chapter 2). My claim is that ‘ethnic cleansing’, by contrast, seizes upon and maintains existing conditions of proximity between perpetrator and victim and in fact creates such conditions if they are not present and prolongs them as a matter of principle whenever they seem to wane. In this superpersonalized violence, whole families were forced to be witnesses to torture, rapes, and killings; Serb militia men often made a point of singling out for particularly cruel mistreatment persons known to them beforehand; and the supreme kind of humiliation was to force relatives to rape, wound, or kill each other. Such enforced intrafamilial – hence intravictim – violence was in fact a speciality among extremist Serbs, even evolving into a quasiroutinized ritual (Girard) in the concentration camps of Omarska, Trnopolje, and Kerasame. To my knowledge we find no parallel to this in the Nazi genocide. A systematic feature of the latter was precisely the separation of family members (husbands and wives, parents and children) immediately upon arrival in the death camp. In keeping with this

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difference of method, secrecy seems to have been much more important to the Nazis than to the extremist Serbs. The violence bred by the policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’ is communally all-inclusive and ubiquitous by its own inherent logic. A police chief in Banja Luka puts it bluntly: ‘In ethnic warfare everybody is guilty, no-one is innocent’ (Honig and Both 1996: 177). On top of this no exit scenario for those trapped comes the personalized twist given to killing, torture, and abuse, in large measure even cultivated and exploited amongst the victims themselves, in what may be viewed as extremist Serbs’ favoured variation on the well-known theme of enforcing self-denigration and humiliation among the victims, having the victims themselves finishing the job started by the perpetrators. Now, whether the role played by seeking to prove purity where impurity has long prevailed, of attaining homogeneity where there is mixture, simple (single-criterion) identity where there used to be a plurality, is what fosters the blatant sadism and sheer perversion of much of the up-front, person-to-person, village-to-village killings in Bosnia, I cannot say with absolute certainty – but it seems a viable working hypothesis. What seems beyond doubt, however, is that communities involved in cycles of violence at some point start to become communities where the solidarity between its individual members feeds on violence, violence precisely as non-secret, all-inclusive, and non-ceasing. Sociologically, we usually expect communities involved in violence to be threatened with disintegration. But ‘ethnic cleansing’ as a communal activity, involving civilians from all walks of life among its perpetrators (not only among its victims), turns the received wisdom upside down, making participation in violence into a device of integration. Labelling the kind of community we speak of here ‘explosive community’, Zygmunt Bauman notes that since the membership of the community is in no way preordained nor institutionally endorsed, the ‘baptism by fire’ – a personal participation in collective crime – is the sole way of joining and the sole legitimation of continuous membership. Unlike in the case of state-administered genocide . . . the kind of genocide which is the birth-act of explosive communities cannot be entrusted to experts or delegated to specialized offices and units. It matters less how many ‘enemies’ are killed; it matters more, much more, how numerous are the killers. (Bauman 2000a: 198)

A salient consequence is that this leaves the individual member with a no-exit situation vis-a`-vis his community; ‘the community born of the initiatory crime remains the only refuge for the perpetrators’ (p. 20). Such individuals are ‘glued together by joint vested interest in contesting the criminal and punishable nature of their crime. The best way to meet these

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conditions is not to allow the spilt blood to dry up: to (periodically or continually) refresh the memory of crime and the fear of punishment by topping the old crimes with new ones’ (p. 20). Genocidal rape: its nature and function Although my aim in this chapter is not the hopelessly ambitious one of presenting a comprehensive account of the policies and atrocities that combine to make up collective evil in the guise of ‘ethnic cleansing’, there is at least one further aspect that merits discussion, lest my account be seriously wanting. I am thinking of the policy and atrocities now commonly referred to as ‘genocidal rape’. I wish to set out the facts about genocidal rape – what it is, the aims it serves, and the traumas it causes – in as accurate a manner as possible. In doing so, I shall rely in particular on two sources: one is Beverly Allen’s book Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia; the other is the anthology War Violence, Trauma and the Coping Process, edited by Libby Tata Arcel and containing contributions from psychologists and psychiatrists who have been working directly with rape victims targeted in ‘ethnic cleansing’. First, what is genocidal rape? Beverly Allen’s definition is worth quoting in extenso: Genocidal rape is a military policy of rape for the purpose of genocide currently practiced in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia by the Yugoslav Army, the Bosnian Serb forces, and the irregular Serb militia known as Chetniks. Three main forms exist: (1) Chetniks or other irregular forces enter a Bosnian-Herzegovinian or Croatian village, take several women of varying ages from their homes, rape them in public view, and depart. The news of this atrocious event spreads rapidly throughout the village. Several days later, regular Bosnian Serb soldiers or Serbs from the Yugoslav Army arrive and offer the now-terrified residents safe passage out of the village on the condition that they never return. Most accept, leaving the village abandoned to the Serbs and thus furthering the genocidal plan of ‘ethnic cleansing’. It is hard to imagine that they could do otherwise, being unarmed except for their farm implements and a rusty rifle or two. Thus the Serbs – in a collaboration between their Chetnik and their regular military forces – accomplish the rout of the BosnianHerzegovinian population of still another village with very little cost to themselves. The ‘ethnic cleansing’ accomplished by this procedure is the clockwork-precise, logical putting-into-practice of the Ram and Brana plans the Serb commanders wrote in 1991; (2) Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Croatian persons being held in Serb concentration camps are chosen at random to be raped, often as part of torture preceding death; (3) Serb, Bosnian Serb, and Croatian Serb soldiers and the militias and irregular forces known as Chetniks arrest Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Croatian

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women, imprison them in a rape/death camp, and rape them systematically for extended periods of time. Such rapes are either part of torture preceding death or part of torture leading to forced pregnancy. Victims who do not become pregnant are often murdered. Victims who do become pregnant are raped consistently and subjected to severe psychological abuse and other forms of torture until such time as their pregnancies have progressed beyond the stage when a safe abortion would be possible, at which point they are released. All forms of genocidal rape constitute the crime of genocide as described in Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. (Allen 1996: 62f.)

If by ‘ethnic cleansing’ we understand the systematic policy of rendering an area ‘ethnically homogeneous’ by using force or intimidation (including killings) to remove persons of given groups from the area, genocidal rape as just defined serves as a major means to accomplish it. In short, the policy of rape is an essential ingredient of the genocide performed in – or as – ‘ethnic cleansing’. I stress this so strongly to establish from the very start that the rape we are talking about in this historical case represents a deliberate and systematically organized policy and so would be fundamentally misinterpreted if looked upon as occurring randomly and/or as the result of some ostensibly ‘deep-seated’, ‘natural’, or ‘spontaneous’ urge on the part of the individual rapists. Far from individually felt and acted-upon sexual desire, what determines these instances of rape are the aims of power: victims are raped as a means to humiliate, traumatize, subjugate, and dominate them, in many cases as part of a psychological and physical torture preceding their being eventually killed; and when allowed to survive, the victim of rape will have been deprived of the elements that normally constitute prospects for the future – relatives to return to, a home to return to, not to mention the multifaceted psychological sufferings. To have been raped as part of the policy of genocidal rape, and to be allowed to survive, is meant to represent a destiny scarcely preferable to that of being killed after the rapes; it is tantamount to having been marked so thoroughly – on body and mind – by one’s victimization, by one’s enforced complete powerlessness at the hands of perpetrators who are absolutely free to do whatever they consider conducive to reinforcing and prolonging one’s suffering, that one is doomed: ‘Victims of rape will never come back to the place of their traumatic experience, even if they have the chance to return from exile’, Seada Vranic observes (Vranic 1996: 195). As we shall see below, a central consequence of trauma – one aimed at by the oppressors – is to rob the survivor of her trust in the world; of ontological security and basic trust in humankind. It is to condemn the survivor to a life in constant fear of the return of the catastrophe (Edkins 2003: 8).

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In many cases the rapes were directly connected by the perpetrators themselves with a motive of expulsion: ‘You must leave now or we will come back and rape you again.’ Telling the outside world about the rapes was said to entail signing one’s own death warrant. This explains why the Serb militia made it a matter of principle to rape a large number of the victims in their homes, or in front of their houses, forcing as many relatives as could be rounded up to be eyewitnesses. Libby Tata Arcel comments, ‘Gang-rapes with spectators, family or strangers, turns one of the most private and intimate human acts into a public affair, exposing the woman (or man) to maximal humiliation and traumatization’ (Arcel 1998: 195). This is to make sure that one’s home, one’s neighbourhood, one’s original life-world henceforth be forever associated with the trauma inflicted, and so tainted beyond repair, spoiled of its sense of goodness, of trustworthiness (to put it in Kleinian terms). The ultimate aim is to ensure that one will never again be (become) the person one used to be prior to the rape. The rape is meant to define one, doom one, forever. What is now part of the past is meant to wholly determine the future. The temporality of the atrocity of rape is – psychologically – such as to span past, present, and future. Several factors combine to endow these rapes with their devastating quality. It is not only that they were not random, but instead pre-planned and encouraged (frequently ordered) as a crucial element in a genocidal campaign. It is also that they targeted male as well as female victims; and, furthermore, that they sometimes occurred with victims in both roles (an old man being forced to rape his granddaughter); men of the same targeted ‘ethnic’ group being forced to rape and perform various sexual perversions on each other, taking turns; and so forth. In short, one does not have to be a female in order to be raped, and one does not have to be adult (or relatively young) either: there are reports of rapes against under-ten-year-olds, as well as over-eighty-year-olds. It is tempting to conclude that these rapes are all about ethnicity – the ‘ethnic’ identity of the victim and rapist being the only thing that matters, the only characteristic that is given significance and symbolic value by the persons behind the policy and its practitioners on the ground. But this is untrue. The conspicuous fact that male as well as female persons are targeted should not lead us to conclude that gender identity plays no systematic role here. It does. Its role must be located in the dynamics of power that attend the commission of atrocities, including genocidal rapes. As Beverly Allen points out, attributes of masculinity always adhere to the perpetrator, whether that person is male or female, precisely because of that person’s dominance over another person

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or group of persons and because that person is immune from prosecution. In a patriarchy, these are masculine attributes. By the same token, attributes of femininity always adhere to the victim, whether female or male, precisely because of that person’s subjugation to another person or group of persons and because that person has no recourse to justice. In a patriarchy, these are feminine attributes. (Allen 1996: 28)

Regrettably, Allen does not spell out precisely what masculinity and femininity mean. My suggestion is that masculinity, thanks to centuries of cultural construction and assessment of gender identity in our type of society, is associated with autonomy, independence, invulnerability, transcendence, and culture, whereas femininity – the counterpart in this binary opposition – is associated with heteronomy, dependency, vulnerability, immanence, and nature; in short, strength as opposed to weakness, the power to control as opposed to the powerlessness of being controlled. That rape is an assault on a human person that leaves particularly deep scars, quick in being inflicted, yet so unbearably slow in healing (will they ever?), is a fact about rape that has come to be widely recognized, not least thanks to feminists. In the present case, genocidal rape in Bosnia, there is an additional characteristic, easily overlooked and, when noticed, puzzling. For the fact is that this policy of mass rapes had pregnancies as a key aim (as distinct from a ‘by-product’ of the rape, as such devoid of significance as far as the rapists are concerned); that is to say, it was an articulated aim of the rapes that the women targeted (to the less-thantotal extent that they were women) get pregnant and that they subsequently were forced to give birth to the baby. Since we know that these rapes formed part of a deliberate plan of genocide, meaning the removal (by expulsion or killings) of a certain group of persons, a paradox emerges. How can forcing one’s targeted victims to give birth to more babies be a means to removing them, to eliminating them and everything they stand for? How can one engage in genocidal assault and at the same time – as a deliberate part of that assault – enforce a numerical increase within the targeted population? To be sure, as Allen remarks, the equation ‘more babies equals genocide’ is a glaring example of faulty logic. The idea that Serbs could kill off the Bosnian-Herzegovinian and Croatian peoples by producing more of them, that is, by fathering babies – babies who would objectively be halfnon-Serb and half-Serb, as it were – seems utterly ludicrous. It is tempting to say that enforced pregnancy as a method of genocide makes sense only if you are ignorant about genetics. Such ignorance is expressed by

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the advocates of this method of genocide when they claim that the babies born from these rapes will be ‘only Serb’. For that is precisely what they claim: the idea that raped female non-Serbs, as a result of being forced to complete their enforced pregnancies, will give birth to a Serb is the very premise on which this case of genocidal rape is based. How could such an idea develop? How could it be spread and – even – believed in? The answer, in logical terms, is simple. As Allen came to realize, to its perpetrators, the equation ‘more babies equals genocide’ is possible ‘on the condition that they cancel every aspect of the mother’s identity – her national, ‘‘ethnic’’, religious, and even genetic identities – other than that as a sexual container’ (1996: xiii). In other words, and as anticipated above, the Serb policy ‘erases the victim’s cultural identity and treats her as nothing more than a kind of biological box’ (1996: 87). I would like to add that this is the utmost form of reducing human persons to mere means – of their instrumentalization. What we are dealing with is not simply one more instance of ‘mass rape in war’ or, alternatively, that rape in war is simply the way it is in patriarchy. Recall that the Ram Plan cited above emphasizes the importance of attacking Bosnian society at its supposedly weakest point, ‘women and children’. To approach genocidal rape as just another misdeed originating in patriarchy and so as a type of atrocity which patriarchy, in a quasitranshistorical and transcultural way, always harbours – as does the prominent American feminist Susan Brownmiller – is to miss the genuine novelty of the bent logic of the Serbian policy on two counts. First, it implies that victims of such rapes will invariably be women, thereby ignoring that ‘the violent crime of rape can be perpetrated on anyone, regardless of sex’; in effect, it means naturalizing ‘women’ as victims (Allen 1996: 90). Second, Brownmiller’s view that war rape reveals ‘the male psyche in its boldest form’ is essentialistic and entails naturalizing ‘men’ as rapists, implying that war serves to bring out a ‘natural’ propensity (otherwise restrained) in men qua men. The man’s psyche is the wrong place to seek for an explanation. Rather, war rape (here, genocidal rape) is about using sexuality as a means to political ends set by certain leaders, drawing upon a combination of ethnonationalistic superiority feelings and a macho cult of male superiority in which everything ‘feminine’ is devalued (in a well-known psycho-logic according to which the more a man attacks human carriers of ‘feminine’ traits, the more he hopes to negate and distance himself from such traits within himself). Libby Tata Arcel’s nuanced and, in my view, convincing hypothesis is that ‘masculinity constructions and nationalist identities can be and are exploited and put in service of a

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male chauvinist and racist military strategy during war, but they can also be disciplined and redirected under a different war strategy’. Arcel stresses that the main responsibility lies with ‘those identified leaders and their followers who conceived and allowed the war rapes’, aiming as they did to lower the borders of acceptable behaviour, change the norms, and corrupt and exploit many men, especially the young and poorly educated, in acts they would not commit during peace (Arcel 1998: 199f.). Add to this the practice of free delivery of alcohol to the men taking part in the gang rapes. Third, the pregnancies, and not the rapes alone, are employed as a major weapon of the genocide; that is, in a process designed to destroy an entire culture – and this is something genuinely new, adding a novel dimension to the role mass rape has played in earlier conflicts and wars. The second count on which special care is needed to grasp the actual nature of genocidal rape has to do with a paradox that is even more bizarre than the one mentioned earlier. If the formula of killing off people by forcing them to give birth to babies is to work, it must be performed on women who have, ‘for purposes of the Serb father equals Serb baby equation, no identity beyond sex – on women, that is, who in theory no longer bear the marks of ethnicity, religion, or nationality that the Serb military and the Bosnian Serbs used to justify their aggression in the first place’ (Allen 1996: 97). That is to say, the overly cultural identity of the targeted persons, ideologically all-important – to the point of determining who is to live and who is to die – in identifying persons as to-be-targeted in the first place, is completely erased when a pregnancy has been (by force) commenced, creating the bizarre notion that the baby to be born will be a fully fledged Serb as far as its identity is concerned. As sexual container and biological box, the mother to the child is perceived – and treated – as nothing else: as solely container, as an entirely interchangeable instrument. Again, as long as we take a detached perspective on this policy, its logical blunders are easy to spot, and to ridicule. It is tempting to think that only the perpetrators themselves, and only the most brainwashed among them, are ready to believe that procreation of Muslim–Serb or Catholic–Serb offspring equals the destruction of the Bosnian and Croatian populations and the ‘purification’ of the Serb one. Unfortunately, as observed by Allen and other commentators who have been in contact with the rape victims, one of the most tragic results of this policy is that the victims, if they survive, often do so believing the Serb illogic. At some level, they begin to subscribe to the very reasoning that seeks to erase their cultural identity: they are convinced that the pregnancy they carry will result in the birth of a Chetnik, a Serb, a child

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who will bear none of his or her mother’s characteristics. It is as though the things told them by their rapists have borne fruit, have become a selffulfilling prophecy – namely, that the raped woman would in the future give birth to a Serb child. The several senses in which this is a subtle psychological device to inflict maximal humiliation and suffering on the victim should not escape us. The destiny to which she is doomed is that of being reduced to a mere means to ensure the reproduction and so future existence of her enemy, of the very people (persons) who have taken everything away from her that constituted her identity and sustained her self-worth: everything valuable to her and a source of her being valued by her dear ones. The subtlety of this traumatization is to do with it being a double one: first, there is the trauma of having been raped; second, on top of that, there is the trauma of being forced to help reproduce, and so in an elementary sense to strengthen, to prolong into the future, the identity characteristic of one’s tormentor by way of giving birth to his child. For the child is now perceived by the woman (mother) herself as ‘his’, as emphatically not hers. And indeed, this attempt to distance oneself from what in such a violent and direct – what could be more direct than something innerbodily, something (precisely not a thing but a life) inside oneself that one cannot flee – manner is psychologically and emotionally associated in the woman’s mind with the very event that so has traumatized her. It has changed her life, challenged – to the point of erasing – her core identity, her sense of who she is; this attempt at distancing is but perfectly understandable. Hence this mother has her own reasons for adopting the conviction (spread by the perpetrators for their reasons) that her offspring, quite simply, ‘is’ the enemy. As Allen says, ‘at some level, she hates it and wants to destroy it. It is part of what has so dreadfully destroyed her town, harmed her, tortured, maimed, and slit the throats of her loved ones’ (1996: 99). What is at stake here can be stated in philosophical terms. To invoke a central notion of Hannah Arendt (1958), one could propose that the overall aim of pregnancy-producing genocidal rape is to rob the victims of their natality, denying them actualization of the dimension of their basic humanity that touches on their capacity to provide a ‘new beginning in the world’ by giving birth to new beginners; that is to say, cutting short their essential future-oriented capacity. The dissociation the ideology behind genocidal rape aims for – that between mother and child – is designed to effect a sense of alienation in the minds of these raped women with respect to their capacity for giving birth to new beginners, beginners greeted as both their bona fide offspring and as representing something

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wholly novel in and to the world (in Arendt’s sense of natality as the principle of novelty). We need to examine what follows for feelings of shame and guilt and so for the general issue of human agency. My thesis is that, in the context of ‘ethnic cleansing’, rape represents a shame-producing form of evil: evil carried out in such a manner as to inflict maximal shame on the victims, whereby the rapists take the signs of the ‘success’ of this strategy – involving signs of its adoption among the victims – as a ground for feeling relief from guilt and remorse. Rape, shame, and agency In her novel As If I Am Not There, Slavenka Drakulic depicts the thoughts and feelings of women who are held captive in a camp in Bosnia, some of them being raped day in, day out for months on end. They were constantly concerned about whether they would leave the camp with a swelling stomach. Their helplessness was total. Drakulic writes: There was no way to terminate a pregnancy, yet they could not imagine having a child conceived in this way. To give birth to a child conceived by rape would be more disgraceful than betrayal for them, a fate worse than death . . . She attended the murder of a child who had done nothing wrong; it had met its death even before taking a breath. Not a breath in this world. As if they had not seen enough death, the women acquiesce to the same logic of violence which says that ours means life and theirs means death. They themselves are becoming capable of killing and that is the victory of the logic of war. What hurts S. even more than the quiet death of that tiny being who no one will ever know existed, is the cruelty of the girl’s mother. Why did she say that it is better this way? (Drakulic 1999: 141f.)

Here shame enters the picture. Drakulic’s novel captures the state of mind expressed by many survivors of the organized rapes. These raped women struggle with feelings of shame, guilt, ‘impurity’, and betrayal, feelings nourished by experiencing having been raped as synonymous with disgrace, the disgrace being felt as something they carry physically. Talking to psychologists, they will say: ‘My body is ruined, filled with terrible things. When I was raped, the evil moved into my body. Evil has since then taken place within me; it doesn’t allow me to go on with my life. I am convinced that I am now evil.’ In some cases, such a woman will make a desperate attempt to get rid of her disgrace by dealing with it physically – that is, by deciding to kill the baby inside her, or her newborn child. But, as indicated in the passage from Drakulic’s novel, this is no successful method for putting an end to one’s pain. When the child is no

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more because one has killed it oneself, the shame and guilt at having taken his or her life remains. The powerlessness of having been acted upon (in a literal sense) is sought overcome by a decision to oneself act upon what was forcefully imposed. The shame of passivity, the passivity of shame, is intolerable. It is felt as incompatible with dignity, with selfrespect. It is sought eliminated by resorting to an active act. But this act – killing the evidence of what caused the pain in the first place – only helps create new guilt and reinforced shame. Shame accompanies the attempted transposition from the role of victim to that of actor. The shame is as though pasted onto the person, irremovable whatever this woman thinks, feels, does, wherever she may go. Hers is an inscribed body, shame remaining the significance of that inscription from without. There is but a short step from assault embodiment to sickness, to types of psychosomatic suffering peculiar to the way the sexual violation experience is and remains an embodied experience, and as such inextricably constituent of who the person is (Kirkengen 2001). We know that, generally speaking, in contexts radically different from that of rapes as both a means and an aim of ‘ethnic cleansing’, it is not the perpetrator who feels shame, but the victim (Russell 1984). Jean Amery, survivor of Auschwitz, compares the shame of what was done to him (during torture) with the shame felt by a raped woman: ‘Logically, it is the rapist who ought to feel shame, but in reality it is the victim who does, for she cannot forget that she was reduced to powerlessness, to a total dissociation from her will’ (Amery 1979: 87). Elaborating on Amery’s observation, Tzvetan Todorov remarks that ‘often, even in the eyes of the inmates, the guards emerge as the true victors, for they succeed in transforming normal individuals into human beings prepared to do absolutely anything in the name of one single thing, survival’ (Todorov 1996: 263). The shame connected with having been helplessly exposed to torture and humiliation of an enormity unknown to most of us, the shame of having witnessed something that should never have come to pass between human beings (most vividly articulated in the work of Primo Levi (1988)), the shame of having been unable to prevent terrible things from happening to others as well as to oneself, the shame of having sunk so far below one’s original standards of conduct, the shame of remembering such unnameable things, of having oneself survived them when so many others (often ‘better’ than oneself, more deserving of life) perished – these are so many varieties of shame that in many instances will haunt the victims for the rest of their lives. Moreover, it is a shame that easily turns into guilt, a feeling of complicity in events that ought never to have taken place, such that one, simply by having been present,

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walks around as a living sign of something about which contemporary and future humans better be – deserve to be – ignorant, to allude to Karl Jaspers’ powerful notion of ‘metaphysical guilt’ (May 1992: 146ff.). I noted that the shame felt by the individual victim is not a phenomenon novel with, or restricted to, the victims of genocidal rape in Bosnia. However, in that particular case, mainly involving Muslim women, the shame is reinforced by the fact that their religion so strongly stresses the dignity that is lost and so the disgrace that is created by being a victim of rape, placing as it does a premium on virginity. In light of what has been documented about the policy of genocidal rape, there is reason to assume that the shame and disgrace were deliberately created – planted – in the women directly assaulted, as well as in their men (husbands, fathers, grandfathers, sons, brothers, etc.) who, being frequently forced to witness the rapes, were exposed to utter helplessness and paralysis with respect to fulfilling their ‘masculine’ role – prescribed both by religion and by traditional culture – as protectors of the(ir) women. Male pride was meant to suffer a blow from which the males involved would never fully be able to recover – not in their own eyes, nor in those of their relatives. Again, this is just another aspect of the sense in which the Ram and Brana plans sought to ‘aim action at the point where the religious and social structure [of the Muslim communities] is most fragile’. Let me expand on the latter. When Serbian paramilitary units participate in organized mass rapes against Muslim women in Bosnia (and later in Kosovo), the physical assault can be regarded as a subtle symbolic communication along at least five dimensions. First, the violent assault communicates that the victim is devoid of value, that the female victim is a mere instrument, functioning as container for the Serb’s semen. Second, the assault communicates a severe blow against the dignity and self-respect of the male members (including husband) of the woman’s family, a blow from which they most likely never will recover – for how can they forgive themselves for their own passivity, and how can they expect others to forgive them – even though they felt that there was nothing they could do, except stand by, looking on the scene that will traumatize them forever? Third, the assault communicates to all present that the perpetrator is ready to transgress all the previously established moral and social norms that his leaders, on the basis of an ideological claim about ‘ethnic’ superiority, may order him to transgress. Fourth, the assault communicates something horizontally in addition to the vertical dimension just mentioned; namely, that the perpetrator is one of the group, acts like the others and for the sake of their community and their common cause. Fifth, the perpetrator communicates something to

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himself – namely, that this is a boundary I am willing to cross, that the transgression I presently perform is of such magnitude as to make me into another person, and that I accept this, just as I accept that this transgression is likely to damage – forever and beyond repair – the relationship I have up till now had with concrete (known) persons within the enemy group. For all these reasons, the assault undoes all established psychological identities and social certainties. Its total effects and repercussions are tantamount to a revolution for all affected. I suggest that the dynamics laid bare here, triggering and reinforcing feelings of shame and guilt in the victims, could not exert such a tremendous impact were it not for the circumstance(s) of proximity. It is precisely the proximity – in broad psychological meaning as well as physical – characteristic of the misdeed that so forcefully serves the goal of inflicting maximum psychic trauma. Now, we normally expect that, once proximity obtains, or is allowed to prevail over distantiation, empathy will do, too. This connects with issues discussed extensively in Chapter 1. The common assumption is that the proximity marking the meeting between perpetrator and victim will elicit empathy; proximity signifies that now (for once, or at last) the perpetrator meets his – emphatically his – victim face to face, as a physically co-present fellow human being, with all the possibilities this entails with respect to humanizing persons who otherwise (in the stereotypes about ‘the Muslim’ or ‘the Jew’ nourished by ideology) are subject to dehumanization and depersonalization. The normative aspect of the assumption, then, is that empathy will side with morality; that the moral as well as affective chargedness characteristic of the face-to-face encounter between a perpetrator and his victim will prove favourable to feelings of compassion and care, in effect triggering emotional and moral inhibitions, so that the assault will appear more ‘difficult’ to perform, since performing it is now perceived as arousing shame and guilt (Vetlesen 1993, 1994). This – and that is the point – is a far cry from what confronts us in ‘ethnic cleansing’. Instead, empathy and the concomitant chargedness of the face-to-face, person-to-person encounter are being turned inside out, as it were; they are transposed into their counterparts, with the consequence that the psychologically emotionally ‘high temperature’ of the encounter – in short, all that makes for the absence of indifference on the part of the perpetrator – comes to side with immorality. When the assault is performed in a context of proximity – I am perpetually inclined to say, in spite of this context – the implication is that the atrocity is profoundly deprived of the prospect of future forgiving and reconciliation. Precisely because the parties saw each other in the eyes on the occasion of the

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assault, they will scarcely be able to see each other in the eyes again – ever. They have both seen something that nobody should have seen, something that should never have occurred – something irrevocable for both. It is this type of peculiar mutuality in what came to pass, its quality as transgression and as irrevocable, that I suggest we consider a deliberate goal in evil a` la ‘ethnic cleansing’ and that, in psychological terms, is meant to radically subvert the prospect that the parties will ever be able to – or want to – live together again, like they once used to, as neighbours. The closer the perpetrator is to his victim – in terms of kinship, friendship; a shared place, a shared past – the deeper and more lasting will be the psychological and emotional impact of the assault on the relationship between the two parties. Chances are that their relationship will be shattered forever. For these reasons alone, ‘ethnic cleansing’ is a particularly subtle and cruel form of evil. There exists, starkly opposed, a sisterhood of shame and a brotherhood of guilt: the shame of the raped victims, the guilt of their aggressors. It is a brotherhood of guilt in a first potency when Borislav Herak and other named and arrested perpetrators admit gang rapes in a sort of Sartrean ‘series’, looking upon themselves (no less than their victims) as perfectly interchangeable. Alexandra Stiglmayer comments upon her interviews with Herak: He seems to have raped automatically, without wasting any time thinking about his victims. It is typical that he always describes his victims as ‘tall, dark-haired, between 20 and 25 years old’ – there is no way in which he more eloquently could have expressed how little they meant to him. It is typical of gang-rapes that the perpetrators hardly perceive their victims as concrete persons, and that they are unable to describe them afterwards, unless they knew them beforehand. (Stiglmayer 1992: 155)

In other words, even though the setting of these assaults is eminently physical, face to face and person to person, perpetrator and victim are nonetheless depersonalized. Or rather, they become so – at first very gradually, later routinely, unselfconsciously – in the mind of the individual perpetrator. Why should he recall his victims’ faces, recall them as unique persons, recall how young, how terrified were some of them, how old and frail were others? Having crossed the boundary the first time, having taken the first and decisive step so as to do ‘that’, so as to become one of ‘them’, there is no return, and numbing – allowing indifference and fatigue to prevail where at first there was great tension, the kick as well as the shock of transgression – is a natural defence mechanism against unwelcome memories, against possible feelings of guilt at things done

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to specific persons. The picture that emerges in these interviews is one of persons who were faces to each other – but, whereas his face is burned into her memory, much as his violent assault is inscribed into her body, her body’s memory, to him she is only a number in an endless series, a face in a mere physical sense, not in a psychic or emotional one. If she notices him, he does not notice her. What about guilt – the guilt of the perpetrator? Does he feel any such thing? Is it only something attributed to him by others? Is the ascription of guilt at all compatible with his self-understanding? A relevant indicator here is that detained and interviewed rapists, such as twenty-twoyear-old Herak, convicted of a large number of rapes and the murder of several dozen Muslim civilians of both sexes and all ages, display no signs of shame. The absence of shame points to an absence of personally sensed guilt. These young men put up a different face from that burdened by shame – namely that of pride, of boasting. With shame we associate a desire for, a need for hiding – concealing what is done, in an attempt to escape the look of others; in short, an urge not to be seen because being seen would betray one. Not so in this case. Here the deed takes place out in the open, not in secrecy, not covertly; it takes place as a deliberately staged event where the aspect of display, of exposure of (and in view of) all involved on both sides of the perpetrator/victim divide brings them together in a shared role as attendants, as forming an audience. The selfunderstanding of the perpetrators is informed by an ideological message, portraying what they are doing as a show-off of masculinity, of Serb masculinity, a character test, a spectacular performance in front of an audience whereby the weak and feeble will be distinguished from the strong, the unworthy from the worthy perpetrators. The misdeed against the victim makes the victim impure and proves the purity of the perpetrator: the rape assault is a ‘two-in-one’ in that it marks self-identity and other-identity in one and the same act. Beyond that, the assault signifies the placing of the sting (Canetti), it condemns the victim to carry the sting forever – initially in a physical sense, as a part of the body, as a life implanted within one’s own body, in short, as an imposed heaviness, as the fate of having been made heavy, immobile with respect to what has been imposed, because the imposed is not separable from the body but is now the body, defining its new meaning; and later as the physical reminder, in the form of the newborn child, of the reality of the deed, granted the logic according to which such a child is wholly ‘alien’, living proof of the enemy, in no psychologically meaningful sense one’s own. In other words, the consequences of the assault, including all feelings of badness, remain with the victim, onto whom they were projected in the first place

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(to invoke Alford) – unconsciously or not, collectively or individually (to the extent that the distinction can be made here, but more on that below). The perpetrator, by contrast – and allowing for a significant number of exceptions (perpetrators’ post-traumatic disorder) from this general trend – is relatively unmarked, busying himself elsewhere and with new projects, perhaps a totally different life, with few or no physical reminders or scars pointing to what happened. He has invested his sense of identity and self-worth in the notion that what he did was essentially right, necessary, inevitable, and the like; and to give up this notion – having always been in the right – would mean to start seeing oneself, one’s actions, in a completely novel light, a prospect likely to be shunned by most killers, rapists, and torturers. To sustain this notion, better not encounter the victims, let alone try for a second to imagine what happened as experienced from their vantage point. In keeping with Alford’s analysis, past misdeeds take on the character of something placed far away and left there; and it henceforth is the business of those afflicted – solely. Here, as in so many other instances, the rule is that power (exercised as violence) is dynamic and eminently mobile, whereas powerlessness spells immobility. It should be added that there is, I suspect, at least one situation in which shame may evolve in a person taking part in atrocities performed by a group. The empirical example I have in mind is not from Bosnia but from the Holocaust. But I believe it is suited to illuminating a phenomenon seen in both cases, since of a general nature. In his acclaimed study Ordinary Men, the American historian Christopher Browning notes that some members of Police Battalion 101 refused to carry out their assignment, namely the open-air shooting of Jews on the Eastern Front. The important point is that the policemen who refused to participate in the killings received no severe punishment (they were mostly given administrative work and allowed to move to a different region). There are several questions worth asking here, like: Why did so few men refuse to murder, having seen for themselves that refusal was a perfectly available option, one not followed by punishment? Or (more to the point in the present context) why did those few who refused do so? How did they think and feel about it? Browning’s comment is worth quoting: The danger of personal isolation was probably reinforced by the circumstance that the ‘no’ voiced could be perceived by the comrades as a moral reproach – as though those who refused considered themselves ‘too good’ to do such things. Not all, but most of these men instinctively tried to tone down the criticism of their comrades

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that was associated with their stance. They did not claim to be ‘too good’ to kill, but instead ‘too weak’. In this way, the attitude of their comrades was not put into question; rather, ‘hardness’ was legitimized and affirmed as superior property. For worried individuals this also had the advantage of not casting doubt upon the murderous policy of the regime. However, a problem was that the difference between being ‘weak’ and being a ‘coward’ was small. (Browning 1992: 241f.)

Browning’s analysis is instructive in the context of ‘ethnic cleansing’, since it demonstrates that when shame does appear within the group of perpetrators, it does so as a feeling experienced by those who refused to murder – not by those who murdered. Even though their fellow officers are reported to have looked upon their refusal with understanding (as opposed to the scorn or fury we might have expected), the men in question apparently had great trouble forgiving themselves – and not, as we again might have expected, in forgiving those who did participate. In other words, as indicated in Browning’s comment, the refusers did not consider themselves too decent, morally speaking, to participate; rather they considered themselves, morally and psychologically speaking, ‘too weak’ to participate. They did not feel up to the task expected of them. In refusing, then, they did not mean to articulate a protest to the effect that they deemed the killing as such morally wrong; in as much as a ‘morality of sorts’ is operative in the minds of these policemen, it is of a wholly (closed) intra-group kind, one from which victims are perfectly precluded, as noted earlier. If anything, the task of killing was conceived as noble, as representing a psychological ordeal of a supreme, even unprecedented order – just think of the ‘natural weakness’, the instinctive pity they had to overcome within themselves to be able to kill, in conditions of utter proximity, defenceless children, women, elderly; the successful overcoming of which would be testimony to their having ‘persisted and at the same time . . . to have remained decent men’, to quote from Himmler’s infamous speech in October 1943 (Sereny 2000: 295). It was just that the task demanded more of them, in terms of psychological character and moral resolve, than they felt themselves able to muster in situ. Hence their refusal was completely devoid of the moral pride and outrage we might be tempted to attribute to their motives. To be sure, this interpretation is tendentious and one-sided. It is possible that, at least for some of the refusers, a genuinely moral motivation was indeed decisive – only pragmatic reasons forced them to downplay this quality. Be that as it may, the point I wish to make is that collective evil, precisely on grounds of being a group phenomenon and so

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setting in motion psychological responses not shown in individuals acting on their own, creates its own type of shame. This shame, we have seen, is a perversion as far as its bearing on positive morality is concerned. Put otherwise, shame as felt by perpetrators at atrocities they did not take part in is a feeling based on an interpretation which in fact affirms the ideologized viewpoint according to which killing and raping bring out the ‘strength’ in man, and refusal betrays his weakness. In an atmosphere conducive to the flourishing of ‘macho’ values and behaviour such as prevailed in the performance of gang rapes in Bosnia, refusers probably tended to feel just as shameful as did those reported by Browning. Above I indicated that the intrafamilial character of some of this (enforced) violence in fact forms a separate and highly significant category of the total violence performed under the banner of ‘ethnic cleansing’. In addition to the cases where a man was forced to rape one or several of his female family members, there is the case of the Serb man who is given the so-called choice between killing his Muslim wife or being killed himself (by the Serbs). Here the play on purity/impurity reaches its peak. Serbs who are (or who are suspected of being) against ‘ethnic cleansing’ of defined categories of non-Serbs are regarded as ‘impure’ Serbs. As such they combine in persona what is ideologically proclaimed to be mutually exclusive, making them a living aporia and, as such, intolerable. This is the point where Girard’s notion of the surrogate victim – most ominously, his suggestion that sometimes the most suitable victim is the neighbour – is borne out in the case under discussion. Forming an anomaly, a category hopelessly in between identities that are presented as allowing either for what is unambiguously pure (own, meaning good, worthy of life) or unambiguously impure (alien, meaning bad, unworthy of life), such persons are a thorn in the side of the ideology hell-bent on ‘cleansing’ whatever is found to be ‘dirty’. However, there is a possibility that they might become pure Serbs, that they show themselves worthy of their ethnic identity; namely, by doing what good Serbs have to do in a situation of conflict – they can step across a boundary, that of taking non-Serb lives, and subsequently be granted status as pure. The closer the Serb man’s links with ‘impure elements’, the more emotionally charged and truly person-bound will be the boundary he is asked to cross. It is vital to see that the kind of intrafamilial violence discussed is not only a violence that the agent performs against his victim: it is also, very significantly, a violence he performs against himself. In the extreme case of a man who is ordered to kill his own wife, we may say that what occurs amounts to psychological suicide: the man kills himself as his wife’s husband. The killing is the enforced denial, abandonment, and

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annihilation of the husband–wife bond, of this particular and intimate person-to-person tie. Why? Why must this bond be removed, even by a physical act? Is it because this couple embodies the ‘multi-culti’ life-form the cleansers loathe and seek to wipe out whenever met upon? Not primarily. Rather, I think it is because the ideology behind ‘ethnic cleansing’ has no conceptual room for a bond between persons that is ‘only’ a personal bond. The non-permitted and so ‘outrageous’ is precisely the ethnically neutral person-to-person bond or, more precisely, the bond between persons whose ethnicity may differ but to whom this difference makes no difference and possesses no negative significance. Persons, that is, are not only (let alone first and foremost) persons – noteworthy and commanding of respect on account of their individual uniqueness. Rather, to the ideology in question persons are ethnic identities, physicalpsychic carriers of ethnic identity and, as such, markers of a similarity and a difference: similarity with the ‘same’ (to allude to Levinas), with those one’s ‘own’; difference from the others, the alien ones. In this fashion, to be a person is to mark purity/impurity. Ethnicity as marker of pure/impure, own/alien, friend/enemy is a marker that leaves nothing untouched, according to this ideology. In short, conflicts based on ethnic identity permit no one to be neutral, unaffected. After everything that has been said about the crucial function given to rape by the ideology behind ‘ethnic cleansing’, a note on the limits of this approach is called for. Specifically, this concerns the theorist’s penchant for regarding such rapes as a special type of ‘symbolic violence’, properly understood only in a wide sociocultural context, one stressing in particular the role played by religion for those directly afflicted, identifying honour as what these rapes are most fundamentally about – destroying pride and dignity within a whole community by way of attacking the female body as the symbol par excellence of virginity, of the purity and sancity of life, hence of the future of that community and all those who are its members. C. N. Niarchos has offered the following comment: The pitfalls in linking rape and honour are many. First, reality and the woman’s true injury are sacrificed: rape begins to look like seduction with ‘just a little persuading’ rather than a massive and brutal assault on the body and psyche. As reports from the former Yugoslavia indicate, violations of honour and modesty are wholly inadequate concepts to express the suffering of women raped during war. Second, by presenting honour as the interest to be protected, the injury is defined from society’s viewpoint, and the notion that the raped woman is soiled or disgraced is resurrected. Third, on the scale of wartime violence, rape as a mere injury to honour or reputation appears less worthy of prosecution than injuries to the person. (Niarchos, quoted in Arcel 1998: 207)

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In recent decades, rapes during warfare have gone from being understood as a sexually motivated ‘by-product of war’ to being (also in the legal setting) understood as a politically motivated act, defined as sexual torture. In 1999, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda made an historic determination that systematic rape is a crime against humanity and that sexual violence constitutes genocide in the same way as any other act (Melvern 2004: 251). As Libby Tata Arcel notes, the importance of the legal understanding of war rape as ‘wilful torture’ cannot be overvalued, for at least two reasons: ‘First, victims of torture are entitled internationally to broader protection than victims of sexual assault, and second, an understanding of war rape as wilful torture moves the responsibility from the survivor to the perpetrator, thus contributing, it is hoped, to less stigmatization of the victim in her social context’ (Arcel 1998: 206). It certainly has taken a long time for the well-rehearsed dichotomy between war rape and torture to be discarded, whereby torture counted as a politically motivated crime, and war rape as a personally, sexually motivated one. While acts of rape have been condemned as violations of human rights, torture has been directly prohibited by war treaties and conventions, mainly the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment and Punishment from 1984 (the Convention Against Torture). It is useful to bear in mind the definition of torture (as put in Article 1): . . . any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent of or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. (Arcel 1998: 207)

Add to this that the essence of torture (following Elaine Scarry) consists in the denial of pain. In her groundbreaking study The Body in Pain, Scarry (1985: 51f.) suggests that the structure of torture consists of three elements: the infliction of pain, the objectification of the subjective attribution of pain, and the translation of the objectified attributes of pain into the insignia of power. The latter element completes the denial of pain; it is an act of self-blinding that permits a shift back to the first step, the infliction of still more pain. One could say that the injury achieves invisibility by way of denying the human import of what is being done to the victim: torture is a matter of actively doing precisely what ought not to

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be done, were its human import for the affected one taken into account. It is a matter of recognizing the victim’s subjectivity only for the instrumental purpose of using insight into that subjectivity to negate it, to effect its destruction all the more perfectly. In this sense, torture aims at the obliteration of the subjectivity of the subject being tortured; it aims at the elimination of all powers of agency, at making the tortured body become – exhaust in toto – the person tortured; at absolutizing the power of the torturer by way of silencing the voice and crushing the world (all held values and all pursued projects) that used to belong to the victim now demonstrably reduced to sheer animality. Perhaps no philosopher has captured the crux of this phenomenon better than Levinas: What characterizes violent action, what characterizes tyranny, is that one does not face what the action is being applied to. One does not see the face in the other, one sees the other freedom as a force, savage; one identifies the absolute character of the other with his force . . . The opposition of the face, which is not the opposition of a force, is not a hostility. It is a pacific opposition, but one where peace is not a suspended war or a violence simply contained. On the contrary, violence consists in ignoring this opposition, ignoring the face of a being, avoiding the gaze, and catching sight of an angle whereby the no inscribed on a face by the very fact that it is a face becomes a hostile or submissive force. Violence is a way of taking hold of a being by surprise, of taking hold of it in its absence, in what is not properly speaking it. The relationship with things, the domination of things, this way of being over them, consists in fact in never approaching them in their individuality. (Levinas 1993: 19)

So much for an extended commentary on Herak and other interviewed rapists’ failure to remember the face of a single victim of theirs. If Levinas is right, the face qua individuality signifies precisely what they negated when doing what they did to their victim(s) – proximity notwithstanding, the face in Levinas’ sense of ‘opposition’, of ‘authority without force’, is that which they had to erase in order to be able to go on doing what they did. Rape of the kind discussed in this section counts as torture (Levinas: violence) in this sense as well as in the given legal one. They are so many cases of an act of destruction, a physical act of violence causing severe pain and suffering at the mental and societal level as well as the physical. As borne out by the material, war rape constitutes intimidation, coercion, and discrimination. The perpetrators are public officials, ordering or personally committing rapes in that capacity and not as some act performed spontaneously or for personal-sexual reasons.

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Even though the fact that war rape has recently been redefined as sexual torture is to be greeted as a significant step in the recognition of the extremely severe nature of this crime, the suffering inflicted on its direct victims remains undiminished in human terms. Earlier sections have paid attention to the phenomenon of collective trauma, and how it is transferred transgenerationally. Experience has taught us that under certain circumstances, when there has not been any other satisfaction or compensation for the suffered atrocities, the ground is laid for the next round of aggression. In cases where the perpetrators enjoy impunity, or where arresting and punishing them (for whatever reasons) are given no priority, thus allowing them to remain at large, aggression will be seen by many as the only way of seeking justice. Libby Tata Arcel, working as a psychologist among the rape victims, reports that a Bosnian politician told her that it was necessary for the perpetrators to be punished by the International Tribunal, ‘otherwise the burden remains on our shoulders, so we have to take revenge sooner or later’ (Arcel 1998: 203). It seems that, despite the progress made with respect to the legal understanding of war rape, shame and guilt linger on as common feelings in the victims. As we saw, it is shameful to have been raped; in addition, it is perceived as shameful if the raped women relate their experiences (psychologists have found that the intra-group victimization of both Catholic and Muslim women is most frequent amongst traditional communities). Accordingly, these women have to be mute and suffer in silence; this is the most dignified position. ‘Nobody forgets and nobody forgives but most practice silence’, Arcel (1998: 204) reports from her work. (Arcel does not address how the men who were raped cope with what happened to them, or how they are met by others. I can only speculate that the stigma (sic) of ‘femininity’ that was meant to go with the experience of being raped in the context of ‘ethnic cleansing’ helps make their reluctance to talk about it even greater than the women’s.) This conspiracy of silence is not only to be regretted on the grounds of the obvious psychological costs to those involved. It is also lamentable in that it prolongs the traumatization at a sociocultural level. Not to speak about it, or not to be willing to hear about it, in fact means to seal the wounds inflicted by the rapists and thus to validate their deeds by contributing (however unwittingly) to their prolongation. It means sharing complicity in the next round of aggression – if it occurs, depending precisely on whether the wounds have been ‘stored’ in the psyche of those afflicted, thus constituting a trauma for which an external outlet is bound to be sought if a symbolic one is not found (to allude to Alford).

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One of the most upsetting aspects of the rapes is the phenomenon of self-blaming, of assuming responsibility for what happened to one, and thus not only shame but fully fledged guilt. Arcel and her colleagues report that many of the raped women (especially from the countryside) were faced with suspicion and asked by other women who had been taken captive as well, but who had been spared the experience of being raped, ‘Why you and not me? You must have asked for it.’ What is particularly regrettable is that in the cases of some of the raped women, the suspicion and hostility they are met with (even from co-victims) translate into the assumption of blame, sometimes even outright guilt for what happened. It is not that they start embracing the notion that they in some sense must have ‘willed’ what happened to them, popular with some of the women who were not raped and who use this fact to challenge those who were, saying to them, ‘Why were you raped when I was not? You must have asked for it since you were selected.’ Though not necessarily accepting this version, some of the raped women become convinced that ‘I had a choice. I have some guilt for what happened. I really, at a deeper level, chose to let it happen to me.’ Why take this line? Why blame herself, in effect letting the real offenders off the hook? A plausible psychological explanation is that she is trying to empower herself. She tries, that is, to reclaim some minimal agency: better to be guilty and responsible than to have been rendered totally powerless and helpless; better to convince oneself that one could have escaped, could have offered more resistance – in short, could have acted differently (a key criterion of free will) – than to admit total lack (bereavement) of agency. It is a matter of reclaiming at least some subjectivity after having been made into a mere object and been told over and over again that one is totally devoid of worth, of feelings, of a capacity for willing and for acting. It is a desperate attempt to rehumanize oneself after having been dehumanized. The practice of self-blaming thus appears somewhat less of a paradox: it represents an act of defying the perpetrator’s intentions by displaying to the world that one is, despite everything that happened, still capable of taking a stand, of saying, ‘Here I am, this is me, this is what happened and this is my active role in it.’ It thus defies the perpetrator even when the price paid for doing so seems to be claiming as one’s own the guilt, shame, and responsibility that truly belong to him and him alone. Having said this, self-blaming must also be understood dialectically, not merely as an intrasubjective defence mechanism, an attempt at coping, at creating some order when there is only chaos. It seems to me that, as long as the rapists go free and are not arrested and punished, it is as

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though the whole effort of restoring some moral order in the wake of all the destruction and suffering rests on the victims themselves – it rests on them for lack of resting elsewhere, in a visible and effective manner. It is as though these raped women say to themselves, ‘At least someone must assume responsibility for what happened. If no one does – not the perpetrators, nor some ‘‘third party’’ – then I guess I have to do it myself; there is no one else and, at least, being a survivor, I am free to do something that symbolizes that I have survived with my human and moral agency intact – that they didn’t succeed in taking away from me, although they tried, and although they took everything else. But still, what they took, they took by force; I gave them nothing.’ Self-blaming among victims corresponds with perpetrators’ declaring, ‘I had no choice. I did what I did because I was forced to. Refusing would have cost me my life.’ The need on the part of the once-powerless victim to empower herself has a parallel in the perpetrator’s need to disempower himself, to claim that he was just an instrument for the carrying out of the will of others. Alternatively, he may claim that ‘The victim wanted it, she brought it upon herself; it didn’t happen to everybody, only to those who somehow stood out and behaved in a conspicuous manner.’ Indeed, the methods employed to belittle the consequences of one’s actions, to shift blame onto others, are legion; and there is no denying perpetrators’ need to believe in the (self-)deceptions they endlessly engage in. There is nothing new here: blaming the victim is known as the oldest method of escaping – at least in one’s own eyes – responsibility for wrongs done to others. What is less known, and historically more rare, is the Serbs’ practice of asking – with clear sanctions attached to not complying – a particular woman held captive in the camp to go to another man and tell him she wanted him to do ‘it’ to her. This is a subtle strategy for creating complicity, a sense that the victim is responsible for what is done to her. It means rendering her a ‘free subject’, one making autonomous choices and, correspondingly, casting the perpetrator as an instrument who merely carried out her ‘secret’ wishes. The effect of this make-believe arrangement is a reversal of the roles of subject and object, shifting guilt and shame from perpetrator to victim. Indeed, according to Elaine Scarry’s (1985: 27–59) impressive analysis, this is a crucial characteristic of torture, highlighted by the way the torturer will attempt to render his victim responsible for confessing or refusing to do so – as if ‘information’ not power and pain is (zero-sumlike) the heart of the matter, of the relationship, of the maltreatment; as if the alternatives of succumbing to the pain inflicted by the torturer or resisting it (remaining silent, betraying no one, come what may) aptly

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reflect on and attest to the agency (power) of the victim, representing his or her ‘moral choice’, instead of the responsibility for the whole sequence (including the positing of the pseudo-alternatives mentioned) resting squarely on the shoulders of the torturer and the powerful individuals and institutions behind him. In short, shifting the powers of agency from oneself as tormentor to one’s individual victim is a much-practised strategy among perpetrators of all kinds – hoping that not only the victim in question but the outside world as well will take the bait – namely by blaming the ‘weakness’ of those who talk and admiring the ‘strength’ of those who resist (sometimes to the point of paying with their life). To effect such a shift of attention from persecutor to victim, thereby transferring agency in general and responsibility in particular from the former to the latter, is a salient characteristic of both individual and collective evildoing. What is difficult for all victims of rape and other forms of torture is made particularly difficult in cases such as this – namely, to preserve (after the assault) an ability to ‘differentiate between herself as an object of violence and as a subject who had no complicity in what happened’, to quote Arcel (1998: 186). She points out that very few of the victims manage to make this distinction. The majority cannot continue living with what happened to them without splitting their mind from their body; without developing a sense that a foreign body-self has invaded their soul, so that they can only live with their body on the condition that it is not seen as belonging to the ego. For fear of being wholly eaten up, taken over, and controlled by the ‘alien’ thing that attacked their body – the thing that is now perceived as identical with their body because having conquered it – the woman disowns her body, her very sense of being a body, of being at one with her body, thus effecting a body/mind split where everything truly ‘herself’ is associated with the bodyless mind. A form of self-protection, this splitting on the part of the raped woman again touches on the role of shame. It is widely accepted that, at about the age of three, a human person develops a feeling of pride over his or her self-control of his or her body. However, if the body is rendered helpless, powerless, ultimately a mere instrument of intentions not one’s own, the feeling of shame will be evoked. No longer a natural and trustworthy source of pride, of self-esteem and self-identity, the body is all of a sudden turned into the opposite: a thing-like ‘object’ that one drags around, reminding oneself only of the body’s fall from grace; a transition, that is, from a subject of willed action in the world whose every move exhibits her sovereignty to an object of abuse at the hands of an alien will. To conclude, the creation of feelings of shame in the individual victim stands forward as both a central aim of the rapes and as a common

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psychological consequence of them – and a long-term one at that. ‘Ethnic cleansing’ is crucially about a type of evil that produces shame. When shame abounds in the victims, when shame is what remains with them and continues to haunt them, seemingly the price to be paid for survival, the perpetrators may feel that they have succeeded in reaching their goal. However, the attempts made by many victims to seize some command over their fate, over their victimhood, by claiming some elementary responsibility for what they suffered – while nonsensical in the eyes of many a detached observer – in my opinion poignantly attest to their humanity, and thus help deny their perpetrators total victory.

5

Responses to collective evil

Introduction In the previous chapter, I elaborated a framework suited to exploring how collective evil may come about. While attention was mainly paid to the mentality and practice of perpetrators, we also looked closely at how such evil is experienced by the victims, especially in the case of rape. In this final chapter, I shall employ as well as expand this framework. Collective evil of the kind I have been studying is a triadic phenomenon, not merely a dyadic one involving perpetrators and victims. It is triadic because the large-scale atrocities making up collective evil are tolerated or condemned, abetted or minimized by what is vaguely called third parties. To be sure, this is a vast and diffuse category, comprising individuals who, in their capacity as representatives of various bodies and institutions, may be: physically present on the scene (witnesses); assigned to monitor or inspect what unfolds (fact-finders); assigned to negotiate and possibly help influence the chains of events (diplomats); on peacekeeping or law-enforcing assignments; pursuing a political and/or moral interest (NGOs, intellectuals, engaged citizens); and, finally, the huge category of individuals who passively know that atrocities are taking place. My point is that the stance taken by each and every one of such third parties significantly impacts on the quality (intensity, extent, duration) of the collective evil in question. In fact, it is a very slight exaggeration to say – as I hope to show – that the doings of third parties, especially when taken combined, are just as decisive for the outcome of events as the actions of direct perpetrators. Responses to evildoing come in many kinds, depending of course on the identity, resources, and policies of the various responding parties. In what follows, I shall begin philosophically, asking what it means to pass 220

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judgment on evil. I proceed to conduct the discussion in an increasingly empirical and sociological manner, focusing on the phenomenon, or rather cultural condition, of indifference, and on issues of responsibility, guilt, and reconciliation. My argument is that these issues deeply involve specific third parties, bystanders of different kinds, and the task set for this chapter is to explore, in a case-related manner, the more exact nature of that involvement. Collective evil in the sense intended here is something in which collectivities (groups, communities, sometimes whole nations) are implicated. Yet we need always to have in mind that those responsible, and those victimized, are distinct individuals. This raises the many-faceted topic of the relationship between individual and group. Does it make sense to attribute guilt to entire groups? Or to feel ashamed for something that one’s group – or parents – did, or did not, do? Or to demand that victims forgive their tormentors? These are some of the questions addressed in the final sections of this chapter. How to pass judgment on evil? I start by asking a philosophical question: What is the viewpoint from which evil may be judged? That of the doer, the victim, or some external ‘third’ party? The answer seems simple. The doer may wish to deny the deed and the victim is party to the event (or conflict) in question; hence both should be deemed unfit to judge. What remains is the third party, one not directly involved in that which took place and is now awaiting fair judgment. According to traditional usage, ‘fair’ means objective, impartial, as opposed to something subjective, which by its very nature is deemed partial. The conclusion is inevitable: an external viewpoint is required for the acclaimed criteria of (moral, legal) judgment to be met, i.e. objectivity and impartiality. Fair judgment aims at justice. And justice is measured by its capacity to speak for all and hold equally for all. It is, and must always be safeguarded as, above partiality of every sort. That is why justice is passed on the affected parties from on high: to achieve fair judgment, one needs to transcend the context in which the offence took place, and the perspectives of all those directly involved are necessarily limited because interest-based. The neutrality of the institution of law vis-a`-vis the two opposed parties is an invaluable principle and an historic achievement in our society, refuting the pre-moral principle that right is might. The

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all-important implication is that the parties be prevented from having to fight the matter out among themselves; instead, the law intervenes and seeks an end to the conflict by peaceful means, thus effectively ruling out blood-letting revenge as the offended party’s way to right the wrongs suffered. Accordingly, a traditional goal of the criminal justice system is to substitute institutional justice for private revenge. Since the law is in principle not a party, it may claim the recognition of all parties concerned. Having a claim to recognition from offender and victim alike, a recognition that cuts across all boundaries, differences, and disagreements otherwise separating the parties constitutes the true privilege of law as justice and justice as impartial. I started by asking: What is the viewpoint from which evil may be judged? It would seem that the question has already been answered beyond doubt. The viewpoint required is that which embodies impartial judgment. And such impartiality is to be found on condition that we bracket the viewpoints of the parties concerned, which are infected by partiality because weighted by interest. In keeping with established rules of fair procedure, each party has a right as well as a duty to testify, to give witness before the court. But the sole purpose of such testimony is to provide the court with a multiplicity of aspects of the material on which it is eventually to pass legal judgment. The parties are given a hearing only in their function as sources of information that may help throw light on the matter to be judged. As to the assessment of this information with a view to the actual verdict to be arrived at, the court alone has a say. So far I have presented a purely formal answer. I have restricted myself to the general, and nowadays almost universally agreed-upon, criteria of moral and legal judgment. The response given implies that what holds for judgment in general will hold for passing judgment on evil as well. The tacit assumption is that passing judgment on evil is just another instance of passing moral and legal judgment in general. But is it? First, a brief recognition of what sort of phenomenon evil is. Evil speaks louder than words. By this I mean that evil as suffered is not a product of our consciousness. It is not an upshot of our intellect; and it is ill-suited as an object of contemplation. Evil – the phenomenon – does not belong in the domain of thought. And, although it may happen that evil generates in abstraction – Arendt once quipped that ‘abstract thinking is strictly comparable to the inhumanity of abstract emotions’ (Ignatieff 2001: 214) – evil does not materialize as abstraction. Evil is concrete. Its presence in the world is experiential. What we know about evil, we know from experience. As experienced, evil has the form of suffering. It is something we suffer or make others suffer. Such suffering is never

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confined to what is merely cerebral, a matter for our powers of intellect to contemplate, assess, evaluate. If and when thinking devotes itself to evil, it does so only indirectly; that is to say, by way of afflictions we suffer as sentient and vulnerable beings – as mortal, as dependent – in short, as beings constitutionally and ineluctably in lack, lacking the invulnerability, immortality, and independency for which we crave (just as involuntarily, it seems). Indeed, I strongly believe that much evildoing must be looked upon as representing a protest against this vulnerability, intolerable as it is found to be – though more so, it seems to me, by men than by women, at least in contemporary Western culture, where independence (the autonomy of the individual) is the ideal and dependency but its negation and threat. Our vulnerability stems not from our intellect – our intellect being precisely what allows us to indulge in fantasies of overcoming it – but from our existence as sensuous, bodily, gendered, and emotional beings; hence from a dimension of our existence in the world ineluctably given to us and, as such, irremovable by thought. True, thought may contemplate evil, plan evil, as well as record it once done, but our capacity for thought is not the dimension in us that essentially makes us susceptible to the experience of evil qua reality, which for us – sentient beings – takes the form of suffering. If I am correct in saying that evil is something we suffer or make others suffer, then there seems to be no entry to comprehending and assessing evil other than that peculiar to the victim – the victim’s viewpoint would, so to speak, represent the standard against which outsiders’ attempts to understand what came to pass must be measured. However, this flies in the face of the conditions for judgment sketched above, and for which unanimity was claimed. Indeed, the contradiction could not be more blatant. Whereas the conventional wisdom claims that sound judgment, irrespective of the particular subject matter, requires an impartial third party (the party that emphatically is a ‘non-party’ to the matter at hand), my present claim is that there can be no genuine appreciation of evil save that gained by the direct route of suffering – that is, of firsthand experience – or, put less strictly, there is no access to evil save that gained by some type of vicarious suffering, of ‘going visiting’ (Arendt) to the viewpoint of those affected by the evil in question. In my view, however, such visiting is primarily a question of empathy, of the capacity to be affected by the affectedness of the other – which, crucially, signifies precisely the capacity in which the torturer is lacking, concentrating his entire effort instead on cognitively registering how his victim reacts to the pain inflicted, looking at the ‘symptoms’ and ‘results’ of pain infliction from a wholly objectifying perspective, one from which their specifically lived, human, experiential

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quality is denied (indeed, denied even the slightest entry along the route of empathy). The dominant position on the matter holds that, for judgment to be impartial, it has to achieve a balance with regard to the always limited, selective, and thus partial, vantage points of those directly concerned. To judge impartially means to be able to take into account the views of all parties without identifying with any of them. Such judgment presupposes the privilege of being a non-party; that is, a spectator as distinct from a participant. Being involved, in medias res, caught in the evolvement of the phenomenon or event to be judged would only blind one; it would inevitably put one’s ‘balancing’ abilities into jeopardy. The second required privilege is that of hindsight. For Arendt, judgment is exercised post festum. Its temporal dimension is that of the past. Ultimately the aim of passing judgment is to attain reconciliation with what came to pass; to exercise judgment is to achieve meaning from a past event – albeit a meaning often lost on those directly involved at the time. This leaves us with an incongruity, a disparity, between thinking and evil. Thinking seeks depth; its ambition is to penetrate what is merely (sensorily) given, never to rest content with surface and appearance. Thinking is radical in the sense of craving to go to the roots. The Cartesian view typical of Western philosophy holds that, as distinct from thinking, our bodily sensuous experience maintains itself on the surface of things, passively recording what impinges on our senses. Moreover, sensuous experience will always be bound up with our position in time and space; consequently, a change of position will entail that we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste the same object in a different manner. Thinking prides itself on transcending the epistemic selectivity, unreliability (Plato), and uncertainty (Descartes) held to be endemic to bodily sensuous experience. This is because, as Arendt was fond of saying, when we think, we occupy no place in particular. Thinking operates in a no-man’s land. Thinking’s peculiar transcendence of everything given, as it is given in time and space, lies in its total freedom of movement. By the same token thoughts are deemed eternal; thoughts defy the defining – I should say, delimiting – characteristics of human existence on earth – i.e. birth and death. In short, thinking points to a sphere of reality all its own, standing apart from our everyday human existence as shot through with vulnerability and finitude. Thinking’s unique capacity for penetration seeks more than depth, however. Thinking craves complexity – the more, the better – much as judgment strives for the illumination of its object from as many angles as possible. It is the complexity of the object – there being more to it than

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meets the eye – that fundamentally fascinates thinking and urges it to proceed, always proceed, because novel aspects and dimensions of the object under consideration are bound to be discovered, sooner or later. Thus the proverbial restlessness of thinking. To be sure, Arendt seemed extraordinarily suited to the task of contemplating evil, equipped as she was with the philosopher’s talent for seeking depth and finding complexity in the object of interest. However, as we saw in Chapter 2, Arendt’s presence at Eichmann’s trial profoundly frustrated her philosopher’s penchant for finding depth and complexity: she could find nothing of any depth, let alone complexity, in Eichmann’s declared motives for doing what he did. How then to explain the resulting gulf between the doer’s perfectly ‘normal’ (even ‘banal’) motives and ambitions on the one hand, and the radical evil which is the true implications of his deeds on the other? Following Arendt, we reach an impasse, discussed in Chapter 2. If this is the upshot, implying that evil of such magnitude as considered here offers no satisfaction to thinking’s craving for depth and complexity, what then becomes of the Arendtian desire to attain reconciliation with past events? In a passage that may well contain her most blunt response ever to this question that so tortured her, Arendt argues that it is impossible, even immoral, to punish radical evil. She writes: It is therefore quite significant, a structural element in the realm of human affairs, that men are unable to punish what has turned out to be unforgivable. This is the true hallmark of those offenses which, since Kant, we call ‘radical evil’ and about whose nature so little is known, even to us who have been exposed to one of their rare outbursts on the public scene. All we know is that we can neither punish nor forgive such offenses and that they therefore transcend the realm of human affairs and the potentialities of human power . . . Here, where the deed itself dispossesses us of all power, we can only repeat with Jesus: ‘It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea.’ (Arendt 1958: 241)

Arendt betrays doubts about the possibility of punishing criminals such as Eichmann in a remotely adequate manner, not to mention the chances that we will be able to forgive him. But again – should we even try? Who is to decide? And who is to forgive? Would the now-dead victims – the victims Primo Levi stresses are the real victims, as opposed to survivors, like himself, who form the exception to the rule – want us to seek reconciliation with what came to pass, to search for some meaning in the midst of unspeakable atrocities and the long-silenced suffering that goes with them? Would the victims of genocide – any genocide – want us to forgive, or try to understand, their henchmen? Would they want us to

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pass judgment at all on their plight, so as to assess, by intellectual means and by standards of objectivity, the depth of what they suffered? These are questions that shall preoccupy us throughout this chapter; they shall do so in an increasingly concrete and context-sensitive manner. As for Arendt, her conclusion about the negativity (shallowness, absence of depth) of evil – even ‘radical’ evil – makes me suspect that she became so impressed by the example of Eichmann, i.e. by his shallowness, his mediocrity, his apparent ‘normality’, that she translated her understanding of that person into a pronouncement about the phenomenon under scrutiny itself, namely evil. In short, Eichmann became a paradigmatic modern evildoer. Or, even more to the point: Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann, stressing his alleged banality, inaugurated a new paradigm; it became a model for other philosophers’ and intellectuals’ understanding of evil and evildoers. I want to suggest that the difficulty Arendt faced, and never quite knew how to handle, is much more fundamental than is allowed by focusing on her wisdom (or lack of such) in launching the notion of ‘banality of evil’. My suggestion is that her difficulty stems from her very point of departure – namely, her loyalty to depth and complexity as prerequisites of judgment per se. If evil is devoid of both depth and complexity, if there is no essence to it, as distinct from its appearance, then what kind of object is handed over to the exercise of judgment? Put otherwise, if evil as empirical phenomenon is basically lacking in the very qualities that thinking qua faculty of our intellect expects to find and to explore in all its objects, then evil begins to assume the peculiar status of an object that, while ill-suited for the effort of thinking, nonetheless requires that judgment be passed on it – if not for philosophical reasons, then for eminently practical ones, since the evil that has been committed awaits a response, lest the evil done be allowed to stand, unrectified in all its horror. I hinted that there is a case for holding that the victim (or, more accurately, the survivor) is the only one who knows the reality of evil, of what evil amounts to as experience, that is, as suffering. However, despite the obvious sense in which this is true, it is also true that victims have a great need to find ways to deceive themselves about the sheer horror of the suffering that has been visited upon them so as to deny it, forget it, minimize it, sensing that their very survival as human beings depends upon some measure of such self-deception. Or alternatively, victims may be tempted to exaggerate the evil they have suffered to such an extent that these evils entirely escape human comprehension, thus disconnecting them from the ambit of judgment – anyone’s judgment.

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As for the perpetrator, he will most likely develop rationalizations adopted to protect him from co-experiencing the human import of the suffering he inflicts upon his victims; he will see to it that the pain caused remain precisely not his, only the victim’s. This is a crucial point about access to suffering: that the one who does his very best to cause it, in the very act of causing it does everything he can to dissociate himself from it in its dimension as human experience, as a piece of lived human reality. Rarely has this insight into the sought-for absolute division between doer and sufferer of evil been more memorably recorded than in journalist Gitta Sereny’s interviews with Franz Stangl, commandant of the death camps at Sobibor and Treblinka. ‘Considering that you were going to kill them all . . . what was the point of the humiliation, the cruelties?’ Sereny asks Stangl at the single most intense moment of their week-long conversations during the latter’s life imprisonment in the Du¨sseldorf jail. Stangl replies: ‘To condition those who were to be the material executors of the operations. To make it possible for them to do what they were doing’ (Sereny 1974: 203; Cohen 2001: 77ff.). As Primo Levi succinctly comments, ‘Before dying the victim must be degraded, so that the murderer will be less burdened by guilt. This is an explanation not devoid of logic but which shouts to heaven: it is the sole usefulness of useful violence’ (Levi 1988: 101). Why do I stress this by no means novel point? Because I want it to serve as a reminder. It tells us something important about the psychology not only of perpetrators, people with blood on their hands, but of humans in general. It may well be that the most instinctive reaction to seeing somebody suffer great pain is to seek ways to block oneself off from it, so as to protect oneself from fully taking in the reality, or what I earlier spoke of as the human import, of the suffering before one’s eyes. Therefore, I am not sure that Arendt (1965a: 106) is right in postulating the existence of an ‘animal pity by which all normal men are affected in the presence of physical suffering’. Or rather, even granted that there is, originally and in pristine form, such a pity in all normal men, the hard-earned insight is that there is an abundance of methods with which to overcome it, to neutralize it – and that many among us start employing them as soon as we have cognitively registered that suffering is indeed the phenomenon at hand. My claim, then, is that the propensity to block oneself off from the suffering encountered, so as to protect oneself from its human import, is not the prerogative of evildoers. It is human, all-toohuman. This being so, chances are that people who are a non-party to evil will tend to identify more readily with the evildoer than with the sufferer – this being, we recall, a key finding of Alford’s, discussed in Chapter 3.

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Or alternatively, since ‘identify’ is a strong word, people will adopt a stance of (emotional) indifference, of (cognitive-evaluative) neutrality with respect to the case at hand. In any case, what they fear, or even abhor, is getting involved, perhaps sensing (unconsciously more than consciously) that once involved in evil, evil contaminates: once taken in in its human import, in its existential reality, it cannot but leave scars on the subject. To return to the issue of passing judgment, it follows that being a nonparty to evil often provides an obstacle to grasping and judging it, rather than being a precondition for doing so – thereby contradicting the position common (with few exceptions) to the entire tradition of Western philosophy, i.e. that the non-party is the one best equipped to pass judgment. On my view, the third party, lacking direct experiential access to the reality of the evil at hand, must open himself or herself to the victims, to those who bear witness to evil in the capacity of having experienced it. This is the task that is morally required, whatever the psychological counter-forces involved. But – leaving aside the psychological dimension – does not such a view imply that impartiality of judgment is jeopardized? What becomes of objectivity the moment we open ourselves to the victims only, possibly to the detriment of that other, just-as-involved party, namely the evildoer? How can judgment be valid if it is influenced, selectively, by only one involved party? Is not the position advocated here just a recipe for partiality of judgment? Would it not therefore be disastrous, especially if permitted to decide questions of guilt and appropriate punishment – that is to say, if permitted to translate into legal judgment, as exercised in trials? In what follows, I shall pursue these very general questions at a more pragmatic level, exploring how they arouse and were responded to by central actors in the case of Bosnia, and asking if there are some general lessons to be learned from that particular case. To anticipate, my central claim is that the tragic events in Bosnia were accompanied, even in crucial respects precipitated, by a grossly mistaken attitude and reaction on the part of the rest of the world. The events in question were subject to a grotesque failure of judgment. This failure, I suggest, is multifaceted, and it has many causes, some touching on the persons involved in high-level decision-making at the time, others being sociocultural and due to prevalent moral relativism and ‘post-emotionalism’, others still being of a more philosophical nature, revealing – I shall argue – utterly problematic aspects of such much-employed notions as ‘impartiality’ and ‘neutrality’.

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A culture of indifference The phenomenon these considerations force us to address is indifference. The indifference that is the problem here is not so much that of specific, nameable individuals (dealt with later); rather, it is indifference of an extra-individual, cultural kind, arguably on the rise in contemporary Western societies. Though much can be said about indifference as a psychological phenomenon pertaining to individuals (Cohen 2001), in what follows I propose to approach indifference in a largely cultural context. I shall do so by discussing a sociological perspective worked out by Keith Tester. In his outline of a theory of indifference, British sociologist Keith Tester quotes Jacques Maritain, the French philosopher who was heavily involved in the deliberations leading up to the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. Maritain commented that ‘nearly all of the participants in the discussions were able to agree about what human rights ought practically to establish but that, if the participants had been asked the question why human rights should involve this and not that, they would have given wildly discrepant answers’ (Tester 2002: 173). The inability to agree over justifications that Maritain observed is no far cry from the thesis about incommensurability famously advanced by the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, referring to the impossibility of arbitrating between different, and often incompatible, moral claims about issues of public import (MacIntyre 1981, 1988). Specifically, Tester’s contention is that ‘the question ‘‘why?’’ is indeed asked insistently and that, with that continued asking, statements of human rights have been deprived of any universal foundation’. Tester goes on to assert that when the question ‘why?’ is asked too often and too much, universal values of any order collapse and binding claims are replaced with a resigned or cynical ‘why should I care?’. The foundation disappears or is destroyed so that there is no definite grounding for declarations of human rights. As such, it is precisely this lack of a foundation which explains the peculiar phenomenon of indifference in the face of human rights abuses and affronts. (Tester 2002: 175)

Although not explicitly dealt with by MacIntyre, the phenomenon of indifference is clearly linked with his diagnosis of current emotivist culture. To the extent that such a culture is devoid of rational standards of justification perceived to be binding on all members of society, reasons to engage in a morally responsible manner with, say, the plight of victims of human rights abuses in some distant country will be in short supply, at least if such reasons are to represent something more compelling than

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what happens to be in tune with the subjective preferences currently held by some specific individual. Accordingly, there is but a short step from the impossibility of arbitrating between different individuals conflicting moral claims (understood as the more or less clever and overt expression of their ‘given’ preferences qua individuals) that so worries MacIntyre the philosopher, to the social and moral indifference – understood as a lack of care and action in relation to the suffering of specific others – that concerns Tester the sociologist. As I see it, this is so because, to be practically effective, moral engagement with the suffering of others needs to mobilize an organized collective of some kind, not merely single ‘idealistic’ individuals, acting more or less on their own and guided by personal conviction. Mobilization of a social collective in its turn depends on there existing a common ground between the individual participants; and for such to be established, some agreement over what needs doing, and for whom, needs to be established, and this cannot be done without reference to some commonly recognized reasons for action. At this point, Tester puts forward a notion of ‘hermeneutic culture’ that to my mind enriches MacIntyre’s diagnosis of current emotivism. Bearing Maritain’s observation in mind, Tester proposes that the question ‘why?’ is asked because the present is dominated by a hermeneutic culture in which the tendency is not to accept claims at face value but, instead, to interpret them in order to identify their hidden and secret meanings. Everything is interpreted ‘critically’ and treated with suspicion, thus allowing the trap of relativism to open up so that universal – and universalizing – principles like human rights are presumed to be questionable. If MacIntyre demonstrates the connection between emotivism, i.e. the triumph of non-rational subjective preferences in moral deliberation, and the impasse in liberal societies over how to solve moral issues of inescapably public import, Tester establishes the link between a culture obsessed with suspicion and with asking ‘why?’ (so as to get at the speaker’s ‘real’ reasons for advocating this or that moral outlook) and the prevalence of indifference in the face of the needs and suffering of others, especially distant others. In establishing these links, Tester quotes Arendt (1958: 9): ‘Action, the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.’ Arendt pictures the relationships between actors in such a way that the experientially objective world, made up of things and artefacts, constitutes an It which is ontologically distinct from the fundamentally moral relationship

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between the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’. Tester theorizes indifference in the light of this distinction of Arendt’s: If social action is defined as orientation towards others and without any mediation via the It of things, then indifference can be defined as the inversion of that condition. By this token, then, indifference can be defined as a preclusion, ignoring or ignorance of the other on the basis of either the allocation of the other to some category of the It (which typically takes the form of an establishment of some category of the ‘Them’), or the insertion of a mediating It between the social actor and the other. In the former case, indifference takes the form of a turning away from the other on the grounds that whatever insult or injury they are suffering is their fate, destiny or an excusable occurrence. In the latter case, indifference takes the form of a denial on the part of the social actor that he or she need act because institutions or organizations will carry out the necessary action instead. Both of these forms are linked, however, in that they similarly identify the other as an object-like, reified thing (precisely an It) to which things happen as from outside. (Tester 2002: 177)

These are crucial insights. For my purposes in later sections, what particularly merits emphasis is Tester’s implication that there is often but a thin line between the stance of bystanders and that of perpetrators: in denying human plurality (Arendt) and hence in denying uniqueness. Perpetrators targeting a ‘Them’ and bystanders deciding to remain indifferent (inactive) in the face of those victimized commit the same destruction of the moral foundation of the other by means of substituting the unique other with reifying categories of the It, making all others appear predictable and alike. Having effected this shift from uniqueness to categorization, from a distinct ‘he’ or ‘she’ to an indistinct ‘It’, from the other to the same (Levinas), blaming the victims by asserting – sweepingly and indiscriminatingly – that they (precisely ‘They’ – recall Heidegger) only get what they deserve becomes just as beloved among bystanders as we know it to be among direct perpetrators. Part of Tester’s thesis is that the lack of ability or willingness to ask ‘why?’ in what he terms our hermeneutical culture is a truly corrosive force as far as morality is concerned. ‘The quest for foundations destroys its own chances of success. It erodes certainty and confidence rather than creates them. And therefore the question ‘‘why?’’ is itself complicit in the condition of indifference’ (p. 178). To the extent that modernity is the asking of the question ‘why?’, meaning that old authorities are interrogated away without solid replacement, ultimately nothing possesses authority of an intrinsic kind such as would escape the corrosive force of being subjected to its ‘why?’. Even in cases of utmost human misery, says Tester, ‘what becomes important is the project of understanding why and how those humans are presumed to have moral significance. The dull

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fact of suffering becomes less important than an inquiry which is groundless by its own admission’ (p. 181). This is not to say that Tester is not aware that one can plausibly argue that the principles of human rights as we know them today represent a deliberate attempt to put up a barrier against the destruction of all foundations that so worries him. Tester admits that human rights allow for such an interpretation, yet he is quick to observe – rightly, I think – that human rights in actual fact are no exception from the rule he stipulates as emblematic of modernity; human rights, that is, are themselves implicated an cultural climate which continues to undermine all claims to extrasocial foundation. The recurrent message is that in this world of ours everything is up for grabs, nothing is so ‘special’ as to avoid radical questioning; to make any claims to the contrary is only to invite particularly vigorous attempts at demasking it and demystifying its sources of proclaimed unconditional authority. More specifically, the relativism thriving here is one that encourages us to look ‘not at the statements of human rights but at the particularity of the speaker’. Lacking in objectivity, in capacity to issue moral commands of a genuinely unequivocal quality, pointing as it were directly to what needs doing toward whom and by whom, even the most horrifying abuses of the human rights of others tend to be given less weight than the right of the speaker to articulate his or her particular standpoint and the ‘truth’ that goes with it. This, then, is the context in which it comes across as only natural and fair that, say, Radovan Karadzic is given just as much time as are representatives of his victims (say, of shelling in Sarajevo) to present his ‘version’ on primetime television – the tacit premise being that, for the sake of permitting an ‘unbiased’ and ‘critical’ discussion about some specific event, all affected parties have an equal right to express themselves and to be taken seriously. Only in this way, the reasoning goes, can one ensure that judgment is not premature, that it is balanced and based on input from a variety of sources and parties. The relativism diagnosed by Tester dovetails only too well with the quest typical of emotivism as diagnosed by MacIntyre – the quest to uncover the secrets of particularity which are presumed to lurk behind all claims to universality. Today we witness a variety of mini-discourses which approach each other with suspicion and in terms of a ‘struggle to cast doubt before doubt is cast’, nervously regarding each other as rivals for the scarce good of attention. In keeping with MacIntyre’s analysis, the universalist ambitions of Enlightenment-borne modernity have collapsed into a plethora of mini-discourses, each of which validates itself

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internally and by closure against the ‘outside’. Tester assesses the grim consequences: In a situation of mini-discourses there is also a multiplication of the categories of the ‘It’ into which human beings can be placed (for example, my ‘It-ness’ can involve my sexuality, gender, ethnicity, social class, national identity and so forth). In this way, the splinters of indifference are multiplied and magnified. We are all wrapped up, put into little parcels and entirely divorced from others because we only recognize their It-ness; an It-ness which is, itself, identified with a tendency towards the oppression and silencing of others. Just as it is true to say that all social relationships contain an embryo of indifference, it is much more true to say that in the world of mini-discourses the embryo turns into a living monster. The world of mini-discourses is a world of indifference running amok. The suspicion towards the foundation of universal human rights leads directly to a lack of care about the misery of others. (2002: 184)

In my view, MacIntyre and Tester combine to provide a framework that is very helpful when trying to understand the nature of the responses given to current instances of large-scale evil. The sad fact is that it is not too crude a generalization to assert that, in salient cases such as Rwanda and Bosnia (and why not add Chechnya?), the responses given by the so-called ‘international community’ have been but variations on the theme of indifference as theorized by Tester. For the bystanders no less effectively than for the perpetrators, the victims’ ‘standpoint’ and ‘version’ have been all but privileged. Instead they have been made to defer to the authority claimed by – and all too readily admitted – rival voices, voices representing the interests of all the other ‘parties’ somehow involved and seen as deserving to have a say. I find it apt to end this section with an episode rendered by the philosopher Berel Lang. Although the episode picked upon by Lang belongs within the domain of academia, what it goes to show about the connection between such cherished principles as tolerance and plurality, on the one hand, and indifference, on the other, holds true in the less lofty world of politics and diplomacy as well. Teaching a course with the title ‘The Concept of Evil’, Lang had a shattering experience: his group of students (well meaning, decent, intelligent all of them), in discussing the literature given for the course (including Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower), proved ‘simply blind to the appearance of evil when it actually appeared, substituting for what was plainly there before their eyes a set of oblique replacements’ (Lang 1990: 236). The students would devote their intellectual energy to inquiring whether the trial of Eichmann was

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not actually illegal and to dismissing the question asked by Wiesenthal by insisting that the SS soldier in his book had acted as a soldier and that there could be no issue either of forgiving him or of not doing so. To Lang, the students’ responses disclosed a pattern that was, it seemed to me, nothing more than a reluctance to admit the necessity imposed by moral choice altogether – an impulse to replace those demands with the deferrals of tolerance and understanding. Where, as for the actions of (Wiesenthal’s) SS man, there seemed no way of judging him without condemnation, exclusion, then the judgment must itself be flattened, denied. (Lang 1990: 237)

And with regard to Eichmann, where the moral enormity was more difficult to avoid, the question for discussion became whether Eichmann, after all, was so different. Lang reflects as follows: ‘What stirred these reactions could best be understood as an enlargement of the principle of tolerance: from a precept governing relations among people to a precept governing judgment within the individual’ (p. 237). In making this timely and important observation, Lang reminds us that tolerance appeared in John Stuart Mill as a social ideal. But presently, as brought out in the young students discussing evil – or, rather, not discussing it – the ideal of tolerance becomes internalized ‘as if the individual person, in the attempt to be fair and just, had the obligation also to see himself as a society, as if he should renounce his own agency, admitting all possibilities and declining to make judgments or discrimination on the ground established by the principle of tolerance, namely, that all potential actions share equally the right to be summoned’ (p. 237). Lang concludes: ‘The point here is, not that tolerance and pluralism are not authentic values, but that by themselves they cannot do the work of moral judgment or action. What tolerance and pluralism teach is mainly how not to choose, how not to discriminate . . . they offer no basis for the positive choices that – often in the same moment – have to be made’ (p. 238). The institutions of education, historically shaped as they are by the Enlightenment ideals pointed to (and expertly invoked by the students Lang refers to), induce in all of us, teachers and students alike, a respect for the many and a keen eye for the universal – inducing, on the other hand, no determined commitment to the one and so being ‘reluctant, almost disabled, to confront the one and the particular’ (p. 239). Lang’s point is well taken. Add impartiality and neutrality to tolerance and pluralism and what you get is the proud ideals to which nearly everyone among leading Western politicians, diplomats, and military officers paid lip-service on a daily basis while genocide was being carried

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out in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Like Lang’s students, but with incomparably more far-reaching and sinister consequences, these leaders used every opportunity, meaning every documented atrocity, to try to take the sting, the enormity, the unequivocal moral imperative out of what was right before their eyes but somehow went unseen. They wished to replace the sting with some balance about to be lost but always in principle, it was hoped, open to restoration and negotiation, provided only that the ‘parties’ could be kept at the conference table. But the conflict was actually premeditated genocide and, as I shall argue in what follows, you do not negotiate genocide because genocide is evil at its evilest and hence beyond the pragmatic weighing of interests and the restoration of balances lost. Knowledge about imminent or ongoing genocide is not neutral; such knowledge only comes with an intrinsic moral obligation – to do whatever is in one’s power to prevent or stop the genocide. Therefore there is a hopeless mismatch between ongoing genocide on the one hand and the moral indifference of the compromise-seeking attitude on the other. While this criticism of mine is scarcely new, we now need to examine in more detail what went wrong and why. In a first step, we need to establish the more precise nature of the obligations carried by various third parties to collective evil such as genocide. The responsibility of bystanders: when inaction makes for complicity What is common to the issues raised here is that they are so many ways of highlighting and questioning the role and self-understanding of bystanders, more specifically, bystanders by formal appointment, by which I mean professionals who have been engaged as a ‘third party’ to the interaction between the parties directly involved in conflict. These actors, and the bodies and institutions they represent, do not form a homogeneous category. Rather, bystanders by formal appointment will include military officers, politicians and diplomats (in the function of envoys) as well as ‘fact-finding’ academic experts and personnel from humanitarian organizations and NGOs. To speak in general terms, the stance of such bystanders to an ongoing conflict, even one with well-documented genocidal implications for one (or more) of the parties involved, is both traditionally and in principle seen as one of impartiality and neutrality, typically articulated as a determined refusal to ‘take sides’. This stance of principled non-involvement is frequently viewed as highly meritorious; indeed, historically it is fair to say that it has formed the very self-understanding of the most central ‘third party’ in the post-World War II world, namely the United Nations.

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What does it mean to be a bystander? To begin with, let us consider this question not from the expected viewpoint – that of the bystander – but from the two viewpoints provided by the parties directly involved in the conflict. Put simply, and taking Bosnia as the selected case, from the viewpoint of an agent of genocide, bystanders are persons possessing a potential to halt his ongoing actions. The perpetrator will fear the bystander to the extent that he has reason to believe that the bystander will intervene to halt the action already under way, and thereby frustrate the perpetrator’s goal of destroying the targeted group. Of course, we immediately need to differentiate within the heterogeneous category of bystanders introduced above. It is obvious that the more knowledgeable and resourceful the bystander, and the more flexible the mandate with respect to the option of use of force, the more the perpetrator will have reason to fear that the potential for such resistance will translate into action, meaning (ultimately) a more or less direct intervention by military or other means deemed efficient to reach the objective of halting the incipient genocide. But is not halting genocide first and foremost a task, indeed a duty, for the victims themselves? Though naive (even cruel), this question needs to be addressed, since it is often on people’s minds, albeit seldom explicitly expressed by professional bystanders. The answer is simple: the sheer fact that genocide is being carried out shows that the targeted group has not proved itself capable to prevent it. This being so, responsibility for halting what is now unfolding cannot rest with the victims alone; it must be acknowledged to rest with the party not itself affected but knowledgeable about the genocide that is taking place. If for the perpetrators bystanders represent the potential of resistance, for the victims they often represent the only source of hope left. In ethical terms, this is borne out in Levinas’ notion of responsibility, according to which responsibility grows larger, the weaker its addressee. Obviously, agents of genocide may be caught more or less in flagrante delicto. But in the age of television – with CNN being able to interview doers as well as victims on the spot, and broadcast live to the entire television-watching world (such as was the case in the concentration camp Omarska in Bosnia in August 1992) (Gutman 1993; Campbell 2002) – physical co-presence at the event at hand is almost rendered superfluous. One need not be there in order to know what happened or is in the process of happening. In the wide sense here intended, bystanders count every contemporary citizen cognizant, say, of a specific ongoing instance of genocide, regardless of where in the world. The given passivity of such a person need not be, or remain, static; in principle, and in the

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spirit of Hugo Grotius (founding father, in the early seventeenth century, to the idea of intervention on the part of a ‘non-party’ to lessen the suffering of some victimized group), even the most remote bystander – an ordinary citizen – possesses a potential to cease being a mere onlooker to the events unfolding. Outrage at what comes to pass may prompt the judgment that ‘this simply must be stopped; I must see what I can do’ and translate into action promoting that aim. But, to be more precise, what exactly does it mean to act? What is to count as an action? We need to look briefly at the philosophical understanding of the notion of action, as well as the notion of agent responsibility following from it, in order to identify the moral issues involved in being a bystander to genocide. ‘I never forget’, writes Paul Ricoeur, ‘to speak of humans as acting and suffering. The moral problem’, he continues, ‘is grafted onto the recognition of this essential dissymmetry between the one who acts and the one who undergoes, culminating in the violence of the powerful agent’. To be the ‘sufferer’ of a given action in Ricoeur’s sense need not be negative; either ‘the sufferer appears as the beneficiary of esteem or as the victim of disesteem, depending on whether the agent proves to be someone who distributes rewards or punishments’. Since there is to every action an agent and a sufferer (in the sense given), action is interaction; its structure is interpersonal (Ricoeur 1993: 145). But this is not the whole picture. Actions are also omitted, endured, neglected, and the like; and Ricoeur (p. 157) takes these phenomena to remind us that ‘on the level of interaction, just as on that of subjective understanding, not acting is still acting: neglecting, forgetting to do something, is also letting things be done by someone else, sometimes to the point of criminality’. Ricoeur’s systematic aim is to extend the theory of action from acting to suffering beings; he therefore emphasizes that ‘every action has its agents and its patients’ (p. 157). Ricoeur’s proposed extension sounds reasonable. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The vital insight articulated, though not developed, is that not acting is still acting. Brought to bear on the (extreme) case of genocide as a reported, ongoing affair, the inaction making a difference is the chosen inaction of the bystander to unfolding genocide. The failure to act when confronted with such action is a failure that carries a message to both the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed. Knowing, yet still not acting, means granting acceptance to the action – if not wholesale moral acceptance, then pragmatic and factual acceptance in the sense that what is being done is allowed to be done without there being any action taken to help prevent it. Inaction in

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this sense entails ‘letting things be done by someone else’ – clearly, in the case of acknowledged genocide, ‘to the point of criminality’, to allude to Ricoeur’s formulation. In short, inaction here entails complicity. It raises the question of responsibility and guilt on the part of the inactive bystander as depicted here. On my view, the theory of action is satisfactorily extended only when it is recognized that the structure of action is triadic, not dyadic. It takes two to act, we are tempted to say – no more and no less. But is an action really the exclusive possession, a private affair, between the two parties immediately affected as agent and sufferer? For one thing, the total consequences of a particular piece of action are bound to reach far beyond the immediate dyadic setting. As Arendt observed, to act is to make a new beginning in the world, to set in motion – and open-endedly so. Only the start of a specific action allows precise localization in space and time; its repercussions escape the control of the agent and evade being traced in any definite manner to some definite end point. Therefore, to realize one’s potential as a human agent means to expose oneself to the role of sufferer, in so far as action is by definition to engage in something that is as unpredictable as it is irreversible. Notwithstanding the lack of complete control, to be an agent and to be attributed responsibility are but two sides of the same coin. To be sure, not all bystanders are equal. In particular, with regard to the question of complicity raised above, some bystanders carry greater responsibility than others. If we confine discussion to bystanders in the present tense, i.e. to ongoing events, some bystanders will be closer to the event than others. ‘Closer’ does not have to denote spatially closer; rather, it may denote closeness by virtue of professional assignment, or by virtue of one’s knowledge as an intellectual. Indeed, the spatial notion of responsibility and its proper scope is hopelessly out of tune with the moral issues prompted by acts facilitated by context-transcending modern technology, as argued convincingly by Hans Jonas in his advocacy of a notion of responsibility as an ‘ineluctably given absolute’ in human reality that stretches beyond the setting provided by two physically and temporally co-present parties; hence today, ethics in world politics must take the form of a deterritorialization of responsibility (Jonas 1979; Campbell and Shapiro 1999). How does this development affect responsibility? What is implicit in Jonas is explicit in Levinas (1991): it is imperative to cut the bond traditionally theorized and practised as obtaining between responsibility and reciprocity. Ethically speaking, reciprocity does not matter; only responsibility does. Cutting the bond implies setting responsibility

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apart from desert, that is, apart from such questions as: Does the other deserve my support? Do I deserve his?; apart from reward, that is, apart from calculation of gain, thus rejecting the idea of responsibility for others as a scarce good, something with regard to which one must be prepared to economize, to calculate with gains and losses; apart from balancing, that is, regarding the recipient as a possible ‘giver’, whereby the support given by each party is seen as aiming for long-term symmetry and equilibrium, lest support be withheld for lack of future payback; and apart from the idea that responsibility is an option, something the agent chooses from instance to instance whether or not to assume, seeing it as the supreme proof of the agent’s freedom (autonomy) that responsibility is undetermined by anything outside of him or her. In advocating that the bond between responsibility and reciprocity be cut, the notion of responsibility I defend is both simple and absolute. On my Levinas-inspired view (though departing from his terminology), in responsibility the factual and the normative aspects are equiprimordial – the normative grows out of the factual. That responsibility is factual – as opposed to being conceived as ideal or optional, a product of consciousness and volition – is due to the fact (seemingly trivial, yet absolutely fundamental in ethical terms) that the consequences of our acts are real. They are real because they rebound through the network of others. Alford (1992: 138) has a matter-of-fact way of putting it: ‘The reality of this network gives responsibility its weight and hence gives meaning to our lives, including the real, if limited, sense of agency that stems from taking responsibility.’ On this elementary level, as human agents we simply are responsible, because what we do has objective consequences in the world, consequences for real others. Stressing the latter aspect, responsibility loses some of the extreme solitariness that is built into Levinas’ notion of what it means to be addressed in a non-optional, no-exit manner as a responsible subject. By focusing on the sheer fact of consequences of acting in the world and on the realness of others who are affected, responsibility emerges as what ties us to others. There is a reality of community with others that follows from responsibility, and this sense of reality may help us to assuage the anxiety we otherwise might have over feeling alone and helpless, unconnected and apart from others. By stressing both consequences and those affected by them as utterly real, gravity is given to our acts, showing them to matter in the world and so ‘linking the acceptance of responsibility to a sense of self as a creative, responsible agent’ (Alford 1992: 139). On this view, this factual quality of responsibility as given is prior to the normative dimension of responsibility with which moral philosophers

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typically wrestle, putting their effort into examining the exact constitution of the ought as distinct from the is (to allude to Hume) and the specific meaning and scope of what agents ‘ought’ to do (and ought not to do). Responsibility in my sense is about taking our actions seriously by connecting them to a world of others, and so making our acts count; it is about acting as though what we do makes a difference, as it surely does. In doing so, no substantive position is – or need be – adopted with respect to the issue of freedom, the issue which so crucially determines the different philosophical conceptions of responsibility. The factual links I stress here – between responsibility and agency, between acting and consequences in the world – can be established at the intended elementary level without a requirement to establish the more exact nature of, and scope of, the ‘freedom’ of human agents in a metaphysical sense. That said, I think that Levinas, somewhat too eager to provoke what he takes to be the canon of Western ethics, goes too far in positing freedom and responsibility as at odds with each other, insisting as he does that we have to constrain our freedom in the name of responsibility (which I consider right), implying not so much that the subject is not free, but rather that he should not be (which I consider wrong). Suffice it to say that on my view, responsibility implies ‘distant nearness’, to use a formulation of Alford’s (albeit coined by Adorno (1974: 89)), by which is meant ‘the distance that allows us to grasp the effects of our acts on others; and the nearness that allows us to see these consequences as virtual extensions or expressions of ourselves’ (Alford 1992: 141). To sum up, to take responsibility, as well as to demand it from others, is a self-constituting act: a way of asserting – to ourselves and to others – the earnest reality of ourselves, and others, by taking our acts seriously, by being genuinely concerned with their impact on the lives of others. To deny responsibility for one’s actions is to deny these dimensions of reality; hence, it is not only to deny something about oneself as agent but something about the world as well. To clarify what is at stake in the discussion of responsibility of bystanders, a couple of distinctions made by Larry May are helpful. A famous quote from Edmund Burke sets the stage for May’s discussion: ‘All that is necessary for evil to triumph in the world is for good people to do nothing.’ May goes on to observe that ‘just as a person’s inaction makes him or her at least partially responsible for harms that he or she could have prevented, so collective inaction of a group of persons may make the members of that group at least partially responsible for harms that the group could have prevented’ (1992: 105). May defines ‘collective omission’ as the failure of a group that collectively chooses not to act; by contrast, ‘collective inaction’ refers to the failure to act of ‘a collection of

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people that did not choose as a group to remain inactive but that could have acted as a group’ (1992: 107). The latter case of collective inaction is particularly salient with respect to ‘putative groups’, in which ‘people are sometimes capable of acting in concert but in which no formal organization exists and, as a result, there is no decision-making apparatus’ (1992: 109). The basic premise informing May’s discussion is that ‘once one is aware of the things that one could do, and one does not do them, then lack of action is something one has chosen’ (1992: 119). For my purposes in what follows, the central question is whether the harm (read genocide) that took place in Bosnia could have been prevented, or at least halted, by contemporary bystanders. Employing the distinction made above between passive bystanders and bystanders by assignment, I shall explore the extent to which both categories can be held responsible for failing to prevent an ongoing case of genocide. Having established a conceptual understanding of responsibility which covers both individual agents and groups, we are ready to turn to the selected case of Bosnia.

Bosnia: the follies of impartiality enacted as neutrality In his book Genocide in Bosnia, Norman Cigar, an American professor of national security studies, writes: The flawed basic premise for political action by the international mediators was that this was at bottom a civil war. The war supposedly reflected long-ingrained hatreds, and all parties shared in the guilt and all had the same basic goals. Therefore, all sides had an equal right to have their interests assured . . . To a certain extent, the assessment that this was a civil war was often used in the West as a rationale for not acting militarily on behalf of the Muslims, since intervention could have been construed as ‘taking sides’ . . . This insistence on ‘neutrality’ implicitly equated the goals and methods of the Muslims and the Serbs and was to be reiterated time and again . . . The [originally Serb-requested, September 1991 UN-sanctioned arms] embargo [imposed on all ‘warring parties’ and freezing a military imbalance whereby the Serb forces outgunned their victims by a ratio of 10 to 1], although initially intended to reduce the level of violence, implicitly placed the victim and perpetrator on an equal moral plane and unquestionably favoured the well armed Serbian aggressor. In moral and practical terms, to have treated the parties equally made little sense. (Cigar 1996: 152, 159, 166f.)

Cigar points to crucial features of what has become known as the attitude of ‘moral equalizing’. Against the background of Cigar’s sober assessment, I want to put forward a stronger criticism: that the bystanders by assignment (including top politicians in the world’s leading

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nations) tended to adopt an attitude of ‘identification with the (main) aggressor’, thus adding moral support to the aggressor’s ‘blaming of the victim’. If this was the case, then it seems that the bystanders in question did not, after all, and despite recurrent assurances to the contrary, conduct their judgment from a position of impartiality. The upshot would be that what merits criticism in this particular case is not adopting a stance of impartiality but adopting one of partiality (i.e. in actual fact siding with one specific party, namely the main aggressor). Therefore, granted that Bosnia does represent a failure of judgment, that failure need not have anything to do with the criterion of impartiality per se; indeed the latter now prevails as cleared of suspicion. This argument is not as strong as it initially may appear, however. There is, I suggest, an equally strong case for holding that the Western world (admittedly a hopeless generalization, but let it pass at this stage for the sake of argument) did endeavour throughout the so-called ‘conflict’ within former Yugoslavia to maintain a position of strict impartiality, impartiality interpreted (it must be noted) and enacted as neutrality. The assumption at work is that principled impartiality, in order to be upheld strictly and rigorously, requires neutrality in the sense of abstaining from voicing a stand as to ‘who is right and who is wrong’ among the parties involved in conflict. For (the reasoning went) how could one hope to negotiate, and thereupon to reach an agreement to stop the fighting and restore the peace, if one did not approach the parties from a position of unequivocal neutrality? Who can hope to enlist the trust, confidence, and loyalty of all parties involved but the party who is not involved and who safeguards the precious value of such non-involvement, signalling as it does to all parties alike that one is not committed ‘against’ (or ‘for’) any one of them? I hold the assumption that principled impartiality requires neutrality to be false. My argument is both theoretical and empirical, since I hold the falsity in question to have been historically documented. For all the unanimous acceptance of the reasoning referred to (at the time, at least), the fact is that something went horribly wrong in Bosnia, and it did so while the most powerful Western nations failed to intervene and for years did nothing more active than continue talking with the ‘warring parties’. True, it may be said that Western political leaders such as Clinton, Major, and Mitterrand, as well as top diplomats Akashi, Owen, and Stoltenberg, in fact pursued a policy of partiality. If anything, then, their stance contradicted the ideal of impartiality instead of exemplifying it. I admit that there is a case for holding that all the talk about the need to maintain impartiality (again, interpreted and enacted as neutrality)

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functioned increasingly as mere lip-service: it became a smokescreen to hide a partiality that de facto favoured the Serbs and left the victims to their fate. Indeed, especially in the case of Clinton (who before being elected had promised he would support military intervention to stop ‘unacceptable’ atrocities), it is beyond doubt that a chief policy objective was to avoid another Vietnam and to ensure, no matter how severe the sufferings of the civilians of Bosnia, that no American soldiers would be sent to Bosnia with the risk of their returning in coffins. In this context, a single episode is extremely significant – or, more to the point, it was made out to be so. In October 1993, a total of eighteen American servicemen lost their lives and eighty-four more were wounded in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital. It was by far the worst US military humiliation since Vietnam and the USA immediately announced, to the jubilation of the Somali warlords, that US troops were pulling out of Somalia and urged all Western nations to do the same (Melvern 2004: 70; Power 2002: 317, 366). With far-reaching consequences, affecting Rwanda’s genocide in the spring of 1994 no less (or even more) than Bosnia’s genocide from 1992 to 1995, the failure of the intervention in Somalia came to set a precedent: the political lesson was ‘Never again!’, and opponents of US-involved military intervention in cases of gross human rights abuses greatly strengthened their hand. Though not my main concern here, Clinton’s invocation of the Vietnam syndrome, and the widespread approval with which it evidently met, is interesting in its own right. It reveals a crucial feature of the cultural climate of the 1990s: the tendency to focus sentiment on the past rather than the present; or, more precisely, to react to a present situation on the basis of past emotionally charged events that obfuscate the present. The emotions evoked by Clinton’s references to United States’ ill-conceived and ill-fated involvement in Vietnam (and to a lesser extent in Somalia) are emotions that involve history in a way that prevents rational and head-on concentration on how to address the situation at hand. Though of course of a much less sinister kind, Clinton’s reference has a feature in common with the rhetorical strategy employed by Milosevic (analysed in Chapter 4): it amounts to a manipulation of emotionally charged collective representations of ‘reality’, of a shared past, premised on the questionable assumption that what happened then has created a specific and widely shared emotional reaction, and that ‘we’ are now well advised to judge about current events on the basis of those emotions. The sociologist Stjepan Mestrovic (1996) calls this phenomenon postemotionalism, and I mention it here as a pertinent observation about the

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wider cultural climate in which Western governments chose to respond by way of not responding (intervening) in the face of ongoing genocide. Indeed, Mestrovic goes further, arguing that the overall indecisiveness led to a passionless indifference toward human suffering that must be characterized as ‘sadistic’: it is the ‘vicarious sadism’ of the postmodern voyeur, coolly and rationally observing the suffering of others, content to know that humanitarian aid is sent to feed victims of Serbian aggression but doing nothing to protect them from being killed before or after being fed. In tolerating a well-known, unfolding crime, Mestrovic (1994: 116, 93) argues, citing Durkheim, it ceases to be a crime, and the collective consciousness is weakened. We need not follow Mestrovic in going that far. The point is made: ‘The destruction of Bosnia was perhaps the most observed, covered, and written about event in the history of the twentieth century, but this coverage did not lead in any direct way to intervention to stop the events that were occurring’ (Cushman 2001: 94f.). The sort of outcry and compassion that many ordinary citizens all over the world felt when watching TV news from, say, the shelling massacres in Sarajevo (alleged by the Serbs to have been perpetrated by the Bosnians themselves so as to achieve sympathy), are spontaneous moral feelings that need to be translated into action, or else they wither. As Susan Sontag (2003: 90f.) points out, ‘The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing ‘‘we’’ can do – but who is that ‘‘we’’? – and nothing ‘‘they’’ can do either – and who are ‘‘they’’? – then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic.’ As long as leaders claim, and repeat time after time, that this ‘war’ is an ‘intractable’ situation, ordinary people will be encouraged to switch off the terrible images, to turn to other problems, ones closer to home and easier to solve. Having said this, the original question has in no way lost its force. How to explain this gap between knowledge and action – knowing about evil and yet refraining from taking action within one’s power to help stop it? The above section on the culture of indifference was meant to produce a framework apt to illuminate this question. To put it briefly, the indisputable knowledge about large-scale evil that existed was constantly suffering the fate common to virtually all issues, or events, in our ‘hermeneutic culture’ (Tester). The documented evil proved unable to trigger a response in kind in terms of moral outrage and intervention by force; failing that, the evil was instead subjected to enormous amounts of intellectual fascination and critical questioning, differentiated as it were into so many mini-discourses (each with its own standards of validity) that, as time went by and the suffering accumulated, it proved

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increasingly impossible to rally support for one specific kind of response, be it moral, political, or military. Those who did come out with strongly worded condemnation of what took place were frequently met with the same attitude of suspicion as those not condemning it: they were regarded as articulating feelings or preferences of a non-rational, subjective kind; or, alternatively, as articulating the non-universalizable standpoint of some particular ‘interest group’, e.g. that of victims. Either way, the elevation of preference to ethical importance MacIntyre sees as characteristic of emotivism is clearly borne out, as is Tester’s grim assertion that ‘a world of mini-discourses is a world of indifference running amok’. An important question to ask is this: What makes the ideal of impartiality so vulnerable to manipulation by agents pursuing an agenda guided by self-interest? Why is it that agents committed to partiality (backstage) so often seem to get away with paying lip-service to a commitment to impartiality? To be sure, posing the questions in this manner amounts to buying into the very culture of suspicion-cum-indifference that Tester warns against. Yet we cannot dismiss such questions if we are to understand what happened. The one viewpoint that is strikingly absent in the approach that we know was adopted by top politicians and diplomats during the Bosnian carnage is the viewpoint of the victims. This absence is immensely rich in consequences, given my earlier claim that the victim’s viewpoint is of supreme importance in providing third parties with an access to what is happening and to the severity of the atrocities being committed. But there is something we need to consider. Perhaps the victim’s point of view is absent for valid reasons. Perhaps my earlier claim should be corrected. And indeed, I acknowledge at least three reasons for regarding the voice of the victim as a problematic source of judgment. First, this voice may prove unreliable. For a variety of reasons, victims may distort what actually happened. Second, victims may adopt adaptive preferences. They may – for lack of knowledge, or due to the impact of tradition, religion, or ideology – adjust to their situation. They may even fail to, or stop to, perceive their situation as unjust, as one of preventable and condemnable suffering. Third, victims may react in quite the opposite direction and get obsessed with revenge, making the injustice they (doubtless) suffered into the main event in their lives and the desire to right the wrongs their basic reason for continuing to live. I grant these (most general) points about the possible unreliability of the voice of the victims and that theirs may often be a grossly imbalanced and distorted viewpoint. But my claim is not that becoming a victim endows one with a foolproof reference point for the subsequent judgment

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of non-involved parties. Nor do I recommend that people – including professional third parties – uncritically endorse or adopt the version of events voiced by those directly victimized. If judgment is to be passed, it needs (in this case no less than in others) to be based on engaging with the matter at hand in an open-minded spirit. My claim is that it is required of the non-party to be as attentive as is practically possible to the sufferings visited upon the victims while the actions causing the suffering actually take place, so as to help stop them. Such attentiveness, I suggest, constitutes the mean between the two opposite extremes – namely, blocking oneself off altogether from engaging with the viewpoint of victims, and adopting it tooth and nail. Attentiveness to the situation of victims is an accomplishment of moral perception, making possible the subsequent performance of sound judgment. Such attentiveness is facilitated by an interplay of our faculty of imagination (Arendt’s notion of ‘going visiting to other viewpoints’) and our faculty of empathy (Vetlesen 1994: ch. 4). On my view, the insistence that the character of the deed, not the (national, ethnic, sexual, etc.) identity of the person (the victim, the perpetrator), is what counts for justice, is the true core of impartiality, one worth safeguarding in theory and in practice. But even though impartiality is the (abstract) core of justice, the route to recognition of the character of the deed to be judged cannot be one of neutrality (taken as sticking to a come-what-may stance of abstaining from deciding what, or who, is right and what is wrong) but must instead be informed by empathy with those being persecuted – empathy in my sense of a capacity to be affected by the affectedness of others. In short, what is required is a conscious reluctance to subscribe to the effacement of the human import of the suffering intended by the perpetrators. Part of the tragedy in the case of Bosnia is that major third parties pretended that impartiality required neutrality in the judgment-undermining sense discussed. For several years neutrality meant professional bystanders’ standing by to the unfolding mass murder, portraying non-intervention as morally sound, as a prerequisite for maintaining impartiality. In that sense, impartiality was trump. The concrete consequence of its supremacy was that inaction prevailed over action. Specifically, leading politicians and diplomats in charge of the response to genocide in Bosnia failed to do what Levinas advocated when he urged that we ‘think through the difference between responsibility for something, for a state of affairs or a free choice, and responsibility for someone. It is by the latter that the former is conditioned’ (Levinas, paraphrased in Llewelyn 1995: 212). The preoccupation with

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continuing, at all costs, with the so-called peace talks, prevailed over the concern for the people being murdered while the talks did indeed continue. The documentation that proves that this is in fact what happened is overwhelming. Suffice it at this stage of the argument to give two examples, both entirely representative and so not to be seen as anecdotal. On 18 May 1993, US Secretary of State Warren Christopher delivered what one commentator labels ‘unfathomable remarks’ to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, stunning his listeners by insinuating that the Bosnian Muslims themselves had committed genocide: ‘You’ll find indication of atrocities by all three of the major parties against each other. The level of hatred is just incredible. So, you know, it’s somewhat different than the Holocaust. It’s never been easy to analogize this to the Holocaust, but I never heard of any genocide by the Jews against the German people’ (Christopher, quoted in Power 2002: 308). However, and very inconveniently, the CIA, by no means a partisan of US intervention in Bosnia, had concluded in a comprehensive report that ‘90 percent’ of the atrocities committed in the former Yugoslavia were committed by Serb forces, Bosnian Muslims being their principal target. How does Christopher react? What is the policy he recommends, given this information? The answer, incredible as it may sound, is that Christopher sent ‘an urgent appeal to the State Department’s Human Rights Bureau, requesting evidence of Bosnian Muslim atrocities’ (p. 308; my italics). He apparently did not get what he asked for; that is to say, evidence of a kind that would invalidate the documented fact that the Serbs were indeed the main aggressor – the fact that refutes Christopher’s cherished argument that continued moral equalization between the ‘three warring parties’ was justified and, indeed, the only viable policy. Enter the second example. Characteristically voicing an identification with the aggressor complementary to the aggressor’s well-rehearsed blaming of the victim, the EU’s top envoy David Owen, losing his temper over the Bosniaks’ stubborn insistence that the multiethnic nature of their sovereign state be retained, told the press: ‘This autumn [1993], the Serbs fought with velvet gloves [!] in order to give the Muslims one more chance. Now they have had enough, as have the Croats. If the negotiations fail now, they [the Serbs] will go all out’ (Owen, quoted in Cigar 1996: 154). As historian Brendan Simms (2001: 137, 140) observes, Owen was ‘a leading critic of the Bosnian government’s failure to ‘‘compromise’’’. In this respect, Owen was steadfastly loyal to the advice he received from his predecessor Lord Carrington, summed up in the statement that ‘they were all as bad as each other’. No one has given a more precise, and a more cynical, summary of the hostile attitude to the option

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of military intervention to stop genocide, and of the concomitant indifference toward those persecuted in that genocide, than Owen himself. A trained surgeon, Owen (in a lecture in Dublin on 8 November 1993) invoked his original profession to suggest the following analogy: As physicians and surgeons we have long been aware of the dangers of simply responding to the cry ‘do something’. All too often we know that an illness has to work its way through the system . . . the skill is to appear calm without being complacent, to act unhurriedly but to be decisive even if the decision is to do nothing. Sometimes to look as if one is doing more than one is in fact doing. Governments similarly face demands for action, and therefore politicians need some of the same skills of masterly inactivity as doctors. (Owen, quoted in Simms 2001: 169)

The point is not to single out Christopher and Owen for criticism. The point is that their attitude is characteristic of the top politicians and diplomatic envoys they represent. What is the nature of this attitude? And how could it become so influential? The sociologist Keith Doubt invokes Erving Goffman’s work on facework to help us understand what is going on here. Doubt shows the various methods that Western leaders employed to ‘save face’; that is, to talk and act in a manner that sustains the ‘front stage’ impression that they are in control of events. To pick a particularly telling example, as the UN-declared ‘safe areas’ of Srebrenica and Zepa were falling to the nationalist Serb army in the summer of 1995, the Contact Group (France, Germany, Great Britain, the United States, and Russia) held an emergency meeting in London. They concluded the meeting by repeating a promise that had earlier been made to the people living in Srebrenica and Zepa. This time, however, as Doubt points out, they promised to protect the people living in Gorazde, a third enclave to the south of Srebrenica and Zepa, which was still under the control of the Bosnian government. So the message sent to the nationalist Serb aggressors commanded by General Mladic was that if, after completing their work of killing in the overrun ‘safe areas’ of Srebrenica and Zepa, they proceeded to take Gorazde as well, they should know that there was now a promise by Western leaders to protect Gorazde – just as there existed a UN resolution to protect the two enclaves already taken. Doubt writes: Western leaders keep their promise by repeating the same promise to another town. By transferring to Gorazde the promise they made to Srebrenica and Zepa, they maintain face. They are committed to the promise but not the ones to whom the promise is made. Hyperreality, the hypothetical situation that Gorazde would be overrun, displaces reality, which is that Srebrenica and Zepa have been overrun. In

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the discourse of Western leaders, what is happening in Srebrenica and Zepa becomes unreal and so unnecessary to deal with. (Doubt 2000: 12; my italics)

It reminds me of a parent who instructs his child not to steal apples. When the child disobeys and steals apples – first one, then another – the parent, instead of addressing the disobedience, shifts attention from what took place to what might take place in the future by declaring that the child is not allowed to steal a third apple. But why should the child now obey? It has proven exceedingly difficult to get a hearing for this kind of critique among the political, diplomatic, and military leaders who were in charge at the time. To understand why, recall Max Weber’s crucial distinction between formal rationality and substantive justice. As Doubt (2000: 70) explains, ‘the goal of formal rationality is efficiency; its purpose is stability and self-perpetuation. The goal of substantive justice is moral knowledge; its purpose is to realize what is right in the here and now. Substantive justice transcends the hegemony of formal rationality; formal rationality suppresses the requirements of substantive justice.’ Recall from Chapter 1 that Bauman laid great stress on Weber’s description of bureaucracy in offering a sociological answer to how the Holocaust could happen. The present point is that formal rationality is embodied – par excellence – in modern bureaucracy. My claim – supported by Doubt – is that UN officials and military officers exhibited this mindset in Bosnia, and that their doing so goes some way toward explaining how the catastrophe could be allowed to happen. To appreciate the thrust of this contention, recall Weber’s classical formulation: Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations. Individual performances are allocated to functionaries who have specialized training and who by constant practice learn more and more. The ‘objective’ discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rules and without regard for persons . . . When fully developed, bureaucracy also stands, in a specific sense, under the principle of sine ira ac studio. Its specific nature, which is welcomed by capitalism, develops the more perfectly the more bureaucracy is ‘dehumanized’, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is the specific nature of bureaucracy and it is appraised as its special virtue. (Weber, quoted in Doubt 2000: 78, 77)

A prominent example of how UN officials embodied the bureaucratic habitus as defined by Weber, is Yasushi Akashi, senior UN envoy to the

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former Yugoslavia 1993–5. A prominent example among military officers is Michael Rose, British lieutenant general and UN commander in Bosnia 1994–5, i.e. at the time of the fall of the ‘safe areas’ mentioned above. I shall restrict myself to Rose. In an ABC special programme entitled The Peacekeepers: How the UN Failed in Bosnia, Rose is interviewed by the journalist Peter Jennings. This exchange offers a rare glimpse into the mindset of Rose: his stance is that of the Weberian bureaucrat. Analysing this exchange, Doubt points out that ‘As a news journalist, Jennings becomes a spokesperson for the ethos of substantive justice. As a professional soldier and a UN servant, Rose is an exemplar of formal rationality. For this reason, Jennings is a threat to Rose; Jennings wants to refute the moral adequacy of UN actions in Bosnia. Rose is committed to the hegemony of formal rationality, as the only legitimate standard with which to measure UN conduct’ (Doubt 2000: 76f.). It is tempting to quote extensively from this extremely illuminating exchange. However, I must confine myself to the following excerpt: Jennings asks, ‘Is not part of your mandate to deter attacks on United Nations’ designated safe areas?’ Rose answers, ‘That is absolutely sound. And that is exactly what we did at the time of Gorazde. We deterred the attacks that were taking place at that time.’ First, Rose accepts the validity of Jennings’s question, but then he hides behind it. The phrase ‘at the time of Gorazde’ is not specific, but it suggests a frame, a time and space, in which an action can be identified and quantified. Rose focuses on questions of ‘when’ and ‘where’ to evade questions of ‘what’. By focusing on the quantifiable questions, Rose evades the qualitative questions of what was done and whether what was done had substance. When Jennings focuses on the moral quality of particular actions by the UN in Bosnia, Rose neutralizes this focus by reframing the issue into the concrete albeit more abstract issue of quantity. (Doubt 2000: 78)

Doubt’s comment is that Rose’s way of replying demonstrates why Weber fears ‘perfect’ bureaucrats and finds them dehumanizing – bureaucracy, that is, in its insistence that decisions pertain to calculable quantity only, never to quality and the particular substance (let alone specifically moral import) at hand, effects a double dehumanization, that of the bureaucrat himself as well as that of the human addressees at the receiving end of the decisions he makes. Doubt reinforces Weber’s grim finding when he observes that the idealized role of ‘calculable rules’ in social action promotes the dangerous illusion that there is no choice. For Rose there is no choice between quality and quantity. There is, notes Doubt (2000: 78), ‘only a choice between different quantities. For Rose,

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quantity, however minuscule, is the exclusive representation of quality.’ In constantly restricting his discussion with journalist Jennings, an exemplar of substantive justice, to the issue of calculability, Rose encapsulates the conduct of the UN in general, and his own contribution to the disastrous fate of the ‘safe areas’ in particular, from serious criticism. In this, Rose stands representative of the bureaucratic ethos of the international bodies (political, diplomatic, military) whose decision-making in Bosnia contributed to the completion, not prevention, of ‘ethnic cleansing’. Having argued that impartiality, as enacted by the UN in Bosnia, boils down to ‘the most rational way for the UN to win the goodwill of the aggressor’, Doubt (2000: 80) asks the critical question: ‘How far can the process of formal rationality depart from the principle of justice without becoming irrational? At some point, the antinomy between formal rationality and substantive justice needs to be resolved. Substantive justice with no relation to reason is mob psychology based only on emotion and intuition. Formal rationality with no relation to substantive justice is an accomplice of evil.’ For my purposes in what follows, we need to keep in mind the strong connection between Weber’s classical notions of bureaucracy and formal rationality on the one hand, and what went under the label of ‘impartiality’ in the context of events in Bosnia on the other. If Doubt’s analysis is sound (and I think it is), bureaucracy a` la Weber may be said to have played a more directly immoral role in Bosnia than in the Holocaust, since – as discussed in Chapter 1 – the German Nazis revolutionized (ideologically radicalized) the bureaucratic institutions, perceiving their sought-for detachedness, objectivity, and neutrality to be in conflict with the ‘absolutely unconditional’ political objectives – including genocide – advanced by the Nazi ideology (Herbert 2001; Wildt 2003). By contrast (and I admit the comparison is strained, yet vital), professional bystanders to Bosnia de facto allowed genocide to occur partly because of an unconditional adherence to the listed virtues of the bureaucratic ethos. For fear of engaging with substantive rationality – perceived as tantamount to the vice of ‘taking sides’ – these high-ranking officials and officers remained committed to a formal rationality that turned out to be morally blind. (I return to this below.) An upshot of the described fixation on impartiality and (moral) neutrality is that the diplomatic pressure is laid one-sidedly on the ‘party’ who was first attacked. Those who were subject to genocide and who resisted that genocide become witnesses to the rewarding of territorial gains to the aggressor. That this is in fact the case is confirmed in the

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peace agreement reached at Dayton in November 1995. In accepting ethnicity as a prime organizing principle in the partition of what used to be an internationally recognized multiethnic nation-state, the Dayton accord (like the series of peace plans before it) in actual fact endorsed the imposition of a simple one-to-one relationship between land (territory) and ethnic group – this being, of course, exactly the political goal of ‘ethnic cleansing’. The message to the world entailed in the acceptance of this principle is that people of different ethnic origin cannot live peacefully together within the same territory. In a world where the majority of the states are not ethnically homogeneous nation-states, one can only imagine the bloodshed that would follow if the principle were to set a precedent for negotiating future conflicts. To be accurate, what I see at work in the diplomatic approach to Bosnia is more a question of indifference toward the victims than of active sympathy for the policies of the main aggressor. True, above I did say that the stance taken for years on end by top Western diplomats and politicians amounted to ‘identification with the aggressor’ and its corollary, ‘blaming the victim’. In my opinion, this holds true as far as the factual consequences of their stance are concerned. This being so, my argument entails no claims about deliberate ‘pro-Serbism’ on the part of these officials (allowing for some exceptions). In this case, indifference among the most influential bystanders suffices to help seal the tragic fate of those directly victimized – if only, ultimately, for the simple reason that deciding to decline from effectively helping the victims was tantamount to permitting the aggressors reach their objectives. Specifically, the rhetorical assertion that what unfolded in the Balkans was at bottom all about deeply entrenched ‘ancient hatreds’ between the ‘parties’ was accepted and repeated by key players of the international community not because they fully believed it to be the truth about what took place, but because paying lip-service to this interpretation of the ‘conflict’ fitted in well with the desire not to intervene. So, rather than ancient hatreds actually being what set in motion the tragedy in the Balkans and, similarly, rather than actually holding this to be the case, Western diplomats bought into this specific line (originating as it did in Belgrade and Pale) because it was a discursive strategy that quite perfectly abetted nonintervention. Non-intervention was the decided-upon goal, the premeditated conclusion for which the narrative about ancient hatreds functioned as a hand-in-glove premise (see Fitz 2002). As I see it, a double contradiction was at work in the approach taken by top envoys David Owen and Thorvald Stoltenberg in particular. Welldocumented illegal atrocities of genocidal nature were for years

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permitted, in the sense of not being halted with available political and (not least) military means, while the right to self-defence in the case of genocide, legally upheld and internationally recognized postNuremberg, was denied to Bosnia-Herzegovina (for a start, consider the 1992 UN enforced arms embargo, freezing a staggering asymmetry of military power among the ‘parties’); that is, denied a state recognized as sovereign, with all rights thereby attached, by EU and UN alike in May 1992. In short, the top authorities and envoys of the so-called international community accepted the illegal act par excellence (genocide) and denied the legal act of self-defence in the face of ongoing genocide. This makes for more than a double contradiction; it is plain immoral. Whatever impartiality has – or has not – to do with it, a more troubling precedent could scarcely have been set. Three lessons of moral failure Considering the material I have presented from Bosnia, is there one lesson in particular that needs to be learned here? I believe there are three. The first is that the bystander is the one who – in practice – decides whether the harm wrought by the aggressor is permitted to stand unrectified or not. The bystander who reacts with non-response, with passivity in the face of killing, helps legitimize that very killing. When nothing is done in the face of what is unfolding, and when what unfolds is, beyond doubt, killing of a systematic nature, the message to the agent as well as to the victim is that such killing may continue. Accordingly, victims of genocide in such a case are victims of indifference in a twofold sense: they suffer directly the indifference (facilitated in particular by absence of empathy) of their tormentors; they suffer indirectly the indifference of bystanders. If the former indifference produces suffering in its eminently physical form, the latter helps prolong, or even at times intensify, such suffering. Knowing, yet deciding not to act when action would have been possible and most likely would have made a difference on the ground, entails complicity (Unger 1996), though we need to inquire further to settle the question of strict legal – meaning punishable – complicity. I return to this below. The second lesson is that there is every reason not to downplay but instead take extremely seriously any statement – be it oral or written, broadcast in the mass media, or published in journals and books – about specific groups if such statements may promote actions geared to rob such groups of their full humanity and right to live under decent conditions. Discourses of misrecognition are likely to constitute an ideological

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preparation for the carrying out of a politics of enforced removal, humiliation, and perhaps eventually downright annihilation, of the abused individuals. Deeds follow upon words. Generally speaking, due among other things to their comprehensive reading, travelling, and contacts across all sorts of borders, intellectuals in different countries have a duty to sound the alarm bell upon learning about the spreading of hate speech. This is especially true in cases where the hate speech is authorized by the authorities, and even more so if the authorities are undemocratic or downright totalitarian, suppressing all internal protests. Although we still await the first convictions of journalists on the charge of incitement to genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda represents a historic precedent. In 1995, Ferdinand Nahimana, a well-known historian who served as the director of the most popular Rwandan radio station, Radio Mille Collines, was arrested and delivered to the Arusha tribunal, where he had to answer to the charge of ‘incitement to genocide’. It is established that this radio station, in the three months in the spring of 1994 when up to 1 million Rwandans were slaughtered, had one single aim: to incite the Hutu masses to go out and exterminate their Tutsi neighbours. The broadcasts explicitly encouraged the population – Hutus of all ages and from all walks of life – to kill: ‘Keep it up, mobilize, work, defend your country. Make a contribution . . . to kill the inkotanyi (Tutsis) wherever they are and exterminate all their accomplices’ (Gutman and Rieff 1999: 192; Melvern 2004: 208). The third lesson is that the failure to act when knowledgeable about ongoing genocide corrupts the bystander – the more so, the greater his or her potential for acting. Specifically, this holds for individual bystanders of assignment who decide to remain inactive and allow what is happening to continue unabated (Mestrovic 1997). Ever since Hugo Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pacis from 1625 (the treatise inspiring the principles behind humanitarian intervention to this day), a central criterion to justify the use of force is that the crime must be excessively cruel so as to shock the society of mankind. Every one of us is an embodiment of the society thus able to be morally outraged at what befalls other human beings – even those unknown and far off. The idea is that we inflict evil upon ourselves when we wilfully remain passive bystanders. Journalist Mark Hubard writes that, since the UN knew that genocide was being planned, and once the genocide began nothing was done, this makes what took place in Rwanda in 1994 ‘more than a crime. It was an event that shamed humanity.’ In fact there was a deliberate decision at the highest level of the UN Security Council to studiously avoid using the ‘G-word’ (genocide), so as not to legally commit the UN to make an effort to stop it from being completed in Rwanda (Power 2002: 329–90).

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To his credit, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan (having himself played a much-criticized role in connection with UN’s decision not to intervene in Rwanda) has inaugurated what might benevolently be called a moral learning process in the UN. In December 1999, Annan delivered his Srebrenica Report to the General Assembly. Ironically – tragically – one of six UN-declared ‘safe areas’, the town Srebrenica is the site of the single most serious atrocity during the Bosnian carnage, in that approximately 8,000 men were massacred there by Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic’s forces in July 1995. In April 2004, The Hague court ruled that Srebrenica was a case of genocide, sentencing Mladic’s deputy Radislav Krstic to thirty-five years’ imprisonment. The report makes for remarkable reading. The amount of self-criticism on behalf of the UN (and by implication the leading powers in the world) is exceptional. What we read here are words of repentance, demonstrating that repentance is not the prerogative of the perpetrator (although of course never a substitute for the latter). Particularly striking is the fact that the tenor of the report is moral, not legal or realpolitisch. ‘When we read the UN charter today’, says Annan, ‘we are more than ever conscious that its aim is to protect individual human beings, not to protect those who abuse them’ (Donnelly 2002: 99). In his report on Srebrenica, Annan takes the organization he heads to task for having subscribed to a philosophy and practice of moral equalization such that the parties to the conflict were seen as equally responsible for and implicated in acts of aggression amounting to genocide. Annan concedes that errors of judgment were made – ‘errors rooted in a philosophy of impartiality and nonviolence wholly unsuited to the conflict in Bosnia . . . Srebrenica crystallized a truth understood only too late by the United Nations and the world at large: that Bosnia was as much a moral cause as a military conflict . . . The men who have been charged with this crime against humanity reminded the world and, in particular, the United Nations, that evil exists in the world. They taught us also that the United Nations’ global commitment to ending conflict does not preclude moral judgments, but makes them necessary’ (Annan 1999: 88, 89). What is the significance of such public self-criticism on the part of a major international player? For a start, Secretary-General Annan’s report on Srebrenica gives us a chance to take a chief agent at his word, and to judge his actions accordingly. True, with regard to the question of complicity to genocide – in the strict legal sense in which this is determined as punishable in the 1948 Genocide Convention, Article III (e) of individuals who, in their professional capacity as UN and EU envoys and as representatives of the

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nation-states represented in the UN Security Council, decided to vote against air attacks over Srebrenica (in spite of the Dutch UNPROFOR troops’ increasingly desperate request for them) (Honig and Both 1996; Barnett 1996; Rohde 1997; Danner 1998, 1999) – it is dissatisfying that what Annan’s report does is to attribute blameworthiness to the ‘UN as such’; that is, to an institution, and not to any named individuals, to the strictly legal (hence punishable) subjects who, as key decision-makers, bear de facto responsibility for the inaction of the UN so harshly criticized in the report. Annan’s manoeuvre is that of a thoroughgoing selfcriticism on behalf of a vast and complex institution, and though the institution is blamed, all involved individuals are let off the hook, legally speaking. Although morally disappointing, it is hard to see how Annan’s report could have concluded differently on this issue; it would take a revolution within the UN for it to happen. In moral as well as legal terms, as far as I can see the single most crucial message of the report (later echoed in a similar report produced over the UN fiasco in Rwanda) is its implication that, in cases of conflict between the inviolability of sovereign nation-states and the inviolability of individuals, the latter is trump. In effect, attention will shift from the traditional preoccupation with threats posed to individuals (civilians) by foreign states (inter-state conflict or war) to focusing on threats posed to individuals within and by their own state (government, authorities). This implication is indeed part of the premises underlying the International Criminal Court (ICC) as proposed in Rome in July 1998 – though opposed by several of the most powerful nationstates in the world, notably the United States, Russia, China, India, Iraq, and Israel. How revealing it is that these states evidently think they have more to fear than to gain by helping such a court to become effective all over the world. To sum up, there are signs that the international community, and in particular the UN, have learned the lesson of Rwanda and Bosnia. There is today widespread agreement that states carrying out, or about to embark on, genocide forfeit the protection of the principle of nonintervention – the latter is no longer automatically trump. Specifically, genocide is coming to be seen as an offence against international society as well as those directly targeted. It is true that this development is harshly criticized in some quarters (both on the left and the right side of the political spectrum), the perhaps most common charge being that of selectivity and hence of double standards: because one did not intervene in A, which is in all essential ways similar to B, intervening in B is unjustified. In my opinion, this often-voiced objection is absolutely

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untenable, both intellectually and morally. As Peter Baehr puts it, ‘one act of commission is not invalidated by many acts of omission . . . the fact that I have acted badly in the past ought not to compel me to act badly in the future’ (Donnelly 2002: 103). If anything, the modest rhetorical thrust I am willing to grant the charge of selectivity ought to be used to advocate an extension of the practice of intervention, not the opposite: since we now intervene in B, let us consider afresh our earlier reluctance to intervene in A. Collective agency and its disaggregation So far the discussion of the role of the third party has been advanced in a case-oriented manner focusing on some of its pragmatic constraints. It is time that the overall issue of the present chapter – responses to collective evil – be treated from a more philosophical perspective. In doing so, I shall dwell in particular on the issue of reconciliation, its nature as well as its key requirements. Above we noted a perpetrator group’s preoccupation with balance – or rather, lack of such. If imbalance – however fictitious – is at the core of the genocidal aggressor’s self-portrait as victim, is the principal task of the non-party that of trying to help restore a lost balance? In that case we seem very close to Aristotle’s notion of corrective justice, worked out in Book V of his Nicomachean Ethics. Instead of depending on merit, corrective justice depends purely on the transactional nexus of the parties: they are doer and sufferer of the same injury. The aim of corrective justice, then, is to restore the original parity before the injury. Aristotle says, ‘the law looks to the difference of the harm alone and treats the parties as equals’ (1985: 1132a2–5). The applicability of Aristotle’s notion of corrective justice to events in Bosnia is limited. It is instructive to see why. For a start, Aristotle’s reflections on judgment and justice precede acts of genocide (at least as they have come to be legally defined in modern times). In the most brutal sense, evil as genocide leaves nothing to be restored – or, more accurately, it leaves nothing that is, strictly speaking, restorable (capable of being restored to the conditions and in the qualities it had prior to the event). This is so because the proclaimed goal of genocide is precisely to wipe out, symbolically and culturally as well as physically, the other party – thus today’s talk of ‘culticide’ and ‘sociocide’. This is the radicalness of evil in the form of genocide: that it ‘goes to the roots’ in the literal sense of complete removal of what it targets. A key ingredient of genocide is to ensure that there is no other party left to whom a lost balance might be restored.

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Apart from the historical experience separating Aristotle’s perspective from ours, more systematic reasons for the limited usefulness of his notion of justice are also put into sharp relief by the atrocities in Bosnia. For a start, I find it obvious that one cannot restore a condition of justice by taking from the offending party what it illegitimately took from the offended one. Genocide is a transgression – read destruction – that cannot be rectified. It may well be that my giving Aristotle short shrift here is due, at least partly, to my taking his notion of corrective justice to aspire to a form of proportionality. For what I have argued so far is that genocide is a crime of such a radical nature as to render ‘proportional’ response (in the manner of punishment of those responsible) impossible. There is more to it than the inadequacy of the principle of proportionality, however. The underlying problem is that evil as genocide is not individual but instead organized top-down and carried out collectively. The upshot of the collective chosen trauma and its concomitant notions of rectification and entitlement is that the ‘response’ to the alleged past wrongs and present threats of the targeted group is perceived as morally justified by the agents. This is why the morality peculiar to ideologized victimhood is one shot through with self-righteousness: once a victim, always a victim. Groups which self-consciously take it upon themselves to right past wrongs aspire to impunity in carrying out their well-organized evildoing. By contrast Aristotle, in line with a powerful tradition of moral philosophy, locates the common root of the various forms of injustice in the egoistic motive of pleonexia, i.e. greed. The paradigmatic case for Aristotle is the individual agent who desires an advantage or a good that he is not entitled to have or, negatively, who shuns a disadvantage or an obligation that he cannot (should not) run away from. To do something unjust is a matter of greed; it points to an imbalance within the agent himself. Evildoing spells the agent’s self-corruption, Socrates claimed; an evil person is someone who deliberately and over a long time cultivates vices, aiming to become really good at doing bad things to others, maintains John Kekes (1990), to mention a contemporary philosopher who continues approaching evil from a perspective of individual character, theorizing evil as caused by the deliberate actions of individuals choosing to cultivate vices, and so willing themselves as persons seeking to harm others. This assumption about the source of evildoing, so central in ancient philosophy, crops up in Kant’s struggle with the topic. Though certainly an intricate matter, Kant’s view of evil seems to me to echo, at least in one central formulation, the ancient thought that if we act badly we do so

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because we act out of self-interest; although we are free – nay, precisely by virtue of our being free – we may determine our action by way of calculating in terms of ‘external’ pressures. An action is evil, then, in that it is governed by the free adoption of a bad maxim, that is, a maxim defying the disinterestedness and impartiality of the moral law and pursuing instead a course of action guided by the agent’s self-interest. Evil is radical – it has no end to it when humans knowingly devote their will to the pursuit of egoistic gain; that is, when the heteronomy that characterizes desire is allowed to gain the upper hand, silencing the universality of perspective built into the moral law in the form of the categorical imperative. To do evil in the strong sense of willing it and knowing it is to use one’s autonomy to further heteronomy, since in Kantian terminology it amounts to defying duty for the sake of affirming desire. And even when we do seem to heed the moral law, Kant observes grimly, we probably do so for self-interested reasons – ‘probably’ because the intransparency of our deeper motives renders them inaccessible to foolproof validation. In Kant’s ‘radical’ reflections on what he termed ‘radical evil’, then, evil is understood as ‘the foul taint in our race’; it is ineradicable because an aspect of human nature (Kant 1960: 25, 31f.; Bernstein 2002: 19ff.). Common to Aristotle and Kant is the notion that injustice in the form of evildoing springs from the agent’s free decision to let self-interest (in some form or another) trump what is demanded by justice (Aristotle) or by the moral law as laid down in every one of us (Kant). Both take it for granted that the agent deciding on evil (and carrying it out) is an individual, and that he or she decides on the evildoing to be done solely on his or her own behalf, as it were. The consequence is that for both of them, albeit for different reasons, deliberate evildoing boils down to the problem of egoism. The trouble here, with a view to Bosnia (which I in the present discussion use as a case to establish general points), is that evil was committed by individuals who were throughout told to identify, feel, and act as members of a certain group, i.e. as its representatives. Likewise, those persecuted were looked upon as so many interchangeable representatives of the other group. Hence they would view their actions as being carried out on behalf of their group; they were encouraged precisely not to act on their own. The logic of evil as genocide, as collective as distinguished from individual, as reactive rather than spontaneous, is imbued with ‘group-think’ in this sense, as argued in Chapter 4. This being so, my claim is that Aristotle and Kant both fail to address the problem of evil on the collective as opposed to the individual level.

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Their versions of the well-worn distinction between acting from selfinterest (egoism) and acting from duty (Kant: for the very sake of duty), helpful as it may be in many instances of individual evildoing (though, significantly, not all), fail to illuminate the motivational dynamics at work in collective evil. Having said this, I hasten to say that there is a vital point about which Aristotle and Kant are perfectly right, normatively speaking: evildoing (like other – less grave – instances of injustice) is something for which the individual agent must be held accountable. Modern law is premised on this very principle – and rightly so. But on an empirical-psychological level, their accounts of how the most severe forms of injustice actually happen suffer for lack of combining an individual-oriented approach with a collective-oriented one. And, as for the central role they (descriptively) attribute to egoism, it must be said that, if anything, planners of collective, large-scale evil present self-sacrifice – the readiness of the individual participant to set aside and overwin his preoccupation with maximizing self-interest in a narrow sense – as the moral virtue that, par excellence, is called for in the individuals ‘worthy’ of taking part in the struggle. As we have noted on several occasions, this is part of the perverted type of morality that is cultivated by organizers of collective evil. Genocidal logic subscribes to a notion of agency as collective and, by implication, to the idea of collective guilt. Individuality is obliterated within the in-group as well as within the targeted group: the killing is not an interaction between unique individuals but instead what a member of one group does (executes) to a member of another. In Bosnia, even though the assaults often took place in conditions of proximity, on a person-to-person basis, the perpetrator would frequently attempt to deindividualize his particular victim. If known – and recognized – by his victim, the perpetrator would make an effort to deny that the person before him possessed the status of unique individual that till then had obtained between the two of them in a mutual and taken-for-granted manner. He would say things like, ‘Yes, Amira, it is true, it’s me, Vojislav; but you must realize that for me you’re nothing special: you are one of them now’ – expecting, as it were, that this would explain everything, make it clear also to his personally known victim why he now would ‘have’ to do unpleasant things to her. It was not really about her – or, for that matter, about him – as persons in the meaning of that word that used to obtain; instead, it was all about what ‘they’ had done against ‘us’ so that ‘we’ now have to do certain things against ‘them’. The sad fact that so many ordinary people in former Yugoslavia turned out to identify with one particular ethnicist or nationalist group (party) at short notice

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and in a mutually exclusivist and deeply antagonistic manner – according to the logic that, since one now ‘is’ a Serb and that only, this means being vehemently against all persons now identified as something else than purely Serbian – is often used as proof that this society never really was a multi-culti one after all. This is false. The point – containing such a dark warning to others – is that disavowing a complex identity and adopting a homogeneous (simple) one is a deeply persuasive mechanism of survival in times of (ideologically manipulated) social upheaval, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Looking back on the extreme swiftness with which this mechanism prevailed, most ‘ex’-Yugoslavs express profound disbelief as to how this could happen. When this development is set in motion, what we ultimately get is the experiential correlate to Adorno’s depiction of genocide as the effectuation of a ‘total reduction of the individuality of the individual to its generic concept’: genocide is ‘absolute integration’, a process whereby ‘the last, the poorest possession left to the individual is expropriated’. Since, on Adorno’s account, the grounds for identifying the victims are conceived of ‘in total independence of the actual person in view, strictly speaking the immediately affected victims of the administered mass killings were not individuals, but specimens, i.e., samples or instances of a class, genus, or whole, where only the universal counts as ground for assessment of worth’. In short, ‘it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen’ (Adorno 1973: 362; Hammer 2000: 77). Although Adorno made his comment with reference to the Holocaust, my claim is: first, that it is acutely relevant with respect to ‘ethnic cleansing’ as well; and second, that the comment allows us to see how the logic according to which individuals turn into specimens ultimately engulfs the perpetrators themselves and not only their victims. The personification of the perpetrator–victim relationship one might have expected to obtain in the small-scale setting of ‘ethnic cleansing’ seems simply not to prevail on the experiential level. The perpetrator cannot allow it – along with the morally charged emotional temperature built into it – to prevail. So, if spoken to as a person by another person, his response is denial: when depersonalization is not already in effect, all the more urgent becomes the task of ensuring that it eventually does triumph, that the category of ‘the same’ comes to obliterate for good the uniqueness of the other as ‘face’ (to put it in Levinasian terminology). That depersonalization – understood as a subcategory of dehumanization – is precisely not given, but instead must be actively worked at, time and again, so as to prevail, is an important empirical finding. It is theoretically important in that it connects with my earlier discussion of Alford.

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The finding suggests that the claim about retained humanization of the (seen, heard, touched) victim, so stressed by Alford in his inquiry into individual evil, fails to apply in cases where the persons involved as doer and victim do meet face to face, yet do so in the wider interpretational and experiential context of organized collective evil – and it is the logic peculiar to such collective evil that, thanks to the aforementioned effort, leaves its imprint on the violence. Why? Because acting in the name of some grand cause and on behalf of some ‘wronged’ group helps lessen the feelings of guilt in the individual perpetrator – indeed the latter even urges his victim to co-operate with him in the ‘group-think’ conceptualization of what happens between them, pleading for the adoption of anonymity on both sides of the perpetrator–victim divide. In trying to recruit his victim as an accomplice in group-think, he seeks confirmation from ‘the other side’ that ‘this is all about groups’, not unique individuals. (Recall how Eichmann bore this out in a face-to-face context with Storfer, creating the impression that ‘we are in this together’.) There are two sides to this worth looking into, because they highlight the relevance of what pertains to the perpetrator–victim relationship for our general discussion about responses to collective evil. Specifically, what this analysis helps us appreciate is the contradiction between the deindividuating mentality at work in collective evil and the individuating mechanisms required for the function of law. In short, the contradiction is that between collective agency and its disaggregation. On the one hand, the deindividuating mentality may be regarded as the perpetrator’s effort to take some of the sting out of the suffering he inflicts on his individual victims; hence the violence that is performed is ‘super-personalized’ (as I called it in Chapter 4) merely in the factual sense that perpetrator and victim actually know each other, yet the perceptual framing of it aims to negate this personalized quality so as to replace it with a depersonalizing one. It is as though the perpetrator, on finding himself in the midst of interpersonal proximity, reacts by going out of his way to instantly disengage himself from it. It is worth recalling that this is precisely the ‘effort’ Himmler sought to spare his SS personnel: he saw to it that proximity between perpetrator and victim not be permitted to arise in the first place. By contrast, in ‘ethnic cleansing’ interpersonal proximity is nothing less than a defining characteristic of the atrocities being committed; and though I said that one gets the impression that the violence carried out here made a point of maintaining the conditions of proximity, we now see that doing so carries a price for the individual perpetrator. The close-up and hands-on quality of what he does against his victims links him so directly to them that he develops a

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wish to distance himself from them, thereby disavowing his own agency understood as his responsibility and guilt for what he does against them. That the perpetrator may wish to hide behind this facade of collectivity is understandable – though it must be added that it drives a wedge between the individual and ‘his’ group which undermines the message (otherwise adhered to) that these two entities are but inseparable sides of the same coin: there simply ‘is’ no individual as distinct from his group. As for the victim, I find it more difficult to say anything general about whether she will accept the invitation to depersonalize what is being done to her by a known tormentor. Would it lessen her suffering to embrace seeing herself as a victim for purely impersonal reasons, as in ‘It’s nothing personal; he’s just doing what he thinks he has to do to me on grounds of our being representatives of two groups at war with each other’? I do not really see why it should. In any case, what is overwhelmingly real, what will not go away, is the pain that was inflicted. What we do know is that, as time passes, there often evolves a tendency to look upon even known members of the perpetrator group as just that: members of the group that did ‘that’ to us. This may readily translate into a desire to take revenge on the other group as such, letting whatever ‘good’ individuals are known to be part of it make no difference. The ‘bad’ whole wins out over the ‘good’ parts (granted they do exist) – this is genocidal logic, pure and simple, nourished, over time, on both sides of the perpetrator–victim divide by fears that whatever is ‘good’ is under threat of being contaminated by the ‘bad’ and so spoiled (to use Melanie Klein’s terminology). Why do I so stress this point? I do so because the experiential impact of processes shirking or downright obliterating a sense of individuality – be it on the part of the perpetrator and not exclusively his targeted victim – clearly flies in the face of the notion of human agency as the property of a specific nameable individual that is the operative sine qua non of law, of modern institutions of justice. Such institutions are by principle, intent, and design a rejection of any notion of human agency to the effect that agency is a property of some group or collective. This being so, the institutions of law and the experiential processes promoted by genocidal ideologies are in conflict with each other. A first rejoinder to this is to say that the blatant contradiction points to the heart of the matter. Since law is estabished in order to punish transgression such as performed in the spirit of ideologies of a collectivistic bent, it is perfectly to the point that law at the most fundamental level rejects the collectivization of human agency advocated by and acted upon in such ideologies.

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I think that this response, though very simple, has a lot going for it. Its gist is to focus head-on on the mismatch between the assumptions made about human agency in the two cases. Indeed, it is thanks to the unambiguity of the mismatch between the two that the one (law) is able to act according to its seminal purpose; namely, that of marking a corrective with respect to the outlook characteristic of the other (collectivistic ideologies). When confronted with collectivization of agency, with collectivistic allocations of guilt, law has one principal task: to disaggregate agency, to strip it down to the individual level where it belongs and where it arises in the first place. Agency is a property of concrete individuals and not collectivities. Disaggregation is a conditio sine qua non when it comes to passing judgment about responsibility and guilt as present in every concrete case. However, it does not follow from the fundamental legal necessity of disaggregation that one should reject collectivization of agency as a powerful mental and social fact. There is no need to invoke experiences of an out-of-the-ordinary kind here, let alone atrocities, to see what I have in mind. Doing something together with someone else, as in play or in lovemaking; acting in concert as an experiential modality of being-inthe-world, of being-with-others: these exemplify daily experiences of being unaware of exactly where I began and you came in, of strictly separating and demarcating the ‘me’ contribution and the ‘you’ or ‘they’ contribution; rather, what we experience and what aptly informs our self-understanding as well as our situational perception here is the lived we-quality of whatever was experienced or undertaken. Human agency as practised – lived – in the life-world is social in this sense, not atomistic. In extraordinary situations the we-quality takes on stronger forms. For example, in the mass rapes in Bosnia, the impact on the individual participant exerted by peer pressure can hardly be exaggerated. Ideologies aiming to mobilize individuals to take part in mass rape, and to provide them with psychological motives as well as morally legitimizing reasons, are tailored to give perpetrators the impression that they indeed form a ‘we’ doing this, and similarly doing it against a ‘they’. Here, aggregation in the sense of individuality-obliteration and individuality-denial, amounting to what I term collectivization of agency, makes its strong psychological and emotional impact. Whereas victims, as discussed in Chapter 4, tend to develop a mental dissociation between their psyche (‘self’) and their body, trying desperately to save part of their soul by insisting that what was done to them was done solely to their body, perpetrators in this type of assaults will tend to merge their individuality with their groupishness.

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My conclusion is that it would be unwise to reject statements of the we-quality alluded to as simply expressing bad faith. We need to acknowledge the extent to which atrocities such as rape and killing take place in an atmosphere pervaded by group-think, the effect being that the distinction between oneself and other(s) tends to be blurred to the point of obliteration. So, to sum up, although easily dismissed as unacceptable on moral and legal grounds, it must be recognized that certain ideologies intent on collectivizing agency evidently succeed in doing so in a psychological sense among a large number of their adherents – and ultimately, as we saw, among some of the targeted victims as well, albeit for different reasons. Truth commissions, trials, and testimonies I will now explore some aspects of the ‘third party’ problematic that have so far received scant attention. The first issue concerns the extent to which justice – in the wake of collective evil – is dependent on truth. In his important essay ‘The Nightmare from Which We Are Trying to Awake’, Michael Ignatieff puts the problem faced by the third party like this: It is an illusion to suppose that ‘impartial’ or ‘objective’ outsiders would ever succeed in getting their moral and interpretive account of the catastrophe accepted by the parties to the conflict. The very fact of being an outsider discredits rather than reinforces one’s legitimacy. For there is always a truth that can be known only by those on the inside. Or if not a truth – since facts are facts – then a moral significance to these facts that only an insider can fully appreciate. The truth, if it is to be believed, must be authored by those who have suffered its consequences. But the truth of war is so painful that those who have fought each other rarely if ever sit down to author it together. (Ignatieff 1999: 175)

I believe that Ignatieff exaggerates the problem. In so far as there is something valuable for the affected parties to the role played by a third party, it must lie precisely in the way the latter represents ‘those not there’, that is to say, the outside world, the general public, or quite simply humanity. Though not directly affected, humanity is affected nonetheless – not physically but morally. Victims need to be seen, to have their suffering acknowledged by someone else than their fellow victims and their perpetrators. In fact, and as I shall elaborate below, perpetrators and victims alike, if they are to recover and get on with their lives, need to experience that what passed between them is of such a nature as to engage the outside world. The message they need to hear for the wounds to start healing is that what happened cannot be sealed by silence and met with indifference;

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indeed, that it is an outrage to those not involved in their sheer capacity as human beings. This most elementary of moral responses – passing the judgment that ‘this ought not to have passed between men’, ‘this cannot stand’ – is the proper prerogative of Ignatieff’s bystander. The ‘truth’ about what happened that Ignatieff speaks about is one that crucially needs the hearing, and subsequent confirmation, that only a non-party can offer, again precisely as non-party. While Ignatieff is right to challenge the idea that truth is wholly disinterested, objective, neutral, and the like, he goes too far in the opposite direction. Truth has an outside as well as an inside. The implications of this are highlighted in Ignatieff’s further observation that ‘The problem of a shared truth is also that it does not lie ‘‘in between’’. It is not a compromise between two competing versions’ (p. 175). Exactly. Both parties urge that the version that is emphatically theirs be heard; and since they do not expect it to be heard by the other side to the conflict, the response to their presented version put forward by a third party will be all the more important. Of course, and in keeping with Ignatieff’s argument, the reaching out to the third party may take the form of more or less outright attempts to enlist that party as a subscriber to one’s own version of the truth. As we saw above when discussing the importance, nay duty, to be attentive to the victims’ viewpoint, the third party would not live up to its function if it were unable to take measures against being recruited, more or less blindly and uncritically, by one of the parties, be it the victims. Later on in his essay, Ignatieff writes: Ethnic cleansing eradicates the accusing truth of the past. In its wake, the past may be rewritten so that no record of the victim’s presence is allowed to remain. Victory encloses the victor in a forgetting that removes the very possibility of guilt, shame, or remorse, the emotions necessary for any sustained encounter with the truth. Victims of ethnic war, for their part, have lost the sites that validate their version of the truth. They can no longer point to their homes, their houses of worship, their graves, for those places are gone. In exile, victimhood itself becomes less and less real. (Ignatieff 1999: 177)

These are vital insights. On a psychological level, it is widely recognized that the removal of any tangible, physical signs – signs visible to everyone, and therefore undeniable – that persons who are missing did exist and live at some particular place, have a deeply disturbing effect on survivors, especially the relatives of persons who have disappeared and who often never come back. Disappearances and the lack of bodies to be buried create an ontological uncertainty among survivors, captured in Freud’s depiction of the psychological experience of the uncanny. For

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example, in many cases of ‘political disappearance’ in Latin America, the security forces would seize and destroy all identification papers of their victim and then deny that they had ever existed (Hamber and Wilson 2002: 40). In this respect much like the practice of ‘ethnic cleansing’ discussed above, such sought-for eradication of the identity of the victim would leave survivors in a state of profound ontological uncertainty: all their basic questions about what happened and why are left hanging in the air, often never to be answered. Given this (deliberately created) lack of knowledge, how can the work of mourning ever be completed, let alone embarked upon in the first place? What Ignatieff’s observations about the plight of the victors and of their victims combine to show is that they are both, for obverse reasons as it were, incapable of establishing adequate conditions for reconciliation and justice. The latter two for their part depend on truth; more precisely, that a truth be established that is acknowledged by both – or all – parties. If, as Ignatieff said earlier, truth must be authored by those who have suffered its consequences, the chances that such authoring will take place certainly seem meagre, to say the least – unless, that is, representatives (individuals as well as institutions) of third parties combine efforts to help the affected parties come together to start such authoring. What Ignatieff has shown is that the process by which such things as truth, justice, and reconciliation may be achieved cannot be left to the parties themselves. That this is so may seem obvious, yet it bears repeating. Just as with truth, for justice to be attained the effort of the third party is crucial. The relevant meaning of justice is put well by Ignatieff: ‘The vital function of justice in the dialogue between truth and reconciliation is to disaggregate individual and nation, to disassemble the fiction that nations are accountable like individuals for the crimes committed in their name’ (1999: 178). Hence the central task is to individualize guilt, to ‘relocate it from the collectivity to the individuals responsible’ (p. 178). As argued earlier, justice requires that the collectivizing of human agency pursued by genocidal ideologies be reversed, ensuring that the mythically proclaimed oneto-one relationship between individual and collectivity (e.g. nation or ethnic group) be dissolved. Only individuals bear responsibility and guilt, only individuals suffer the injustice of evildoing, only individuals can be reconciled with each other. While the processes toward justice and reconciliation involve entire collectivities, they are accomplished by concrete individuals on both sides of the perpetrator–victim divide. Significantly, the invention of ‘truth commissions’ – such as, most prominently, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

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(TRC) – has been criticized precisely for ascribing a collective identity to a nation, thereby assuming that nations have psyches that experience traumas in a similar way to individuals. This act of ‘psychologizing the nation’ mistakenly implies that ‘individual and national processes of dealing with the past are largely concurrent and equivalent’ (Hamber and Wilson 2002: 35). I readily grant that nations do not have collective consciences. It is less clear to me that they cannot, in some meaningful sense, be said to have collective psyches. The argument frequently raised against the latter idea is that it is an ‘ideological notion’, one advanced by collectivistic ideologies bent on denying or concealing the diversity of interests that sets individuals apart from ‘their’ collectivity (as well as from each other). But this interest-based understanding of the relationship between individual and collectivity is too rationalistic to carry psychological weight. I wish to show why this is so by focusing on two distinct issues: first, there is the general one touching on the nature of the individual–group relationship; second, there is the phenomenon of vicarious responsibility, i.e. responsibility taken by some prominent representative of a group for deeds committed by it, yet for which he or she carries no direct responsibility. As to the first issue, if there is one common finding across different approaches to group psychology, it is that individuals invest themselves, by way of projection, in collectivities, and that they, by way of introjection, let themselves be invested in by the ‘psychic’ attributes of the collectivity with which they identify themselves (recall my earlier discussion of Klein, Alford, and Girard). I say this to emphasize the need to distinguish between psychological processes as having the quality of a dialectic interplay between individual and group, on the one hand, and the moral and legal principle of separating individual and collective for the purpose of locating responsibility (culpability), on the other. The imperative of maintaining the latter separation should not carry over into a denial of the experiential realness of the psychological ‘exchange’ between individual and group – an exchange, moreover, that need not be dubious, morally speaking, since in many instances it is a genuinely enriching quality of interpersonal experience, as observed above. The task is to recognize the impact of group-psychological processes on the individual agent, while simultaneously upholding responsibility for concrete choices and actions as a non-reductive property of the individual. Having said this, it is true, of course, that the needs of a post-conflict nation are different from those of directly targeted victims (i.e. survivors). For example, governments often seek closure on the past more readily than individuals. To exemplify, the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo

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in Argentina were unwilling to accept reparations because doing so would imply giving up hope that their loved ones (the disappeared) will return alive. More principally, their unwillingness meant that they would not accept the ‘sacrifice’ of their children for the new civilian order. As Brandon Hamber and Richard A. Wilson observe, the government, on its part, sees the Madres as imprisoned in the past, ‘as hostages to their own memory and therefore obstructions to the process of selective forgetting advocated by reconciling national political leaders’. Accordingly, and as against the recommendation of former South African State President F. W. de Klerk to simply ‘let bygones be bygones’, it is ‘critical that victims are not expected to forgive the perpetrators, or forget about the past because some form of reparation (or a comprehensive report on the nature and extent of past violations) has been made’. Therefore, reparations and the truth about what happened must be linked; if they are not, survivors may feel that ‘reparations are being used to buy their silence (‘‘blood money’’) and put a stop to their continuing quest for truth and justice’ (Hamber and Wilson 2002: 46). Having noted the difficulties reconciliation faces because of undeniable conflict of interests (or better, needs) between survivors and nation (government), the positive potential of publicly displayed efforts at reconciliation in the wake of large-scale atrocities must also be stressed. As Hamber and Wilson (2002: 42) write: ‘The TRC in South Africa, at least to some degree, became a model of psychological repair, where denial could be superseded and both the work of mourning (transition out of uncertainty and liminality) and narrative fetishism (teleologizing and attaching transcendental meaning to loss) could take place.’ Both are ways in which individuals reconstruct their social identities through forging a meaningful and coherent narrative in the wake of trauma. A similar point can be made about the function of trials conducted to try the persons most directly responsible for severe human rights violations. In his thoughtful study Radical Evil on Trial the Argentinian law scholar and human rights activist Carlos Nino describes this function as follows: The trials enable the victims of human rights abuses to recover their self-respect as holders of legal rights . . . Their suffering is listened to in the trials with respect and sympathy. The atrocities are publicly and openly discussed, and their perpetrators’ acts are officially condemned. The true story receives official sanction. This process not only assuages the desire for revenge but reconstitutes the self-respect of the victim. (Nino 1996: 147)

As Nino goes on to note, such trials promote public deliberation in a unique manner. They help create an atmosphere in which events long

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tabooed and silenced can come out into the open; they make it possible for questions like ‘Where were you, Dad, when these things were going on?’ to become part of daily discourse. There is more. Trials conducted to seek justice in the aftermath of large-scale collective evil effect something of invaluable moral significance by virtue of their sheer legal formalism: in seeking that those guilty receive the punishment due to them, and in breaking the walls of silence previously solidifying the sorry fate of those victimized, such trials proceed on the premise that both ‘parties’, the perpetrators as well as the victims, are bearers of rights. My point is the Hegelian one that trying and punishing somebody entails recognition of that person as a legal subject, indeed as one autonomous and free, and therefore suited to be made to answer for his or her decisions and deeds. In a word, punishment serves the individual function of representing a compliment to the criminal in that it affirms his human agency and so the accountability that goes with it; and it serves the communal function of facilitating a re-establishment of the interpersonal bonds that were torn apart by way of the crime, in so far as committing a crime against others brings with it a mutual estrangement that both sides will yearn to overcome (Hegel 1991: 100ff.). Hegel helps us see that in such trials recognition cuts both ways: the victims, taking their stand as witnesses giving experiencebased testimony in the trials, are thereby de facto and de jure granted the very rights that were violated and denied them by the actions of those now standing trial. Such trials, therefore, must be seen to represent a moral and symbolic rehabilitation by formal legal means of their status as inviolable persons in the Kantian and Hegelian sense. Such trials negate the negation earlier effected by the organizers of large-scale ‘legal crimes’ (Arendt): they undo the undoing of the legal status of those victimized by giving them, by means of formal procedure, a chance to regain and reclaim their once (legally as well as psychically-physically) silenced voices. Herein lies the deeper meaning of testimony. As expressed by Joshua Greene and Shiva Kumar, The power of testimony is that it requires little commentary, for witnesses are the experts and they tell their own stories in their own words. The perpetrators work diligently to silence their victims by taking away their names, homes, families, friends, possessions, and lives. The intent was to deny their victims any sense of humanness, to erase their individuality and rob them of all personal voice. Testimony reestablishes the individuality of the victims who survived – and in some instances of those who were killed – and demonstrates the power of their voices. (Greene and Kumar, quoted in Alexander 2002: 57f.)

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In my opinion, coming forward to testify is also an important task among bystanders, especially those who can base their version of events on firsthand experience. In 1996, journalist Ed Vulliamy was the first individual from his profession to testify before the Hague war crimes tribunal addressing the events in the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Regrettably, not many of his colleagues have followed his example. Instead, they have counselled strongly against members of the journalist profession testifying. Why? Vulliamy writes that the objection often is to do with ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’; hence it merely repeats, on behalf of a specific profession, the very attitude that journalists often (and rightly) criticize when articulated by politicians and diplomats confronted with massive violations of human rights, yet unwilling to ‘take sides’ so as to stop the violators. Vulliamy’s response is worth quoting: ‘There are times in history when neutrality is not neutral at all, but complicity in the crime. I do not want to be neutral between the camp guard and the inmate; the woman raped seven times a night every night, and the beast who rapes her.’ And he continues: ‘That was the cowardly and callous neutrality adopted by the UN itself in Bosnia, to such disastrous and bloody effect.’ However, the UN also set up the Hague tribunal, which to Vulliamy’s mind ‘remains the only institution still trying to reckon with the tempest of violence in Bosnia – and to judge it’ (Vulliamy 1998: 12). I concur. The central point is that the formal procedures deployed in indicting perpetrators and in calling upon victims (and bystanders such as Vulliamy) to come forward and testify overshoot the immediate legal framework. More important than the legal status thereby assigned to the parties involved is the moral message conveyed – a message to the effect that what the one party did against the other was wrong and should never have come to pass, not simply because of the nature of the deeds, but, more comprehensively, because the deeds were premised upon, and fostered by, a false notion of the status of the parties; namely, that the perpetrators are the sole bearers of rights and that the victims have none whatsoever. This asymmetry (and be it, at least for a while, reflected in positive law such as the 1935 Nuremberg Laws geared to strip the Jews of all rights as German citizens) is now declared null and void; it is replaced by the equality between persons qua persons that obtained prior to the policies of the perpetrators and which they therefore had to take explicit measures to negate so as to prepare for immoral acts behind a smokescreen of legality. No one has understood the deeper underpinnings of what is often dismissed as the ‘tedious formalism’ of law and of legal procedure than Hannah Arendt. It is for the kind of reasons just referred to that she

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noted, in her book on totalitarianism, that ‘the first essential step on the road to total domination is to kill the legal character in man’ (1951: 447). It is worthwhile recalling that the distinctive trait of the Nazis’ extermination policies did not lie in taking the lives of millions of innocent men, women, and children, but in stripping them of the different layers that made them subjects of law: depriving them not just of their jobs, but of their professional status; not just of their property, but of their right to ownership; not just of their homeland, but of their nationality; depriving them finally of their name, by turning them into numbers – destroying their human status before taking their lives. One can speak here about the ‘liquidation of the anthropological function of positive law’ (Supiot 2002: 117), helping us realize that the institution of law – the symbol of the crucial function of the ‘third party’ in organized social life – is not something ‘external’ to the experience of being a person, and an inviolable one at that; it is its institutional precondition, at least in the era of modernity. Hence policies seeking to rob, step by step, liberty by liberty, paragraph by paragraph, a specific group of persons of their rights in this anthropological sense of Arendt’s, must be fought with all means available – for we know only too well what is likely to follow in their wake. It has taken the greatest disasters of the twentieth century to demonstrate this anthropological-cum-moral underpinning of the institution of law – true to the dictum that only when something breaks down do we become aware of its significance. Arendt writes: The law surrounds each new life with boundaries and, at the same time, guarantees its freedom of movement, the possibility that something totally new and unforeseen may occur. The boundaries of positive law are to man’s political existence what memory is to his past: they guarantee the pre-existence of a common world, the reality of a certain continuity which transcends the individual lifespan of each generation, which absorbs all new beginnings and is nourished by them. (1951: 465)

Reconciliation, forgiveness, and collective guilt The issue of reconciliation highlights the implications of individualist as against collectivist notions of agency from a different angle than the purely legal one. Among victims no less than perpetrators (though, as we saw, for very different reasons), the perception is likely to prevail that what happened happened to one precisely as a member of a group and as performed by members of the other group. The ‘me’ disappears behind the ‘we’, the ‘you’ behind the ‘they’. So who is to seek reconciliation? Whom is reconciliation between?

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It is tempting to answer in a way directly analogous to our earlier discussion. That is to say, the parties between whom reconciliation is to take place need to be disaggregated, enabling the parties to recognize each other not as so many members of specific groups but in their capacities as distinct individuals – for instance, as that Muslim woman having been raped by that particular Serb man. For reconciliation to do the work of healing it is meant to, it has to assume the form of a mutual recognition between unique individuals, wherein each is fully prepared to take responsibility, to concede guilt, to express shame or remorse, as an act chosen by an individual that in no way tries to hide behind collective identity. Hence it will not do for a perpetrator to say that he did what he did ‘because’ he was acting as, say, a Serb (meaning as Serbs are apt, or have a right, to act); similarly, victimhood needs to be lent a name and a face so as to match the individualized perpetrator coming forward. I am critical of drawing an analogy between what is required for legal processes to operate as they should, and what is required for reconciliation to take place between directly involved parties. Legal processes cannot do without formalism. They cannot set aside the primacy accorded to the notion of agency as individual not collective. When a group did something, legally speaking it was so many particular individuals who did something, each of whom must be held accountable for the specifics of his acts. On this basis, responsibility may be distributed and justice be done. By contrast, reconciliation is less a formalized procedure than a troubled undertaking involving lots of emotions – on both sides of the legal divide between sinner and sufferer. The notion of reconciliation derives from religious contexts, where it designates the re-establishing of a broken relationship between man and a deity (God). Reconciliation here means re-establishing this relationship in so far as the human being becomes aware of his personal guilt toward the deity, who then forgives. Note the close connection between the admission of guilt on the one part and the offering of forgiveness on the other: the former serves as a necessary condition for the latter (Andreassen and Skaar 1998: 23). Of course, one may question whether reconciliation in wholly secular contexts, addressing the suffering caused by humans to humans, exhibits the features just described in religious terms. Suffice it to say that the role played by the one party’s concession of guilt, often taking the form of repentance, is not to be underestimated. Victims often ask how they can possibly forgive as long as the individuals responsible for their suffering show no signs of regret. For lack of repentance, forgiveness would be but an empty gesture, since it would be devoid of something to be a response

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to. I therefore strongly believe that reconciliation must go both ways and be a joint affair: it cannot do without the one party repenting (or showing other signs of assuming responsibility and regretting what happened) and the other party being ready to respond to repentance by forgiveness. To exemplify, what darkens the prospects of reconciliation in post-genocide Bosnia is not only that some of the greatest criminals remain at large for years on end (Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic). It is also the fact that so few among the convicted plead guilty and express remorse. So far, only Biljana Plavsic, once a close ally of Karadzic and one of very few women at the top, has publicly expressed repentance among the Bosnian Serbs’ political leadership. Is a woman more prepared to take this step than a man? Sometimes, however, we witness a (growing?) tendency to demand that victims come forward and declare they forgive their tormentors. Considerable pressure to publicly display forgiveness was exerted by the various truth commissions in South Africa, not least due to the influence of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I see three reasons why such a demand is ill-conceived. First, by the sheer act of voicing an expectation that victims forgive those responsible for their suffering, a step is taken toward moral equalization between the two parties: the plea that the guilty party confess his guilt is ‘balanced’ with the plea that the offended party forgive. In this manner, a device of exchange is brought into play, delegating responsibility to both parties for contributing to the attainment of balance, of symmetry. But this amounts to a model that suppresses the blatant asymmetry between the parties to the affliction. Second, demanding public acts of forgiveness seems to me a category mistake since it infringes on the privacy of the victims (a privacy, of course, that has been infringed upon already, by way of the original affliction). A more appropriate approach would be to leave it entirely to the individual victim him- or herself to decide whether or not forgiveness will be forthcoming. This is a matter involving both strong (and presumably complex, ambivalent) feelings and personal moral (and/or religious) conviction on the part of the victim, and so a matter about which no one else is entitled to decide. Forgiveness is and remains a difficult, acutely personal issue. Third, it follows from my argument that forgiveness is to be looked upon as supererogatory, that is, as beyond duty. In some cases, forgiveness will rightly meet with personal praise and moral approval among the wider public, but from this it does not follow that deciding not to forgive is morally reproachable – rather, both decisions should be allowed to be made freely, individually, just as they both should be met with respect.

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The other side of the expectation (or demand) that forgiveness be shown is that resentment comes to be seen as the key obstacle to reconciliation – and not the lack of declared guilt and repentance on the part of perpetrators. When this happens, the burden of reconciliation is shifted one-sidedly onto the damaged party. A possible way of combating this tendency is to make a case for the appropriateness of resentment. To my mind, the case for resentment has been most impressively articulated by Jean Amery, a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who was subjected to extensive torture. Amery’s position is that of a victim unwilling to compromise. He finds that the real problem in ‘postconflict’ society is that the past has been overcome too early, that reconciliation is premature and, at any rate, undeserved by the perpetrators. All moral demands should be addressed to the perpetrators – one-sidedly and unconditionally. In this, victims (or, more precisely, survivors, to allude to Primo Levi) have a definite task; namely to keep the wound open, to ensure that the crime become a moral reality for the perpetrator. This, then, is what makes resentment a warranted stance, being simultaneously psychologically required and morally justified; my resentment, writes Amery, persists in order to force the crime to take on moral realness for the perpetrator, to ensure that he becomes entangled in the truth of his misdeed. Contradicting Nietzsche’s famous rejection of resentment as part and parcel of the ‘slave morality’ developed by the weak and cowardly, Amery regards resentment as the emotional foundation of a ‘genuine’ morality, the sort of morality that is bound to be ridiculed by the powers that be as the surrogate morality of the weak and inferior (Amery 1979: 81–101). To be sure, there are pitfalls in both directions here. As Amery perceptively points out, persons who are anxious to forgive are often motivated by not-so-admirable considerations: in secretly admiring their own fine feelings, forgiving (for them) is a form of vanity. What drives them is a wish to be seen by others as generous, tolerant, understanding; in short, as sensitive to the difficulties and complexities of the human condition. Stubborn nonforgivers, however, may also choose their stance out of vanity. What they wish is to see themselves, and have others seeing them, as morally upright, unyielding in their rejection of each and every manifestation of evil, untainted by any sympathy with wrongdoing or wimpish tolerance of the intolerable (Garrard 2002). Moreover, as a survivor of Auschwitz observed when asked about forgiveness, ‘it can happen that when a man forgives, he feels guilty because he no longer feels the hatred which he ought to feel; he sees forgiveness as a kind of betrayal of those tortured and exterminated, somehow failing to keep faith’ (Engelking 2001: 317).

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I agree with Amery that a case can be made for the appropriateness of resentment among firsthand victims (such as himself), and that others’ outright condemnation of resentment and, more generally, of unwillingness to forgive, is lacking in justification. In assessing his case it is vital to realize that Amery is not intent on turning resentment into an ideology. Rather, the kind of resentment he – I think successfully – defends is a minority position, embodied in the single individual’s enduring gesture of protest: protest against the perpetrators of yesterday who, as time goes by and their crimes pale in the public’s memory, in a self-complacent manner seek to be exonerated from everything to do with that past; and protest against the general public’s readiness to grant such ‘forward-looking’ exoneration, thereby siding with the interests of the perpetrators rather than with those of the victims (survivors). In this scenario, Amery’s role as a kind of self-proclaimed pain in the ass of society at large, taking it upon himself to keep the memory of the deed alive, is indispensable. On the other hand, I do recognize that a case can be made for forgiveness, too, provided that we do not understand it as a stance that can – or should ever – be demanded from victims. The premise of the argument in support of forgiveness is that forgiveness comes about out of recognition of the human capacity for moral choice and change. Hegel, we recall, argued that punishing someone entails regarding them as members of the moral community, as possessing autonomous agency (this being what makes them blameworthy in the first case): to punish is to recognize; it is to affirm agency in the wake of attempts to deny or suppress it. In like manner, forgiving someone involves regarding them as members of the moral community – but then so does refusing to forgive them. The point I see as making some headway for the case for forgiveness, however, is to do with the role played by forgiveness in helping us recognize that ‘human nature is morally mixed, not in the sense that some of us are almost entirely good, and some entirely evil, but rather in the sense that most if not all of us are capable of both good and evil’. Eve Garrard, the philosopher who says this, proceeds to conclude that, in this way, ‘the perpetrators do share a common human nature with us; we share, to some unknown extent, their capacity for evil’ (2002: 161). Garrard reminds us that the notion of crimes against humanity (the category of crimes at the centre of our discussion) contains a twofold assumption: it is not only that the crimes to be punished, and perhaps (also) forgiven, are crimes against humanity; they are at the same time always crimes committed by humanity; they are, that is to say, crimes that we are implicated in, simply qua human beings, in the sense that we have the capacity both to commit them and to be

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victimized by them. This ‘we’ is at the heart of the case for forgiveness. Specifically, what is required for forgiveness is ‘the adoption of a particular attitude towards the perpetrator, an attitude which can broadly be described as wishing him well’. Garrard explains: ‘In forgiving another, we no longer desire his downfall, nor even feel indifferent to what becomes of him, but instead want him to flourish, to have a worthwhile life; again, on a moralised understanding of what a worthwhile life amounts to’ (2002: 155). What justifies our being liberal with our forgiveness is basically that our proneness to sin means that none of us is well placed to cast a stone; reasons for forgiveness arise from what is ‘weak, pitiful and degraded’ about us as human beings (Scarre 2004: 40). Thus conceived, there is but a short path from forgiveness to vicarious shame, in the sense that the former is often facilitated, indeed experientially spurred, by feeling such shame. Speaking not of forgiveness but of this sort of shame, Primo Levi recalled how ‘the just among us (the survivors of Auschwitz), neither more or less numerous than in any other human group, felt remorse, shame and pain for the misdeeds that others and not they had committed, and in which they felt involved, because they sensed that what had happened around them in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable’ (Levi 1988: 66). Garrard’s comment is worth quoting: Even in the depths of those hells, some of the innocent victims felt implicated, tainted, in virtue of their common humanity, by what the perpetrators alone had done. Given its source, this seems to be evidence that the bonds of common humanity are strong enough to make the crimes of the perpetrators shame and contaminate all the rest of us, even the victims. If so, then there is some reason to think that the relationship between fellow human beings may be significant enough to generate a reason to forgive even those who, in their slaughter of the innocents, have degraded and debased all those who share their common humanity – that is, all of us. (Garrard 2002: 164)

Notwithstanding the validity of Garrard’s reasoning, it seems right to maintain that some instances of evildoing are of such a gravity as to be beyond forgiveness. But does the same necessarily apply to the perpetrators in charge? No. Note the obvious yet fundamental point that forgiveness, understood correctly, refers to persons (doers) not events. There is no question of ‘forgiving’, say, Auschwitz or Srebrenica. But then again, are not those guilty of what Auschwitz and Srebrenica stand for automatically tainted with that self-same utter immorality, that very quality of being beyond what can – or should – be forgiven? Whereas resentment, to be justified, must be directed at the act, not the entirety of the person, forgiveness must address the person implicated in

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the act, yet in such a manner that there is a recognition that the person in question is not exhausted by that evil act of his: what he did needs to be seen as part of the repertoire of human action, as one of numerous manifestations of human agency, hence of something that we – the ones who may forgive – share in common with that person. Thus understood, forgiveness is a truly interhuman act, resting on an assumption (or a hope) that the person will in the future transcend that act, and so, with time and the possibility for change thereby permitted, may develop into a person manifestly capable of more than that kind of act, even perhaps of acts clearly negating the act that gave rise to the need for forgiveness in the first place. I said above that only individuals, not nations, can be reconciled. Yet, as Ignatieff remarks, ‘individuals are helped to heal and to reconcile by public rituals of atonement. When President Alwyn of Chile appeared on television to apologize to the victims of Pinochet’s crimes of repression, he created the public climate in which a thousand acts of private repentance and apology became possible.’ Leaders, continues Ignatieff, ‘give their societies permission to say the unsayable, to think the unthinkable, rise to gestures of reconciliation that people, individually, cannot imagine’; hence they help individuals come to terms with the painfulness of their society’s past (1999: 187, 188). Examples to show how this can be done are few and far between. But they exist. Let me quote extensively from a newspaper report on how reconciliation along the lines envisaged by Ignatieff has been actively sought – namely, by the Belgian government with regard to events in Rwanda: The Belgian prime minister, Guy Verhofstadt, was addressing thousands of Rwandans gathered in Kigali in April 2000 for the sixth anniversary of the millions of deaths of the 1994 genocide. Pale, and gripping his lectern tightly as he stood by communal graves containing the remains of 50,000 murdered, Verhofstadt said: ‘I pay my respects to the victims of the genocide. In the name of my country and my people, I ask your forgiveness.’ The crowd listened in heavy silence, and many were in tears. Verhofstadt went further and spoke in stronger terms than any Western leader to visit Kigali before him. Earlier, outside the barracks where 10 Belgian soldiers from the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (Unamir) had been killed by Rwandan soldiers in an attack on 6 April 1994, Verhofstadt acknowledged that the operation in which the UN soldiers had been involved had been ‘ill-planned and illequipped, displaying an insensitivity to Rwanda’s tragedy that verged on the absurd’. Belgium’s unilateral decision to withdraw its Unamir forces after the murders made it impossible for the UN to intervene effectively and prevent the genocide.

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For eight months a parliamentary commission chaired by Verhofstadt had heard evidence from dozens of witnesses. Its investigation went far beyond the events of 1994. Participants and witnesses from the highest levels of government and the armed forces looked back on Belgium’s record in Rwanda and Burundi, former German colonies mandated to Belgium by the League of Nations after the first world war. While some tried to defend the colonial operation, others pointed out that the division between the country’s two main ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis, which resulted in the conflict culminating in the genocide, was partially due to the Belgians . . . Verhofstadt’s words of remorse in Kigali met with widespread approval. Belgium had finally come to terms with facing up to its colonial past. The prime minister went further when he spoke to the stunned Rwandans, giving an assurance that those in Belgium who had been responsible for the genocide would not escape justice. He was going to make sure that the country implemented the 1993 universal jurisdiction law allowing the Belgian courts to try war crimes and crimes against humanity committed abroad. In June 2001 a Brussels court sentenced two nuns for their part in the genocide. The trial was a further reminder of Belgium’s historic role in Rwanda. After that experience, Belgium turned its attention to the Congo – an even darker heart of its colonial past. (Braeckmann 2002: 12)

It can be said that the relevance of this example is limited: this is a case of a ‘third party’ to genocide assuming its share of responsibility for letting that crime take place, as opposed to a case where a direct party to such a crime – i.e. a high-level representative of the perpetrators – stands forward publicly to assume responsibility – and to demonstrate remorse. Although I consider this a valid distinction, its legal and moral validity should not lead us to downplay the immediate as well as longlasting effects of the kind of symbolic atonement performed in the example given. Evidently the declaration of guilt offered by the Belgian prime minister made a strong impression on those present; that is, on survivors and representatives of the victims. Further, it goes without saying that such a declaration by a third party helps reinforce the moral pressure on parties directly involved to finally step forward and assume their responsibility – though it must be admitted that direct perpetrators for their part tend to sit back and hope that symbolic reparations and declarations of guilt made by less culpable persons will take some of the urgency out of the wider public’s desire for justice, and so deflect attention from their guilt rather than intensify it. The process toward reconciliation can only be completed when all affected have made their distinct contribution. Although it is utterly important to keep a keen eye on the specifics of each particular case, I suggest that something to the same effect applies to Srebrenica. Following the publication in April 2002 of an exhaustive Dutch report on the behaviour of the Dutch battalion in the UN-declared

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‘safe haven’ of Srebrenica in 1995, Wim Kok, prime minister of the Netherlands, took responsibility – not for the killings, of course, but for having let them happen under his watch – and decided that his government resign. Since this acknowledgement of responsibility comes after the report on UN responsibility for the massacres at Srebrenica (discussed above), it adds weight to the considerable moral pressure on Western powers no less than the Belgrade authorities to intensify their efforts to arrest the two most high-ranking Serbs indicted for the massacre, yet still at large – namely, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. The injustice entailed in these two high-ranking individuals remaining at large even after individuals as well as institutions with less direct responsibility have declared their guilt, is becoming more intolerable by the day. Such passivity is an insult to the public’s sense of justice, besides prolonging the victims’ painful perception that their plight holds no genuine priority. The prospects for reconciliation within a post-conflict or post-genocide society cannot be determined in abstracto and in a general manner. To return to my main historical case, Bosnia, reconciliation is made difficult by a number of factors. Some of these have to do directly with the parties involved in the roles of perpetrators and victims, but not all – I particularly have in mind the double standards adhered to by major third parties. Indeed, the implications of these double standards are so severe as to put into question both the credibility and the underlying motives of those now applauding the trial against former president Slobodan Milosevic. The Guardian journalist Hugo Young is right on the spot when he writes that ‘nothing made it unambiguously obvious that Milosevic should end up in The Hague. If Milosevic had not made the fatal error of going into Kosovo, at a time when American and European leaders were finally geared for action against him, there is every chance that the crimes for which he is being indicted would remain untried. He himself might even still be in power, courted by some of the very countries now putting him on trial’ (Young 2002: 10). One way of putting this is to admit that Milosevic has a valid point. When Milosevic, that is, asks that (former) Western leaders such as Clinton and Major be called as witnesses in his trial, his demand contains a kernel of truth: these are the leaders that were active at ‘doing business’ with him for years on end, thereby lending his regime – and so indirectly his policies, including ‘ethnic cleansing’ – an aura of legitimacy. The vehement protests with which Milosevic’s request has been greeted by Western governments only attest to its element of truth – it would be most uncomfortable for these politicians to be forced to listen to the defendant’s reminders of the support they de facto gave his policies

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by remaining for so long unwilling to do anything to halt them and to recognize his culpability. Much as I welcome the trial, then, its element of hypocrisy is not to be denied: if Milosevic is guilty of crimes against humanity (and he is), then the political leaders who voted against intervention to stop the genocide are no less guilty of complicity to the Milosevic-led crimes. Even so, I warn against the kind of moral perfectionism on which a wholesale rejection of the Milosevic trial rests. To those who point out – as do a number of well-informed Serbian intellectuals – that Western societies have no right to preach tolerance and to teach Balkans about multiethnicity (citing that these societies remain overwhelmingly white and continue to distribute power and wealth unequally, and partly along racial lines), the only honest answer is that ‘the requirement that ‘‘he who casts the first stone should be without sin’’ is a guarantee of inaction. The fact that the west does not live up to its ideals does not invalidate the ideals or invalidate their defence. Ideals are frequently defended by people with dirty hands – and bad consciences.’ This is Ignatieff’s (2001: 155) argument to defend not the Milosevic trial but NATO’s military intervention over Kosovo. I hold his argument to be valid in both cases. Assuming vicarious responsibility and guilt It can be said that the demands for reconciliation in such places as Bosnia and Kosovo, while morally justified, are premature. Reconciliation takes time – lots of time. It even takes generations. Since the relevant events are very recent, predictions about which course reconciliation will take, and about its eventual success or lack of it, will be largely speculative. Again, this reminds us of the considerable extent to which reconciliation needs to be carried out vicariously. Perpetrators with direct responsibility for atrocities will rarely ask for forgiveness and actively seek reconciliation with their victims. The prospect of masterminds of collective evil doing any such thing is practically nil – witness Milosevic. Indeed, it would mean for them to repudiate everything they have stood for; a metamorphosis that is rare enough even among ordinary people. Add to this the philosophical point that, to be morally genuine, what the ‘wrongdoer wants in securing forgiveness is forgiveness from the one he has injured’, thus highlighting the gratuitousness of third-party declarations of forgiveness (Scarre 2004: 85, n. 26). But, to shift the perspective, Wim Kok stood forward to acknowledge responsibility, as did Guy Verhofstadt, thereby indirectly asking for forgiveness – not from

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some third party but from the victims. They did so vicariously, on behalf of a collectivity and with reference to events in the past (even distant past). They did so not in their own right, but as a gesture of recognizing a responsibility that those most directly responsible never took (never were forced to take, or never accepted, even when urged to, as the case may be). The importance of observing these features of vicarious responsibility is that it throws novel light on the issue of collective guilt. I have argued that, morally as well as legally, the notion of collective guilt is untenable. My position is not controversial: the reasons for disaggregating agency are widely recognized (as Arendt quipped, ‘when all are guilty, nobody is’), both intellectually and as an element of the practice of criminal justice. So, to repeat, while we should reject an atomistic view of society, we should maintain an atomistic line on moral responsibility. Even so, we need to recognize that, for the purposes of achieving postconflict reconciliation within a nation-state, the notion of collective guilt may come into play in a genuinely constructive manner. Note the context in which this happens: it is not the legal one of meting out punishment, but that of accepting, in a performative act (exemplarily, a public speech by a leader), that something morally unacceptable has been committed by – or in the name of – the collective one is representing, and that this necessitates that repentance be expressed and guilt conceded. ‘We’ can no longer ignore or deny what ‘we’ did, whereby this ‘we’ is deliberately vague enough to comprise all the different degrees of guilt and complicity that will obtain within a large group. The concrete practical consequences of doing so, for those doing it, will vary from case to case, and need not occupy us here. The point I wish to make is simply that taking responsibility for deeds committed on a collective basis is to be seen as a version of ‘collectivizing’ agency that genuinely makes sense to those addressed by it – on both sides of the perpetrator–victim divide. A second crucial feature is that vicarious responsibility transcends generational gaps. In this it certainly resembles the logic characteristic of genocidal ideologies, yet in the present case this device is put to use for the aims of bringing the parties together, as opposed to pitting them against each other so as to stimulate conflict. True, some bearers of vicarious responsibility are more vicarious than others. And, while some leaders step forward to declare it as a result of public pressure, others do so in a more spontaneous manner. There is a huge difference between, say, Wim Kok taking responsibility for the Dutch complicity in the massacre at Srebrenica (after all, he was Dutch prime minister at the time), and the public display of German collective guilt for which Willy Brandt will always be remembered, spontaneously

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kneeling in front of the statue set up to commemorate the Jews killed by the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. Brandt as a private individual had no perpetrator responsibility to look back upon – he had been fighting in the anti-Nazi resistance. But Brandt the political figure was now the chancellor of Germany, and in that capacity it was perfectly apt for him to show repentance and respect for the Nazi victims the way he did. However, not everybody who assumes vicarious responsibility does so by virtue of a leadership position. Barring the more or less spectacular performances of a Kok or a Brandt, the issue of reconciliation – and its links with collective guilt – is, most of the time, an eminently private affair; it is something that concrete individuals have to find their unmistakably individual ways of coming to terms with in the context of their particular life-history. Otherwise put, the issues and the challenges they entail are easily expressed in general formulas – but the responses can only be lived in plural. Thus, one may legitimately ask questions like: Is reconciliation at all the right thing to strive for in the case of genocide – or, more accurately, in the cases of genocide? Should we try to forgive criminals such as Eichmann and Mladic? Who is ‘we’? Who is to decide? Would the now-dead victims want us – outsiders or bystanders to events – to seek reconciliation with what came to pass, to search (perhaps) for a meaning in the midst of unspeakable atrocities and the long-silenced suffering that goes with them? Would the victims want us to forgive their henchmen? Would they want us to pass judgment at all on their plight, so as to assess, by intellectual means, the depth of what they suffered? Or would we do well to approach evil – specifically, large-scale and collective evil – in an altogether different manner? Shifting the perspective, from the vague ‘we’ comprising outsiders to the original events to the victims themselves, less general questions emerge. What becomes of the grandfather who raped his granddaughter in a Serb concentration camp? Will he spend the rest of his life blaming himself for his deed, despising himself, viewing himself as a coward and an outcast since he did not refuse? What becomes of all the children who, as part of the very design of psychological torture, have seen things no children should ever see? How can a mother recover from having witnessed the rapes, over and over again, of her pre-teenage daughters? As I said, these are questions allowing only for so many individual, hence particular and eminently contextual, responses. There are no rules to go by. Yet this much may be asserted as having general validity: wounds of the type and magnitude inflicted upon the victims of genocide will not be successfully healed if they are ignored by the world of nonvictims, by the rest of us. Such healing is not something private; but

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rather it is nurtured and realized only through the concern of others. To be sure, healing is private in the vital sense of being accomplished (or not) in a particular person’s life. The suffering is and remains an event in that person’s life, and uniquely so, since there are many ways to experience, look back upon, and try to cope with the atrocities that happened. But the healing we talk about in cases such as Bosnia cannot be merely a private matter because what made the victims targets in the first place was nothing personal or individual: people were victimized because of the specific group identity attributed to them by way of the ideologically painted enemy portrait spread by their perpetrators. This portrait, so many words and images that served to prepare for murder, must be corrected, must be declared fabricated and invalid, by public acts meant for the wider public. It is extremely important to see that the response to the suffering of an entire group of people is of interpersonal, genuinely public import. Note that this marks a difference between having suffered ‘collective’ as distinct from ‘individual’ evil in my terminology. In the latter case, the very grounds on which a victim became so will have to do with either characteristics of that person qua individual or with characteristics of the perpetrator – or both, since the psychic and/or physical violence acted out here – say, in the context of a marriage, or some other familial constellation (i.e. child abuse) – possesses no necessary links with a group of perpetrators (or, for that sake, victims). Here, the person is doing what he does, choosing the victim he does, in his own capacity – be it as a jealous husband, for example. Suffering inflicted in this personalized manner carries no inherent or performative links with a group or collectivity; though I grant that such suffering – e.g. that of battered wives or abused children – does deserve to be acknowledged by a wider public, and indeed as a cause of social concern, hence not to be dismissed as merely a ‘personal’ problem or tragedy. My point is that cases of individual evil retain a more person-based quality, in keeping with the context of proximity in which they took place. By relative contrast, in collective evil we deal with cases of suffering which are extra-individual and communal from the very start and hence in a performative sense lacking in the former case. This being so, and the more so the more comprehensive the deeds in question, there is a task here for the world at large to express a desire that these wounds heal, premised upon the acknowledgement – in public – that undue suffering did take place. Conversely, if the world is silent in the face of suffering and the ensuing need to heal, its silence communicates that it is – remains – indifferent to the suffering and consequently to the fate of every victimized person.

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This brings me to the last type of vicarious guilt I shall mention. This is the guilt assumed by children (or other relatives or descendants) of direct perpetrators. The case of postwar Germany is the most documented one. In Gitta Sereny’s interviews with children of top Nazis, the parents are typically described as being – or having been – ‘incapable of shame and repentance and therefore left us alone with nothing but the heritage of their awful guilt’. Sereny relates how ‘virtually all of the children of Nazis told me of their contempt for elders who insisted, to the end of their lives, that they knew nothing, saw nothing, and even suspected nothing reprehensible during the Nazi time, while their children remembered with amazing clarity not only events but also their reactions to those events’ (Sereny 2000: 303). Thomas Heydrich, whose uncle was Reinhard Heydrich, a mastermind of the ‘final solution’ and the SS leader who chaired the 1942 Wannsee Conference, speaks on behalf of many when he insists that ‘somebody had to feel guilt for the devilish things my uncle had done’ – the message being that, since those with blood on their hands went out of their way to deny guilt, others would have to take it upon themselves – if only vicariously. Vicarious guilt is better than no guilt, these sons and daughters believe. It is easy to agree. Perhaps too easy. On second thoughts, in what precisely resides the guilt we speak of here, the guilt internalized and embodied by such children, often throughout their lives and forming part and parcel of their identity? Bracketing our spontaneous moral admiration, what justifies their assumption of guilt for things done by others – and be it their own parents? The decision to carry a burden refused by its proper owner may qualify as a moral virtue. Others failing, one does what one does on the simple grounds that it must be done. Besides coming, in many cases, to totally dominate lives that could have focused on matters less burdensome, the issue of internalizing guilt on such conditions is a thorny one. As I have said many times, it is one thing to demonstrate the untenability of the notion of collective guilt in a legal framework and to argue the case for disaggregation of agency and ‘atomization’ of moral responsibility. In the wider cultural context, the notion, as we have seen, is not so easily dismissed. The fact is that guilt possesses both a cultural and a moral dimension in its own right, in addition to the restricted legal one. Moral philosopher Geoffrey Scarre (2004: 75) writes that ‘our German born after the war does not share in the moral faults of his forebears’. This is true – but it is true on a superficial not a deep level. Ju¨rgen Habermas, born in 1929 – before the war, yet too young to have committed greater crimes during the Nazi rule than letting his parents enlist him in the

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Hitlerjugend – points to the deep level by way of raising Karl Jaspers’ question of collective guilt today. Speaking for both his own and later generations, Habermas writes: As before, there is the simple fact that subsequent generations also grew up within a form of life in which that was possible. Our own life is linked to the context in which Auschwitz was possible not by contingent circumstances but intrinsically. None of us can escape this milieu, because our identities, both as individuals and as Germans, are indissolubly interwoven with it . . . There is the obligation incumbent upon us in Germany – even if no one else were to feel it any longer – to keep alive, without distortion and not only in an intellectual form, the memory of the sufferings of those who were murdered by German hands. It is especially these dead who have a claim to the weak anamnestic power of solidarity that later generations can continue to practice only in the medium of a remembrance that is repeatedly renewed. (Habermas 1990: 232f.)

What transcends the legally pertinent fact of atomistic responsibility is precisely the larger cultural milieu in which those horrible crimes were conceived, planned, and performed; the life-form of a specific collectivity that, qua life-form and qua collective, does not cease to exist and have a formative impact – say, the day Auschwitz was liberated or the Nazi regime militarily defeated. Habermas’ thoughtful formulation, ‘even if no one else were to feel it any longer’, transposes the direct guilt of the first generation into the vicarious one – collectively shared, individually assumed – of later generations, lacking or, rather, short of a definite point after which this no longer applies. Thus conceived, vicarious guilt is simultaneously an historical fact and a moral task, showing once again that, in matters of human agency, the factual and the normative are intimately connected. As Jeffrey Alexander perceptively observes, with growing temporal distance to the event of the Holocaust, to be guilty of such ‘sacred-evil’ (Durkheim) did not mean, anymore, that one had committed a legal crime. It was about the imputation of a moral one. One cannot defend oneself against an imputed moral crime by pointing to exculpating circumstances or lack of direct involvement. The issue is one of pollution, guilt by actual association. The solution is not the rational demonstration of innocence but ritual cleansing: purification. In the face of metonymic association with evil, one must engage in performative actions, not only in ratiocinative, cognitive arguments . . . This performative purification is achieved by returning to the past, entering symbolically into the tragedy, and developing a new relation to the archetypal characters and crimes. Retrospection is an effective path toward purification because it provides for catharsis, although of course it doesn’t guarantee it. The evidence for having achieved catharsis is confession. If

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there is neither the acknowledgement of guilt nor sincere apology, punishment in the legal sense may be prevented but the symbolic and moral taint will always remain. (Alexander 2002: 45)

This captures the idea that has been both necessitated and precipitated by the series of genocides in the twentieth century: the idea of moral guilt without legal responsibility. Admittedly, Alexander’s observations do not come anywhere close to answering all the questions raised. Nor do I mean them to. It is much too early to tell whether the sons and daughters of the architects and hands-on perpetrators of ‘ethnic cleansing’ will follow the kind of moral precedent set by numerous members of the second (and even third) generation in postwar Germany. Leaving aside the ambiguities in assuming guilt for the actions of others, what strikes me as a wellestablished finding is this: a heightened sensibility with respect to the dangers of evildoing and of hate speech seems to be present both among descendants of perpetrators and descendants of victims. Despite their initial departures from the opposed sides of the perpetrator–victim divide, there seems to be a pretty widespread devotion to the imperative ‘Never again!’ This is a hopeless generalization, of course. Its optimism is contradicted daily. Consider, for example, the way Israel’s prime minister Ariel Sharon has turned ‘never again Auschwitz’ into a ‘moral’ justification for his once-victimized people to go to extremes in hunting down, humiliating, and killing thousands of members of a people – the Palestinians – said to endanger their survival. It is a depressingly old story: victim turning into victimizer, recognizing (with significant exceptions, of course) no other way but that of violence and so making the inevitability of violence-induced suffering a self-fulfilled prophecy, inflicting it upon others in the name of self-defence. Current Israeli policies against neighbours comprising teenagers ready to die in suicidal terrorist missions may serve to remind us that ‘the cruellest thing about cruelty is that it dehumanizes its victims before it destroys them. The hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions.’ These words come from Janina Bauman, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto (Bauman and Tester 2001: 12). I do not intend them to apply to any conflict or group in particular – be it, say, Israelis or Palestinians. Rather, Janina Bauman’s observation is universal; it makes us realize that being, or having been, victims is not an ennobling experience. It may bring out the ‘best’ in some people, it is true, but it is equally likely to bring out the worst, to lead people to commit acts – for the sole sake of survival – of which they would otherwise have thought themselves incapable. Accordingly, among survivors

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of collective evil, obsession with vengeance will often prevail over any desire for reconciliation; disorientation and self-doubt may eclipse any superior moral wisdom that outsiders may wish to attribute to them. However, I shall end on a less grim note, shifting perspective again from victims to descendants of perpetrators. In the next quotation, the person speaking is Martin Bormann, a son of the notorious Nazi bearing the identical name; a person not only speaking for himself but for his eight siblings as well, all of whom have come to reject their father’s beliefs. Drawing on his privileged kind of experience, he says: Some fifty years ago, a few people created horror, but far too many, knowing about it, tolerated it. It started then just as now – with graffiti, vulgar jokes, and knowing winks. Then it was the Jews, now it is the Turks and the Vietnamese. The moment one hears somebody say something offensive to human dignity in any way, whether against foreigners or people of other faiths or colour, one must protest and argue. The obscenity of discrimination will only be stopped if we accept individual responsibility for never, in a single instance, allowing it to go unchallenged. That, I think, is our task – yes, as our parents’ children. (Sereny 2000: 308)

6

A political postscript: globalization and the discontents of the self

We come full circle in this inquiry into evil when I reiterate that what makes us suffer evil is also what makes us want to cause it. Much evildoing springs from the fact that our being-in-the-world is shot through with vulnerability, concretized by our mortality and by our dependence on others, to name but two different aspects of the same basic condition. In this perspective, evildoing is an existential project in which the individual, finding his non-chosen vulnerability intolerable, seeks ways to get rid of it, hoping to do so by transporting the vulnerability to others so as to feel some control over it. This is the sense in which evildoing is a protest against vulnerability or, more accurately, against vulnerability-induced limits: limits to what and who we are and can be, emphatically our limits, yet limits not of our making; hence, limits that define our very being. While universally, because anthropologically, given, this vulnerability and the limits that go with it have to be faced individually, as something awaiting responses in the first-person singular. This is fine as far as existential(ist) approaches to evil go. But as I have tried to show, especially by means of the historical material invoked in Chapters 4 and 5, not all evil is this individual, be it in its causes or its effects. Nor – contra Alford – is all evil comprehensible as a manifestation of how an individual struggles to cope with unwanted givens-cum-limits of existence, for such givens, and the question of their meaning, are always subject to over-individual (social, cultural, religious) frameworks of interpretation. Furthermore, as documented, specific social forces and social agents are often no less damaging in the way they encourage, channel, and distribute suffering upon other people than are the ‘existential’ conditions stressed by Alford. Indeed, the dialectic between what is existentially given on the one hand and what is thoroughly man-made on the other, whereby the second offers a specific direction to (or imposes 289

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a specific direction upon) the outlet craved for the former, has been at the centre of my discussion. To say this is not to reject the need to disaggregate what confronts us in fully ‘collectivized’ gestalt – be it, again, on the side of perpetrators or victims. To repeat, unique individuals commit evil as well as suffer it. And yet there is much more to it. As Martin Bormann (the son, not the father) pointed out with such clearsightedness at the end of last chapter, the distinction that I have so belaboured in this work, that between individual and collective evil, is not solely about differences; it is about continuities too. There is a path from the micro-incident of individual A abusing individual B, to the macro-event of a mass murder or genocide: from what I overheard in the street on my way to work this morning, to what may add up in the near future to organized assault against the entire category of ‘others’ of which B is but a single member. Conversely, to cause effective harm, all macro-sources of organized evil (racial hatred, nationalist ideologies, genocidal policy) must ultimately exert their influence at the level of micro-interactions. Such continuity between what I have distinguished as individual and collective types of evil is overlooked, theoretically as well as practically, only at our peril: to prevent evildoing from assuming a full-scale collective socio-logic, it is crucial that no single incident be seen as too innocent and inconsequential to be met with protest. If not nipped in the bud, evil that seemed too minor to bother with may quickly grow too overwhelming to be stopped. Not that all instances of what I call collective evil start out in discrete and isolated manner. Some instances of collective evil simply defy being stripped down, or traced back, to discrete micro-incidents devoid of a larger context in which to make a real impact. That is to say, sometimes the collective aims, and design, are fully present right from the first, subsequent consequences being not the sum of mechanic aggregation but rather the completion of what was systemically conceived of and organically carried out all along. Collective evil such as genocide – take Rwanda – may exhibit the features of a collective undertaking from the very first murder, which – to prove the point – is simply not to be located: what is massive in the end was so also at the start. And yet we never stop being shocked by how much quicker destruction moves than construction; how quickly mistrust may replace trust, and enmity harmony – provided that dominant social and ideological forces combine to effect such multifaceted transformation at a given time and by naming the optimal threat-cum-enemy. There are other examples to make the same point; less spectacular ones, to be sure, and so less likely to appear in scholarly books on evil.

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They typically revolve around feelings of injustice, humiliation, and powerlessness. Consider the effects of current economic globalization. In today’s world, 600 million people are chronically undernourished; some 40,000 children die each day as the result of hunger and malnutrition, or from preventable diseases such as measles, diarrhoea, and malaria; one in four children around the world live in poverty. Why? While some would say that this has nothing to do with capitalism in the era of globalization, others will contend that it has everything to do with it – the former arguing that more free-market capitalism will solve the problem, the latter that this is precisely what helps create and intensify it. Even though I believe the latter case to be much stronger than the former, my intention here is not to engage in a debate on globalization. Nor do I wish to politicize, in a crude manner, the roots of collective evil as a reality in the world today. Rather, the fact of economic globalization – the worldwide trend that ever more sectors of society are being opened to the imperatives of the market, of making a profit of every single human activity and need, of seeing profitability as the sole source of justification for just about everything – serves as the sociopolitical context in which my following remarks must be read. In Pierre Bourdieu’s provocative formulation, the neoliberal ideology backing globalization is ‘a programme of methodical destruction of collectives’, meaning all long-standing collective structures, such as trade unions, class solidarity, and local belonging. I agree with Bourdieu that this is to be regarded as a systemic evil, a systematically produced social injustice, that humiliates its victims, stripping them not only of material security but of positive sources of social respect and ultimately of self-worth. Here, evil breeds evil, since all non-episodic and enduring violence is eventually paid for in the utterly concrete form of human misery and suffering: ‘the structural violence exerted by the financial markets, in the form of layoffs, loss of security, etc., is matched sooner or later in the form of suicides, crime and delinquency, drug addiction, alcoholism, a whole host of minor and major acts of violence’ (Bourdieu 1998: 40). In keeping with Alford’s Kleinian insight into how psychic pain not only stifles vitality and self-worth but tends to be transported from one individual (the one originally afflicted) onto others, the suffering caused by economic-systemic injustices is today subject to various attempts among the victims to reclaim their threatened agency by turning – be it by subtle psychological assaults, be it by violent physical ones – against selected others perceived as even weaker and more marginalized than themselves; witness, for example, gangs of unemployed male youth in France or Great Britain who beat up coloured immigrants.

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The question is: Where does this leave the subject? The optimistic answer would be that, unfortunate social trends notwithstanding, each individual now becomes truly free: free to be him- or herself, in so far as everyone is to break free from the chains of dependence. Rather than owing his existence to something else – to which successive ontologies have given different names: Nature, Ideas, God, or simply ‘Being’ – and in this sense to some Other, the current ideology teaches that the individual owes his existence to himself. The trouble is that this does not work. The self-sufficient individual is but a myth. Without any extra-individual instance functioning as its Other, the individual is at a loss. He or she has no one to turn to in order to become a somebody. To put it in terms both Hegelian and Levinasian: no Other, no self. For the subject, it is the Other that makes time and space possible. Without a proper sense of living in time and space, and of the limits thereby imposed upon human agency, the existential meaning of identity and the moral meaning of responsibility will never take hold: there is simply nothing to nourish them. Of course, there is a kind of answer offered in contemporary Western society. It is the answer provided by the market, encouraging the shaping – and constant reshaping – of identity through consumption: ‘I consume, therefore I am’, identity having become a commodity. However, the market economy’s claim to take charge of all personal and social relations, its ambition to function as a substitute for the sense of orientation once provided by the collective and longue dure´e structures now destroyed by the market, is not borne out in practice. The market is of no use as a new Other, since it thrives on structurally eroding and ideologically ridiculing the very properties that an entity would require in order to function as the individual’s Other – namely, marking limits by highlighting the vulnerability that defines human beings and the dependence on the Other of humanity (outer nature) and on human others, the twofold dependence that reminds us who we are by reminding us that not everything is possible, that what is most important in our lives is not to be had by instant gratification. The French philosopher Dany-Robert Dufour describes the current condition like this: The subject is no longer defined by neurotic guilt (Freud), but by something akin to a feeling of omnipotence when things go right and total impotence when they do not. In short, shame (towards oneself) has replaced guilt (towards others). Lacking points of reference that can serve as a basis for symbolic exteriority and anteriority, the subject is unable to deploy himself adequately in space and time. He is trapped in a present moment in which everything is taking place. Relations with others

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become problematic because his personal survival is always at stake. If everything is decided in the present moment, then projection, anticipation, self-appraisal and introspection become problematic. The individual’s whole critical universe is affected . . . The new individuals are abandoned, rather than free. That is why they are such easy prey to whatever appears to satisfy their immediate needs and sitting targets for such a powerful mechanism as the market. (Dufour 2001: 8)

I have established a connection between the perception that given limits (deriving from vulnerability, from dependence) are intolerable and the belief that rebellion against them, in the form of attempts to project them onto others so as to get rid of them (individually or collectively), is a worthwhile undertaking. The sequence thus implied – from limits over rebellion to ‘acting out’ in the form of hurting others – is not inevitable, let alone automatic. Nonetheless, the sequence we talk about is a well-rehearsed one, in recent history perhaps even more so than in earlier times (often – mistakenly – called ‘barbaric’ or ‘primitive’). Indeed, the twentieth century has been called ‘the age of genocide’ (Rieff 1995: 50). Significantly, it has also been called ‘the century of the self’ (Bunting 2002: 11). In the perspective I have tried to develop here, we may see how it can be that both designations – seemingly so unconnected – are right. To be sure, the discontents of the modern self, its insecurities and fears upon being freed – as neoliberalism has it – from collective structures and long-lasting moral and social bonds, is a dated topic – Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Riesman et al.’s The Lonely Crowd were written more than half a century ago. For all that, the phenomenon has lost none of its urgency. The familiarity of the psychological and sociological factors pointed to is only part of today’s picture, however. Let me just mention two findings of a more recent date, each reinforcing, it seems to me, the grim picture painted by Dufour. First, research among five-year-old kindergarten children as well as among eleven-year-old pupils indicates that the capacity for empathy is decreasing rather dramatically. The findings are roughly the same in such otherwise different countries as Sweden and Greece. Impulse control is highly problematic for a large portion of children and young people. At the same time, behaviour described by psychologists as exhibiting ‘narcissistic rage’ is on the rise, as most teachers – and perhaps also parents – can testify: low or no tolerance for not getting what one wants to have, of sensing that others are reluctant or plain unwilling to provide instant gratification of one’s momentary needs or wants. Even minor disappointment is likely to meet with explosive rage, as are any attempts to place the blame for things gone wrong on the individual himself (Kohut 1985). Gratitude

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and patience, repentance and reparation: these traits of character, all at the heart of Melanie Klein’s ‘depressive position’ and seen by her as crucial to emotional maturity, are conspicuous by their absence, reading instead like a catalogue of virtues now gone. The second finding is one accounted for by Alford and Bauman: increasingly, identification is with the aggressor not the victim. The poor, for example, are increasingly criminalized and subject to ghettoization in a moral no less than a physical sense; as have-nots, they are excommunicated from good society, regarded as having only themselves to blame, and so eliciting no compassion on the part of the haves, who, in supporting the creation of no-go areas that today illustrate the overall policy of letting privatized insecurity prevail over collective concern, inhabit a social universe where out of sight means out of mind (Bauman 1998, 1999a). Empirically, this seems to be connected to the lack of empathy just referred to: bullying is increasingly about ‘going all the way’, not stopping the beating and kicking when the victim is clearly unable to defend himself or herself, but instead continuing long beyond the point of resistance, apparently just for the kick of inflicting pain. Suffering is responded to not by empathy-induced attempts to stop it but by cheers to do still more of it. The upshot is that the difference between perpetrators and bystanders is purely legal; ethically speaking, it ceases to make sense. Whether we speak about children being bullied at school or the plight of the poor, perpetrators and bystanders face the same need of denial; in doing so, they resort to the same repertoire (Cohen 2001). I readily admit that depictions such as these easily turn into caricatures, besides sounding awfully nostalgic about earlier times, when presumably things were better. Still, I maintain that the two findings referred to – a decreased capacity for empathy, and an increased readiness to identify with the aggressor instead of the victim – need to be taken extremely seriously when addressing the roots of evil in present-day society. Let us move from micro to macro once again. There are two large issues with indisputable relevance for discussing current forms – and dangers – of collective evil. They can be analytically distinguished, yet they are substantially linked. I am thinking of security and survival. Commenting on Le Pen’s strong showing in the French presidential elections in 2002, Jonathan Freedland writes: ‘In a globalized world, where turbo-charged capitalism can take days to trample over and destroy a local culture that might have taken centuries to build, people seem to latch on to anything, or anyone, who promises to slow the pace – or even turn back the clock.’ This, then, is the light in which Freedland

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views the current fear of immigration: it is about ‘clinging to the familar, tribal identity at a time of great uncertainty and confusion’. Being scared of globalization, people will warm to any prophet, no matter how false, who tells them they can keep the world at bay (Freedland 2002). But where does evil enter the picture? For a start, recall the notion of securitization discussed in Chapter 4. Far right leaders like Le Pen are no less adept than communists-turned-ethnonationalists like Milosevic when it comes to identifying some cherished shared value that is now held to be under severe threat from some specific enemy, be it internal or external or both. In purely functional terms, and notwithstanding all differences between them, the Muslims of Bosnia and the immigrants in France may well serve the same aim as far as the cynical political exploitation of widespread uncertainties over the future and fears of ‘identity’ are concerned. Feelings of insecurity, of being robbed of traditional markers of safety, identity, belonging – be it materially on grounds of unemployment (outsourcing, downsizing, and deskilling, in the parlance of neoliberalism), or culturally on grounds of being ‘swamped’ by other cultures, different lifestyles – are seized upon, rhetorically manipulated, and channelled so as to target the more or less fabricated villains claimed to be the source of threats now endangering everything near and dear. Insecurity is the shadow side of globalization, which centralizes power, bolsters a winner-takes-all culture, and brutally marginalizes those who, for lack of resources or abilities, cannot keep up with the relentless pace of change. Told that they are losers and coming to perceive themselves as such, the rising rage and frustration of individuals who have little or nothing more to lose is likely to target anyone who can be construed as the cause of their felt disempowerment. Evil, then, to answer the question, is at both ends of this process: in the deliberate operation of channelling the (rhetorically inflated) fears and insecurities, and at the receiving end of what is thus channelled, in the form of the discrimination, humiliation, and (worst case) killing visited upon the named collective targets. Let me situate this in a larger perspective. It may seem that, in the aftermath of 11 September 2001, the leading governments of the world have decided to reject the cultural and moral relativism associated with the ‘postmodern’ 1980s and 1990s, developing instead a tough intervention-oriented determination to fight all sorts of terrorism and fundamentalism. So, instead of the intellectual relativism of Clinton we now have the no-nonsense militant activism of Bush, showing no restraint in his willingness to name, hunt down, and eliminate what he emphatically calls ‘evil’.

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In light of my earlier attack on the follies of impartiality-cum-neutrality in the face of genocides in the 1990s, this post-11 September turn of events might be expected by some readers to be greeted with a certain amount of approval on my part. Not so. The basic trouble is that the ideological as well as military toughness now on display in different parts of the world leaves the deeper roots of social problems unaffected, targeting instead the victims of globalization and its activist critics (now deemed ‘terrorists’ and so rendered sufficiently suspect to warrant criminalization), creating a climate where dissent is seen as tantamount to siding with evil, with the enemies of democracy. The questions that would go to the roots of the problem are not asked by those in power – such as: How can governments wedded to free-market globalization reduce its corrosive impact on the social fabric of personal and local identity? What changes are needed for economic globalization to stop being tantamount to the global production of injustice, of rising differences between the haves and the have-nots? True, there exist terrorists who have demonstrably, horrifyingly, collectivized agency with regard to the ‘West’, painting all Westerners as infidels and so issuing a licence to kill them indiscriminately, in the ostensive service of the ‘good’. Nonetheless, the unwelcome and often-denied point is that the evil epitomized by Osama Bin Laden must be recognized as a – inexcusable and utterly immoral, to be sure – response to an economic system experienced as evil by millions of people around the world. As so many times before in history, the evil of a terrorism that enjoys popular support in Third World countries is an evil that is nourished by structural injustice and constant humiliation, and as long as the political and economic powers producing and sustaining that injustice continue doing so, the war waged against the evil of terrorism is doomed to failure, indeed to backfire so as to produce even more of what it purports to eliminate. Unfortunately, liberalism is of little help here, not only because of its traditional link with free-market capitalism, but also because it is blinded by its preoccupation with the individual. On a philosophical level, liberalism’s emphasis on autonomy as both the capacity and the right that crucially defines the individual, and that does so in a normative manner, has the unfortunate consequence that the dignity of the less-than-autonomous, less-than-independent, less-than-successful individual is without solid grounding. In existential(ist) terminology, liberalism’s coupling of dignity with autonomy means that it is ill-equipped to counter the trend that everything pointing to our dependence, vulnerability, mortality, and loneliness as human individuals is ‘bad’, something calling for denial, deception, and shame. The culture (in Alford’s sense, explained in

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Chapter 3) fostered by liberalism’s individualist and autonomy-oriented understanding of what it means to be a human individual gives individuals scant comfort and little guidance in one of their seminal tasks: that of learning how best to come to terms with the fact that their dependence and vulnerability are in fact ineluctable conditions of their existence – conditions which, properly understood, do not threaten or diminish their being human but existentially define it. Instead of offering individuals the sort of symbolic resources required to be able to come to terms with these painful conditions of human existence, the dominant culture in our market-driven society fosters the opposite attitude: denial coupled with the displacement of whatever is found uncomfortable onto specific others. In fairness to liberalism, it must be said that what it meant to remedy was passivity – the supine victim, the parasite who feeds off the welfare system and so the activities of industrious others. Unfortunately, and as observed by Richard Sennett, John Locke and his followers up to the present fired a blunderbuss at this evil, attacking human dependency itself. In denying the dignity of dependence, this tradition of political thinking has made ‘I need you’ seem a shameful admission of personal failure; whereas in the polity, in business, as in private life, it designates the beginning of an honourable connection (Sennett 2002: 10; 2003). As I have observed so often in this book, history has taught us that if individuals come to look upon the conditions in question as wholly negative and unwished-for, wishing that they either disappear or be controlled, the consequence is that they start looking upon (certain) others as targets or containers of the features they cannot tolerate in themselves – the result of which is a willingness to participate in, or to tolerate, evildoing against them. The mechanism is as elemental as it is dangerous, collectively even more so than individually. As I see it, the seriousness of the process described hinges, first and foremost, on whether the security/identity issue is fused with that of sheer survival. For this is when securitization and its corollaries turn truly existential. And no fusion is more explosive with respect to collective evil than that between securitization qua collectivized and obsession with survival qua collectivized. To put the sequence in question somewhat differently, the worst-case scenario is about identity ceasing to be an individual matter, and an optional and non-essentialistic one at that. It is about identity becoming merged with collective fears about security, fears which in their turn are made to appear inextricably linked with the requirements of sheer survival, in which the survival of the individual is seen as dependent upon the survival of the community as such (the

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nation, the race, the ethnic group), such that fighting for the former means being willing to die for the latter. Zygmunt Bauman (2002) observes that ‘survival is essentially an enemy of morality and at war against morality’. That is partly right, partly wrong. We have had plenty of occasion to see that survival may indeed bring out the worst in people, and only that – provided the survival their actions are spurred on by is the survival of themselves and their own group and taken as precluding that of certain others. But there is also the very human phenomenon of wishing to secure the survival of genuine others, motivating actions that bring out the best in us and whose nature is surely of the greatest moral import. Is not that what empathy, pity, compassion are all about, what makes them moral precisely qua other-directed emotions and acts? The lesson seems to be that not survival per se but its its priorities, range, and scope are what makes a truly moral difference. Presently, this world of ours is not in a very good shape – witness not only the war on terror and the deeply troubling causes producing as well as constantly reproducing it; witness also the rapidly growing problem of climate change. Both, albeit for different reasons, remind us that nothing less than humanity’s survival is at stake. Political and ecologic catastrophes have at least one thing in common: both represent an opportunity for mourning and reparation, for giving up narcissistic and grandiose fantasies as entertained by entire collectivities no less than by single individuals. Simultaneously, both represent an opportunity to appear impermeable, to repudiate vulnerability itself, precisely in the immediate wake of its unprecedented exposure for all to see (Butler 2004: 40). Inability to learn from past wrongs and from grand delusions about independency, invulnerability, and immortality may again and again prevail over the ability to learn from them. But the more objectively global the stakes involved, the more subjectively shared they become, the less divisive they might prove, this time around. Such is the lesson owed not so much the victims of yesterday’s collective evil as ourselves and, in particular, the generations hoping to inherit an inhabitable earth after us.

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Index

adiaphorization 34 Adorno, Theodor W. 19, 20, 123, 240, 261 agency 99, 102, 146, 158, 216–19 agentic state 18, 21 Akashi, Yasushi 249 Alexander, Jeffrey 286–7 Alford, C. Fred 6–7, 88–9, 104–44, 181–2, 184–5, 239–40, 261, 289 Levinas, the Frankfurt School, and Psychoanalysis 143 The Psychoanalytic Theory of Greek Tragedy 121 The Self in Social Theory 119, 130 What Evil Means to Us 104–44 Whistleblowers 143 Allen, Beverly 196–202 Rape Warfare 196 Amery, Jean 204, 275–6 Annan, Kofi 255–6 Arcel, Tata Libby 196, 198, 200–1, 213, 215, 218 War Violence, Trauma and the Coping Process 196 Arendt, Hannah 2, 5–6, 15–16, 49, 52–103, 202, 222–7, 271–2 Eichmann in Jerusalem 21, 52 The Human Condition 80 The Life of the Mind 53, 58 Love and Saint Augustine 54–6 The Origins of Totalitarianism 72 Aristotle, 257–60 Auestad, Lene 62 Augustine, St 53 The City of God 54 Confessions 59 autistic-contiguous position 110, 114–15

310

Bagge Laustsen, Carsten 168 Bartov, Omer 44–5 banality of evil 5, 20, 69, 226 Bauer, Yehuda 45 Bauman, Janina 287 Bauman, Zygmunt 2, 5, 14–51, 84–5, 141, 190, 195–6, 298 Modernity and the Holocaust 14–51 Postmodern Ethics 29 Beck, Ulrich 138, 165 Becker, Ernest 107–8 Escape from Evil 107 Bernstein, Richard 98 Best, Werner 101 bestiality 36–7 Bion, Wilfred 171, 172 Bosniaks 156–8 Bourdieu, Pierre 291 Brandt, Willy 282–3 Bringa, Tone 157–8 Browning, Christopher 30, 209–11 Ordinary Men 31, 209 Brownmiller, Susan 200 bureaucracy 19, 44–6, 249–51 bystanders 235–57 Campbell, David 156 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 120 Christopher, Warren 247 Clendinnen, Inga 37–8 Clinton, Bill 152, 242–3, 280 communitarianism 161–2 complicity 193, 217 conscience 54–6, 63–5, 67–77 Copenhagen School 167 corrective justice 257–8 Cosic, Dobrica 149, 178

Index culture 120–2, 143, 296 Cushman, Thomas 2, 106 dehumanization 17, 33, 35, 85–9, 93–6, 102 demonization 129 dependency 223 depressive position 116–17 Diner, Dan 15 distantiation 8, 17, 18–19 Doubt, Keith 248–51 Douglas, Mary 185 Purity and Danger 185 Drakulic, Slavenka 203 As If I Am Not There 203 dread 111 du Gay, Paul 44–5 Dufour, Dany-Robert 292 Durkheim, Emile 22, 27, 34, 106, 286 Eichmann, Adolf 5, 55–7, 59–61, 64–5, 66–70, 135–8, 233–4, 263–5 Eide, Espen Barth 191 Einsatzgruppen 43 empathy 11, 32, 206, 223 envy 100, 124–7 ‘ethnic cleansing’ 187–96, 197 evil 2 collective 7, 21 individual 7 as malum (St Augustine) 54, 56–8 Fine, Robert 87, 89 forgiveness 274–8 Frankfurt School 15 Freud, Sigmund 4, 47, 68, 70, 107, 113, 191, 266 Fromm, Erich 71, 112–13, 164 Escape from Freedom 71, 112 Garrard, Eve 276–7 genocide 155–9, 189–91, 236–7 genocidal logic 175–7, 260–2 genocidal rape 211–16, 272–4 Giddens, Anthony 138 Girard, Rene 182–8, 211 Violence and the Sacred 182 globalization 291–6 Goffman, Erving 248 Goldhagen, Daniel J. 6, 29–34 Hitler’s Willing Executioners 29 goodness 126–8 greed 126, 258 Gross, Jan 39–42 Neighbors 39 Grotius, Hugo 254 guilt 74–6, 216, 217, 285–8

311

Habermas, Ju¨rgen 3, 177, 285–6 hardness 60 Hegel, Georg W. F. 76, 83, 160, 270, 276 Heidegger, Martin 53, 56–8, 71–7 Being and Time/Sein und Zeit 53, 56–7, 71–6 das Man 73–4, 82–3 Herak, Borislav 207–8 Herbert, Ulrich 43, 96–7, 101, 147 Heydrich, Reinhard 43, 96, 285 Hilberg, Raul 16–17, 191, 194 Himmler, Heinrich 96, 174, 210 Hitler, Adolf 70, 140, 180 Mein Kampf 181 Hobbes, Thomas 119, 137 Holocaust 14–51 Horkheimer, Max 19, 20, 123 The Authoritarian Personality 19 The Dialectic of Enlightenment 123–4 Ho¨ss, Rudolf 60, 90 human rights 229–30 humiliation 134 Huntington, Samuel 153 ideology 168–71 Ignatieff, Michael 261, 265–7, 278, 281 immorality 3 impartiality 221–4, 241–53 indifference 206, 229–35, 252 individualization 138–9, 159–66 insensitivity 60 intellectuals 134, 169 Jaspers, Karl 205, 286 Jedwabne 39–40 Jennings, Peter 250 Jonas, Hans 238 Ju¨nger, Ernst 108 justice 221–2 Kant, Immanuel 68, 72, 98, 127–8, 141–2, 258–60 Kaplan, Robert 152 Karadzic, Radovan 10, 134, 178, 229–33, 280 Katz, Jack 38 The Seductions of Crime 38 Kekes, John 258 Kelman, Herbert 16 Kierkegaard, Søren 76 Kissinger, Henry 153 Klein, Melanie 10, 104, 114–20, 120–33, 143–4, 170, 181, 294 Kohut, Heinz 4, 117, 130 Kok, Wim 282–3 Kristallnacht 33 Krstic, Radislav 255

312

Index

Lacan, Jacques 71 Laden, Osama Bin 296 Lang, Berel 232, 233–5 Lasch, Christopher 132, 138 The Culture of Narcissism 138 The Minimal Self 138 Lemkin, Raphael 157–8 Levi, Primo 36, 38, 204, 227 Levinas, Emmanuel 10–11, 27–9, 48, 143–4, 214, 231, 238–40, 246 liberalism 161–6, 296–7 Lifton, Robert Jay 50 The Nazi Doctors 50 Lorenz, Konrad 47 Luban, David 53, 54, 56–8, 78

paranoid-schizoid position 115–16, 118–20, 171 phronesis 78 pity 15–16, 28, 137, 139 Plato 61 Gorgias 61 Plavsic, Biljana 274 Police Battalion 30, 45, 209 projection 109 projective identification 115–16, 172 proximity 8, 23–7, 33, 36, 43, 95, 100–1, 102–3, 145–6, 262–3 Pot, Pol 134 punishment 270 purposive rationality 34

McGinn, Colin 128 MacIntyre, Alasdair 166, 229–33 Maass, Peter 193 Maritain, Jacques 229 Markovic, Mihailo 10 masculinity 208 May, Larry 240–1 Mestrovic, Stjepan 243–4 Mielke, Fred 50 Milgram, Stanley 3, 5–6, 24–6, 47–8, 104–6 Mill, John Stuart 234 Milosevic, Slobodan 12, 153, 178–80, 280–1, 295 Mitscherlich, Alexander 50, 70 The Inability to Mourn/Die Unfa¨higkeit zu Trauern 70 Mitscherlich, Margarete 70 Mladic, Ratko 192, 248, 255, 274, 280 modernity 148–9 moral capacity 22–3 Morris, David 11 Mu¨ller-Hill, Benno 50

radical evil 98, 127–8 Ram Plan 188–9, 196, 200 Rank, Otto 107, 108 Rawls, John 137 reconciliation 272–4 Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) 43–4 resentment 275–6 responsibility 24–9, 71, 86–9, 102–3, 217–18, 236, 238–41, 268, 281–3 Ricoeur, Paul 237–8 Rieff, David 192 Riesman, David 4, 96 The Lonely Crowd 4 Rose, Michael 250–1 Rousset, David 14 Rwanda 1, 41, 213, 254

Nahimana, Ferdinand 254 Nazi Weltanschauung 45 neutrality 241–53 Niarchos, C. N. 212 Nietzsche, Friedrich 70, 83 Nino, Carlos 269–70 numbing 207 Nuremberg Laws 22 Nussbaum, Martha 133 Ogden, Thomas 110, 114, 120 Omarska 194 Orientalism 153 Osiel, Mark 85–6 Owen, David 247–8, 252

sacrifice 182 sadism 106–7 sadomasochism 112–13 Safranski, Ru¨diger 140 Sartre, Jean-Paul 74, 76, 102 scapegoating 7 Scarry, Elaine 213–14, 217 The Body in Pain 213, 215 Scholem, Gershom 55 Scott, Joanna V. 54 securitization 167–9, 178, 179, 295 Segal, Hanna 119, 120 selfishness 98 Sells, Michael 151–3, 192–3 The Bridge Betrayed 151 Sennett, Richard 138, 165, 297 September 11 3, 13, 296 Sereny, Gitta 35, 101, 227, 285 Seselj, Vojislav 178–9 Shakespeare, William 63, 77 shame 136–7, 203–5 vicarious shame 210–11, 277

Index Sharon, Ariel 287 Simmel, Georg 34 Socrates 2, 59, 61–5, 258 Sofsky, Wolfgang 36–7 The Order of Terror/Die Ordnung des Terrors 36 Sontag, Susan 244 Srebrenica 248, 255, 279 Stangl, Franz 35, 101, 227 Sta¨nicke, Erik 10 Stark, Judith C. 54 Stiglmayer, Alexandra 207 Stoltenberg, Thorvald 252 Stone, Dan 47 Storfer, Bertold 89–96 suffering 222–4 superfluousness 98–9, 100 surrogate victim 182–4 symbol 120–3 temptation 63, 66 Tester, Keith 229–33, 245 thinking 69, 80, 222–6 thoughtlessness 59–60 Todorov, Tzvetan 204 tolerance 234 torture 213–15 To¨nnies, Ferdinand 34 transitional object 120–1 trauma 175, 178, 179, 202, 215 truth 267–9

313

Tudjman, Franjo 153 Turner, Victor 185 The Ritual Process 185 Vetlesen, Arne Johan 10 Perception, Empathy, and Judgment 11, 32 Villa, Dana 67–8, 76 Arendt and Heidegger 76 Voegelin, Eric 58 Volkan, Vamik 179–81 Vranic, Seada 197 Vulliamy, Ed 271 vulnerability 11, 223, 289 Weber, Max 15, 34, 45, 249–50 whistleblowers 88–9 Wiesenthal, Simon 233 Wildt, Michael 43, 45 Winnicott, Donald 117–18, 120–3, 131–2, 173 Wojak, Irmtrud 96 Eichmanns Memoiren 96 Wolin, Richard 79, 82 Heidegger’s Children 79 Wæver, Ole 168 Yugoslavia 1 Young, Hugo 280 Zizek, Slavoj 2, 71, 168

Other books in the series (continued from page ii) NINA ELIASOPH,

Avoiding Politics Translated by N I C H O L A S L E V I S A N D A M O S W E I S Z , Intellectuals and the Nation P H I L I P S M I T H , The New American Cultural Sociology M E Y D A Y E G E N O G L U , Colonial Fantasies L A U R A D E S F O R E D L E S , Symbol and Ritual in the New Spain R O N E Y E R M A N & A N D R E W J A M I S O N , Music and Social Movements S C O T T B R A V M A N N , Queer Fictions of the Past S T E V E N S E I D M A N , Difference Troubles C H A N D R A M U K E R J I , Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles L E O N H . M A Y H E W , The New Public L Y N N R A P A P O R T , Jews in Germany after the Holocaust M I C H A E L M U L K A Y , The Embryo Research Debate L Y N E T T E P . S P I L L M A N , Nation and Commemoration S A R A H M . C O R S E , Nationalism and Literature D A R N E L L M . H U N T , Screening the Los Angeles ‘Riots’ P A U L L I C H T E R M A N , The Search for Political Community A L B E R T O M E L U C C I , Challenging Codes A L B E R T O M E L U C C I , The Playing Self K E N N E T H H . T U C K E R , J R ., French Revolutionary Syndicalism and the Public Sphere R O G E R F R I E D L A N D A N D R I C H A R D H E C H T , To Rule Jerusalem S U Z A N N E R . K I R S C H N E R , The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis L I N D A N I C H O L S O N A N D S T E V E N S E I D M A N , Social Postmodernism I L A N A F R I E D R I C H S I L B E R , Virtuosity, Charisma and Social Order BERNHARD GIESEN,