Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror PDF
Preview Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror
MASS HATE The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror MASS HATE The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror NEIL J. KRESSEL SPRINGER SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, LLC Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data On file Reader Note: The depiction of a human skull on the front cover is computer generated and is not a photograph of an actual human skull. ISBN 978-0-306-45271-0 ISBN 978-1-4899-6084-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-4899-6084-9 © 1996 Neil J. Kressel Originally published by Plenum Press, New York in 1996 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 10 987654321 All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher To Dorit and Sam Contents 1. The Hater's Mind .............................. 1 2. Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia ..................... 13 3. Muslim Extremists in New York ................ 47 4. Rwanda-The Legacy of Inequality ............ 87 5. Why people Followed Hitler ................... 119 6. The Power of the Situation .................... 169 7. The personality of the Perpetrator ............ 211 8. Can Anything Be Done? ....................... 247 Notes ............................................. 283 Index.............................................. 317 vii MASS HATE The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror 1 The Hater's Mind Sick people are made by a sick culture; healthy people are made possible by a healthy culture. But it is just as true that sick individuals make their culture more sick and that healthy individuals make their culture more healthy.1 Abraham Maslow, Psychologist The twentieth century has been a century of hostility, an epoch in which the brutality of humankind has erupted and flowed more expansively than ever before. During the past eight decades, mass hatred has reached genocidal proportions in Turkey, Germany, Indonesia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Burundi, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and elsewhere. Blood has gushed so freely, and with such frequency, that one might consider the urge to kill one's neighbor an inborn characteristic of our species. Moreover, during the latter part of the century, the power to wreak bloody havoc on innocent civilians across the globe has fallen into the hands of terrorists whose hate knows no bounds. By the early years of the next century, these terrorists may possess nuclear devices that will make their previous methods seem quaint. People often ask whether mass hatred could ever again flour ish as it did in Nazi Germany. Only Americans-optimistic by nature, unschooled in world affairs, and protected by a powerful constitution-can deny the obvious, and unnerving, answer. 1 2 • CHAPTER 1 Our century has taken butchery to a new level. It has drawn great minds to evil causes, and introduced nightmarish technolo gies of destruction. Worst of all, it has spawned legitimizing ideo logies that have provided misguided inspiration to tens of mil lions. Unless humanity learns to tame its murderousness, the twenty-first century promises more of the same. The only hope lies in understanding the human impulse to hate and, more im portant, the forces that transform that impulse into action. Throughout the twentieth century, the overwhelming major ity of Americans have been shielded against the worst excesses of human conflict. Despite the best efforts of the Ku Klux Klan, Michigan Militia, Aryan Nation, Nation of Islam, and others, mass hatred in the United States has been, at most, a disturbing side show. The bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City exacted an unprecedented toll in lives but so far has not sparked any campaign of extremist violence. Whether America's golden shield will hold, however, remains to be seen. This book will draw together the results of six decades of research on the psychology of mass hate. It will focus on situations where large portions of nations or cultural groups have partici pated in mass murder, acts of terror, or other atrocities against unarmed civilians selected primarily because of their race, reli gion, ethnicity, nationality, or ideology. The goal is to crawl into the minds of the haters, however despicable, and to share their world, at least momentarily, to learn why they are so willing to act as they do and under what circumstances they might be less likely to take part in violence. Additionally, we will examine the pros pects for an eruption of mass hatred in the United States. Three examples help clarify the central issues of this book, two from the recent past and one from the Nazi era. BOSNIA, 1992: PSYCHOSEXUAL DESTRUCTION An estimate of twenty thousand rapes, offered by indepen dent human rights organizations and European Community in- THE HATER'S MIND • 3 vestigators, may overstate or understate the scale of the terror. The primarily Muslim Bosnian government set the figure at fifty thou sand for the early phase of the war in Bosnia. The first figure is more plausible, though both are difficult to confirm and, therefore, likely to provoke skepticism if cited as authoritative. (A U.N. war crimes commission has collected reports of three thousand rapes and identified about eight hundred victims by name.)2 What ap pears beyond question, however, is that thousands of Muslim girls and women have endured horrifying sexual degradation, some times repeatedly, and often as a prelude to torture or a bullet to the head. And many experts claim that Serbian soldiers participated as part of a sanctioned "ethnic cleansing" campaign. Anna Quin dlen in the New York Times aptly described this campaign as "a particularly sophisticated and brutal form of genocide ... which relies on the psychosexual destruction of those who would bear the next generation of Bosnian Muslims, so hated by the warring Serbs."3 Victims of sexual assault seldom wish to discuss their ordeals, much less embellish and magnify them. Many women probably choose to suffer in silence, owing to shame, shock, societal taboos, and fear of reprisals against loved ones. Thus, we have little reason to doubt the disturbing tales recounted by Bosnian women like Rasema, a thirty-three-year-old mother who resisted a gang rape in front of her two daughters. Her Serbian attackers report edly threatened, "We will cut out your teeth! Do you want us to slaughter your children, to watch us cutting them into pieces, piece after piece?"4 Another Muslim woman, Sofija, was raped every night for many months by five or six different Serbian soldiers.5 Yet another, at the Partizan Sports Center, endured twenty-nine rapes in one night before passing out.6 In Bosnia, during the summer of 1992 and more recently, the bodies of women and girls have become just another battlefield. The scars will remain decades after the military conflict has ended, not least in the tormented lives of children born of forced impregnations. According to feminist author Susan Brownmiller, "there is
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