From: Jackie Hulme <cadwallader@igc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Date: 28 Jul 92 17:39 PDT
Subject: GENOCIDE PROJECT - Part IV
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1473800117:000:26794
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cadwallader    Jul 28 17:39:00 1992


July 28, 1992
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen
Pull 134, 135 and 140 for Preface and Chapter I
 
Chapter 2 - The evolving Genocidal Mentality
 
<You press a button and death flies down ... How can there be 
writhing, mangled bodies? ... It's like listening to a radio account 
of a battle on the other side of the earth. It is too far away, too 
separated to hold reality.
                                CHARLES LINDBERGH
 
        How have we come to this readiness to destroy ourselves and our 
species? Mind-sets have histories, and the history of this one 
includes struggles with the twnetieth-century emergence of, first, 
aviation technology, then atomic weaponry, and finally the hudrogen 
bomb. From the American side, that history can be traced in relation 
to attitudes and policies of the presidential administrations from 
the time of the Second World War to the present. Faced with 
formidable problems and threats, kind and intelligent men were 
subject to <an accredtion of large fears, thoughtless assumptions, 
and incremental decisions>, and the emerging mentality came to be 
associated with necessity, loyalty, and psychological health.
        
THE BRUTALIZING POOWER OF TECHNOLOGY
Neve viewed solely as a weapon, the airplane was the instrument of 
flight, of a whole new dimension in human actigvity. Therefore it was 
uniquely capable of stimulating fantasies of peacetime possibilities 
for lifting worldly burdens, transforming man's sense of time and 
space, transcending geography, knitting together nations and peoples, 
releasing humankind from its biological limits. Flight also resonated 
with the deepest impulses and symbols of religious and particularly 
Christian mythology -- nothing less than Christ's ascension. Its 
realization, then, served as a powerful metaphor for heavenly 
aspirations and even, among the literal-minded, as the palpable 
vehicle for achieving them.
                        MICHAEL S. SHERRY
 
 
        We have mentioned the relationship between brutalization and 
numbing, and the silent brutalization that can be associated with 
weapons of high technology. If airmen themselves were "too far away, 
too separated> from <writhying, mangled bodies> to <hold reality,> 
that process held even less reality for those making decisions from 
the ground. The people involved, though by no means inherently brutal 
or bloodthirsty, were in the grip of a rationale for weapons use, a 
rationale that allowed them to separate themselves emotionally from 
the human consequences of that use -- as in the practice of strategic 
bombing which set the stage for the use of atomic weapons.
 
STTRATEGIC BOMBING OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR
        STRATEGIC BOMBING is part of an overall policy or strategy, such 
as destroying the enemy's industrial capacity or generalmorale, as 
opposed to TACTICAL BOMBING employed as part of an immediate battle 
or effort to defeat an enemy force or take a city. In practice, 
strategic bombing involved the systematic killing of hundreds of 
thousands of people, the overwhelming majority of whom were non-
combattants.
        The area bombing of civilians had begun almost with the 
discovery of the airplane at the turn of the century, strategic 
bombing having been attempted even with the primitive flying machines 
of the First World War* The results were inconclusive: but given the 
horrors of ground fighting, air power came to be seen as NOT ONLY A 
TECHNICAL BUT A MORAL ADVANCE. It was viewed as <a merciful 
substitute for the hell of the trenches,> and even, at least tomany 
observers, as an escape from, rather than an extension of, the 
slaughter of modern war. As the ranks of the air visionaries 
increased (to include Milly Mitchell in the United States and Basil 
H. Liddell Hart and Hugh Trenchard in England), all came to stress 
the potential of air warfare to demoralize populations together with 
its relative humanity.
        <Of all the belligerents of World War II,> a leading American 
historian of area bombing tells us, <only Great Britain and the 
United States had made a strong committment to the strategic air 
offensive BEFORE the conflict started, and only they were able to 
mount and sustain such offensives once the war began> (italics 
added). In spite of their favorable response to Franklin Roosevelt's 
appeal of 1 September 1939 to all belligerents in the Second World 
War to avoid the bombing of civilians, the British, with Trenchard 
now their leading air theorist, clearly had contingency plans for 
implementing srategic bombing. For the British, as later for the 
Americans, there was a <piecemeal evolution of air war,> as it became 
possible for the Allies to bomb German cities.
        There was an attempt, especially on the part of the Americans, 
to maintain a concept of <precision bombing> -- aiming bombs not 
randomly, but at specific miliytary and industrial ttargets -- a 
concept that proved to be extremely difficult to realize. Moreover, 
daytime raids, necessary for even a modicum of precision, resulted in 
devastating losses of planes and airmen. America gradually adopted 
the policy of area bombing it had initially resisted upon joining the 
European air offensive in mid-1942; earlier policies of 
discrimination or precision in targeting gave way to <blind> bombing 
by means of radar, which <depended for effectiveness upon drenching 
an area with bombs.> Yet the concept of precision could serve as a 
justification for strategic bombing.
        Nazi evil did play an important part in the overall dynamic. In 
their early strategic bombing, the British saw themselves as 
retaliating for Nazi bombing of civilian populations -- in Warsaw in 
late 1939, and in 1940 in Rotterdam, a London residential area, and 
the small city of Coventry. But it turned out that the Nazi air 
actions, cruel as they were, tended to be in support of ground 
operations o to result from communication confusions (both factors 
affacted the bombing of Rotterdam), accidental (the London 
residential area), or as a form of limited Nazi reprisal (switching 
from military to civilian targets in raids over London, and the 
killing of five hundred civilians in Coventry). In the case of the 
BRitish, however, there was a clear directive to Bomber Command in 
February 1942 that <the primary bjective of your operations should 
now be focused on the morale of the enemy civil population and, in 
particular, of the industrial workers.> But Churchill and other 
British leaders, in going ahead with this policy, were affected by 
their increasing sense of Nazi malignancy and threat (and the Germans 
were to employ, toward the end of the war, their own indiscriminate 
civilian-targeted weapons, the V-1 and V-2 rockets). There followed 
massive incendiary attacks on virtually all major German cities, 
culminating in the joint British and American attack on Dresden of 13 
February 1945. Within that sequence, the <four furious assults> on 
Hamburg in late July and early August 1943 had resulted in the first 
great firestorm of the war and in the abandonment of even a pretense 
of industrial targeting in the systematic bombing of residential 
areas, so that any destruction of factories was only a <bonus>.
        American theorists were ready to transfer these techniques to 
the Pacific war, long aware that, as Billy Mitchell had put it,  
<towns, ... built largely of wood and paper, ... form the greatest 
aerial targets the world has ever seen>; and <Incendiary projectiles 
would burn the cities to the ground in short order.> <With an eye to 
the bombing of Japan,> American experts studied the Hamburg firestorm 
carefully. there was some reluctance about area bombing on the part 
of the person first designated to be in charge, Brigadier General 
Haywood S. Hansell Jr.: Je diod it when ordered, but without great 
enthusiasm or effect. While it is uncertain whether this reluctance 
derived solely from his committment to the doctrine of precision 
bombing, which he had helped to formulate, or from moral reservations 
as well, he was soon replaced by GENERAL CURTIS E. LEMAY**, who 
clearly had no such reservations. Then, and subsequently, LeMay was 
to prove himself a zealous, even fanatic, advocate of air warfare in 
general and strategic bombing in particular. He also demonstrated 
tactical ingenuity in combining several new bombing methods -- 
keeping the B-29s at low altitudes and making extensive use of 
incendiary bombs -- to produce the success of the large Tokyo riad on 
9 and 10Marrch 1945. But while that raid was LeMay's greatest Second 
World War moment, it cannot be understoood as merely a product of his 
personal energies and style. It resulted, as the historial Michael 
Sherry tells us, from <pressures upon and within the Air Force to 
secure an incontrovertible sucess, and to do so before invasion 
closed the opportunity.>
        That bureaucratic pressure was supported by impulses for revenge 
upon the Japanese for their bombing of Pearl Harbor and extreme abuse 
of American prisoners of war. Also of great importance were ongoing 
technological advances involving bombers, targeting, and incendiary 
materials. These technological advances expanded what was 
operationally possible, so that <bombing forces, British or American, 
did what they could do best, not necessarily what it was best to do.> 
Contributing greatly to the technological breakthroughs was early 
collaboration between Air Force authorities and civilian scientists 
and technologists, and a <civilian militarism> that involved 
professionals of all kinds. Military officer and civilian alike then 
found themselves <concentrating their energies on the perfection of 
technique rather than the enemy.> Freeman Dyson, himself a talented 
physicist enlisted for the British war effort, noted later how <the 
more technological the war becomes, the more disastrously a bad 
choice of means whill change a good cause into evil>; and how 
<science and technology ... made evil anonymous.>@  The technological 
distancing of combat airmen, as Lindbergh observed, rendered the evil 
unreal. Americans at home were, of course, radically removed from the 
bombing -- a <distance.... [that] not only enhanced its 
attractiveness in the immediate struggle, but blinded awareness of 
future perils>; while many high-ranking American and British air 
officers had similar <difficulty viewing the air war any more 
realistically than did the general public ... especially when that 
war intensified in 1944.>
        In their drive to destroy an evil enemy in any way possible and 
to achieve vengeance for enemy cruelties, Allied planners preferred 
not to see the reality of the bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and 
Tokyo. At Dresden at least forty thousand people were killed 
(estmates go as high as two hundred and fifty thousand) in a city 
virtually undefended and teeming with civilian refugees; the 
firestorm was visible to bomber crews two hundred miles away.# At 
Hamburg, where it is also believed that more than forty thousand 
Germans died, people had a sense of a <world-ending event, one 
transcending all human experience and imagination...a speechless 
horror, one usually identified later only with the victims of atomic 
bombing.> In the Tokyo raid, as many as one hundred and thirty 
thousand people were killed. Improved incendiary materials and 
techniques created an even more furious firestorm which was 
<rapaciously expansive,...a giant bellows to super heat the air to 
1800 degrees Fahrenheit,> so that <entire block fromts burst into 
flames before the main body of fire reached them.> That American raid 
on Tokyo, a city with an extraordinary population density, caused 
greater devastation and killed more people than any single air attack 
in human history, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki.
 
THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS
        For many military and political leaders, the atomic weapons were 
simply more efficient vehicles for the continuing policy of strategic 
bombing; by that time, <the distinction between *military target* and 
*city* had totally collapsed.> In a sense, the brutalization during 
the war had already settled the matter: the Stimson Committee charged 
with making decisions about the use of the atomic weapon never really 
considered NOT using it. Indeed, such restraint during wartime would 
have been remarkable, though a good case has been made for the 
special opportunity for such restraint created by the Japanese 
surrender overtures already received. President Truman himself, 
enraged by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and their extreme 
abuse of Ameican prisoners of war, declared, <When you have to deal 
with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast.> To be sure, many 
American decision makers genuinely believed that use of the weapons 
would save lives by ending the war quickly. There is also evidence 
that strengthening the American position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union 
was an important factor, as was the impulse to make use of something 
produced with such great cost and effort (and the difficulty of 
explaining to a goncressional investigation committee why it was not 
used), as well as everyone's enormous curiosity to see whether the 
device would *work*.
        Was racism a factor in the American use of the atomic bomb on 
the Japanese? Work on the bomb had originated from specific fear that 
the Germans would make it first, and had continued as a secret 
portion of the general war effort. But the Hapanese, more than the 
Germans, were seen as alien, as fanatical (in their willingness to 
die or kill for the emperor), and as murderously cruel (in their 
treatment of American prisoners of war). the Japanese were more 
readily dehumanized, viewed as <animals> or as <rats and apes,> so 
that an atmosphere was created in which the chairman of the War 
Manpower Commission could favor <the extermination of the Japanese in 
toto.> There were surely racist attitudes on the part of Americans -- 
and, indeed, of the Japanese toward Americans as well, and there is 
no doubt that these influenced political and military attitudes and 
policies. But rather than serving as a primary reason for the bomb's 
use, they probably blended with the factors already mentioned in the 
irreversible momentum toward that use, a momentum fueled by the 
escalation of violence in general and by strategic bombing in 
particular.
        American scientists involved in making the bomb at the Los 
Alamos laaboratory or contributing to the process from the MET 
laboratory in Chicago or from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, thought little 
about mass killing or genocide; they mostly understood themselves as 
contributing their special knowledge to their country's need to 
defeat an evil and forbidable enemy and end a terrible war.@@ 
Hoevering over the entire Manhattan Project, however, was the 
possibility of the weapon's capacity for uncontrollable destruction. 
As eary as 1942, during exchanges among the leading scientists prior 
to the formation of the Los Alamos laboratory, the Hungarian-born 
physicist Edward Teller raised the question whether there was a 
danger of the bomb's igniting the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the 
hydrogen in the oceans sufficiently to burn up the world. Although 
Oppenheimer came to conclude, with considerable relief, that such an 
uncontrollable, even world-ending explosion was impossible, 
apprehension about it never entirely left the project. During the 
hours just preceeding the Trinity test explosion of 16 July 1945, 
Fermi offered to take bets from scientific colleagues <on whether or 
not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would 
merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.> Fermi was 
undoubtedly engaging in gallows humor (either of those two outcomes 
would have allowed little prospect of collecting on a wager) that 
barely covered over anxiety about the weapon's potential for 
destruction. And although General Leslie Groves, the military head of 
the project, was <annoyed> with Fermi's behavior, he himself took 
precautions against unforseen effects by ordering the preparation of 
a public statement explaining the sudden death of a large number of 
scientists and by informing the governor of New Mexico that he might 
have to declare martial law.
        To be sure, there were expressions of resistance to this overall 
pattern of numbing: Chicago scientists petitioned against the bomb's 
use, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Ralph Bard urged restraint 
in the form of a preliminary warning abou"he bomb in order to 
preserve America's standing <as a great human itarian nation.> But 
these were cries in the night.
        The consequences were unprecedented. The single Hiroshima bomb 
exploded, with a force equivalent to twenty thousand tons of TNT, 
1,800 feet in the air near the center of a flat city built mainbly of 
wood. Totally destroyed were an area (including residential, 
commercial, industrial, and military structures) extending 3,000 
meters (about two miles) in all directions; and sixty thousant of 
ninety thousand buildings within 5,000 meters (over three miles), an 
area roughly encompassing the city limits. Flash burns from the heat 
generated by the release of an enormous amount of radiant energy 
occurred at distances of more than 4,000 meters (two and a half 
miles), depending upon the type and amount of clothing worn and the 
shielding afforded by immediate surroundings. Injuries from the 
blast, and from splintered flass and falling debris, occurred 
throughout the city and beyond.
        The number of deaths, immediately and over a period of time, 
will probably never be fully known. Variously estimated from sixty 
three thousand to two hundred and forty thousand or more, the 
official figure is usually given as seventy eight thousand; but the 
city of Hiroshima estimates two hundred thousand -- or between twenty 
five percent and fifty percent of the city's daytime population. The 
enormous disparity is related to the existed, to differing methods of 
calculation, and to emotional influences at times affecting 
estimators. What is clear is that from the moment of the explosion 
ALL OF HIROSHIMA IMMEDIATELY BECAME INVOLVED IN THE ATOMIC DISASTER -
- a disaster that had, and has, no end point. Delayed radiation 
effects, mainly in the form of leukemia and cancer are still being 
recorded; and fears of these effects extend over a survivor's 
lifetime and, given the possibility of their hereditary transmission, 
into future generations. A sense of the totality of the experience 
never left survivors' minds, as they later reported: <I thought this 
was the end of Hiroshima, of Japan, of humankind>; <Hiroshima had 
disappeared...That was mainly what I saw -- Hiroshima just didn't 
exist>; and <My body seemed all black, everything seemed dard, dark 
all over. Then I thought, *the world is ending*.> This devastation 
and sense of the end of the world resulted not from thousands of 
firebombs and hundreds of attacking bombers as in Tokyo, Dresden, and 
Hamburg; rather, it was one plane, one bomb, one city.
        When American leaders learned about the effects of the atomic 
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were able, at least at first, 
to continue to view the use of the new weapon as merely a 
continuation of strategic bombing, or of what has been called <the 
science of city-burning.> And this numbed view could be maintained by 
justifying the use of the bomb. That was done, almost lyrically and 
salvationally, by no less a figure than the British Prime Minister, 
Winston Churchill: <To avert a vast, indefinite butchery, to bring 
the war to an end, to give peace to the world, to lay healing hands 
upon its tortured peoples by a manifestation of overwhelming power at 
the cost of a few explosions, seemed, after all our toils and perils, 
a miracle of deliverance.> Yet at the same time, Americans most 
closely involved (decision makers and scientists) and eventually 
everyone else came to recognize that this time things had gone much 
further, that strategic bombing had transcended itself. But that 
second view has never been fuly able to displace the first, the sense 
of the bomb as another weapon in the strategic sequence, as a basis 
for policy.
 
THE HYDROGEN BOMB
        The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this 
weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction 
a danger to himanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing 
considered in any light.
                        ENRICO FERMI AND I.I. RABI
 
        The destructive power of the hydrogen bomb was as revolutionary 
in respect to the atomic bomb as was the latter to conventional 
weaponry. The atomic bomb involves the release of energy through the 
fission, or splitting of the nuclei, of such heavy atoms as uranium 
or plutonium; it requires the existence of a certain amount -- a 
critical mass -- of fissionable material in order to produce the 
necessary *chain reaction* that creates the explosion. The hydrogen 
bomb, in contrast, produces energy from the joining together, or 
fusion, of lighter elements into heavier ones,  means of a rteaction 
produced under very high temperatures .## No critical mass is 
required; and once the fusion has begun, the energy released promotes 
additional burning or explosive power so that <a fusion can...be made 
arbitrarily large, as a fire can be made arbitrarily large, by piling 
on more fuel.> the hydrogen bomb was revolutionary in a moral sense 
as well. Now no one could plead ignorance of its effects. What the 
new weapon could do was known. The human power to destroy had now 
become, in the precise meanings of the words, limitless, infinite.
        that was the essence of the report of 30 October 1949 issued by 
the General Advisory Committee (chaired by J. robert Oppenheimer) to 
the Atomic Energy Commission. The report not only advised *strongly* 
against an all-out effort to make the hydrogen bomb, but also made 
clear that the new weapon would be <in a totally different category 
from an atomic bomb,> with <no inherent limit in the destructive 
power that may be at%ned.> It pointed out that the weapon's use 
<would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians,> 
so that <a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.> such 
warning voices as in the minority report signed by the physicists 
Enrico Germi and I.I. Rabi (quoted above) could not be heard in the 
agitated atmosphere of the cold war. In their distrust of the Soviet 
Union, American decision makers had vividly in mind the Greek civil 
war of 1946-48, the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the 
Berlin crisis of 1948-49, and the communist victory in China in 1949. 
Stalin replaced Hitler as a looming figure of evil. But the key event 
was the Soviet testing of an atomic bomb in the summer of 1949, which 
in turn intensified American fears that the Soviets could, before 
long, make their own *super* or hydrogen bomb. Four days before 
President Truman's decision to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb, Klaus 
Fuchs, who had been greatly involved in early British-American work 
on the super, was arrested for espionage. To suggest ethical 
considerations under those conditions was, as one participant in the 
deliberations put it, <like saying *no* to a steamroller.>
        With the development of the hydrogen bomb, the genocidal 
mentality took shape. That is, a weapon was being made that was known 
to be capable of destroying entire human populations -- millions of 
people; and policies were formulated for its potential use. That 
mentality had, as we have seen, evolved slowly through the strategic 
bombing of the Second World War, to the making and using of atomic 
bombs in 1945, and to the progressive postwar weapons development (by 
December 1948, warplan Trojan called for dropping 133 atomic bombs on 
seventy Soviet cities in ways that would result in tens of millions 
of immediate deaths.) But the commitment to the hydrogen bomb in the 
face of kowledge that it involved a completely new dimension of 
destruction -- and at a time when there was no war but only FEAR OF 
AN ENEMY -- was a quantim leap in this genicidal connection between 
mind and weapon. In the United States and the Soviet Union, which 
quickly plunged ahead with its own hydrogen bomb development, the 
genocidal mentality took shape in decision makers, weapons designers 
and strategists, and large portions of the general population. So 
powerful had become the forces shaping that mentality that to refuse 
it became an act of resistance.
 
End of part I
Next: Crude deterrence versus flexible response; Asssured, Mutually 
Assured, Destruction; Aggressive Vulnerability; Protracted Nuclear 
War and Ethnic Targeting; War Fighting and Peace-Mindedness; Threat 
and Use; Arms Control Versus the Genocidal Mentality; Nuclear 
Normality.
 
        
 
------------
* As early as 1910, Giulio Douhet, the Italian air-warfare visionary, 
had declared, <From above one can see wlll and from above one can 
strike easily.>
 
**[NDT: a recent article in NYT identifies General Curtis LeMay as 
the probable model for the lunatic base commander in Dr Strangelove.]
 
@ Inadvertently, Dyson revealed how that kind of evil begets more 
evil, as he concluded that <once we had got ourselves into the 
business of bombing cities, we might as well do the job completely 
and get it over with.>
 
# The American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a prisoner of war in Dresden 
at the time, described the city as having been made into <one big 
flame> that <ate everything organic, everything that would burn,> so 
that when he and others came our of a shelter, <Dresden was like the 
moon...nothing but minerals. The stones were not. Everything else in 
the neighborhood was dead.>
 
@@ Such was the extent of wartime collousness among scientists, 
however, that in April 1943, the brilliant Italian physicist Enrico 
Fermi suggested to the project director, Robert Oppenheimer, that 
radioactive fission products might be used to poison the German food 
supply. Oppenheimer, after considering the proplsal seriously and 
discussing it with others, came to the conclusion that strontium 90 
<appears to offer the highest promise,> but recommended holding back 
because <we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food 
sufficient to kill a half a million men.>
 
## A fusion, or hydrogen bomb, requires an optimal temperature of one 
billion degrees, though it can proceed at ten million degrees, the 
temperature required for the fissioning of plutonium.

Newsgroups: soc.culture.german,soc.culture.soviet