From: Jackie Hulme <cadwallader@igc.org>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.latin-america
Date: 27 Jul 92 12:27 PDT
Subject: THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
Nf-ID: #N:cdp:1473800110:000:5297
Nf-From: cdp.UUCP!cadwallader    Jul 27 12:27:00 1992


895
 
July 27, 1992
THE GENOCIDAL MENTALITY
 
Preface by Robert Jay Lifton
 
LONG BEFORE embarking on a study of Nazi doctors in the late 1970S, I 
had been much concerned with psychological and moral dimensions of 
nuclear threat. By the time I published The Nazi Doctors: Medical 
Killing and the Psychology of Genocide in 1986, I was convinced that 
certain forms of behavior in German society during the Nazi period 
had relevance for American and Soviet behavior in connection with 
nuclear weapons. To bear witness as a scholar to these Nazi actions 
required looking back to confront them and looking ahead to apply 
what I could learn from them. 
During the early 1980s, Eric Markusen and I were in active dialogue 
about these matters. He was assisting me with research on Nazi 
doctors and at the same time teaching courses on nuclear weapons and 
completing his dissertation connecting strategic bombing during the 
Second World War with certain themes of the Nazi Holocaust. It was he 
who suggested that we collaborate on a book; and, over time, we came 
to our particular way of doing that. 
We noted that many people were invoking comparisons with the 
Holocaust in discussing nuclear dangers, but we felt that these 
comparisons needed to be made more systematically and in ways that 
stressed differences as well as parallels. The form our book came to 
take, as worked out together, emerged primarily from my discussion of 
general themes of genocide at the end of my study of Nazi doctors. 
And the book's conceptual principles derive mostly from my earlier 
work. Markusen provided insight from his studies of various forms of 
governmental mass killing as well as specific analyses of American 
nuclear-weapons policies. We met frequently in both New York City and 
Wellfleet, Massachusetts, to discuss in detail the structure and 
content of each chapter, and many ideas developed in dialogue. I then 
wrote the chapter, and we continued our dialogue with each of my 
subsequent drafts. 
We make use of a research method we have developed over the years for 
the psychological study of contemporary or recent historical events. 
It is influenced by the work of Erik Erikson, who was the first to 
combine a depth-psychological approach with full intellectual 
immersion into the historical era studied. While Erikson's approach 
focused on the great person in history, mine centers on shared 
themes, on psychological characteristics of a particular group of 
people centrally involved with significant historical forces of their 
era. 
Thus, an early study dealt with Chinese and Western groups exposed to 
"thought reform" (or "brainwashing"), a problem I viewed as by no 
means exclusively Chinese but related to wider tendencies toward 
absolutism or "ideological totalism" in our time. Similarly, I 
related my work on Hiroshima to psychological issues surrounding 
worldwide nuclear threat, and at the end of the study compared 
Hiroshima survivors and those of Nazi camps. My work with Vietnam 
veterans had to do not only with their war but with a person's 
psychological capacity, upon confronting death, to undergo 
significant change in the direction of renunciation of violence. And 
my study of Nazi doctors suggested the extent to which certain 
psychological mechanisms, notably that of <doubling> could be called 
forth by ordinary people in the service of evil 
For all of these studies, I conducted extensjve interviews as a way 
of getting directly at the mind-sets of the people involved, of 
learning (in Isaiah Berlin's phrase) "what it must have been like 
[for them] to think, feel, act." I obtained an empirical body of data 
from which I could draw the shared themes in question, and then 
raised further questions about the social and historical significance 
of these shared psychological themes. 
I also made use of interviews in the present study, in this case with 
scientists who have done weapons work, nuclear strategists, and 
retired military officers of high rank. I interviewed six former 
strategists, two of whom had been presidential advisers, and four of 
whom were scientists as well; six physicists who had been involved 
with weapons work; and three retired admirals. Beyond what they 
revealed about psychological involvement with nuclear weapons, these 
interviews raised larger psychological and moral questions that 
Markusen and I could further explore. 
Some readers will be offended by the use of the Nazi model, however 
we qualify that use and emphasize "disanalogies" as well as 
analogies. I well understand that sentiment. The Nazis, after all, 
probably came as close as any group in history to something on the 
order of naked evil. But that does not mean that they have nothing to 
tell the rest of us. Having immersed myself, over the past three 
decades, in a number of highly destructive events, I am convinced 
that we must confront this dimension of the human psychological and 
historical repertoire. 
The approach is a hopeful one. It assumes that such intellectual and 
moral confrontation can help open the way to alternative 
possibilities in the direction of human realization Eric Markusen and 
I carried out the work described in this volume in precisely that 
spirit of hope.
 
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