| THE PSCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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application of administrative techniques,”121 the Auschwitz killing system could be described
by Dr. B. as “perfect.”
In the process of being improved,
the technology itself comes increasingly to dominate the perpetrators’
field of attention. Thus, the Nazis could reach a state of function in which
(again in Dr. B.’s term) “ethics played no part — the word does
not exist.” The technology helps create a hermetic world in which everyone
is motivated to help make things “work.” And that preoccupation takes
on a sense of everydayness, of normality.
Albert Speer wrote of having
“exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to
his task. … These people were … without any scruples about their
activities.” Speer considered himself to have been the top representative
of a technocracy which had without compunction used all its knowledge in an
assault on humanity.122 While Speer to some
degree tried to hide behind technology in minimizing his own ideological
passion, he rightly stressed the Nazis’ success in rendering their most
murderous actions into technological problems. The term, “reactionary
modernism” is appropriate for the regime’s combination of technocracy
and pre-modern visions and structures.* The “reactionary” part of the
regime’s psyche was anti-technological; and precisely that contradiction
toward technology and modernism — not so much a contradiction as the most
extreme ambivalence — is likely to characterize genocidal regimes.
The rationalized search for a “final solution of the Jewish
question” involved the idea of solving a problem in the most conclusive or
“final” manner. From top to bottom, each perpetrator’s part in
solving the problem can thus be looked upon as essentially technical. And the
pattern can be insidious: for technology does not require the conceptual level
of scientific thought, but tends instead to create a focus on maintenance and
function. Those closely related to it — especially when embracing it to
avoid perceiving themselves as killers — are likely to model themselves
after it. More than that, the very creation of the technology of murder is made
possible by those same “manacles” (expressions of the technological
mind-set)† increasingly transmitted by modern industrial society. Because
it works — or so long as it does — technology can quickly be
perceived as part of the natural order of things, an aspect of nature.
Technological distancing and altering of the moral mind-set was
illuminatingly demonstrated by the striking correlation between attitude and
altitude among American pilots and air crews in Vietnam and Cambodia. B-52
pilots and crews, who bombed at such high altitudes that they |
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* The term is Jeffrey
Herf’s. He sees Ernst Jünger (see page 127) as a key forerunner of
reactionary modernism, and draws upon Klaus Theweleit’s study of fascist
male fantasy to identify Jünger as the prototypical “martial
man” who needs such dichotomies as man/woman, dam/flood, purity/filth,
height/depth in order to achieve domination over the feminine both inside and
outside himself.123
† The phrase
“mind-forged manacles” is William Blake’s, quoted by William
Barrett to suggest our own mental responsibility for these attitudes toward
technology.124 |
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