| THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE |
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give them special priority, while contributing to a
partial sense that one is not murdering people at all but doing something
benign. This deamplification of language — with its attendant numbing,
denial, and derealization — may extend to the point of relative silence,
thereby maintaining the mixture of part-secrecy and “middle
knowledge” likely to surround genocide.
Max Weber, though
recognizing the necessity of bureaucracies, was acutely aware of their danger,
especially to the mind. He equated bureaucracy with the “inanimate
machine” of “mind objectified” and saw the phenomenon of
bureaucratic organization as “busy fabricating the shell of bondage which
men will perhaps be forced to inhabit some day, as powerless as the fellahs of
ancient Egypt.”130 The Nazi genocidal
project demonstrated that the human structure can be rendered relatively
“inanimate” and “machine”-like, and the mind of
bureaucratic perpetrators sufficiently “objectified” that the killing
was rarely experienced in human terms, as vital beings murdering other vital
beings. An important part of bureaucratic function is its sealing off of
perpetrators from outside influences, so that intrabureaucratic concerns become
the entire universe of discourse. What can result has been termed “group
think,” a process by which bureaucracies can make decisions that are
disastrous for all concerned and, when viewed retrospectively, wildly
inappropriate and irrational. Irving Janis attributes “group think”
to the collective need for cohesiveness and unity and to the avoidance of the
kind of conflict engendered by dissenting voices.131 But when the group concerned is a genocidal
bureaucracy, there is a powerful impulse, both from without and within, to
create absolute barriers of thought and feeling between itself and the outside
world. Only then can the strange assumptions of virtue within the group be
maintained: ideological (“We are doing this for revitalization of our
people”), technical (“What is most efficient is best for
everyone”), and therapeutic (“We are healing our race and going about
it as humanely as possible”).
The genocidal bureaucracy
contributes also to collective feelings of inevitability. The elaborateness of
the bureaucracy’s organization conveys a sense of the inexorable —
that one might as well (as perpetrator or, victim). go along because nothing
can be done. The bureaucracy’s structure and function — the murderous
flow of its action — becomes itself the rationale, as clarity of cause and
effect gives way to a sense not only of inevitability but of necessity.
Ancillary bureaucracies can be all too readily enlisted to carry out
the genocide, as in the case of the German railroad organization in
transporting Jews to the death camps while holding strictly to its own
conventional bureaucratic routine (see page 446).132
Under certain circumstances, victims'
bureaucracies can be coerced into participating in their own people’s
victimization (as, for instance, Judenrat organizations, and also those
prisoner doctors who collaborated closely with the Nazis [see chapter, 13])
Perpetrators’ bureaucratic de- [… amplification |
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