Introduction

In relation to the three preceding chapters, this chapter marks a twofold shift. It shifts the emphasis from the theoretical to the empirical, concentrating on specific historical cases; and it shifts the emphasis from individual to collective evil.

However, these shifts should not be understood in an absolute sense. Just as I have been drawing on empirical material (mainly from the Holocaust) to develop my criticisms of Zygmunt Bauman's and Hannah Arendt's positions, I shall in the present chapter, as well as in the next, analyse the historical events referred to by drawing on theoretical work on evil. Theory and practice mutually illuminate each other – and I intend them to mutually question each other too, in a truly critical fashion.

In the two historically oriented chapters now following, I shall make use of the insights gained in the chapters where I assessed the contributions of Bauman, Arendt, and Alford. But I shall not do so in a pedantic manner. I am not interested in bringing all three positions to bear on all – or nearly all – the issues thrown up by the historical material at hand. Instead I will employ concepts and insights developed earlier in the book for the chief purpose of illuminating the issues that will prove to be the singularly most challenging, and disturbing, ones. Among these, the issue of proximity will occupy centre stage.

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I elaborated a framework suited to exploring how collective evil may come about. While attention was mainly paid to the mentality and practice of perpetrators, we also looked closely at how such evil is experienced by the victims, especially in the case of rape.

In this final chapter, I shall employ as well as expand this framework. Collective evil of the kind I have been studying is a triadic phenomenon, not merely a dyadic one involving perpetrators and victims. It is triadic because the large-scale atrocities making up collective evil are tolerated or condemned, abetted or minimized by what is vaguely called third parties. To be sure, this is a vast and diffuse category, comprising individuals who, in their capacity as representatives of various bodies and institutions, may be: physically present on the scene (witnesses); assigned to monitor or inspect what unfolds (fact-finders); assigned to negotiate and possibly help influence the chains of events (diplomats); on peacekeeping or law-enforcing assignments; pursuing a political and/or moral interest (NGOs, intellectuals, engaged citizens); and, finally, the huge category of individuals who passively know that atrocities are taking place. My point is that the stance taken by each and every one of such third parties significantly impacts on the quality (intensity, extent, duration) of the collective evil in question.

Introduction

How was the Holocaust possible? David Rousset, a survivor of the death camps, reflected that ‘normal men do not know that everything is possible’ (Arendt 1951: 436). And indeed Auschwitz has come to stand for unprecedented horror, unimaginable cruelty. This lack of comprehension, though readily recognized as intellectually disturbing, has a reassuring and, as such, comfortable effect on us: it helps side us, normal men as we take ourselves to be, against the doers, the Nazi perpetrators. The doers, we like to think, are not like us; indeed, their being unlike us is the very quality which explains that they could do what they did. Having committed atrocities so outrageous in nature and scope as to explode our faculties of comprehension, they, authors of the unthinkable, must surely be – or have been – abnormal men.

To think like this – and who tends not to? – is to close oneself off against the Holocaust. It is to prevent the challenge posed by that event from being fully acknowledged; it is to help perpetuate the very conditions which made its occurrence a historical fact in the first place.

Therefore, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Holocaust, the first condition that must be met is to bid farewell to the twofold premise that what happened then was fundamentally abnormal, and that it took abnormal men to make it happen.

Introduction

I now turn to a theoretical approach to evil quite different from those considered so far. In several books, the American philosopher C. Fred Alford engages with the phenomenon of evil. Alford's contribution makes for a fresh start: by focusing on evildoing as performed in a face-to-face, more or less ‘private’ context, Alford directs attention at the social micro-level on which evil takes place most of the time, being a personal and emotionally charged affair. This micro-oriented approach sharply contrasts with the macro-sociological analysis of organized evil given by Bauman; it also differs from Arendt's philosophical reflections, centring on the Holocaust and on Eichmann. Alford's point of departure is not informed by such conspicuous embodiments of evil. Instead, his focus is on evil in its existential dimension, as a theme confronted and (somehow) tackled in every human individual's life. Sociologically, this makes for a bottom-up approach, in Alford's case thoroughly informed by psychoanalytic theory, in particular concepts and insights developed by Melanie Klein. I shall argue that this type of approach partly puts into question and partly supplements those of Bauman and Arendt. My distinction between individual and collective evil will be theorized in a novel manner. Though interesting in its own right, Alford's largely Klein-inspired take on the relationship between individual and group will be of special usefulness when we turn to the evildoing characteristic of so-called ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the next two chapters.

Introduction

Although there exists a vast literature dealing with Hannah Arendt's thoughts on evil, few attempts have been made to assess Arendt's position on evil by tracing its connection with her reflections on conscience. In this chapter, I set out to examine the significance of such a connection.

Conscience does not figure among the topics for which Arendt's work is most known. One searches in vain for an essay or book of hers devoted to it. To present-day readers, Arendt is associated first of all with the notion ‘the banality of evil’, coined in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1965a). Arendt's struggle to come to terms, philosophically if not morally, with Eichmann and his kind of (doing rather than being) evil, forced her to consider again and again the interrelation between thinking, willing, and judgment, on the one hand, and evildoing, on the other. Her undertaking was to see how much light philosophy – meaning thinking as such, not the academic discipline – can throw on evil.

So what about conscience? As I said, conscience is no salient topic in Arendt. However, this is not the whole truth. As soon as one starts to trace Arendt's reflections on evil in her oeuvre, one finds that she from early on explored a connection now overshadowed by the aforementioned one between thinking and evil – namely, a connection between conscience and evil.

Some fifteen years ago, just after the end of the cold war, Leonard Cohen contended, ‘I have seen the future. It is murder.’

He has been proved right. Not that human evildoing is something new; far from it. If anything, what is new is the readiness of society to denounce large-scale atrocities whenever they occur and to indict those responsible, as demonstrated by the UN Conventions inspired by the ‘Never again!’ unanimously voiced in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Now take a look at what happened during the last decade of the twentieth century – the century that will go down in history as the century of (increasingly universal) human rights and as a century stained by genocide. The facts are as plain as they are deeply disturbing: the 1990s saw the slaughter of more than 800,000 people within three months in Rwanda, as well as the murder of nearly 200,000 people in the former Yugoslavia. In the former case, the victims were massacred with machetes, axes, and kitchen tools; in the latter, with guns, knives, and broken bottles. The principal victims were civilians, of both sexes and all ages. The atrocities were not carried out in secrecy; on the contrary, they were reported live on television for months on end. Despite the knowledge – or perversely, partly because of it, as I shall argue – not much was done to stop the genocides.

We come full circle in this inquiry into evil when I reiterate that what makes us suffer evil is also what makes us want to cause it. Much evildoing springs from the fact that our being-in-the-world is shot through with vulnerability, concretized by our mortality and by our dependence on others, to name but two different aspects of the same basic condition. In this perspective, evildoing is an existential project in which the individual, finding his non-chosen vulnerability intolerable, seeks ways to get rid of it, hoping to do so by transporting the vulnerability to others so as to feel some control over it. This is the sense in which evildoing is a protest against vulnerability or, more accurately, against vulnerability-induced limits: limits to what and who we are and can be, emphatically our limits, yet limits not of our making; hence, limits that define our very being. While universally, because anthropologically, given, this vulnerability and the limits that go with it have to be faced individually, as something awaiting responses in the first-person singular.

This is fine as far as existential(ist) approaches to evil go. But as I have tried to show, especially by means of the historical material invoked in Chapters 4 and 5, not all evil is this individual, be it in its causes or its effects.

My obsession with this book's subject goes way back in time. I remember my shock when coming across, at the age of fifteen, the autobiography of one of the handful of Jews from Norway who survived Auschwitz, Herman Sachnowitz. His book is titled It Concerns You Too.

Now a professor of philosophy specializing in ethics, my early interest in how organized evil comes about and what it does to all affected is, if anything, more intense than ever. Being a contemporary to the occurrence of genocide in the 1990s – in Bosnia and in Rwanda – made the topic even more urgent. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, we know only too well that the promise, nay imperative, ‘Never again!’ has been betrayed again and again.

During the years spent working on this book, I have benefited from exchange with a large number of friends and colleagues. For contributions big and small, I wish to thank Per Nortvedt, Jan-Olav Henriksen, Lars Svendsen, Henrik Syse, Carsten Bagge Laustsen, Tone Bringa, Odd Bjørn Fure, and Bernt Hagtvet. Alastair Hannay once again offered his unfailing moral support. Zygmunt Bauman once again demonstrated that genuine friendship can endure heated disagreement. Thomas Cushman showed his belief in the book at a decisive moment. To all of them, and to the students who have made my seminars on evil into a workshop of ideas from which my argument in this book slowly ripened, I wish to express my deep gratitude.