back

by dgellow·9y ago·view on hn ↗
That's the most horrible thing we learned during the 20th century. That kind of atrocities haven't been perpetrated by 'monsters', 'psychopath' or however we could depict the authors to remove their humanity. They have been done by 'us', normal human, people who thought of themselves as good persons and thought they were fighting for a good cause and doing the right thing.

They way you do it is little by little. You first makes the person feel entitled, you give him reasons to hate the 'enemy', you remove accountability of the executant by using a strict hierarchy and by engineering the killing process. At one point it becomes 'normal' and 'logic' to do what you do.

2 comments
Thats a great way of describing the process of creating an enemy, the question is what you do with that enemy. Natzy Germany took it to the extreme of total extermination. I can't help but notice how this is still a very effective tactic that governments, in particular in the west, continue to use to advance its military agenda - we just haven't got to the point of were we see another full blown extermination in progress. However, and the scariest part of this is that all the machinery to achieve that is in place and has only improved. The media (willingly or unwillingly) is very effective at painting an enemy, dehumanizing him and eventually justifying military action. Can this be changed, is there a way of doing the right thing, without abusing it?