I would like to thank all of you for enriching this thread with such interesting observations and thoughts.
Thinking about pathocracy and how normal peoples minds get twisted by characteropaths, spell-binders and psychopaths, led me to book ‘
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland’ by Christopher Browning
(Browning uses other historical books, few interesting psychological experiments and which is most interesting, statements from trials found at courts where people from this battalion were trialled, as arguments – he tries to connect all of this in one bundle).
It is really interesting in dot-connecting way to read it in conjunction with Political Ponerology, because it can supplement PP with even more examples of pathological mindsets and behaviors, including the deeper pathologization of normal (read average) and semi-normal people which is of primary concern here.
Ok, so how can average human being become mass murderer (if needed) and is it even possible?
- It looks like this is really possible, but only in right circumstances.
In latter part of the book author tries to explain why ordinary German people (recruited in Order Police wing) accepted killing and started even participating in it willingly.
I must state at the beginning that author
dismissed the argument about them killing people because they were resentful/angry/vengeful toward ‘enemies’, because enemies on front killed their comrades, so they wanted revenge and found it in willing massacre of thousands of civilians.
Why he dismissed this argument? –
Because ordinary people recruited in Order Police never went to front lines, they never really participated in war actions, so none of their comrades was ever killed in war clash with real nazi enemies.
(Even some of them were over-aged for war actions, hence recruitment in OrdungPolizei)
What happened with these people?
Their first massacre in Juzefovo was very interesting, psychologically, because major Trap (head of whole battalion), with tears in his eyes(they say) tells his people that they needed to kill 1500+ people in the village. After that, he asks if anyone felt not suitable for action. It was an initial shock for these people because no one told them they had been sent to kill civilians. Only few accepted majors offer. Only few of them said at the beginning they are not suitable and do not want to kill innocent people. They knew they had been disobeying higher orders. They knew that they would look like cowards in their comrades eyes and still receded.
Interesting observation is that when they started shooting people in the back of the head in the woods, a lot of policeman tried to find ways how to be excluded from killing (posing as guards at entrance of woods, asked major to exclude them or find replacement activity etc.). But still, a lot of them obeyed orders
even when they knew they would suffer no consequences for not obeying the orders. They could step away if they wanted to.
(*Psycho note: There are some policeman testimonies where they described that some of their fellow policeman enjoyed killing/torturing people which is seen in the way of how they kill/torture – these were clearly psychopaths, but big majority was not like this).
Majority of policeman from battalion were depressed/terrified by actions they did, after the massacre in Juzefovo (Excluding psychos and those similar).
In short, Reserve Police Battalion 101 was not sent to Lublin to murder Jews because it was composed of men specially selected or deemed particularly suited for the task. On the contrary the battalion was the "dregs" of the manpower pool available at that stage of the war. It was employed to kill Jews because it was the only kind of unit available for such behind-the-lines duties. Most likely, Globocnik simply assumed as a matter of course that whatever battalion came his way would be to this murderous task, regardless of its composition. If so, he have been disappointed in the immediate aftermath of Juzefowo, but in the long run events proved him correct.
After the first massacre and psychological breakdown, Command decided to depersonalize killings and use 101 police battalion for deportation of Jews into death camps and use other paramilitary squads for dirty civilian killings. By this depersonalization of killing(‘they are just deporting Jews, someone else is killing them’), policeman got used to torture and killing. Actually they became even more indifferent.
It was an interesting tactic for acclimatization of average German people to killing environment so they could continue the killing spree in Lomazi, Mjondzizec, Konjskovola etc.
(This depersonalization of killing is very intriguing if we look at it from todays perspective – Nuclear/Hydrogen bombs, Self flying Jets/Drones, Artificial Intelligence Robots which can replace humans and kill by algorithm - killing with these robots may even become like a Call of Duty game – yes we have to consider efficiency, but have to think also in terms of depersonalization – it’s easier to kill behind the desk than to look at victims eyes)
Another very important observation about how they got used to killing/torture is when they were assigned to hunt and shoot every Jew in Lublin district (which is an ongoing operation for few months). Even those who did not like it, but did it, got used to it so much that they even joked about killing/killed Jews. But this hunt for Jews was NOT depersonalized. As Browning said, they looked at victims eyes and this time, contrary to Juzefovo, majority of them committed killing and got used to it without any psychological consequences at that time. (Some even enjoying it)
Anyway, this happened in 1942 and it was an overture for November 1943 where they committed mass murders in Majdanek and Ponjatova with SS, other police battalions and Hiwis(I must say that psychology of Hiwis is really worrying). More than 40.000 victims in just two days.
(_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_Erntefest)
(_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiwi_(volunteer))
Count of killed and deported victims of 101 Reserve Battalion exceeds 83.000 in 1942/43. But they were just ordinary men, right?
Many studies of Nazi killers have suggested a different kind of selection, namely self-selection to the Party and SS by unusually violence-prone people. Shortly after the war, Theodor Adorno and others developed the notion of the "authoritarian personal¬ity". Feeling that situational or environmental influences had already been studied, they chose to focus on hitherto neglected psychological factors. They began with the hypothesis that deep-seated personality traits made "potentially fascistic individuals" particularly susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda. Their investigations led them to compile a list of the crucial traits (tested for by the so-called F-scale) of the "authoritarian personality": rigid adherence to conventional values; submissiveness to authority figures; aggressiveness toward outgroups; opposition to introspection, reflection, and creativity; a tendency to superstition and stereotyping; preoccupation with power and "toughness"; destructiveness and cynicism; projectivity ("the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world" and "the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses"); and an exaggerated concern with sexuality. They concluded that the antidemocratic individual "harbors strong underlying aggressive impulses" and fascist movements allow him to project this aggression through sanctioned violence against ideologically targeted outgroups. Zygmunt Bauman has summed up this approach as follows : "Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis. " He is highly critical of the methodology of Adorno and his colleagues, which neglected social influences, and of the implication that ordinary people did not commit fascist atrocities. Subsequent advocates of a psychological explanation have modified the Adorno approach by more explicitly merging psychological and situational (social, cultural, and institutional) factors. Studying a group of men who had volunteered for the SS, John Steiner concluded that "a self-selection process for brutality appears to exist." He proposed the notion of the "sleeper"- certain personality characteristics of violence-prone individuals that usually remain latent but can be activated under certain conditions. In the chaos of post-World War I Germany, people testing high on the F -scale were attracted in disproportionate numbers to National Socialism as a "subculture of violence," and in particular to the SS, which provided the incentives and support for the full realization of their violent potential. After World War II, such men reverted to law-abiding behavior. Thus Steiner concludes that "the situation tended to be the most immediate determinant of SS behavior" in rousing the "sleeper".
Ervin Staub accepts the notion that "some people become perpetrators as a result of their personality; they are self-selected ." But he concludes that Steiner's "sleeper" is a very common trait and that under particular circumstances most people have a capacity for extreme violence and the destruction human life. Indeed, Staub is quite emphatic that "ordinary psychological processes and normal, common human motivations certain basic but not inevitable tendencies in human thought feeling" are the "primary sources" of the human capacity for destruction of human life. "Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not exception.". If Staub makes Steiner's "sleeper" unexceptional, Zygmund goes so far as to dismiss it as a "metaphysical prop". For him the cruelty is social in its origin much more than it is characterological. Bauman argues that most people "slip" into the roles society provides them, and he is very critical of any implication that "faulty personalities" are the cause of human cruelty. For him the exception-the real "sleeper" - is the rare behavior who has the capacity to resist authority and assert moral autonomy but who is seldom aware of this hidden strength until put to the test.
{ After all psychopathy talk here – Lobacewski/Rain/Samenow/Fellon/etc., we know that these ‘faulty personalities’(psychos, characteropaths, similar spell-binders ) indeed ARE major cause of wrong social influences, propaganda, wrong-doing, indifferent attitude to crime, spell-binding etc. }
We see that these ‘faulty personalities’ aka. psychopaths need to occupy all higher positions in hierarchy of state/organization in order to bring life to pathocracy. Psychos must occupy every command node in hierarchical structure.
Ok, we know that now, but what is with average humans which are majority?
So, paragraph continues:
Those who emphasize the relative or absolute importance of situational factors over individual psychological characteristics point to Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment. Screening out everyone who scored beyond the normal range on a battery of psychological tests, including one that measured "rigid adherence to conventional values and a submissive attitude toward authority" (i. e. , the F-scale for "authoritarian personality"), Zimbardo randomly divided his homogeneous ‘normal’ test group into guards and prisoners and them in a simulated prison. Though outright physical violence was barred, within six days the inherent structure of prison life-in which guards operating on three-man shifts had to devise ways of controlling the more numerous prisoner population - had produced rapidly escalating brutality, humiliation, and dehumanization. "Most dramatic and distressing to us was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited in individuals who were not ‘sadistic types’". The prison situation alone, Zimbardo concluded, was "a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, anti-social behavior."
Perhaps most relevant to this study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 is the spectrum of behavior that Zimbardo discovered in his sample of eleven guards. About one-third of the guards emerged as "cruel and tough." They constantly invented new forms of harassment and enjoyed their newfound power to behave cruelly and arbitrarily. { Even if they were not diagnosed as ‘sadistic types’ }
A middle group of guards was "tough but fair." They "played by the rules" and did not go out of their way to mistreat prisoners.
Only two (i.e. less than 20 percent) emerged as "good guards" who did not punish prisoners and even did small favors for them.
Zimbardo's spectrum of guard behavior bears an uncanny resemblance to the groupings that emerged within Reserve Police Battalion 101: a nucleus of increasingly enthusiastic killers who volunteered for the firing squads and "Jew hunts"; a larger group of policemen who performed as shooters and ghetto clearers when assigned but who did not seek opportunities to kill (and in some cases refrained from killing, contrary to standing orders, when no one was monitoring their actions); and a small group (less than 20 percent) of refusers and evaders.
So, among average people we have:
1)
Increasingly enthusiastic killers/wrong-doers (this really looks like sleepers previously mentioned by Steiner) -> 10-20%
2) “Order is order” people – just follow the rules and everything will be ok; they act their social role accordingly, but the main problem with these people is WHAT IF social norms and duties include extermination/pogroms of other groups of people like Jews/Muslims/etc. or any violent/pathological behavior? -> 60%+
(*Note: One part of these people refuses to do action when they can – when not observed by authority for example or similar behavior )
3) Refusers-Evaders – people that can say NO to pathological environment -> 10-20%
(We should keep in mind that this is statistical calculation among RANDOM AVERAGE PEOPLE – which was devastating for me when read it)
I think that the second biggest problem after pathological individuals is with these average “Order is order” people that embrace their social role and have no real I, or have, but it’s fractured – their values are fractured. They are one big homogenous mass that literally depends on environment/situation and can be used by pathologicals for their own purposes (building the imaginary world they hope for) , especially if pathological are majority in higher positions in hierarchy. (We can probably call this type of people: ‘Bureaucratic personalities’ – just doing their jobs given by social role even if it’s against their moral attitude; but devastating problem is that their moral attitude changes as environment changes(not instantly but across time), they get more indifferent and ‘just doin’ their job’).
- This is why I think The Work and thinking with the hammer is most important thing in life – a modus operandi for every situation we find ourselves in.
Next:
Among the perpetrators, of course, orders have traditionally been the most frequently cited explanation for their own behavior. The authoritarian political culture of the Nazi dictatorship, savagely intolerant of overt dissent, along with the standard military necessity of obedience to orders and ruthless enforcement of discipline, created a situation in which individuals had no choice. Orders were orders, and no one in such a political climate could be expected to disobey them, they insisted. Disobedience surely meant the concentration camp if not immediate execution, possibly for their families as well. The perpetrators had found themselves in a situation of impossible "duress" and therefore could not be held responsible for their actions. Such, at least, is what defendants said in trial after trial in postwar Germany.
There is a general problem with this explanation, however. Quite simply, in the past forty-five years no defense attorney or defendant in any of the hundreds of postwar trials has been able to document a single case in which refusal to obey an order to kill unarmed civilians resulted in the allegedly inevitable dire punishment. The punishment or censure that occasionally did result from such disobedience was never commensurate with the gravity of the crimes the men had been asked to commit. A variation on the explanation of inescapable orders is "putative duress." Even if the consequences of disobedience would not have been so dire, the men who complied could not have known that at the time. They sincerely thought that they had had no choice when faced with orders to kill. Undoubtedly in many units zealous officers bullied their men with ominous threats. In Reserve Police Battalion 101, as we have seen, certain officers and NCOs, like Drucker and Hergert, tried to make everyone shoot initially, even if they subsequently released those not up to continuing. And other officers and NCOs, like Hoppner and Ostmann, picked out individuals known as nonshooters and pressured them to kill, sometimes successfully.
But as a general rule, even putative duress does not hold for Reserve Police Battalion 101. From the time Major Trapp, with choked voice and tears streaming down his cheeks, offered to excuse those "not up to it" at Juzefowo and protected the first man to take up his offer from Captain Hoffmann's wrath, a situation of putative duress did not exist in the battalion. Trapp's subsequent behavior, not just excusing Lieutenant Buchmann from partici¬pation in Jewish actions but clearly protecting a man who made no secret of his disapproval, only made matters clearer. A set of unwritten "ground rules" emerged within the battalion. For shooting actions, volunteers were requested or shooters were chosen from among those who were known to be willing to kill or who simply did not make the effort to keep their distance when firing squads were being formed. For large actions, those who would not kill were not compelled. Even officers' attempts force individual nonshooters to kill could be refused, for the men knew that the officers could not appeal to Major Trapp.
Everyone but the most open critics, like Buchmann, did have participate in cordon duty and roundups, but in such circumstances individuals could still make their own decisions about shooting.The testimonies are filled with stories of men who disobeyed standing orders during the ghetto-clearing operations and did not shoot infants or those attempting to hide or escape. Even men who admitted to having taken part in firing squads claimed not to have shot in the confusion and melee of the ghetto clearings or out on patrol when their behavior could not be , closely observed.
If obedience to orders out of fear of dire punishment is not a valid explanation, what about "obedience to authority" in the , more general sense used by Stanley Milgram-deference simply , as a product of socialization and evolution, a "deeply ingrained behavior tendency" to comply with the directives of those positioned hierarchically above, even to the point of performing repugnant actions in violation of "universally accepted" moral norms.
In a series of now famous experiments, Milgram tested the individual's ability to resist authority that was not backed by any external coercive threat. Naive volunteer subjects were instructed by a "scientific authority" in an alleged learning experiment to inflict an escalating series of fake electric shocks upon an actor/victim, who responded with carefully programmed "voice feedback"-an escalating series of complaints, cries of pain, calls for help, and finally fateful silence. In the standard voice feedback experiment, two-thirds of Milgram's subjects were "obedient" to the point of inflicting extreme pain.
Several variations on the experiment produced Significantly different results. If the actor/victim was shielded so that the subject could hear and see no response, obedience was much greater. If the subject had both visual and voice feedback, compliance to the extreme fell to 40 percent. If the subject had to touch the actor/victim physically by forcing his hand onto an electric plate to deliver the shocks, obedience dropped to 30 percent. If a nonauthority figure gave orders, obedience was nil. If the naive subject performed a subsidiary or accessory task but did not personally inflict the electric shocks, obedience was nearly total.
{ We have to recall depersonalization of victims when deportation of Jews to death camps occurred, battalion was not responsible for killing only for deportation, so obedience was total – no one protested;
In 14) footnote in chapter ‘Ordinary Men’, Browning writes:
“Staub includes one Vietnam veteran's story that parallels the experience of the policemen of Reserve Battalion 101 who felt initial distress at Juzefovo but soon became accustomed to the killing: "Flying over a group of civilians in a helicopter, he was ordered to fire at them, an order he did not obey. The helicopter circled over the area and again he was ordered to fire, which again he did not do. The officer in charge then threatened him with court-martial, which led him to fire the next time around. He vomited, felt profoundly distressed. The veteran reported that in a fairly short time firing at civilians became like an experience at a target-shooting gallery, and he began to enjoy it” }
In contrast, if the subject was part of an actor/peer group that staged a carefully planned refusal to continue following the directions of the authority figure, the vast majority of subjects (90 percent) joined their peer group and desisted as well. If the subject was given complete discretion as to the level of electric shock to administer, all but a few sadists consistently delivered a minimal shock. When not under the direct surveillance of the scientist, many of the subjects "cheated" by giving lower shocks than prescribed, even though they were unable to confront authority and abandon the experiment.
Milgram adduced a number of factors to account for such an unexpectedly high degree of potentially murderous obedience to a noncoercive authority. An evolutionary bias favors the survival of people who can adapt to hierarchical situations and organized social activity. Socialization through family, school, and military service, as well as a whole array of rewards and punishments within society generally, reinforces and internalizes a tendency toward obedience. A seemingly voluntary entry into an authority system "perceived" as legitimate creates a strong sense of obligation. Those within the hierarchy adopt the authority's perspective or "definition of the situation" (in this case, as an important scientific experiment rather than the infliction of physical torture). The notions of "loyalty, duty, discipline," requiring competent performance in the eyes of authority, become moral imperatives overriding any identification with the victim. Normal individuals enter an "agentic state" in which they are the instrument of another's will. In such a state, they no longed eel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.
(There are many interesting excerpts like this, so I encourage you to read this book as a great supplement to pathological studies – btw. I like how Browning uses multi-layer explanations of causes for such behaviours, not just they were anti-semites, they were evil etc. the point is WHY?)
Links to experiments:
_https://web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/uarch/exhibits/Narration.pdf – Zimbardo: Stanford Experiment
_https://archive.org/stream/ObedienceToAuthority_368/milgram#page/n7/mode/2up – Milgram: Obedience To Authority
This whole story serves as a great example of two main rules of ponerogenesis that Lobacewski defined:
1) Losing the ability to recognize pathological symptoms and individuals in the group (I would add ‘and becoming indifferent’)
– We can derive from this story that even the majority of average people get used to violent behavior and lose their ability to recognize pathological symptoms under environment where violence is ideologically accepted even encouraged and becomes value by which you prove you are a strong man and not a coward. Human tendency to be accepted by fellow humans.
2) Statistically high number of people with psychological deficiencies in the group
- SS and higher ranking officers who gave orders to ‘ordinary men’ were probably 95-100% people with mid to severe psychological deficiencies (They willingly killed many of the Jews, and even tortured and played with them before killing…some of them acted and loved their role of ‘Gods of life and death’ and said it openly – Volauf/Gnade etc.)
And why was conversion of average/ordinary people to mass-murderers so interesting to me?
- Because they are executioners, they are the muscle, they are the majority. Pathologicals are nothing without executioners who obey orders above else. Pathologicals are nothing without ordinary people. They have manipulative skills and knowledge of flaws in common men thinking, but they are not majority. Hence the need to occupy higher positions in hierarchy and laid the groundwork for future deeper ponerologization of ordinary men through ideology, authority/obedience dynamic, threats, fear, ego boost(ubermensch), awards, ‘xyz group is our enemy’ philosophy etc. all serving the one special goal:
-Using the muscle(ordinary men) for achieving the psychopaths long-hoped world where everything is subordinated to them - where they are masters of Life and Death. A long awaited dream of psychos.
To translate this to our time, your observations that LGBT/Trans/Leftists etc. CAN/MIGHT fulfill the role Jews had in Nazi Germany was very insightful to me. ‘Terrorists’/Arabs/Russia as imaginary external threats and liberals/trans/lgbt/sjw-s as internal threats. Having in mind the ‘coincidence’ of similarity between Trump and Vilhem II, and the whole story symbolically representing situation 100 years ago…I’m thinking more than before that this is rather Fascist Dawn than Road to Liberation. But I’m probably wrong because I haven’t calculated Earth Changes and ‘Winter is Coming’ in this Fascist Dawn scenario.
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Many excerpts from the latter part of the book where Browning explains all factors that did and did not influence thinking patterns and behavior are interesting, but I’m leaving them for you to read, because I cannot quote pages of interesting material here – it would be too dense.
So here’s the excerpt I found very intriguing from the former part of the book:
(*Note: In former part of the book(around first 100 pages) – history and events prevail, but in latter part psychology/sociology and causes of behavior/thinking prevail…)
The battalion arrived in Bialystok on July 5, and two days later was ordered to carry out a "thorough search of the city, for Bolshevik commissars and Communists," The war diary entry of, the following day makes clear what this meant: "a search of the Jewish quarter," allegedly for plunder seized by Jews before the German arrival. The German police in fact carried off twenty wagonloads of booty during the search.
By July 8 the battalion, had shot twenty-two people. "It was a matter . . . almost exclusively of Jews. "1, On this same afternoon of the July 8 search, the battalion received a surprise visit from the Reichsfihrer SS and chief of German police, Heinrich Himmler, and the commander of the Order Police, Kurt Daluege. The battalion commander, Major Nagel, was invited to the dinner given that evening by HSSPF Central, Bach-Zelewski, in Himmler's honor. The following morning Daluege held a review of the police battalions in Bialystok in Himmler's presence. In his speech Daluege emphasized that the Order Police "could be proud to be participating in the defeat of the world enemy, Bolshevism. No other campaign had the significance of the present one. Now Bolshevism will finally be destroyed for the benefit of Germany, Europe, yes, the entire world. "
{ From this paragraph we see how conversion and para-moralism is used for nefarious purposes by spell-binders and psychos
( 1. Conversion -> changing the place of subject and object - is used in first bolded part to accuse Jews of plunder, which actually police carried out)
2. Para-moralism -> Justifying killing ‘Bolsheviks’ because they are danger to ideology/state/’well-being’ etc. (‘Bolsheviks’ is in quotes because of third)
3. I don’t know if this can fall under reverse blockade (insisting on things totally opposed to truth in order to twist people perception and persuade them to accept truth somewhere in between – because not all of those German executors were total pathological individuals, so they needed to convince them (we can see that from paragraph 2 in written order presented below)) - they are saying that they are killing Bolsheviks/communists but actually killed more than 3000 Jews in Bialystok from 12th july to 15th july 1941. (conventional number is 3000, probably more people) )}
Two days later, on July 11, Colonel Montua of the Police
Regiment Center (which included Police Battalions 316 and 322), issued the following order:
Confidential!
1. By order of the Higher SS and Police Leader, all male Jews between the ages of 17 and 45 convicted as plunderers are to be shot according to martial law. The shootings are to take place away from cities, villages, and thoroughfares. The graves are to be leveled in such a way that no pilgrimage site can arise. I forbid photographing and the permitting of spectators at the executions. Executions and grave sites are not to be made known.
2. The battalion and company commanders are especially to provide for the spiritual care of the men who participate in this action.
{ ‘Provide spiritual care’ – spell-binders whose task is: systematic destruction of common sense and ability to recognize pathological individuals and behaviors among their subordinates }
The impressions of the day are to be blotted out through the holding of social events in the evenings.
{ “Bread and circuses” – shifting the focus from conscience to distractions and unrelevant things, which enhances current indoctrination, para-moralization, destroys common sense and freezes emotions }
Furthermore the men are to be instructed continuously about the political necessity of the measures.
{ Classical ideological indoctrination/justification loop – reasons stated above }
