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1. According to his biographer “His obedience research has become a classic of modern psychology…a ‘must’ topic for introductory psychology and social psychology courses, and any textbook for those courses that failed to mention those studies would be considered incomplete.” [Thomas Blass: The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram, New York: Basic, 2004, p. 259.]
2. Unveiled in Hannah Arendt: Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, New York: Viking Press 1963.
Milgram’s biographer observed that “Milgram’s work provided the scientific underpinnings for Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ perspective…” [Blass cited, p. 268.]
Quoted in Stanley Milgram: Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p.178.
Ibid., p.6.
Ibid., p.2.
Peter Kenez, an American historian wrote: “No other mass murder was so ideologically driven, so well organized, and carried out with such mad efficiency.” [The Coming of the Holocaust: From Antisemitism to Genocide, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 1].
Blass cited, p. X.
Milgram cited, pp.6, 188.
“The wide public exposure he received via television appearances and books reviews made him something of a minor celebrity… Milgram was still giving invited talks on the obedience experiments in 1984 - 22 years after he had completed them.” [Blass cited, pp. 222, 232.] On the 50th anniversary of his experiments the Journal of Social issues devoted a whole issue (Vol.70, No.3.) to his work.
Blass cited, p.278.
He made this point in the preface to the German edition of Obedience to Authority. Quoted in Blass cited pp. 269–270.
Milgram 1974 cited, p. 189.
See Ibid., pp. 176, 183, 186, 211.
Brunner: “Foreword” Obedience to Authority, New York: Perennial Classics, 2004, p. XIV.
Philip Zimbardo: “Foreword” to Obedience to Authority, Harper paperback edition, 1975 p. XV.
Milgram cautioned that “it is…important to recognize some of the differences between the situation of our subjects and that of the Germans under Hitler.” He also pointed out that the experiments were ostensibly devoted to increase knowledge and about learning, while the Nazis pursued morally reprehensible objectives. Furthermore, “the mechanisms binding the German into his obedience were not the mere momentary embarrassment and shame of disobeying but more internalized punitive mechanisms that can only evolve through extended relationships with authority.” [Milgram 1974 cited, p.176.
Obedience to Authority, 1974 p. 175.
Ibid., 178.
Not one of the 14 contributors to 1995 symposium on Milgram’s obedience experiments raised the question of their applicability to the political violence of communist states. [See “Perspectives on Obedience to Authority: The Legacy of the Milgram Experiments”, Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 1995]. Remarkably enough this has remained the case up to the present as reflected in the 2014 symposium: “Milgram at 50: Exploring the Enduring Relevance of Psychology’s Most Famous Studies’”, [Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 70., Number 3, 2014.] in which there is still no reference to communist systems. Apparently it did not occur to a single contributor to these 14 articles, (with the exception of one brief, passing reference to Stalin) that there have been other momentous campaigns of mass murders in the 20th and 21st century undertaken by communist states, which also invite reflection and research about the part played by obedience to authority. I can suggest two possible explanations of this spectacular and persisting indifference about, or ignorance of, communist political violence. One is that American psychologists are not interested in history and know little about it, including 20th century communist states and their mass murders. Another possibility is that residual leftist sympathies among American academic intellectuals, including psychologists, predispose them to a more sympathetic view of communist systems that precludes comparing their record of political violence with that of Nazi Germany.
Estimates of the combined total of the victims of communist systems approach 100 million. See R.J. Rummel: Death by Government, New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 1997; Stephanie Courtois et al.: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror Repression, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; Tony Judt: “The Longest Road to Hell,” New York Times, December 22, 1997. For estimates of the number of Soviet victims (ranging between 15 and 20 million) see Robert Conquest: The Great Terror: A Reassessment, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008 and Anne Applebaum: Gulag: A History, New York: Doubleday, 2003.
I made this point at some length in “The Attention Gap and Selectivity in Moral Concerns,” Introduction to Paul Hollander ed. From the Gulag to the Killing Fields: Personal Accounts of Political Violence and Repression in Communist States, Wilmington DE: ISI Books, 2006, pp. XXIV–XXXIX.
Hery V. Dicks: Licensed Mass Murder: A Social-Psychological Study of Some SS Killers, New York: Basic Books. 1972, p. 268.
See Richard Overy: “‘Ordinary Men’ Extraordinary Circumstances: Historians, Social Psychology, and the Holocaust”, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 70, Number 3, 2014, p. 519.
Ervin Staub: “Obeying, Joining, Following, Resisting and Other Processes in the Milgram Studies…” Journal of Social Issues cited, pp.502, 503, 509.
Blass cited, p. 272. It has also been shown by other authors that Arendt made a serious error asserting that Eichman was not an antisemite and lacked ideological motivation. See Deborah E. Lipstadt: The Eichman Trial, New York: Schoken, 2011 and Richard J. Bernstein: Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation, Cambridge, UK Polity Press, 2002, see esp. p. 270, note 42.
Blass cited, p. 276.
Dicks, p. 57.
Arendt insisted for no discernible reason (other than being beholden to her own theories), that Eichman was not an antisemite. [See Arendt 1963, especially pp. 22–23.]
Arthur G. Miller: “The Explanatory Value of Milgram’s Obedienmce Experiments: A Contemporary Appraisal,” Journal of Social Issues cited, p. 567.
31. Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess eds.: ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by Its perpetrators and Bystanders, New York: Free Press, 1988, p. XIX.
Overy in Journal of Social Issues cited, p. 520.
See for example “Forced to obey orders - the myth,” in “Good Old Days,” cited, pp. 75–86. Christopher R. Browning also pointed out that “in the past 45 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.” [Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: Harper Perennial, 1993 p. 170]
To say the least, (as Browning put it) “The Jew stood outside their circle of human obligations and responsibility…they [the executioners] had at least accepted the assimilation of the Jews into the image of the enemy.” [Ibid., 73]
Ibid., pp. 184–185. Browning emphasized “the pressure for conformity - the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group…” [Ibid., p.71]
Browning listed: “wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination and conformity. These are factors applicable in varying degrees, but none without qualification.” [Ibid., p. 159] Needless to say all this applied only to the Holocaust, Browning was not trying to generalize to other mass murders.
For a further discussion of the connection between acts and legitimations of political violence see Paul Hollander “Introduction” to Paul Hollander ed.: Contemporary Political Violence and Its Legitimation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008., pp. 1–20.
Browning emphasized the difference between the executioners and designers of the Holocaust: “‘grass-roots’ perpetrators of the Final Solution…were not desk murderers who could take refuge in distance, routine and bureaucratic euphemisms that veiled the reality of mass murder. These men saw their victims face to face.” [Ibid., p. 36.]
To be sure at the time these experiments were first conducted ethnic cleansing was an unknown concept (though not an unknown practice) and Jihadist terror did not exist.
In his conclusions Milgram wrote that there was no “…aggression, anger, vindictiveness or hatred in those who shocked the victim” [Milgram 1974, p. 188.] Arendt made the same claim about Eichman’s attitudes toward his victims.
The remarks of a German police officer illustrate this mentality: “We police went by the phrase, ‘Whatever serves the state is right, whatever harms the state is wrong.’ …it never entered my head that these orders could be wrong…I was…at the time convinced that the Jewish people were…guilty… The thought that one should oppose or evade the order to take part in the extermination of the Jews never entered my head.” [“Good Old Days” pp. 220–221]
Since I knew Milgram quite well (he was a close friend) for over 20 years I believe that he was not inclined to moral relativism and did not refrain from taking strong judgmental positions on various occasions.
Browning, p. 188.
Goldhagen was criticized for singling out murderous antisemitism, he believed was peculiar to Germany, as the only explanation of the Holocaust. While it is true that only Nazi Germany introduced industrial style mass murders of Jews, many other European nationalities displayed comparable levels of murderous hatred of them and engaged in their killing, sometimes assisting the Nazis, sometimes independent of them, when the opportunity presented itself.
Present day Islamic radicals are another group whose murderous hatred of Jews rivals, and possibly exceeds similar sentiments of the Nazis.
Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1997, pp. 392, 385, 404, 389, 391, 377, 383.
Visual evidence of these attitudes may also be found in the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC (among other places) in the photographs of cheerful, smiling Nazi executioners standing by their victims, or next to their mass graves, before or after performing their grisly task.
“Good Old Days” pp. 201, 203, 205.
Kenez 2012, p. 289.
See Browning p.68 and David Satter: It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, pp. 59–60.
Satter, p. 233.
Avraham Shifrin: The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, Uhidingen, Switzerland: Stephanus, 1980, p. 10.
Satter, p. 59.
Vladimir Farkas: Nincs Mentseg: Az AVH alezredese voltam (No Excuse: I was a lieutenant colonel of the AVH) Buapest: Interart Studio, 1990, pp. 239–240, 241. AVH is the abbreviation (in Hungarian) of State Security Authority.
Satter, p.60.
Quoted in David Pryce-Jones: The Strange Death of the Soviet Empire, New York: Holt, 1995, p.13. According to another account Tokaryev denied direct participation in the executions but “agreed to provide all organizational assistance.” [Satter pp. 242–243]
Bela Szasz: Volunteers for the Gallows: Anatomy of a Show Trial, New York: Norton, 1971, pp. 70, 15, 21.
Alan Levy: Good Men Still Live! The Odyssey of a Professional Prisoner, Chicago: O’Hara 1974, pp. 84–85.
Nikolai Khoklov: In the Name of Conscience, New York: McKay 1959, pp. 165–166.
Peter Hruby: Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia, New York: Pergamon Press, 1980 pp. 223–224.
Victor Serge: Memoirs of Revolutionary, 1901–1941, London: Oxford University Press 1963, p. 80.
Quoted in Robert Conquest: The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, New York: Macmillan, 1968, p. 544.
Amy Knight: Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, p. 10; Dmitri Volkogonov: Gyozelem es Tragedia: Stalin Politikai Arckepe, (Victory and tragedy: the political portrait of Stalin) Budapest: Zrinyi, 1990, p. 236.
Quoted in Gong Xiaoxia: Repressive Movements and the Politics of Victimization, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1995 p.157.
“Foreword” by Hugh Trevor-Roper to Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Riess eds.: “The Good Old Days” - The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders, New York: Free Press, 1988, p. XII. The attitudes described in the quote, and especially the singing of the national anthem are reminiscent, of Islamic terrorists shouting “God is Great” while murdering people. Both are grotesque and pathetic attempts to associate repugnant acts with nationalistic or religious symbols and beliefs and thereby justify them.
Ibid., pp. 31–32. The invocation of the Lithuanian national anthem by the mass murderer here described is also reminiscent of presnt day Islamic terrorists who are in the habit of shouting “God is Great” when committing morally repugnant acts of violence. It is hard to decide what is more absurd and delusional: the attempt to associate in order to legitimate the murder of innocent people with a national anthem, or with God, but in both cases the perpetrators obviously felt that their inexcusable atrocities required some lofty symbolic justification, or excuse.
See “Execution as popular entertainment - The murder of Jews as public entertainment” in Ibid., 107–135.
Trevor-Roper cited, p. XI.
“Good Old Days” cited p. 76.
Pavel Sudoplatov: Special Tasks, Boston: Little Brown, 1994, pp. XII, 3.
Markus Wolf: Man Without a Face, New York: Random House 1997, p.233.
Quoted in Albert Resis ed.: Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics, Chicago: Ivan Dee 1993, pp. 265, 78.
Satter, p. 242.
Nate Thayer: “Day of Reckoning,” Far Eastern Economic Review, October30,1997, pp. 14, 15, 16.
Nathan Leites: A Study of Bolshevism, Glencoe IL: Free Press, 1953, pp. 141, 114–115.
Quoted in Daniel Bell: “First Love and Early Sorrows,” Partisan Review, November 4 1981 p. 547
75. Dicks cited, p. 55.
xHimmler quoted in Joachim C. Fest: The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership, New York: Pantheon Books, 1970, p.118.
Quoted in Martin Malia: The Soviet Tragedy, New York: Free Press 1994, p.268. Such devotion to the Party did not save him from being executed in 1937.
George F. Kennan: “The Buried Past,” New York Review of Books, October 1988.
George F. Kennan: At a Century’s Ending: Reflections, 1982–1995, New York: Norton, 1996, p. 236.
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Hollander, P. Revisiting the Banality of Evil: Contemporary Political Violence and the Milgram Experiments. Soc 53, 56–66 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-015-9973-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-015-9973-4