Abstract
Few people have had access to Southern Africa’s most feared perpetrators, members of the notorious killing team called Koevoet, an “antiguerrilla” group of the South African army, which fought in Namibia. Members wore T-shirts inscribed “Murder is our business: And business is good!” “Sometimes we killed them quickly, sometimes we killed them slowly.... We felt fantastic. We drank a beer and said a short prayer: ‘Thank you, Lord.’” The group killed large numbers of black guerrillas representing the Namibian forces that now govern that country. These former killers speak of the satisfaction it gave them, commenting, “After a day, you must have another kill, to feel the adrenaline in your blood.”
And death is no longer a chance event. To be sure, it still seems a matter of chance whether a bullet hits this man or that, but a second bullet may well hit the survivor, and the accumulation of death puts an end to the impression of chance.
Sigmund Freud (1915, pp. 291–292)
The only way to stop feeling so bad is a new kill.
—South African Perpetrators and Their Children
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Simpson, M.A. (1998). The Second Bullet. In: Danieli, Y. (eds) International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5567-1_30
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