Abstract
Actors preparing to commit large-scale evils typically portray their victims as a mass, as being all alike. “Your group is your destiny”: this is the message perpetrators of collective evildoing convey to their targeted victims. This focus on group identities can be designated as the ontological thesis of this chapter and has become characteristic of ideology-driven aggression against groups of individuals, such as the Jews during the Holocaust. The central logic emanating from this ontological thesis is “One for all, all for one” as it claims to capture an essence in each part of the whole (species). There is nothing the concrete individual (exemplar) can do, drawing on his or her powers of intentionality, of forming thoughts and initiating action, that may alter this essence and its ascribed primacy. The primacy of ontologically conceived essence over individuality-based variation is a metaphysical claim, immune to any attempt to refute it.
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Notes
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 177.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1973), 405ff.
Randall Collins, “Micro-interactional Dynamics of Violent Atrocities,” in Irish Journal of Sociology 15, no. 1 (2002): 40–52.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking press, 1963), 287.
Lt. Philip Caputo, quoted in Collins, “Micro-interactional dynamics,” 41
Collins, Ibid., 44.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid.
Ibid., 48.
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951), 460ff.
Collins, “Micro-interactional dynamics,” 48.
Bruno Bettelheim, Foreword to Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz (London: Granada, 1971), 7.
Collins, “Micro-internactional dynamics,” 48.
Ibid.
Caputo, quoted in Collins, Ibid., 41.
Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007), 320.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 322.
Ibid., 265.
Philip Zimbardo, “Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison,” in International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1 (1973), 90.
Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 11.
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (London: Tavistock, 1974), 188.
Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works1946–1963 (London: Virago, 1988), 174.
C. Fred Alford, Group Psychology and Political Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 40.
Ibid., 42.
Vamik Volkan quoted in Alford, 41.
Ibid., 41.
Ibid., 112f.
Ibid., 119.
Tocqueville, quoted in Alford, 117.
Emil Durkheim, The Suicide (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), 70.
Alford, Group Psychology, 121.
Ibid., 124.
Ibid., 165.
Ibid., 41.
C. Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 26.
Ibid.
Ibid., 27f.
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© 2008 Renée Jeffery
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Vetlesen, A.J. (2008). Collective Evildoing. In: Jeffery, R. (eds) Confronting Evil in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612532_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230612532_4
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