of how educated, ordinary people allowed themselves to commit barbaric acts and became torturers and killers ...THE SECRECY
"Early perpetrators become a scientific and moral elite and form a spiritual
engine of biological necessity. The rest of the population is not deemed
ready for full knowledge; there is an ambivalence between secrecy tinged
with shame and pride of achievement as the genocidal radius moves outward
into an increasingly enveloping system of order and policy, of bureaucratic
and technological arrangement"
PROFESSIONALS
"The KILLING PROFESSIONALS-Genocidal projects requires the active participation of educated professionals... - who combine to create not only the technology of genocide
but much of its ideological rationale, moral climate and organizational
process...."
TECHNOLOGY
"In the process of being improved, technology itself comes increasingly to dominate the perpetrators field of attention."
"The technology helps create a hermetic world in which everyone is motivated to make things "work". And the preoccupation takes on a sense of everydayness, of normality"
NUMBING
"The GENOCIDAL SELF - Extreme numbing can, as we have seen, lead to amoral self-process; and numbing and doubling to evil-self-process, sometimes with
the self losing its capacity to distinguish between good and
evil.....Precisely when the principle called upon takes on a strong
therapeutic tone can self-process move readily toward genocide"....
THESE ARE EXTRACTS FROM:
The Nazi Doctors - Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide by Robert J. Lifton
"A powerful reminder of the monumental evil done by particular human beings who were trained to heal and cure."--Robert Coles, "Boston Globe"
