Sunday, September 27, 2020

"Early perpetrators become a scientific and moral elite and form a spiritual engine of biological necessity."

The Psychology of Genocide


 "The smaller genocide develops the technology , personnel (medical units), and institutional structure (killing centers) for the large genocidal act. But the prior event does more: it provides a shared sense, notably among the elite, that it can be done, that one can move from relatively amorphous imagery of victimization and triage for the act of total murder; and that it seems to work - a problem is solved.

 
There is a sense of achievement, a movement towards health."...
..." 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. "