The Killing Compartments: The Mentality of Mass Murder

345 Pages·2015·1.23 MB·English

by  Abram de Swaan

The Killing Compartments
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The Killing
Compartments
The Mentality of Mass Murder
A S
brAm de wAAn
New Haven and London
Copyright © 2015 by Abram de Swaan.
All rights reserved.
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Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949830
ISBN 978-0-300-20872-6
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and the British Library.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of
Carrie de Swaan,
1946–2010
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Contents
Preface ix
chapter 1 Introduction 1
chapter 2 Ordinary Perpetrators and Modernity:
The Situationist Consensus 19
chapter 3 Widening Circles of Identification and
Disidentification 48
chapter 4 The Transformations of Violence in
Human History 71
chapter 5 Rwanda: Self-Destructive Destruction 88
chapter 6 Genocidal Regimes and the Compartmentalization of
Society 115
chapter 7 The Four Modes of Mass Annihilation: Case
Histories 143
ctet
chapter 8 Genocidal Perpetrators and the Compartmentalization
of Personality 203
chapter 9 Conclusion 252
Notes 269
Bibliography 297
Index 315
viii
Preface
More than twenty years ago by now, the phone rang. It was
Nico Frijda, once my Doktorvater, as the German fondly call their
thesis supervisor. “How come,” he asked, “so many people hold
such passionate feelings about faraway human beings they have
never even met?”
Somehow the question stuck with me, and I wrote an essay
on “Widening Circles of Identification,” the gist of which is re-
produced in this book. But shortly thereafter, Yugoslavia began to
disintegrate with great mayhem and bloodshed. Only a year later,
the genocide in Rwanda occurred. Unlike preceding episodes of
mass annihilation, these instances happened right under the eyes of
reporters, sometimes in front of TV cameras. They shocked read-
ers and viewers all over the world. It seemed as if humankind had
“learned nothing” from the Holocaust, which had happened half
a century before. Of course, that lesson about not having learned
anything could have been learned many times in the preceding fifty
years, for there had been numerous instances of mass annihilation
in the years since 1945. And after Yugoslavia and Rwanda there
were more to come. I wrote a complementary essay, this time about
ix