- We are very pleased and happy to be able to bring to you our main speaker, our keynote, this is
really our keynote speaker, we're calling that, and it's
Dr. James Waller who is here. He is the Cohen Professor of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College in New Hampshire. And I'll say Keene is the
only college in the country who has an undergraduate degree in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, so any of the students who
maybe wanna follow that may consider applying to
Keene, it's a great place. And he's a professor in that program. He is the author of a number of books. The book I wanted to mention 'cause this speech will be based on that, it's a really great book, it's called "Becoming Evil: How Ordinary
People Commit Genocide". And his talk, as I said,
will be based on that book and I would recommend it to everybody. And he also is known
actually all over the world. He's a strong researcher on genocide and also an advocate for
the victims of genocide which, sadly, continue, and
you'll hear about, proliferate, and also someone who's
worked for world peace which is obviously very challenging, so we're very happy to
have Dr. Waller here. (audience applauding) - Thank you, Ron, can you
hear me okay in the back? Thank you to Ron, thank you for the Holocaust
Genocide Studies Center, thank you President Douglas
for the invitation here. It's a beautiful campus. Wonderful to be with you. I'll try to make sure you
guys feel somewhat included as well as we go on. And I wanna say a special
thank you to Honorato who amazingly pulled all this off in just hardly any time
at all, so please join me in thanking him for (audience applauding) putting this together. As Ron mentioned, I'm the Cohen professor at Keene State College. It's exactly two hours, 21
minutes from here by car, so anyone who is interested
in additional work in Holocaust and genocide
studies, as Ron said, we're the only school in the country to offer a major in that field and we'd love to have you look at us if you wanna continue your education. What we wanna talk about today is a very difficult topic
related to perpetrators. Not victims, not
bystanders, not survivors, not architect of genocide,
not the bureaucrats who carry out genocidal policy, but the actual rank and file. The people who pull the triggers, the people who swing the machete, the people who do the hard work of killing in the face of genocide and mass violence. This is a field I've worked
in now for close to 25 years. When I first started working in the field, I'd say it was safe to
say that we knew far more about the broad mechanics of mass murder than we did about the men and the women who actually carried the murder out. So we were very fascinated
with the bureaucracy and structures and the architects and you could read a book on the Holocaust and at the end of it if
I asked you the question, "Who committed the atrocities?" All you could list to
me were some architects and bureaucrats, most of
whom never killed anyone face to face, although
they made the policy, but you would've known next to nothing about the individual people who actually carried out the killing. So the course of my time in this field, in addition to far more archival work than anyone should ever have to do, I've had the chance to
also travel the world and interview alleged and
convicted perpetrators of atrocity face to face. To this point, I've interviewed
about 225 perpetrators of atrocity in countries as
far-ranging as Guatemala, Columbia, Chile, Peru,
the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia Herzegovina, Serbia,
Croatia, Montenegro, the Great Lakes region of Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and most
recently during my time as visiting professor
at Queen's University in Belfast in Northern Ireland. In those interviews, I'm
setting with perpetrators who, some were in prison,
some have been in prison and now they're released from prison, some will never see a day of prison, and my question as a social psychologist is not a question of who,
what, when, and where. That's been laid out by the courts. That's been laid out by historians. My question's a why
question, a how question. How do these people come
to commit these atrocities? How do they justify it in their minds? What are the reasons they use to make their perpetration
okay in their minds? When I do those interviews
and that field work, I also, when I'm on the
ground, take the opportunity to speak with victims and survivors. Some call themselves
victims, some survivors, some victim-survivors,
and also bystanders, witnesses, because I wanna ask them, "As these tragedies were unfolding, "how did you think these
people were justifying "why they did what they did? "Many times these people
were your neighbors. "How do you understand
people who you've known "for 30, 40, 50 years "who started committing these atrocities?" So I'll start today with an example from one of those interviews I did with a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. I'll apologize in advance,
it's a graphic example, but this is a graphic topic. This was a young woman who had survived the genocide in 1994. Whenever I interview
survivors in these cases, it is up to them how long we speak, what we speak about, where we speak, and the mutual friend
who has introduced us said that she wanted
to go back to the site of the massacre that she
survived for the first time and she wanted to tell her story. The Rwandan genocide, as many
of you know, happened in 1994. It was 100 days. In that 100-day period,
800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were killed by Hutu extremists. We don't have any segment
in modern history, any 100-day segment of any genocide where 800,000 people were killed, not by highly sophisticated
technical means but mostly by machete, mostly by masu, clubs with nails driven through them. 800,000 people in 100 days. Most of those killings,
the large-scale killings took place in churches
and mission compounds like the church you see here, a Catholic church in a small
village called Ntarama. The reason that these were
the places of killings actually goes back to 1959, 1962, the first time Hutu extremists targeted Tutsi for destruction. About 2,000 to 3,000 were killed
over that three-year period but most survived because
they fled to churches, they fled to missionary compounds, and the killers would not
cross those boundaries to kill. So on April 6th 1994 when
the killing starts again, Tutsi husbands and wives
say to their loved ones, "Get to the churches. "If you get to the church,
you're gonna be safe. "The killers won't come into the church." But in 1994, Hutu extremists
had a different version of a final solution in mind, so with all the Tutsi
fleeing to these churches and mission compounds, what
had they done to themselves? - [Audience Member] Rounded themselves-- - They had rounded themselves
up for slaughter unknowingly. The killers came, they threw
grenades at the church, the windows and the doors. And they came in, they raped
some, they killed everyone. So many of these sites of massacre today are sites of memory in Rwanda. Here at this church in Ntarama, 5,000 people died, very small church, much smaller in square footage
than what we're sat in here. 5,000 people died. She wanted to go back to
this church to tell her story because she was one of the
few survivors of the massacre. We walked up to the
church with our friend. Today this is a place of memory. That's why you see the
metal shed over this. We walked to the front door of the church. She couldn't enter the front door because of the trauma she had
suffered four years earlier. So this is in 1998. She could not enter the front door but I could look into it and I'd actually been
to this church before, and the first time I visited Rwanda, you'd look into these churches
and these mission compounds and the victims just lay
where they had fallen. You didn't have to look hard to see the defensive wounds on
the forearms of victims who tried to shield
themselves from machete. You didn't have to look
hard to see the skulls that were cleaved in two
or some with bullet holes. Over time, Rwanda has kept rethinking how they keep these places of memory, but still today at this church in Ntarama, the bones and remains of many
of the victims are in there. They're stacked neatly but this
is Rwanda's sense of memory. She began to tell me her story at the front door of this church. She said she fled here. She found a way to the back
of the church by a window. Killers came in. They raped, they killed,
they came to kill her, and the day she was telling me this story, it was a hot day in July in Rwanda. She had a scarf on,
she took the scarf off. She had a wound that ran
from the front of the neck to the back of the neck, a machete wound. No idea how anyone with a wound like that could survive it, but she did. As the killing went on in Ntarama, and this was about a
14-hour spree of killing, she was cut, she was left for dead. The killers thought they had killed her. They went to other parts in the compound to kill other people and
eventually she's able to gain enough strength,
despite this wound, to crawl out of a window and crawl to another
outbuilding behind the church. This small building was
a Sunday school classroom and she was able to find her
way on her hands and knees, she told me, behind this building, and I stood with her behind the building and she said, "Here, I lost consciousness. "I'd lapse into and out of consciousness "for about six to eight hours,"
but every time she woke up, she said from inside this small building, she heard the same
sound, and she just said it was a slap.
(hands clap) And a few seconds would pass and she'd (hands clap) hear another slap. A few seconds would pass (hands clap)
and she'd hear another one and she said it just
sounded like a wet slap. She knew it wasn't the sound
of machete hitting bone because she had experienced
that, she had heard that. She knew it wasn't gunfire because she heard some gunfire
at the massacre as well. Eventually the killers left Ntarama. She regained enough
strength to find her way to look inside this small room
that she had hidden behind and what she saw was very
different than what we see here. What she saw was about
close to 200 children thrown across these concrete pews. The children had been killed. She had been listening to the killing. How had the children been killed? (audience speaking faintly) They'd been swung
head-first against the wall. (audience murmuring) So the stain you see
there is a blood stain. That blood stain's not
preserved, it's not archived. That blood is in that
brick, so deep in that brick it'll be there as long
as the brick is there. That's what she had heard. Now, for all of its brutality, and again, I apologize for the graphic
real brutality of it, for all of its brutality, it's not anything new in genocide studies. U.S. cavalry troops had killed
Native American children in the 1800s by swinging them
head-first against trees. In Cambodia, if you ask to see
a memory place in Cambodia, you'll often be taken to a killing tree where children and young
adults were picked up, swung head-first against trees. In the Holocaust, Ukrainian paramilitaries killed Jewish children by throwing them, slinging them head-first against carts. In Armenia, Turkish
paramilitaries killed children in the same way, slinging them
head-first against buildings, so for all its brutality, unfortunately, it's not something unheard of, certainly not something unseen
before in genocide studies. So our question comes here,
how would we describe, if we have to step away from
the experience of the victims, how would we describe the people who carry out something like this, the men, and in this case, it was all men, who were in this room doing this killing, what are the first types
of words that come to mind? Just throw things out. - Monsters.
- Monsters, sadist. - Insane.
- Insane. - Evil.
- Evil, beasts. - Psychotic.
- Demonic, psychotic. In many ways, I start with this example because four years later,
I was back in Rwanda in prison, Central Prison 23 in Kigali. I mean, I wasn't there as an inmate. I was back there interviewing
people in the prison. I just need to make that clear. I'm interviewing people in the prison and a prisoner comes out
and he either came out early or I got his folder late,
and typically the folder just tells me who, what, when,
where, just the charge sheet, what he's been charged for and convicted for and sentenced for. I didn't get a chance to see it. We started the conversation cold and two or three minutes into it, he said something that triggered a memory, and a few minutes later, I
realized exactly what it was, that he had been in this place. Just by coincidence I happened
to be interviewing him. He not only had been one of these killers but he had been the person
organizing the killing in this Sunday school
classroom at Ntarama. Now, we could be done now if I could say to you he was demonic, he was sadistic, he was
insane, he was a madman, he was a lunatic, he was a
beast, all those descriptors, we could have it done, but who was he? He was from this village in Ntarama. This was his home. This is a small village, 300, 400 people. This is his home. This was his church. He had been an alter boy
in this Catholic church. The week before the killing,
he had received Mass in this church before
the killings started. By occupation in his village,
he was the equivalent of a fourth, fifth, sixth-grade teacher. We asked him, "Were any
of the children you killed "in this room your students?" He said, "Yes." He was a well-known
footballer in the region. He was actually the soccer
coach for the village. "Were any of the children
you killed your athletes?" He said, "Yes." (audience murmuring softly) When we went back to the
village we talked to people, Tutsi, who knew him, and
said he was a great father, he was a great son, he
was a great husband, he was a great member of this community. We trusted our children with him. We would've never expected he could've done anything like this. When we ask him the questions
of how did you come to do this in Ntarama to people you knew, to a community you grew up in, all he could keep repeating
in Kigali, Rwanda, all he could keep repeating
was, "I'd lost myself. "I did not know who I was. "I'd lost myself, I did
not know who I was." So you see the challenge
of working in this field, and again, I know it's, when you come to Holocaust
and genocide studies, your focus and your lens are
on victims and survivors, as they should be, and
we spend a lot of time and study there, but there's
never been any such thing as a perpetrator-less genocide. For every victim,
there's always been what? (audience speaking faintly) A killer, there's always been a killer, and we cannot let those
people remain in the shadows simply because we don't
want to talk about them, simply because it's too painful to ask the questions they raise. So what I wanna do with
you over our time together is think together about
the questions raised by these people and the lessons. I have five lessons hidden
throughout this presentation like little Easter eggs. They're not actually hidden. If you don't see 'em, it's
just 'cause you're asleep, but look for the five
lessons as we go through that I think will be important for us. One issue has to do with
a question of numbers. How many people does it take to carry out this type of atrocity? We don't actually, no one can
give you precise numbers here because when the killing is
over, who does justice go after? - [Audience Member] Leadership. - Leadership, we go after the big fish. We go after the big architects typically. Rank and file, it's hard for
justice to get its hands on. One of the phrases I use often is genocide overwhelms justice. In other words, genocide is
such a title event in society that when it's over, one
of the many hard questions society has to ask itself is
can we afford to do justice? Do we have the time,
do we have the people, do we have the resources? Let's go back to Rwanda. When the killing is over, July 4th, 1994, there are seven judges and
lawyers left alive in Rwanda. (audience murmuring) That's, you can't, we
can't do justice there. The infrastructure's been destroyed. That's very typical
after cases of genocide. So all we can do are offer estimates. We can estimate in the Holocaust, 100,000 to 500,000 killers. I certainly think it's much
higher, toward the upper end. 500,000 people who perpetrated
atrocities face to face. At the end of the war,
the end of World War II, there were surviving still
over 800,000 former SS members at the end of the war. Of that number, we've
successfully prosecuted 124. The reality of justice after genocide is if you're rank and file killer, you're very, very likely
to get away with it. You'll go back to doing whatever you did before the conflict started. For many of them, that means
going back to be police, going back to be military, going back to be political leaders. We simply do not have the resources, and a lot of times, not the political will to bring the rank and file to justice. In Rwanda, sorry, I'm
sure I just did that. In Rwanda, the questions
are 75,000 to 250,000. I mean, Rwanda's a country
the size of Vermont, much more populous, obviously, but a country geographically
the size of Vermont, 800,000 people killed. Again, I think the number's
up at the upper end. At least 250,000 people
who bloodied their hands with the hard work of killing. In the former Yugoslavia,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, 15,000 to 25,000 people, judges tell me, Bosniak, Muslim, Croat, and Serb who committed crimes
during the war, war crimes, crimes against humanity,
crimes of genocide, that are never gonna be brought to justice but should be brought to justice. So even though we can't
give exact numbers, we can say it takes thousands of people at the front lines for
genocide to be successful from the mindset of the perpetrator. So here's lesson one of
five, a critical mass. You do not have to, to
commit large-scale violence, you do not have to persuade everyone in a society to commit violence. You just have to persuade
a critical mass of people that it's necessary, or in many cases, that it's permissible, and again, when I talk to perpetrators
around the world, that's one of the things
they keep coming back to is we were told it was okay to do this. There was no law against it. We were encouraged by
our politicians to do it. They transferred, and this is important for us today to think
about, perpetrators admit that they transferred their
conscience to someone else. They let someone else be their conscience and whatever that someone
else said was okay to do, they did because they transferred
their conscience that way. We can't give away our
individual conscience to political leaders, social leaders, religious leaders, in that sense because many times it leads
down to this path and road. My central research question has been, for these 25 years, who are these people who perpetrate these type of atrocities? Can we recapture the experiential
history of these killers, the choices they faced,
the emotions they felt, the coping mechanisms they employed, the changes they underwent? In other words, can we step into the shoes of the people who carried
out these atrocities not to forgive, not to exonerate, not to apologize, but
simply to try to understand how they came to do what they did because if we understand it,
what hope does it give us? (audience murmuring) I heard murmurs but somewhere in there, I'm gonna say someone said we can stop it. If we understand it, we
can start to understand how we build the structures and solutions to make it less likely for people to commit these type of crimes. Now, the danger here is that
by stepping into the shoes of perpetrators, you
certainly run the risk of excusing their behavior,
apologizing for their behavior, and that's not something
we have any intent to do. Understanding and forgiving, apologizing, those are completely separate enterprises. We're trying to understand the behavior so it is not repeated, so we
can stop it in the future. So that's what we're looking at. I think, when I think of this quote here, I think, for instance, of the
time I spent at Auschwitz. I also work with a group
called the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation. We train government officials, military, and police on issues
of genocide prevention. Over the 11 years I've been with the group, we've trained now over 4,000 government
security sector personnel from more than 85
countries around the world. Most of those trainings take
place in Poland at Auschwitz, the largest of the six Nazi death camps. On day two of the training,
they visit Birkenau which is the actual killing
center in Auschwitz. They walk into it and they're looking at what they should look at. They're looking at the
enormity of 430 acres of a killing center that the
Nazis meant to exist forever. It was a permanent killing facility. After the Jews, there
would've been another group. There'd have been another
group and another group until the Nazis got the
racial ideology satisfied that they wanted. I find myself, because it's
been probably 45 times now I've been to Auschwitz with these groups, I find myself looking the other way and I'm looking across the
street at a row of houses. Some of those houses
are post World War II. Some of those houses were
there during World War II but I know from historians at the museum that there were a row of houses there that housed Nazi personnel. Some of the houses were
dormitory-style housing for the single officers who
were appointed to Auschwitz. Some of the houses were family housing and a Nazi personnel
appointed to Birkenau decided to bring his family to
Birkenau for that appointment. What were their jobs at Birkenau? The job was killing. It was the only reason the camp existed. It wasn't a concentration
camp at Birkenau. It wasn't a labor camp,
it was a death camp. Auschwitz had other camps, forms of camps, but Birkenau's job was to produce death. If you're a Nazi and you work
there, that was your work. You got up in the morning,
you left your home, you crossed the street,
and you did your work, which was to kill, to produce
death in large numbers. And at the end of the day, you came home, you crossed the street, I wasn't there, I can assume you came home
to a home-cooked meal. If you had children, I can
assume you read bedtime stories, tucked your children in. You had a wife, I can
assume they had relations with their wives at different times. The next morning you
wake up, have breakfast, cross the street, and
you go back to your work and your work is the job of killing. How do people cope with that life? How do people cope with those choices? What emotions do they feel? What type of changes do they undergo? So that's what I've spent
my focus and work on. Other people have, (coughs) excuse me, asked the same question but have focused on
something very different. Other people have said when you think about extraordinary evil, like
the example we started with, it has to have extraordinary origins. And if I were to say to you, if there's just one part
of this you stay awake for, y'all doing actually
great at staying awake. This is very different than my classes. So if there's one part here, it is that I know that cognitive tendency is you see extraordinary evil and you assume an extraordinary cause. What I'm asking you to do in
this time we have together is think about extraordinary evil but think about the very ordinary causes. Sever that relationship and say the causes of this type of evil don't
have to be extraordinary. They actually can be very ordinary in the sense of the types of things you and I experience on a daily basis. Some people have disagreed and said no, it's just a collective, in groups, people come together, bad things happen. That's true, sometimes groups
of people come together, bad things happen, but
sometimes groups of people come together and incredibly
good things happen as well. What groups do is they do what this microphone does to my voice. They amplify the tendencies
of people within them. If you bring together a group of bitter, angry, resentful people, yeah, being together as a group,
you've been in those groups. You know that it just gets ratcheted up. You bring together a group of good, kind, caring, cooperative people, you know that in those groups, you start to ratchet
those feelings up as well. So I wanna be careful about how we think about issues of group. I wanna be careful about how we think about issues of ideology,
what you believe. I think a lot of people tend to assume that perpetrators have
some hateful ideology, some belief system, and that's
what drives their behavior. It happens sometimes, but in
my experience over the years, sitting face to face
with over 200 of these, this is very seldom. I mean, if they have
hate-filled world views, they tend to have developed
after the killing as what? - Justification.
- Justification, a reason for what, and I've seen this time after time after time again. One Hutu perpetrator, one
of the questions we ask is when did you start having
these feelings about Tutsi? When did you think they
should be exterminated, when they were bad for
your community, and so on, and he honestly said,
and this is very typical, he said, "Oh, I've always
gotten along with Tutsi. "I've members of my
family who married Tutsi. "I would've married a Tutsi woman "if the possibility had arisen. "Tutsi had been fine, but
when I started killing them, "that's when I learned to hate them." That's not hatred driving killing. That's hatred being used
to justify killing done for other reasons, greed,
opportunism, careerism, so I wanna be careful about ideology. And then finally before you came in today, if you had asked a friend
who are the type of people who perpetrate this type of evil, most of them would've
probably said something along the lines of these
people have to be crazy. Now, (laughs) I don't want to,
crazy's not a technical term. I just used it like it was. I'm a social psychologist, I'm
not a clinical psychologist, so I have permission to use crazy. (audience laughing)
I don't have to go for the technical terms. Technical terms are pathological,
it's been sociopaths, psychopath, it goes back
and forth in history, but the assumption is
the only type of people who could commit these
atrocities have to be crazy. They have to be pathological. They have to be people we can identify at a distance as not
being mentally healthy. So at Nuremberg trials after
the Holocaust in '45, '46, we actually have a
psychiatrist and psychologist who do some testing on the
defendants at Nuremberg to try and address this question, and one of the tests they
give them is the IQ test. The IQ test has been
normed from its beginning and still today across cultures, so the average score
on the IQ test is what? - 100.
- 100. - 100, good, who said that? (audience murmuring)
Good, very brave, that's a hard, if you
answer that question wrong, that doesn't look good
on you when you can't get the average IQ, (laughs)
(audience laughing) but you jumped up, you said it, it's 100. You go to college,
graduate, average IQ is 110. PhDs, average IQ is 120. I'm a PhD, I work with PhDs every day. We're 80, 85 on our best days
is what we're reaching for. (audience laughing) What did we, for comfort
reason, and again, what we wanna do with perpetrators is we wanna keep them
out there away from us. What are we hoping their intelligence is? - [Audience Member] Low. - Low, we're hoping it's low
because if they're stupid, and again, that's not a technical term, but if they're stupid, we can fix stupid. I've always thought I'll
never be a college president like President Douglas.
(audience laughing) If I am, the motto of the school is gonna be "We fix stupid." That's what we do.
(audience laughing) That's what we're here for. So if they're stupid, if
they're low intelligence, we can fix that. What do the results say? - They're not.
- Bright people, all above 100, 110, 120, couple of the defendants, 130, 140. These were very, very intelligent
men on trial at Nuremberg so if it's not intelligence, then certainly it has to be pathology. This is our go-to test in pathology. This is a Rorschach inkblot. This is called a projective test. It's so vague and ambiguous that you're supposed to project
your personality into it without really knowing it. I'm not trained in Rorschach analysis so please don't start blurting things out. (audience laughing) I'll say that because it was,
what was it, four months ago, I was in Romania, we were doing a training for the Romanian National Police Academy, very hierarchical structure,
it was first-year cadets, but the head of the
academy was in the room so they're all deferring
to whatever he says and this slide came up
and I didn't ask for any, I didn't say anything. I was just going on my merry way and then he started just
blurting out everything he saw in this Rorschach and I had
to interrupt him and say, "I don't know how to interpret
this, but I just hope," I mean, I'm glad he didn't go dark places. He was seeing rabbits and butterfly. I mean, if he'd seen
knives and guillotines, I'd have been worried, but
everyone just kinda let him go 'cause he was a police chief
so don't say what you see. I can't interpret it anyway. But what we're looking for,
what are we hoping for? Again, to keep these people at a distance, we want them to be what? - Dark.
- Sociopaths. - Sociopaths, dark, we
want them to be crazy. I mean, we want them to be pathological. What did the results reveal? Mentally healthy people. One psychiatrist who
reviewed the results said, "These defendants tested as
mentally psychologically healthy "and normal, much more healthy and normal "than I feel after I read the results "because we thought they'd be crazy." The only one who tested
pathological was a man by the name of Julius Streicher and some of you know Streicher. He was the editor of "Der Sturmer", so all the antisemitic images
you see from the Holocaust, they came from the very twisted
mind of Julius Streicher. But here's what you need
to know about Streicher is before the trial
started, his co-defendants, other Nazis, said to their legal council, "We know we're gonna be on trial "but we don't wanna be
tried with Streicher "because he makes us look bad." (audience laughing) When a Nazi says about you
that you make them look bad, that's, you're pretty,
(laughs) you're pretty bad. So even his co-defendants
knew Streicher was crazy. So what it leaves us with is, well, if it's not pathology,
it's not intelligence, maybe it's some twisted Nazi personality. Again, we haven't found this. People looked for decades for the so-called Nazi personality. We don't have it, there's no
personality test I can give you to determine who's more or less likely to perpetrate these type of atrocities. So it leads us to lesson two which is really the central
lesson of my time with you which is it's ordinary
people like you and me who commit genocide and mass killing. W.H. Auden once wrote,
"Evil is unspectacular "but it's always human." He wasn't saying the effects
of evil aren't spectacular. The example we started with,
that's spectacular evil, but Auden was saying
the people who commit it are unspectacular and always human. One of the questions I often get, I was actually in Atlanta
last Thursday and Friday. We were doing a training for
U.S. law enforcement personnel from around the country and
we did a version of this and one of them asked in the questions, "What does it feel like
when you sat with evil?" And I understand the
intent of the question but honestly I can't answer it. 225 interviews, three, maybe
four people I've sat with that I thought, "There's no
point of connection here," and that's not why I'm there. But I felt like that must be
what this guy's asking about because that felt like sitting with evil. The other 221, absolutely
people like you, people like me, people I work with, have
gone to school with. I mean, striking just
in their ordinariness. What makes this argument
so difficult for us to admit, to understand, to absorb? Why is this such a painful
thing for us to look at and say, "Yeah, I think that's true"? - 'Cause it could be us.
- You don't wanna believe that your neighbor could do this. - I'm sorry? - You don't wanna believe
that someone you know could do something like that. - Good, I think there are two levels of understanding, she's hit one. One is you don't wanna
believe other people in this room could do anything like that, and that's a very
uncomfortable world to live in, to look around you and go, "God, "other people in here could
do something like this, "it makes me feel a bit uneasy." But someone else mentioned
really the deeper lesson is not only what it says about others but what it says about us. What does it say about my capacity to do something like this as well? And again, I'm simply talking
here about capacities. I'm not saying most people
will do this, because in truth, the vast, vast majority of us
never do anything like this. But do we all have the capacity
to do something like this? I would argue that we do,
that it's ordinary people like you and I who carry this out. When I was in Northern
Ireland, just quickly, this was a Tuesday night. I spoke to a group of former IRA people. They were all still in the IRA but I have to call them
former when I speak publicly. Former IRA men, some
version of this lecture 'cause it's what I do, and afterwards, they came up and they just flooded me. They were like, "Oh, Dr.
Waller, that's brilliant. "That's the best lecture we've ever heard. "We finally understand
those murderous Protestants "on the other side of the road." (audience laughing) And then, as no lie, the next night, I was with a group of former
Loyalist paramilitary. Same lecture, same reaction. "We finally understand those
murderous Fenian bastards "over there, those
Catholics," and it was good because I thought, you got half of it, (audience laughing) but there's another half which is what does it say
about our capacities as well? Tina Rosenberg has written
about violent criminals in Latin America and she said this: "I wanted them to be monsters." And when you came today, you probably would feel a lot better if what we talked about here
were just pathological monsters but as she says, "Coming to understand "this is not the case was disturbing "for what it taught me about these people "and ultimately about myself. "I did not want to think
that many of the violent "are people like us, so
civilized, so educated, "so cultured, and because
of that, so terrifying." And I think that is the terrifying piece, that perpetrators are
civilized, they're educated, they're cultured, they're
like us in so many ways, and that's the most
terrifying reality of it. So I've spent the majority of
my career trying to understand what are those tiny things that help us to understand how people come to do this? Because I've never
interviewed a perpetrator, and I do think they're
being honest with this, who said, you know, for all my life, I waited to kill Tutsi, Jews,
Muslims, Christian, whomever. It's always been some variant of I never thought I would
do anything like this. I never thought I'd be capable
of doing anything like this but I did one thing and
that led to another thing and that led to another thing and they had these series
of escalating commitments that at some point, they
were doing something they never in their life
envisioned they would do. Again, it does not excuse
them because at every step in that process, they made a what? - Choice.
- Decision. - They made a choice that
someone else didn't make, and I'll get this in Rwanda, actually, the perpetrator we talked
about at the beginning from Ntarama, he kept saying
to me, "You have to understand. "We didn't have a choice, all
the pressures in the village." And I said to him, "John Paul," because I knew his village
well, "You have two brothers. "They didn't do this. "They grew up in the same village. "One of them lived in
the same house with you. "They were subjected to the
same things, they didn't kill. "Now, they didn't rescue,
they were bystanders, "but they didn't kill, they
didn't do what you did. "They didn't hack to death
and kill over 30 people," is what he was convicted for. So the choices that perpetrators make, they still have to be
held accountable for. So the three things I've looked
at just quickly are these. One, I've wanted to look at
the cultures people come from. Cultures differ in how
they think about groups as related to identity. Cultures differ in authority
orientation, social dominance. Some cultures just work more easily within authoritarian structures. That doesn't make those bad
cultural characteristics, but it does mean when a architect
of genocide comes to power he or she, in a culture like that, is gonna have a bit easier
time recruiting the people to kill because they already work within those authoritarian structures. Now, that said, this is the third lesson. While these cultural constructions are always important for us to understand, each of us still have capacity and agency. Now, today, I'm talking
about the capacity and agency to commit every crime, but we
also each have the capacity and agency to commit every good. So I certainly don't want you leaving here thinking all of us are
predisposed toward this evil and this is what we naturally do. It's not what we naturally do. Again, most of the people in the world never do anything like this. It's simply a capacity issue. We have the capacity to
commit these types of crimes but we also have the
capacity for incredible good and I'm sure that those of you who've studied courses
here in the Holocaust and programs of the Holocaust
and Genocide Center, you occasionally see those glimpses of the capacities that each of us have for that type of good. I've also focused quite a bit on how perpetrators see the other. How do they come to
think of the other person as not just someone it's okay to kill but actually someone if they don't kill, they're committing a sin, do
you see the difference there? So archival testimony from
a Holocaust perpetrator I read one time where the
prosecutor said to him on trial, "How did you come to think
it was right to kill Jews?" And he said exactly that, he said, "It's not that I thought
it was right to kill them. "I thought it was wrong
if I didn't kill them. "In other words, they pose such
a threat to me and my group "that they had to be
eliminated," and that word threat is a word that we see consistently. If you were to ask me
what one thing have I seen in nearly every interview
with a perpetrator, it's been some expression of
the word or sense of threat, that they killed the other
because the other posed a threat. Does the threat have to be real? Not at all, just has to
be a perceived threat. Threat doesn't have to be real,
it just has to be perceived. So we see perpetrators who easily engage in us/them thinking. We see perpetrators who do
not turn off their morality. I get this question a lot. How do perpetrators lose their compass or turn off their morality
like a light switch? I don't think that's the case at all. Perpetrators absolutely see themselves as fundamentally moral people. Nearly everyone I've talked to has upheld his or her morality. How can they say they're moral people when they're killing dozens of people? They say it because what
they've done with their morality is just reoriented it
this way and they can say, "I'm a fundamentally moral person "because I behave in moral
ways with these people. "Now, these people, I
don't behave in moral ways "but that doesn't change the
fact that I'm a moral person "because these people aren't deserving "of my moral commitment." And if we're honest, we
all make some of those type of judgements in our daily lives. We decide who's worthy
of moral consideration in our communities, who's less
worthy, or who's not worthy. And then finally there
is very much the reality of blaming the victims. Perpetrators have, I'm convinced,
perpetrators cannot live, physically live for long periods of time having to face the reality
of what they've done. So what they do is they
build cognitive structures, emotional structures, that protect them, that fence them in, that keep them away from facing the reality
of what they've done. And one of those big tools
is blaming the victims because when they can blame the victims for their own victimization,
they're not responsible. We see this all the time in our culture with victims of what? - [Audience Member] Rape. - Rape and sexual assault,
and at some point, someone close to those victims very often will ask questions like what? (audience murmuring) What were you wearing, what did you say? How much did you have to drink? Why were you there that time of night? Why did you go to that
place and not this place? We ask those questions and
they're re-victimizing questions. We ask them because we
want to somehow believe we live in a safe world and that people who are victimized by
these types of things did something to bring it about. I'll give you two
examples from my research. There was only one Holocaust perpetrator I ever interviewed face to face. It was 1990, I was teaching in Berlin. He was a well-known perpetrator. For a fee, he would be interviewed. We had a 45-minute interview. 44 minutes were great, he
said all the right things, "Horrible what we did to the Jews, "stained our national conscience, "should never have done it." And he had been convicted of these crimes. "Terrible things we
did," on and on and on. But I still remember going
to close up the recorder and he was sitting in
the back of his chair and as I went to close it,
he moved up in his chair and he pointed his finger in my face and he said, "But you have to remember, "the Jews were going to
take over the world." And then he sat back and I thought, that's what I needed
from this whole interview was I was just trying to figure out how you've lived with
yourself, and he told me. He still thought, 45 years
later, what he did was right because if he didn't do it, the Jews were gonna take over the world. Now, second example that
shows us blaming the victim doesn't have to have any
basis at all in reality, not that the first one did, Serb perpetrators in
the former Yugoslavia. I was with my translator a few years ago and we were interviewing a group of six who had committed crimes but
had never been convicted. They were all still police officers and they wanted to be
interviewed in a bar. So we went to the bar. We pulled one in the back at a time to ask our interview questions and one of the questions
is why the Bosniaks? Why the Muslims, Bosnian
Muslims, why did you target them? And the first person we asked
that to said very quickly, "Because the Muslims killed Christ." And I let it go, I mean, I
thought, you know, it's fine. Second one comes in, "Why the Muslims?" "'Cause they killed Christ." I mean, there's no hesitation, and my translator who's Croatian is getting really bothered
by this because why? What's wrong with it? - They didn't kill Christ.
- It's not the time-- - Yeah, we got two problems. One problem is we've already
committed the historical crime of pinning the crucifixion
of Christ on Jews even though it's completely inaccurate, so there's a line here of
people who killed Christ that you have to get into,
but the bigger one is, (audience murmuring) Muslim faith doesn't exist for 700 year. I mean, it's not like
it's off by two days. (audience laughing)
It's 700 years. So my translator, and I can admit here, I fully admit to you, just
between you and I, (laughs) I lost complete control of the situation and the translator was
pulling up Wikipedia in Bosnia language
(audience laughing) and he was starting to show the people. He said, "No, look here,
it's 700 years later. "They couldn't have killed Christ," and generally what they
responded to us with was, "No, no, no, don't confuse me. "Our priest told us,"
their Orthodox priest, "they killed Christ," and
the priest blessed them in this particular group. The Orthodox priest had blessed them the night before the killing and had joined them on
the killing the next day. (audience member gasps) And the priest said to them, "They're doing it because
they killed Christ." So they all kept saying, "No, no, "our priest told us this is true." And one of them, finally, our translator got through to him somehow, and he's, "Okay, maybe it's
true, what Wikipedia says," (laughs) "that the Muslims
didn't exist at the time. "But if they had, (audience laughing) "I'm sure they would've killed Christ." And at that point, you throw your hands up and you say blaming the victim is such a strong cognitive
mechanism for us, it doesn't have to be true. You can make up whatever you want to because it just serves the purpose. And then the final piece, or
so the fourth lesson then, is this danger of othering, that one of the things we recognize is that in societies with deep divisions where people have been
othered in some way, when democracy fades, when
the rule of law retreats, you're always gonna find people who can perpetrate these atrocities against whoever has been defined as other. It's why, for us, we
have to be intentional, and I've always seen community colleges as democracy's colleges. You are the front line of
holding all of us accountable to recognize that if we
let democracy go astray, if we don't hold firm to
democratic institutions and all the things that go into it, the people who we've identified
as other in our nation, and we have them and
you know we have them, there will be people, absolutely, willing to step up and
perpetrate atrocities. Every country in the
world's at risk of genocide. No country's immune. We're no better than the other countries in thinking we're immune. In many ways, I wrote a piece
a couple years ago and I said, "If you look at what's
unfolding in the U.S., "if we saw this type of behavior
politically and socially "in an African country,
a Latin American country, "an Eastern European country, "everyone would be looking
at it and saying, 'Wow, "'that country's going down the slopes. "'That country's in trouble,
we gotta keep an eye on it.'" No reason that we're
immune to that at all. We're a country founded on the twin evils of the extermination of
one people, native people, and the enslavement of another people, Africans we brought here. The thought that somehow
we're so exceptional we can never return to
those type of atrocities, that is the height of
arrogance to think that. So we're always on defense
of our democratic principles, and then finally, I do focus a lot on the group dynamics of the
groups who do the killing. Genocide doesn't happen
because one person goes off on a killing spree, it happens
because people get together in groups and they decide
to kill other people in large numbers and over
an extended period of time. So I'm interested in those group dynamics, the peer pressure, the conformity, the pressures of socialization, the binding factors of the group, because these groups
come to have deep meaning to the people who are in them. I've interviewed in Rwanda several killers who were members of groups
called the Interahamwe, these paramilitary groups,
some of them as young as 12 years of age who bonded together, many of them coming from homes
without fathers involved, some of them coming from homes
without fathers or mothers, small villages, these killing
groups became their families. That's what they bonded over. Now, it's great that they had
these groups to identify with. The problem was the group
they identified with, their task was killing. So you interview them
in prison 20 years later and they can't wait to get back
out and rejoin these groups, not to kill but because the
groups had become so important to them just in a sense of family, a sense of fraternal bonding in many ways. So I'm interested in the social structures that surround these groups,
and this is our fifth lesson, that we should be less
concerned about bad apples, the individual people. We have to be more
concerned about the barrel, the structure, the system
that they're coming into. Again, I'll go back to
last week in Atlanta with the law enforcement personnel. We talked with them about
identity-based violence, that's the purpose of the seminar, and they'll often keep retreating back to, and they're good people, they
often keep retreating back to, "Yeah, we gotta
keep the bad apples out. "We get some cops that are bad apples. "They shoot when they shouldn't shoot, "they're too aggressive,
they're too violent. "We gotta protect ourselves
from the bad apples." And I spent two days just pushing out, saying, "Yeah, you gotta protect
yourself from bad apples, "but what is the barrel,
what's the structure? "What's the situation people come into?" If the structure of a police
force is a toxic masculinity, you're gonna make bad apples regardless of who you get in there. If the structure is militaristic, if the structure is hierarchical
and authority-driven, that structure is what we
have to pay attention to. So these really are the five things that, if you've been asleep,
now you can wake up. You get these five, the critical mass, the dead end of demonization, our human capacities and agency, the danger of othering people, and the power of social structures. All of these, if you are
interested more in these, as Ron said, this is the
subject of "Becoming Evil", the book I wrote in 2002 and 2007. This, I don't know which
slide people wanna see so I'm gonna leave it
here but I wanna finish, you've been great about staying with us. I wanna take just a few
minutes of questions, comments people might have,
and then we'll wrap up, things people wanna ask or, yes, please. - [Audience Member] So we're
talking a lot about men. What about women? - Good, so if you didn't
hear the question, the question was, "We're
talking a lot about men. "What about women?" This is a great question
because in genocide studies with perpetrators, we do
tend to see far fewer females carrying out these
crimes than we see males, so then the question becomes
do we see fewer females because they don't have the capacity or they don't have the opportunity? So many times people will take
a very gender-biased position and say, "Well, females don't do this "because there's something
about the feminine nature "and spirit that makes them more nurturing "and they could never carry
out these atrocities." I'm on the other side which says, no, females don't do this as often. They do it, they don't do it as often because they don't have
the same opportunities, that genocide often happens in very male-dominated societies,
paternalistic structures, and females' responsibilities
tend to be more, like in Rwanda, it wasn't killing as much as it was stripping
the bodies of the clothes, washing the clothes,
selling them at market. But when given the opportunity to kill, women clearly show they
have the same capacity. None of this should be a surprise to us because after the Holocaust,
survivors of camps would often write about
female concentration camps and they'd write about the
guard to those camps and say, "These guards were more
brutal than the male guards "on the other sides of
the camps in many cases," so I do think females have the capacity to commit these atrocities. They simply aren't, in
genocidal societies, often given the opportunity. That said, the very first
conviction of genocide for Rwanda, the first
conviction was a woman who was the minister of
education and family affairs in Rwanda but had actively
participated in killing. Other questions, that was a good one, yes? - [Audience Member] You talked
about being there in Poland and doing genocide prevention training. - Uh-huh. - [Audience Member] How
do you approach that? I mean, I realize some of this
is what you're talking about but how do you tell a culture, okay, you're going down that road, don't do it? - Oh, now, that's a good question. It's not that we're telling Poland that but what we do in Poland is
we hold week-long seminars at Auschwitz with the
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the seminars are for government and security-sector people
from around the world. So we're drawing Latin
America, Africa, Europe, U.S., Canada, everyone's
coming to these seminars. We do it in groups of 24 and the seminar week
is really three things. We're working with them because
they're front-line people. So we wanna teach them what genocide is, what the warning signs
are, and most importantly, what they can do in their
jobs to make a difference because their jobs carry more leverage than most of the jobs we have. This was a branch out of
a Jewish philanthropist from New York City a dozen years ago who has recently passed away,
and Fred's point was to say academics always talk to other
academics about these issues. None of you can do anything
about it in a large sense. Why aren't you talking
to government leaders? Why aren't you talking to
military and police personnel? And those are the over 4,000
people we've had a chance to speak with over the course of the years at the institute, yeah, yeah. Yes, please. - [Audience Member] How do
you get the right people to come to these, are they self-chosen? - Question was how do
we get the right people to come to these seminars? They're not self-chosen,
we identify certain offices within governments and it's
typically human rights offices or ministry of foreign affairs or some form of their
department of justice. And what we're looking for is
we don't wanna train a person. We want to train someone who
goes back to their home country and says, "The whole of government needs "to take this approach to prevention." So I'm terribly proud
of the work we've done because we have six countries in Africa that now have what U.S. doesn't have, an office of genocide
awareness and prevention. We have 12 countries in Latin America that have those offices, and we've trained and established all those offices. We've trained the people in those, so to some degree, it
is targeted attendance for these and targeted recruitment. Sometimes a government comes to us and just wants to send a
diplomat for whatever reason, but yeah, usually now at this point, we'd aim to target that. Questions, ooh, one in back. This is the steepest
room I've ever taught in. I gotta tell you,
(audience laughing) I'm gonna get vertigo
up here with the, yeah. - [Audience Member] So
when you're speaking with the perpetrators, do you
ever ask them their opinion on other genocides to
see if they saw the pain, what they've done to them? - Wow, that's a great person. No--
- Can you repeat? Yeah, I'm sorry, the question was, in interviewing perpetrators,
do I ever ask them about other genocides to kind
of get a sense of context? It's a great question,
I have not asked that. It relatively seldom comes up. The truth is in many cases,
I'm sorry to keep going back to Rwanda but it's where
I've been most recently, but one of the first
times I went to Rwanda, I was talking with some
survivors of the genocide. So this is probably three
years after the killings and they were talking about the trauma they were experiencing but
they didn't have the language. They were describing it,
and I said, "You know, "people who went through the Holocaust "have a lot of similar reactions "to having survived the Holocaust." And it just, it was a group
of three or four women and it just fell dead, and
finally one of them said, "What do you mean, Holocaust?" And I realized they had no
idea what the Holocaust was. And then when I explained this to them, I still remember one of them stopping me. She put her hand on my
knee and she stopped me and she said, "You mean other people "have been through what
we've been through?" And in some ways, it was
both assuring for her and it was also both terrifying for her. "You mean someone else
has had to go through "what we've been through?" So I think in a lot of
these cultures and context, there's probably relatively
little awareness historically of other cases, certainly
in Bosnia Herzegovina, World War II is definitely on their mind, more painting them as victims
rather than anything else, but no, we haven't asked that question and I'm glad you raised it though. It's a good possibility. Someone else, yes, we'll
go here and then here and then here, a triangle. - [Audience Member] Yeah,
what you were saying about people transferring
their moral compass to someone else is pretty fascinating. How much have you guys done
with evolutionary psychology and seeing how people
involved in genocide, I don't know what their separate thing is, how much that affects that mentality of-- - That's a great question. When I first started writing
"Becoming Evil" in 2002, I had a friend say to me as
I was going through drafts, "I really had to get into EP." I didn't know what EP was. It was evolutionary psychology, but it was just starting as a field so there's actually a significant part of one of the chapters in the book that deals with evolutionary psychology and its implications
for understanding this because as you point out, the reality is that we have
a long evolutionary history where things like us/them
thinking have worked well for us. - [Audience Member] With the travel stuff. - Yeah, where things
like moral reorientation have worked well for us. So another thing I wanna point out is that I don't approach this at all as a blank slate problem. We have natural ingrained
tendencies within us that we have to work
within those frameworks and understand how those frameworks constrain some of what we
do in terms of prevention. Thank you, good question, yes? - [Audience Member] I'm curious
about what your reaction is to, like, after World War II, the prosecution of the war crimes both in Germany and
Japan were pretty minimal compared to the numbers
like you described. And we actually, though, we
brought a lot of them over. I mean, we actually brought
them into this country to re-integrate them. Was there a rationale to that or? - No, I think the rational was twofold. He's asking about perpetrators, why not the pursuit of
justice after World War II? The rationale was twofold. The ones we brought over
tended to be scientists. We were working on both atomic
weapons, nuclear energy. There were many German scientists who were members of the Nazi party that the U.S. could see benefit in, and those were brought over. Space, rocket technology, you could argue that we got to the moon
as quickly as we did because we had Nazi scientists
that were brought over by the U.S. after World War II that did a large part of
that engineering work. So some of it had those purposes. I think others of it,
and as I said earlier, a post-genocidal society
does have to ask itself the question, how many people
can we afford to prosecute? How many people can we afford to put away? West Germany wanted to
move on fairly quickly. East Germany actually did a
fair amount of prosecution. And it wasn't always fair prosecution, but they brought a good
number of people to justice. But really, the question
becomes to what degree can society sustain those
pursuits of justice? And again, if you forgive me, I'll just go back to Rwanda. Rwanda had put 400,000 people in jail, most of them just awaiting trial. One of the first
interviews I did in Rwanda, when I get the file folder, it tells me the expected trial date and I called the guard back and I said, "Something's wrong with the date." And he said, "No, it's right." The expected trial date was
almost 100 years to the day from when I was sitting with this guy. (audience members murmuring) The system just can't keep up with it. And in Rwanda, their
economy started to suffer because they had so many people in jail that the farms were laying fallow, and the government had
to make a tough decision and say, "If we wanna
get this economy back, "we're gonna have to bring
workers back into the economy." And that was a large part of the reason for the amnesty program, so
genocide pushes our thinking about justice in some different ways because it involves so many thousands and thousands of people. Yes, sir, here and then over here. - [Audience Member] Why
do you think religion is such a motivation for
collective actions of genocide as opposed to other
motivations (speaks faintly). - Can you repeat it again, I'm sorry. - Why do you think religion is such a-- - Oh, religion, uh-huh.
- Motivation for collective acts of genocide
as opposed to other reasons for genocide?
- Good. - [Audience Member] You
don't see the genocide over property lines to the same extent. I mean, historically-- - Yeah. - [Audience Member] We
got this, we got that. - Yeah, the question is-- - [Audience Member] Religion
plays such a big role. Yeah, the question is, if you didn't hear, why religion plays such a big role. There are a lot of things
we go to conflict over. We do go to conflict over
property and territory and resources but genocide,
I've always argued, at its heart, is an
identity-based conflict, that genocide is about
you have an identity that we no longer wish to exist. Native Americans, how
did we respond to them when we came here, it
was you have an identity we don't want to exist. If you lose that identity
and become like us, dress like us, worship
like us, speak like us, you can live with us. But at some point, even
that wasn't successful because they're still Indian
at the end of the day. Religion is that most
common form of identity that we see in
identity-based violence, why? For me, when we look at the things that identity-based violence leads to, this us/them thinking and so on, when you add to it the weight
of a god where you can say, "It's not just me who says
you're wrong but it's a god. "It's a religious authority,
it's a institution, "a church that says you're wrong," I think that weight really does impel some of these forms of destruction. Sometimes it's religious identity
tied to other identities, like Bosnia Herzegovina, it's really an ethnoreligious identity. Muslims were Bosnians,
Catholics were Croats, Orthodox were Serbs, so
sometimes it's religion tied in with other stuff but
religion has always been, unfortunately, a great
divider among people and unfortunately as something often used to justify violence. Someone had a question-- - It is 1:45 so students need to leave to go to their classes at two p.m. - So I'm gonna take that part so we're not distracted by people leaving, but thank you very much
for staying with it. I appreciate you being here. (audience applauding)
Thank you.
