The Myth of Evil by Philip Cole.

The author's premise is that evil is really a myth we have created about ourselves. It is neither a force which creates monsters in human shape nor is it the consequence of the actions of misguided or mentally deranged agents. It is not a reality in itself but is created in a literary sense to perform a role in the story we choose to tell. The most feared evil is the hidden enemy in our midst who seems to be just one of us but is in fact bent on destroying us. Fairbairn first named the anti-libidinal ego as the internal saboteur and if the author had gone a little way beyond orthodox Freudianism he would have found the psychological underpinning for what he was talking about. As expected I found material that supported my theory concerning impressed behaviour patterns and the anti-libidinal impulse. The author did not address the issue of the individual's need for the "the myth of evil". It is in support of the defence mechanism of splitting: if I am to maintain my self identity as "good" there must be someone on whom I can project those aspects of myself that are "bad", and those aspects which are so appalling as to be totally inadmissible can only be projected onto something equally inadmissible i.e. not human. The author's correct assertion that the perpetrators of horrors are ordinary but seriously damaged human beings is exactly what other not quite so seriously damaged people cannot allow themselves to admit because it cuts too close to the bone and might shatter their fragile self-image. Politicians cannot expect votes from people who feel threatened in that way. Look at what is happening in Serbia with people resisting all truth and reason to hold onto their false image of country and self. In the same way the media cannot make money by reporting on the quite comprehensible, if somewhat complex, explanations for horrific events that can only be voyeuristically "enjoyed" if they are firmly distanced as incomprehensible evils. The author points out the political use of the myth of evil and issues warnings (I'm doing this memory now and I hope I'm not being inaccurate) but I think he's wasting his time unless humanity takes serious responsibility for its own nature. Well you know by now what I think: greed and selfishness have a strongly inherent place in our evolved survival repertoire but so also as altruism, self-sacrifice and concern for the other. These could help towards abolishing the myth of evil if we gave proper care to nurturing them through supporting the dyad, the mother/infant bond, by all social means available

Mon 16th April. I've just listened to Zimbardo on Start the Week talking of his Stanford University experiment (see below chapter 8), when he turned the basement of the psychology department into a "prison". He told how careful psychological tests showed that the students selected for the experiment were all "good apples" and of how quickly the situation they had created turned the "guards" into abusers doing much the same as the American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. He told how they had chosen the "prisoners' " garments to subtly femininise them (they had no underpants), and how quickly the abuse was sexualised. He put the explanation all onto the effects of the negative environment in which they were placed, as he did in situations like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. I'm sure the psychological tests did not deal with issues from the first year of life when the behaviour patterns are laid down in experiences of negative (or absent) mothering. He talked about the need to educate into the ability to be "heroes" and not merely passively resist the descent into evil but take action positively against it. What a masculine solution. I think the American affluent lifestyle undermines all the good that can be put into the psyche in the first year of life which would do more to prevent that descent, but what hope is there of getting anyone to see that, which to me is so obvious; especially as no one is reading this stuff! Nevertheless I hope I've eliminated all the Dragon errors and I'll post it now.

Notes on Myth of Evil

Chapter 1. Terrorism, torture and the problem of evil.

(Page 16) the sceptical David Hume makes the point that mere indifference to virtue is not sufficient for evil. "A creature, absolutely malicious and spiteful, were there any such in nature, must be worse than in different to the images of vice and virtue. All his sentiments must be inverted, and directly opposite to those, which prevail in the human species". (Hume 1975: 226). This, observes Hume, is to make the truly evil person someone inhuman, and this is an impossibility.

(My comment: inversion is exactly the function I have ascribed to the anti-libidinal capability.)

Chapter 2. Diabolical Evil -- Searching for Satan.

(Page 27) the author describes how the arrangement of the books in the Old Testament by Christians is a polemical and even a doctrinal pointer to what is to follow it in the New Testament, changing it from the Hebrew arrangement which is "at once timeless and open". Most significant is the placing of the Prophets last to point to the New Testament, and closing the cannon with the Malachi, who declares "I will send my messenger and he shall prepare the way before me" (Carroll and Prickett 1998: Old Testament 1038), and that the day of the Lord is approaching. So it supports the Christian claim that the New Testament was the fulfilment of the Hebrew Scriptures. And of course the process of translation itself was ideological, or at least doctrinal.

(My comment: interesting to have more information on how the Scriptures were manipulated.)

(Page 28). Russell pointed out that the God of much of the Old Testament is both light and darkness, good and evil (Russell 1989: 28). Here we have a monotheistic religion with a dualistic God. "The Old Testament God is powerful and benevolent, but he had a shadow side, and that shadow is part of the background of the Hebrew Satan" (Russell 1989: 29). Neil Forsyth agrees that here is an ambivalent God who has "a destructive as well as creative side". Gradually this ambivalent God is transformed into a wholly beneficent God, and evil is seen as having another source. There were two strategies to account for this, first an emphasis on the alienation of humanity, that the people are sinful and so are justly punished by God for straying too far from him, and second the existence of a supernatural being opposed to God who attacks the faithful and makes them suffer.

(My comment: an ambivalent is the psychologically important word here. You can see the psychological process of the one mother who can be experienced as both good and bad being split into the Good Mother/Bad Mother and definitively masculinised to secure the defensive structure. Psychological maturity would be able to recognise that mother/God can do good things that can be experienced as bad because not understood. I have not heard any modern theologians attempting to look at, say,  BOOKMARK  the AIDS virus from the viewpoint of God although the Bible is very clear that God loves all of his creation; that is, he loves the AIDS virus. This is something quite different from saying that there is some good ultimate purpose in babies dying of AIDS).

(Page 45). The author uses as an example the case of the two teenagers who shot and killed 12 children and one teacher and then killed themselves at Columbine high school in Denver, Colorado, in April 1999. One response to the question why they did it was to look at their background, and find that they were exposed to violent pornography, and this is taken to explain their actions. Yet there is the fact that vast numbers of other young people, similarly exposed, never come near to committing acts of this magnitude. And so the author says we have an explanatory gap, a black hole, into which people insert supernatural forces of evil.

(My comment: what happens there of course is that both sets of people are fixing on one simple answer; as if an entire childhood could be summed up by one factor in the same way that Christian religion tries to sum up evil in the one figure of Satan. One can deduce from the fact that they were exposed to such material that their parenting was deficient in some way but that doesn't take us much further. A detailed analysis of the life history from the womb to the time of the crime, put in comparison with a similar detailed analysis of other teenagers exposed to similar pornography who did not commit such crimes could probably throw up several likely significant influencing factors. It would be very difficult of course because one would have to rely on evidence from the parents, which is likely to be either deliberately or unconsciously untruthful. Statistically however one could find out much more looking at the style of childhood in a country like America, where this sort of crime is now becoming less unexpected, with other countries where it does not occur.)

(Page 47). The author refers to St Augustine’s account of the fall from heaven: "others delighting in their own power, and supposing that it could be their own good, fell from that higher and blessed good which was common to them all and embraced a private good of their own". This is quoted in Graham (2000:200) who concludes: "precisely this (or something very like it) is seen to be at work in the episode at Columbine…"

(My comment: but this is nonsense! One can hardly think that the boys rationally chose suicide as a preferable "good". A look at my work with my client Rosita in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 would be relevant here.)

Chapter 3. Philosophies of Evil.

(Page 67). " Ressentiment, then, is Nietzsche's term of art for a special kind of festering hatred and vengefulness, one motivated by impotence in the face of unpleasant external stimuli, and that leads (at least among the impotent) to the creation of values that devalue (or at least make sense of) those unpleasant stimuli" (Leiter 2002: 204).

(My comment: this explanation immediately evokes Melanie Klein's ideas about envy and anger in the baby's response to mother.)

(Page 68). "From powerlessness their hatred grows to take on a monstrous and sinister shape, the most cerebral and most poisonous form" (Nietzsche 1996: 19). The way the priests attack is through a radical transvaluation of values, "an art of most intelligent revenge" the priests, because they lack physical power, had to become clever, far more clever than the Warriors. "Human history would be a much too stupid affair were it not for the intelligence introduced by the powerless" (Nietzsche 1996: 19).

(My comment: exactly the point I have been making in my book Created in the Image and in the paper The First Year of Life….. where I showed that the evolutionary origins of human intelligence lie in the vulnerability of the early Homo infant.)

(Page 71). Nietzsche's conclusion to our present condition: our morality is an expression of ressentiment aimed at ourselves. We have learned -- have been taught -- to loathe our physical selves, our natural selves, our desires. We are consumed by guilt. But this suffering does not drive us to despair and for this, as well as for the guilt, we have to thank the priest. Nietzsche concludes the Genealogy: "his problem….. was not suffering itself, but rather the absence of an answer to…. "why do I suffer?" Man, the boldest animal and the one most accustomed to pain, does not repudiate suffering as such; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided that he has been shown a meaning for it, a reason for suffering. The meaninglessness of suffering, and not suffering as such, has been the curse which has hung over mankind up to now -- and the ascetic ideal offered mankind a meaning!" (Nietzsche 1996:136).

(My comment: lots of good schizoid keywords there, see my various discussions of the schizoid condition. If I can get round to it, I must check up on Nietzsche's early life.)

Chapter 4. Communities of Fear

(Page 80). Concerning epidemics of vampirism from 1670 to 1770, the explanation Rousseau is concerned to find is not a natural, as opposed to supernatural, one, but a social/political one, because the epidemics were a social/political phenomena. First, we can take the vampire as a metaphor for our social and political competition. It stands, says Rousseau, for the exploitative relationships that have arisen from the possession of private property. "So, with the birth of property and the growth of agriculture we have transfigured ourselves into masters and slaves in turn, everyone moved by contempt for the person and lust for the goods of the next man, so that we had finally become a species of animal which in its totality is self-destructive" (Frayling1991:34). Second, we can look for a social/political explanation of the vampire epidemics, one in which religious and political authorities seek to exercise control over populations by appealing to popular myths and superstitions, to irrational panics.

(My comment: Rousseau of course has his own agenda; my point is that civilisation provided powerful tendencies towards pathologising the anti-libidinal. For an example the vampire in fantasy see Chapter 3 where I deal with Jung's patient who lived on the moon. Vampires are usually seen as male because this serves to disguise what would be a much too close analogy between the sucking of blood and the sucking of milk. Like the earlier witch craze in Western Europe, the vampire craze in Eastern Europe was a product of severe stress on the mother/infant bond. The witch is hostile, damaging, rejecting mother, and is more usually female; the vampire is devouring mother, the mother who sucks out of the infant more emotional resources than she gives. My client Rosita had a mother of this type. The whole fantasy of the dead rising from their graves to prey on the living, considering the grave as the womb, puts the action into those first months when mother and infant are merged and the baby's experiences of "death" at the hands of rejecting mother, and of killing her, are merged with the mother's behaviour.)

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(Page 82) the changed picture of witchcraft emerged on the continent in the 15th century. This was developed by intellectuals in the church and the universities and saw all forms of magic, with no exception, as evidence of a pact entered into with the devil.

(Page 84). So we can see that the idea of diabolical heresy and the witch craze that followed it arose from a sense of fear and anxiety throughout Western Christian Europe. But what gave rise to this general fear and anxiety, such that the Christian community saw in itself under a terrifying set any assault? Historians have identified a range of causes. Certainly, in the 14th and 15th centuries Europe had experienced famine, plague, general warfare and financial instability. The Christian Church itself was experiencing crisis and instability, with schisms (there were two popes from 1378 to 1409 and three from 1409 to 1415) and pressure for reform.

(Page 85). Christina Larner draws two more important developments from the context of religious warfare. The first is the importance of personal religion among the general population. Prior to this period it was not important what the peasantry believed, but the Reformation and Counter-Reformation christianised the peasantry for the first time. The second development is the rise of the nation state, as the new regimes established more centralised, more secular governments. These new regimes had to demonstrate their legitimacy by appropriating religious authority.

(My comment: it will be seen that the fragmentation of the Christian community of Europe and religious warfare follows much the same pattern with similar causes as warfare of a "secular" nature (see Archaeology of Warfare), not surprisingly as it is the same hominin psyche that is responsible for the lot. Just as an individual under threat exert greater control over the self in defence, so the church under threat needed to exert control over its "less important" members.)

(Page 87). An imperialistic ideology depends upon a stable identification between nation and self. The more diverse a nation, the less claim it has to national identity; and this "weakening" of identity makes it more vulnerable to absorption by imperialistic nations elsewhere. Therefore there is fear of loss of national identity through unregulated movement across borders and growing deviance within them, as one's nation "dissolves", and in Stoker's novel of this becomes "the fear of dissolving into vampires" (Gelder 1994: 12). During the period Larner identifies in early modern Europe, with the rise of new nation states and new political regimes, the fear of the absorption was very real, but during Stoker's time of British Empire the fact was that "even the most apparently stable, imperialistic nations can evoke horror fantasies in which self-identities are invaded and absorbed into the other".

(My comment: separation anxiety and devouring/invasive mother issues indicated by language above)

(page 89). The prosecution of witches is a peculiarly economical way of attacking deviance (Larner 1984: 64 -- 5). This to an extent explains why the victims of the trials were predominantly female. The position of women is so crucial to the social order that any deviance is seen as extremely destabilising: men have a much wider range of acceptable behaviour is before being labelled as deviant. In times of social crisis, therefore the woman is the primary problem and it is her role that has to be enforced most strictly. In the law-and-order crises generated by the new regimes of early modern Europe, women were a prime symbol of disorder; this of course was because they were a prime symbol of order.

(My comment: see all my previous notes and comments on issues around the purity of women and honour etc)

Chapter 5. The Enemy Within.

(Page 96). For Arendt, therefore, thinking clearly can prevent us from falling into the banality of evil itself, and for Newman can prevent us from flying into irrational panic at the thought of evil. There is a faith in the power of reason here which the author shares, but in order to ground that faith we need to assess the power of un-reason the power of the fear that must be suppressed. What Newman suggests that while the apparent source of fear is some external evil that threatens us, its actual source is internal, something to do with our psyches rather than the external world, and it is this internal fear that is politically exploited and mobilised against the myth of evil in the world. And so we must explore our inner psyches to discover the source of fear.

The author goes on to talk of psychoanalysis and of course Freud, and uses one of his essays on the uncanny published in 1919 to discuss the psychological explanations for evil.

(My comment: as usual discussion of the psyche is confines to orthodox psychoanalysis. To be fair the author does also mention Jung and one or two other practitioners, but always the orthodox; the work of Alice Miller would have been a valuable addition, as also Scott Peck's book The People of the Lie, and his suggestion in it that evil is a form of malignant narcissism. Of course Fairbairn's and Guntrip's work would I think have given him a more complete answer.)

(Page 110). And it is the fear that makes horror films and literature quite so disturbing, that as the vampire drains us, or the zombie eats us , or the serial killer skins us -- as we are reduced to the blood and flesh and skin that makes us -- we are aware, we are watching, we are not yet really dead. We saw earlier that Marina Warner and others emphasise the positive aspect of the dark narratives, that they are "a means of strengthening the sense of being alive, of having command over self, that people "discovered that they are still alive, outside the tale,. In fact the opposite process is in play, perhaps at the same time, that these stories strengthen the sense of being completely helpless and destroyed, that we discovered that we are inside the tale, being dead -- and, worst of all, despite our death we continue to watch, our eyes wide and blinking in horror, as the cannibal eats us and the serial killer skins us; we are dead, but not dead -- the un-dead audience, being violently consumed by our malignantly evil pursuers.

(My comment: the whole situation of the absolutely helpless infant being undressed -- skinned -- and cleaned by overstressed devouring mother.)

(8114). The abject is therefore to do with the fragility of boundaries, here the boundary between the infant and maternal body. The infant experiences horror at its dependence on the mother's body, and at the way in which its identity is consumed by that body, but it is also fascinated by it (Oliver 2002: 226). The maternal body becomes associated with what the drives seek to expel and so: "with the various little rituals tied to cleanliness, toilet training, eating habits, etc., the "mother" is gradually rejected (Lechte 1990: 159). But after this process the abject remains with us as both a source of horror and fascination, as "the ambiguous, the in-between, what defies  BOOKMARK  boundaries, a composite resistant to unity" (Lechte J19 90:160).

(My comment: in fairness I include an example of Freudian analysis around the issue, which agrees in terms of the importance of infantile experience but fails, in my opinion, at the evolutionary level.)

Chapter 6. Bad Seeds

the author begins by bringing to the fore two illusions about childhood: childish innocence and childish malevolence. ",,,the ambiguity of children, as innocent victims and as untrustworthy mischief makers. In horror fiction they often go beyond mere mischief and become fully developed little monsters. The presence of children in literature in this form is relatively recent. Up until the end of the 18th century they were largely absent. The child was mainly an emblem, a symbol of innocence, an object of compassion -- functions that are especially rooted in the Christian tradition. This changed with the romantics in the 19th century when "childhood came to be treasured as a metaphor for the ideal human condition". This evolved into the Victorian cult of childhood towards the end of the century. According to this cult "both child and mother were thought of as mediating figures retaining intuitive powers as well as a natural vitality and a natural (if untutored) piety" the child represented the future of humanity and so did childhood itself, but it also represented the primitive past -- adulthood was a fall from grace. For the Victorians, the dead child was "twice blessed" "children are memorable figures in death not only because they show pietistic fortitude in extremis but also because they have not yet "fallen" into adulthood, and so retain visions of pre-existence". But it is precisely through the other-world aura that children become sinister and this is perhaps why they find their way into horror narratives around this period.

(My comment: it was through the Industrial Revolution that children became a persecuted and exploited a subset of humanity, working under conditions similar to slavery in factories etc., forced by economic circumstances to support their parents (mothers) far beyond anything achieved by evolution. But all this was of course building on the inherent impulse first evolved on the Pleistocene savannah to support mother. A glance through history will demonstrate how normal it is to demonise a persecuted minority. The demonising of course was being done by the educated classes who were benefiting from this exploitation and whose infants as a result would be receiving more care from servants than from their mothers. The split between good child and bad child is exactly what one would expect as the schizoid condition became more generally pathologised in an increasing proportion of the literate population. There would be the issue of suppressed guilt also etc etc.)

(page 129). The author discusses Thompson and Venables who killed little James Bulger. I have dealt with the public aspect of this case in Chapter 10, and wished at the time I had known more about the background of the two 10-year-old perpetrators. This chapter give some of the background and all the evidence for those that the author quotes who regard the boys as damaged children and not as evil little monsters.

"Robert Thompson was the fifth of six sons. His father left the family suddenly in 1988, when Robert was five, and there is evidence that the relationship between his parents had been a violent one. Ann Thompson then turned to drink, going out regularly leaving her six sons pretty much to their own devices. The eldest brother, then 17, was regularly left in charge, and would hit the other boys. The relationship between the brothers was itself violent, with each other bullying the one younger; Robert regularly bullying the youngest Simon. The older boys were taken successively into care, and although the family had the reputation as a problem family the neighbours reported as unexceptionable, and eventually it seemed that what was left of the family became more stable.

John Venables was "another product of a broken home" and had an unhappy childhood. He was born in 1982 and his parents divorced in 1985. His older brother and younger sister had learning difficulties and attended a special school, and he was given a difficult time by his contemporaries both in his home street and at his school because his brother and sister were "backward". He became a deeply unhappy young boy. By 1991 his behaviour at school was a serious concern and the schools psychology service report on what was bizarre conduct. His teacher reported that he would sit on his chair and hold his desk with both hands and rock backwards and forwards and start moaning and making strange noises. Sometimes he would bang his head on the furniture he became destructive, would sometimes lie inside a group of desks lodging himself so that his teacher had trouble moving him, occasionally he would cut himself deliberately with scissors or cut holes in his socks. Eventually he attacked another boy with a 12 inch ruler trying to choke him.

(My comment: I think that's enough to prove the point that there was enough in their history to explain the development of such negative behaviour patterns and emotional immaturity that they could torture and kill a toddler. Of course they were doing to their internal toddler self what they had experienced being done to themselves.)

(Page 132). "Such limited research as exists suggests that most young people who commit serious crimes -- murder, manslaughter, rape, arson -- have one thing in common. They had been abused physically or sexually, or both, and emotionally, in childhood. Not all young people who commit serious crimes have been abused. And not all young people who have been abused commit serious crimes.

(Page 133). "One of the most consistent findings in the literature is that the majority of youthful homicide perpetrators present with a history of adverse family factors" eight such factors featured heavily: physical abuse, sexual abuse, instability of caretaker situation and/or residency, absence of a father, parental alcohol or drug abuse, parental psychiatric history, parental criminal background, and violence in the home. Physical abuse was the major variable, followed by violence in the home.

"Perhaps the most intriguing finding concerned the especially high frequency in which pre-teens had engaged in cruel behaviour towards other children". "Homicidal behaviour in young children does not appear to occur "out of the blue"; rather there seems to be a history of cruel and aggressive behaviour that precedes the horrific actions". Alongside this, 91% of the sample had a negative relationship with a male carer, and 82% had suffered physical and emotional abuse."

(Page 134). "In comparison with a control group of non emotionally disturbed children, emotionally disturbed children watched more hours of aggressive television, were more likely to prefer aggressive characters, had more difficulty in comprehending the unreality of the television portrayal of violence, and were more willing to hurt other children following exposure to aggressive content in laboratory situations".

(Page 135). Research has identified three mandates for the universal care of all children (Heckel and Schumacher 2001:159): access to preventative health care, education, clothing, immunisation and dental care; appropriate adult care and supervision; and an enduring relationship with a caring adult.

(My comment: how typical that the most essential one is placed third!)

(Page 141). The "Black-Hole" Problem.  BOOKMARK  All the psychological and social factors never add up to a complete explanation of why individual make the choices they do. There is always a gap, a "black hole", in our accounts. Many thousands of children today goes through the trauma of broken homes, poor parenting and even outright abuse, without turning into fully fledged killers (Thomas 1993:173).

(My comment: there is of course no "black hole" but there is an omission from the list of causal factors which is the experience in the womb and the first year of life. Of course one might say this is covered in general terms in three mandates listed but to deal with the one I think is foundational it is necessary to focus on the dyad, the mother/principal carer and infant as a unit requiring the healthcare, education, and social support. The whole chapter provides much evidence confirming the idea of impressed behaviour patterns, and in fact my work provides a theoretical foundation for effective action. It also makes quite comprehensible why it is only a few children who actually act out the self-murder they have experienced, projecting that murdered smaller self onto other children.)

Chapter 7. The Character of Evil.

(Page 159). These people "do not choose to act in these ways"; instead, they "spontaneously and naturally respond according to habitual patterns ingrained in their characters" (Kekes 1990:6).

(Page 161). Malevolence arises from a condition of oppression and consists of a response to that oppression of "saying no to life -- to their own, to the lives of people like them, and certainly to the lives of those who adversely judge them" (Kekes 1990:80).

(My comment: a good description of the action of a severely pathologised anti-libidinal capability that has built itself a subpersonality.)

Chapter 8. Facing the Holocaust.

(Page 175). The most disturbing truth that must be understood is the ordinariness of most Nazi doctors. They were by no means the daemonic figures -- sadistic, fanatic, lusting to kill -- people have often thought them to be, and we have to face the disturbing psychological truth that participation in mass murder need not require emotions as extreme or daemonic as would seem appropriate for such a malignant project. The lesson of history is that "ordinary people can commit daemonic acts" (Lifton 1986:5).

(Page 176). "Somebody will have to explain why so many killers were intellectuals, academicians, college professors, lawyers, engineers, physicians, theologians" (Wiesel 1990: 17).

(My comment: I will do so! Many intellectuals have a more severe schizoid condition, which means a more pathologised anti-libidinal capability which leads to a greater likelihood of killing, either the self or another, when pressed on by social and cultural factors. Take a look at my suicidal client Rosita's dream encounter with her internal killer (Chapter 4 and transcripts) and Chapter 1 for my own experience).

(Page 178). Most disturbing of all the figures among the victims were those who had the task of, among other things, extracting the corpses from the gas chambers, having first sorted out the new arrivals to send into the gas chambers, then pulling gold teeth from jaws, cutting the women's hair, sorting and classifying the clothes shoes and the contents of luggage; transporting the bodies to the crematoria and overseeing the operation of the ovens; extracting and eliminating the ashes. These were Jews and after a few months of work they were killed and it was the task of their replacements to burn the corpses of their predecessors. This collaboration brought no privileges only certain death and the author discusses its incomprehensibility.

(My comment: it is identification with the oppressor taken to extreme limits, merging of rejected ego with rejecting object. Presumably what it did bring was a postponement of ego-death, refusal would no doubt have meant immediate and worse suffering.)

(page 183). In the 19th century, says Browning, the German conservatives associated anti-Semitism with "Everything they felt threatened by" (Browning 2001:195), and so it became "an integral part of the Conservative political platform" and became "more politicised and institutionalised than in the western democracy of France Britain and the United States".

(Page 187). Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment seemed to show -- setting up a simulated prison and separating a random sample of people into "prisoners" and "guards" -- was that it was the prison situation alone which produced the behaviour. Browning notes that Zimbardo's guards split into three groups that strikingly resembled the members of (Nazi) police Battalion 101: a third were enthusiastic about their roles, a large middle group kept to the rules but did not go out of their way to apply them, and a very small group "opted out" in the sense that they subverted the rules when they thought they could. Milgram's experiment on authority simulated the application of electric shocks. Two-thirds of the randomly selected subject group applied to shocks to the most extreme level -- where the "victims", after protests and cries of pain, fell silent -- when instructed to do so by an authority figure. In the absence of such a figure, clients failed to zero. Milgram and his team concluded that obedience to authority does not rest on duress -- there is a tendency to obey authority. Milgram did not test for conformity to peer pressure, but thought this was a factor, and Browning speculates that in the case of police Battalion 101, conformity assumes a more central role than authority.

(My comment: there's more but I can't put it all down, but it is good to find something on the experiments that I knew of but could not remember any names that would allow me to track them down when I was completing in my book. Such experiments give confirmation of the significance of impressed behaviours from infancy; negative experiences are there to provide the foundation to be magnified into horrific behaviour, when conducted on an adult scale, by the factors such as authority figures, environmental conditions, peer pressure etc that the experimenters were concerned with. It's all there in Alice Miller's books if you want a more psychoanalytic perspective.).

While the ordinary men of police Battalion 101 may have lacked the education to critique the Nazi program, the fact is that a majority of German intellectuals also failed to mount any serious critique, and indeed joined in with the program, some of them to the fullest extent. The intellectual framework in Europe during this period was dominated by "scientific racism the view that there were distinct races arranged in a hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, with the "Aryan" race at the summit.

(Page 189). Lifton asks how could the physician become a killer? From his interviews with Nazi doctors who worked in the camps, Lifton concludes that the psychological process of "doubling" was an essential aspect of their work. They were he says offered a Faustian bargain, participating in the vilest work of the Nazi program and in exchange were offered various psychological and material benefits.

(My comment: including ones that would pander to the incipient megalomania  BOOKMARK  that is a feature of a strong schizoid condition: "That of becoming the theorists and implementers of a cosmic scheme of radical cure by means of victimisation and mass murder" (Lifton, 1986:418). What the author calls doubling I would call splitting, the Auschwitz self and the prior self are two subpersonalities. I think Freud himself suggested that a surgeon could be sublimating a sadistic or killer self, and subpersonalities usually come in opposing pairs).

(Page 190). Lifton argues that Auschwitz as an institution depended on doubling. For an atrocity-producing institution to function it has to be able to motivate individuals to engage in the atrocity. "Sending typhus patients or potential carriers to the gas chamber did control the disease, and doing the same to the large numbers of weak and sick prisoners did improve the hygienic situation in Auschwitz. If one entered into the healing-killing paradox with a comprehensive Auschwitz self, it could seem to make sense, to "work"" (Lifton 1986:433). In this context then what they were doing made sense.

(Page 191). The dynamism of genocide offers considerable temptation to the professional to become the "spiritual engine" of change, revolution, renewal, and one participates in these things with the conviction that they are "in accord with the natural history and biology of man", and that one is acting as healer and saviour. This is not to deny that there was some resistance from the academic community, but the fact remains that intellectuals and academics are easily seduced by the powerful when they are told that their discipline -- science, medicine, philosophy, history -- lies at the centre of the renewed political life of the nation.

(Page 199). The banality of evil: beyond personal advancement, Eichmann " had no motives at all" (Arendt 1976:287). She concludes: "that such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man."

(Page 205). Arendt speaks of radical evil having something to do with "making human beings as human beings superfluous". And this in turn has something to do with the "elimination of human unpredictability and spontaneity" (Bernstein 2002: 208).

(My comment: I take it again back to infancy: the more an infant has been treated as an object and its unpredictability and spontaneity curbed the more easy it will be to make it, as an adult, treat others in the same way as its superego continues to control it).

(Page 207). Robert Wistrich also notes the connections. He says "the Holocaust was a pan-European event" and observes that it could not have happened if there had not been a consensus about the Jewish problem, especially strong in eastern Europe, but "there was also a growing anti-Semitism in western Europe and America, tied to the hardships caused by the Great Depression, increased xenophobia, fear of immigration and the influence of fascist ideas" (Wistrich 2002:6).

Chapter 9. Twenty-First-Century Mythologies.