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Writer's pictureNikita Brodskiy

Anatomy of Mass Violence: What We Need to Remember

Updated: Oct 1, 2019

A lifespan of two last generations - a relatively long period of time for modern history - the World is enjoying life without mass violence. There are of course a lot of cases of the state-sponsored and independently organized mass murders and lately - terrorist acts; and still thousands of people are experiencing violent deaths every year. Yet, a scope of violence in modern world doesn’t even compare with what humanity went through in the XX century.


Last century beat all records by the number and scope of mass massacres. Armenian Genocide, Holocaust, World War II crimes, Stalin’s Gulag, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, Khmer Rouge genocide by far surpassed all other tragic periods of the world history by the scale and scope of the organized murders.


History has examples of human societies where murders and human sacrifices used to be a religious cult (Aztecs) as well as over-militarized societies that brought devastating massacres (Timur khan).

It is rather hard to measure the scope of mass violence of the ancient and medieval time since history tends to glorify political achievements and social upheavals, neglecting the means . Timur’s hordes are believed to have killed about 5% of the world’s population of those days. Destructed cities of Herat, Delhi, Isfahan, Damascus and many other urban areas in 14th century - could not recover for decades after Timur’s violent murders of almost entire population of those cities.


With that, the main difference between the medieval and the XX-century violence was how mass massacres were blended into a cultural and civilizational narrative. In the past, violence could be a social norm that lasted for the period of several generations (until a society became exhausted and in many cases fail like Aztecs). In the XX century societies happened to plunge into atrocity of incredible violence within a lifespan of one generation.


The most shocking aspect of the XX century violence is a rapid transformation of the ordinary people who suddenly became rapist and torturers carrying out mass murders in the unprecedented scale.


Two notorious episodes from the last century are standing aside maybe because both were well documented and researched. First - Nanjing Massacre (1937-38), documented in the the diaries of John Rabe. And the second - concentration camps and specifically, Auschwitz, described in the Memoirs of its commandant - Rudolf Höß.


It remains largely inconceivable how a modern person would break off into such depth of violence. And moreover, how a massacre was combined with an ordinary life of the executioners’ families and children at a place where in average 2000 people were murdered daily for the period of several years.


It took the World a few decades to sort out and fully comprehend all the horrors of the WWII massacres. And then in late 60s-70s came the Cultural revolution in China and the Khmer Rouge terror with millions of violent deaths. And even then no one seemed to be able to stop the mass violence..


All the memories of atrocities separated from us by just a few decades involuntarily raise a question of how far the World has gone away from violence? And even more mundane: can the mass massacre happen again any time in foreseeable future? If yes, is there anything humanity can do to prevent it?


A combination of human psychology, certain social and cultural backgrounds and politics historically lead to the periods of mass violence.


Human psychology


Mass violence very often comes along with the mass movements. A critical mass of frustrated and marginalized individuals inspired by an idea, a religious believe or just a hope normally form a basis of the large scale social movements. As Eric Hoffer pointed, mass movements completely assimilate individuals into a collective body. “The fully assimilated individual doesn’t see himself and often others as human beings”. Thus mass movements are usually negligent of the human life.


Psychology of the violence has been well researched. In many cases, when individuals act in a mob, their personal accountability is deluded to the extend when the darkest sides of the human nature are fully unleashed. For the members of social group violent behavior often becomes a manifestation of the social protest.


However, periods of large scope mass violence and massacres have not been chaotic. Instead, they have been an organized action of one group of people against another. Normally, a massacre is committed by a social minority against a majority (although, there are exceptions).


There are modern day examples when on the local level violence takes over the whole communities (although, closed). Crimes in the Russian system of imprisonment have been lately in a spotlight. Mutilation, rape and violence have become almost conventional methods of supporting social order at the detention places.

From multiple cases leaked to mass media, Russian system of imprisonment appears to be a large scale Stanford Prison Experiment brought to reality.


Ironically, episodes of mass violence demonstrate that the role and psychology of a victim is as important as those of a murderer. Resistance as well as impotence of a victim sparks even more atrocious violence. Human psychology feeds violence, both on the side of a murderer and a victim. When spurred properly, the ignoble instincts unfold.


Social and economic background


Narrow interpretation of the group values, nationalism, religious hatred have been historically the main drivers of aggression and violence. A prevalence of the Friend or Foe mentality in its extreme mode leads to the group supremacy ideology, rejection of any foreign culture and at the end - hate and physical eradication of those unlike.


The hierarchy of social values of an individual are usually seen as an individual personal necessities at a basement, then goes a family, an ethnicity and a humanity. Of course, there are always variations that include congregations, fraternities, social networks. However, normally the inner circles of the social hierarchy are closer to the individual perception of the surrounding reality and therefore are valued higher by an average individual.


Under certain historical circumstances, the regular hierarchy of individual values can be broken. For example, social movements and upheavals usually suppress individual and family values and replace them with the goals and priorities of a group (fraternity, congregation). On the contrary, in the stable political environment social awareness of an individual grows beyond the inner circles toward the global values and goals.


There have been times over past two centuries when the World approached fairly high levels of social unity. In many countries the balance of values (individual - family - ethnicity) became so solid that people started to act together effectively on a global scale. Mainly, those were the periods of social and economic stability.

For example, the last 50 years humanity has been experiencing the longest period of sustainable economic growth. The process strongly supported by social and cultural exchange, altogether received the name of Globalization.


Although, for now it is becoming obvious that Globalization as a social concept has not obtained a true potential to inspire equally the entire world. Being partly an economic phenomenon, globalization has been blamed to become a cause of an increasing disparity and income inequality. As a result, starting in 2010s the World has been leaning increasingly on the nationalistic and religious concepts that are providing much stronger ground to the nations for self-identification.


Large countries like Russia, China and India nowadays push forward nationalistic agenda as a way to ensure social and political stability and growth. Their example is actively followed by the smaller nations around the world. Lately, we are seeing many developed countries prioritizing their national interest as well.


Abandoning global values for the sake of local and national interests can be justified in the short time. Thus the global policies and institutions get shaken up and revamped. However, in the long run mankind should be able to find a right balance between the national (ethnical, religious) and the global human values.


Historically, nationalism and religious fanaticism taken to the extreme levels, strongly ignited the mass movements during the periods of extreme violence.


Politics.


Societies exposed to an external threat or being at war have normally higher tolerance for violence and in many cases would give an open license for it. External threat unites people in their desire to sacrifice their personal values and even lives for the sake of the common good and safety.


Mass altruism of the turbulent times usually is heavily exploited by governments and political leaders. This is when the violence becomes legally and socially justified, first toward the external and internal enemies. And when the genie is truly out of the bottle, it becomes almost impossible to get violence under control. And it may take over the entire society, and become a social norm.


So politics plays an important role in unleashing the violence. Yet, when it is blended with the social upheavals that combination could truly transform local acts of violence to mass massacres.



What can be done to prevent the mass violence.


  1. As trivial as it may sound, humanity must know its own history. Education and mass popularization of the lessons of the past must be ubiquitous. Unfortunately, political regimes tend to re-write the history and glorify the episodes of massacres. For example, nothing in modern China ever reminds of the Cultural revolution crimes. Many of the Red Guards were successfully integrated in the post-Mao establishment. So current political regime is not interested in educating the youth on the lessons of the near past.

  2. Social groups should be able to steam off as much as possible without harsh and abusive confrontations. In the modern democracies political decisions are supposed to be made in accordance with the will of majority. However, taken that minorities are normally more politically active, their social ambitions are in many cases prioritized. As a result, political balance in a society may shift toward a radicalism as it seen by a conservative majority. What is happening in many developed countries nowadays is the reaction against rapid liberalization. Even though a society seems to be loosing its consolidation, social rearrangement is truly necessary since it will lead to a more sustainable model in the long run.

  3. Majority has a right to self-protect itself. It may look unusual in this context, but American households owning guns (over 100M) can best of all protect themselves from a government sponsored or any other mass violence. Partly, atrocities of the XX century became possible because societies of New Time delegated their protection to governments and the latter applied mass violence against the disarmed people. US experience with the guns is too radical for the most of the World and will hardly be followed by any other country. In that regard, many nations in the world continue to be vulnerable to the mass violence outbursts, especially when they are sponsored by the governments.

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