Sleepers
On “normal”
My son and I recently read Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101, well he read it (old school) and I listened to it (but I’m still claiming the reading credit).
The Amazon synopsis:
In 1942 a unit of ordinary, middle-aged, German reserve policemen were ordered to liquidate a Jewish village. Most of them had never fired a shot at a human being before, yet they killed with little hesitation and eventually went on to slaughter tens of thousands in cold blood. How could this transformation have taken place?
Christopher R. Browning's shocking study of how Reserve Police Battalion 101 became mass murderers has already achieved classic status all over the world. By examining the policemen's frank personal testimonies from their post-war interrogations, he builds up a startling study of human evil in the Holocaust.
It’s an important book because it clearly outlines what we, and I mean you and I, ordinary normal people, are capable of under the right set of conditions.
My son is travelling in Europe at the moment, unjabbed thank you very much (so much for getting injected to travel…all you had to do was use the D.A.D. Strategy), and because he had just read the book he decided to go to Poland and visit Auschwitz. He sent me this most wonderful of pics:
This would have to be one of the most perfectly circular, ironic and unaware, publicly displayed “reminders” I have ever seen.
A call to not forget our totalitarian past, while requiring masking and social distancing.
Santayana is rolling in his grave. Or maybe not, he might have missed it too.
Peterson missed it and he studied totalitarian tyranny for 15 years before he wrote Maps of Meaning. I was very angry with him for missing it, but he has come good.
The best and “brightest” missed it.
So, this subject has been top of mind recently when I saw that the two Canadian brothers from Academy of Ideas had produced this latest video (members only unfortunately).
Could We Turn Evil? – How Evil Spreads Through a Society (academyofideas.com)
Here are some excerpts:
“…the majority of psychologically normal people are ‘sleepers’—that is, they are dispositionally inclined, when the situation is right, to aggression and destructiveness…Such ‘adequately provoking situations’ unfortunately, as we know, arise with great frequency and prevalence.” Stephen James Bartlett, Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health
And there it is, I love the framing of normal people as “sleepers” that is exactly what we are, and that is exactly what Ordinary Men proves. “When the situation is right…” we can become monsters.
Obviously, a small group don’t, and thank God for them, but it’s a depressingly small portion of society. I’m still yet to clearly understand why some people are immune to this evil when most are not.
I think part of the answer has to do with the ability to generate “principle” internally.
I had this exchange with one of my readers recently (thank you Tasmin):
Tasmin
When I heard Bob Moran interviewed by Geopolitics & Empire, I was quite taken by this bit:
“The starting point for me is simply understanding that what was being done is completely wrong – morally, democratically, scientifically, logically. It was incredibly dangerous and it needed to stop. To hold that position, you don’t need to entertain any kind of conspiracy theories, you don’t need to believe there’s any kind of agenda. There are some people who immediately will argue (and this happened at the beginning a lot) ‘but why would they be doing this (if it didn’t make any sense)?' As if the lack of motive meant that the crime didn’t exist. [My response would be] ‘I can’t tell you why they are doing it, but it is what they are doing. So let’s stop it, and then worry about why.'”
Me
Agree, the obsession with WHY really frustrated me. If someone is committing a crime, it doesn't matter Why they are doing it. People seem to need an answer to the Why to help them navigate their PRINCIPLES, without it they seem to have lost their own internal ability to generate or source Principle. Is the societal Religion hole also a Principles hole?
Tasmin
The internal ability to generate or source Principle would be the Natural Law, in Catholic theology.
And yes, people of good will are supposed to consult the Natural Law, written on their hearts, to be able to know that, for instance, masking children is wrong.
But. People of good will who are too busy living life itself are relying on mainstream media to let them know if a wolf is at the door, and the media keeps telling them the wolf at the door is a virus you can keep at bay with masks and vaccines, and the virus is most definitely unplanned.
The American Academy of Pediatrics tells parents children will develop normally with masking. Hospitals, schools, churches all tell them to mask children. So very evil. My own Archdiocese has promoted masks and vaccination; Dr. Paul Cieslak is a prominent Catholic who is the Medical Director of the Communicable Diseases and Immunizations at Public Health Division of the Oregon Health Authority. He advised the Archdiocese in its policies to align with Governor Brown's emergency pandemic orders, and mRNA vaccine rollouts all the way to shoot up the youngest children. I don't know how he sleeps at night.
Reasoning circularly, decent people can't imagine they participate in evil because they are decent people who don't participate in evil. And then it's easy for decent people to believe the absence of (media-reported) evidence of evil planning is evidence of the absence of evil planning. Perfect.
To be perfectly clear, I'm thankful for smart people who are worrying about "why", in order to help stop it, but it's enough for me to focus on "stop it" by not complying with illegal and immoral orders. Do not assist Them, whoever They are, in their wrongdoing.
Back to the two Canadian brothers:
The first condition for the emergence of evil on a mass scale is a social crisis. All the genocides of the 20th century occurred in the crisis of war and the economic and social breakdown which war produces. While many political or religious persecutions in the centuries prior to the 20th, were preceded by a famine, drought, or epidemic.
When faced with a crisis a society can react in a constructive or destructive manner. The constructive reaction is to identify the cause of the crisis, mitigate its effects and return order to a society. This optimal approach requires a self-reliant population and the possession of virtuous and courageous leaders. But if a society is too weak to cope with the threat at hand, too disoriented by its effects, or too easily manipulated by a corrupt political class, it will be inclined to react to a crisis in a destructive manner. That is, the society will turn on a scapegoat and this scapegoating process has played out repeatedly, both cross-culturally and in all periods of history. As René Girard explains in his classic work on the scapegoating process during a severe social crisis:
“. . .rather than blaming themselves, people inevitably blame either society as a whole, which costs them nothing, or other people who seem particularly harmful for easily identifiable reasons. . . Ultimately the persecutors always convince themselves that a small number of people, or even a single individual, despite his relative weakness, is extremely harmful to the whole of society.” René Girard, The Scapegoat
The scapegoats, while not guilty of the crimes of which they are accused, nor the cause of the crisis, possess characteristics that define them as a social out-group. They may be a poorly integrated minority, taboo-breakers, or individuals unwilling to comply with certain social norms, and it is these differences that are the hooks on which the masses project their frustrations.
Obviously, we know who the scapegoats have been during the GMC. The conspiracy theorists (who have simply been ahead of the curve by 6 months) and the unjabbed.
“The crowd tends toward the persecution [of a scapegoat] since the [real] cause of what troubles it . . . cannot interest it. The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect [the real] causes [of the crisis]. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will appease its appetite for violence.” René Girard, The Scapegoat
Once a scapegoat has been identified, the next step in provoking an evil reaction from normal men and women is to demonize the scapegoated group. Or as Jean Hatzfeld explains in his book Machete Season, the masses must be “. . .mobilized to think of other human beings—people who were their school friends, neighbors, co-workers, and fellow parishioners—as not human beings at all. . .” (Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season) In the modern day, this dehumanization process is accomplished with the use of propaganda. Typically, this propaganda is spread by those in positions of power who are looking to deflect blame for their inability to deal with the crisis, or for their role in causing the crisis. If the propaganda is effective, eventually even normal people will talk of the scapegoats in a manner which strips them of their humanity.
In Australia one of our many people “in positions of power” that used propaganda “to dehumanise” was our own Brad Hazzard. In this instance the unjabbed were framed as not giving a damn about others, that was their “less than human” trait.
One effective method to demonize the scapegoat is to find the worst members of the group, and to represent them as typical members of the group. This means to find the handful of racists, degenerates, or criminals, who inevitably pepper all social groups, and to generalize their actions to the group as a whole.
That tactic was used against Kristian Pulkownik, and the rest of us.
BTW he didn’t punch the horse. He just firmly but actually quite gently, just shoved horse away.
Unless this process of scapegoating is halted it will devolve from small acts of harm, to imprisonment, and eventually the torture and killing, of the scapegoat. An important question thus arises: How can the perfect storm of evil be avoided if its clouds are already forming? The power to stop the process does not lie in the realm of politics, as politicians are often perpetrators of evil, rather it lies with the bystander. The bystander is the individual who has not been convinced of the guilt of the scapegoat. They are individuals, in other words, who are largely immune to the propaganda and who see a bit more clearly than the so-called normal members of society.
How do bystanders hold the power to prevent a mass atrocity? Each time a bystander speaks out and condemns the actions of those participating in the scapegoating process, this increases the chance that others will follow suit in resistance. The more people that speak out and condemn the perpetrators of evil, the harder it becomes for the perpetrators to commit their evil acts.
Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism makes a very important point about the absolute value of “speaking out”:
Finally, the third group speaks for itself. This group usually becomes, to a greater or lesser extent, the object of the frustration and aggression of the masses (see chapter 6). It is typically dehumanized, presented as creatures of inferior humanity. If this group ceases to assert its voice, it confirms the stigma. Speaking and rational reasoning is what distinguishes humans from animals; to stop speaking out paves the way for dehumanization. This in itself shows the importance of continuing to speak out as calmly and wisely as possible. But there is another important reason to do so. Speaking leads to experiences of meaning and existence, at least if the one who speaks tries to express his subjective truth as honestly and sincerely as possible. Dissident speech doesn’t have to be primarily tactical or rhetorical in nature, but it should be authentic and honest (see chapter 7). Even if speaking out has no effect on the Other, it will still do something for oneself. Eventually, it is in this act of truth-telling that the absurdity of totalitarianism becomes meaningful: Those who do not join in the collective madness and quietly and sincerely continue to assert their opposing voice are, by doing so, steadily elevated in their humanity. Read, for instance, Solzhenitsyn’s poignant testimony on the effects on himself that speaking out and writing had during his eight-year stay in the gulags.
The first and foremost task is to keep speaking out. Everything stands or falls with the act of speaking out. It is in the interest of all parties. The specific manner in which the act of speaking out takes place—in books, publications or interviews, in front of the cameras, in shops or at the kitchen table, in the company of a limited or large group of people—is of less importance; everyone who, in his own way, speaks out about the truth, contributes to the cure of the ailment that is totalitarianism. It is not necessary to have a huge number of people who unite in speaking out to form a meaningful social group. Remember that the masses (the totalitarized portion of the population) usually consist of only about 30 percent of the total population, and the 40 or 50 percent who meekly follow do so mainly because the masses form the largest contiguous block and have the loudest voice, which to them is the most convincing. However, the absurdity of the discourse of the masses also plays to their detriment. If this remaining 10 to 20 percent can form a countergroup (without becoming a crowd themselves!) and is able to assert an alternative voice in a sensible way, this group will then be able to undo the mass formation, or at the very least, to free society from its grip. Moreover, the nonconformist group has to always bear in mind that the masses (and the totalitarian system) are intrinsically self-destructive and always destroy themselves in the long run (see chapter 7). The totalitarian system doesn’t have to be overcome so much as one must somehow survive until it destroys itself.
Back to Ordinary Men.
To us, it is a warning, to others it is a “How To” manual:
On “Distancing”
The context of war must surely be taken into account in a more general way than as a cause of combat-induced brutalization and frenzy, however. War, a struggle between “our people” and “the enemy,” creates a polarized world in which “the enemy” is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation. War is the most conducive environment in which governments can adopt “atrocity by policy” and encounter few difficulties in implementing it. As John Dower has observed, “The Dehumanization of the Other contributed immeasurably to the psychological distancing that facilitated killing.” Distancing, not frenzy and brutalization, is one of the keys to the behavior of Reserve Police Battalion 101. War and negative racial stereotyping were two mutually reinforcing factors in this distancing.
On “Desk Murderers” and “Tiny Steps”
Many scholars of the Holocaust, especially Raul Hilberg, have emphasized the bureaucratic and administrative aspects of the destruction process. This approach emphasizes the degree to which modern bureaucratic life fosters a functional and physical distancing in the same way that war and negative racial stereotyping promote a psychological distancing between perpetrator and victim. Indeed, many of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were so-called desk murderers whose role in the mass extermination was greatly facilitated by the bureaucratic nature of their participation. Their jobs frequently consisted of tiny steps in the overall killing process, and they performed them in a routine manner, never seeing the victims their actions affected. Segmented, routinized, and depersonalized, the job of the bureaucrat or specialist—whether it involved confiscating property, scheduling trains, drafting legislation, sending telegrams, or compiling lists—could be performed without confronting the reality of mass murder. Such a luxury, of course, was not enjoyed by the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101, who were quite literally saturated in the blood of victims shot at point-blank range. No one confronted the reality of mass murder more directly than the men in the woods at Józefów. Segmentation and routinization, the depersonalizing aspects of bureaucratized killing, cannot explain the battalion’s initial behavior there.
On “Division of Labor”
The facilitating psychological effect of a division of labor for the killing process was not totally negligible, however. While members of the battalion did indeed carry out further shootings single-handed at Serokomla, Talcyn, and Kock, and later in the course of innumerable “Jew hunts,” the larger actions involved joint ventures and splitting of duties. The policemen always provided the cordon, and many were directly involved in driving the Jews from their homes to the assembly point and then to the death trains. But at the largest mass shootings, “specialists” were brought in to do the killing. At Łomazy, the Hiwis would have done the shooting by themselves if they had not been too drunk to finish the job. At Majdanek and Poniatowa during Erntefest, the Security Police of Lublin furnished the shooters. The deportations to Treblinka had an added advantage psychologically. Not only was the killing done by others, but it was done out of sight of the men who cleared the ghettos and forced the Jews onto the death trains. After the sheer horror of Józefów, the policemen’s detachment, their sense of not really participating in or being responsible for their subsequent actions in ghetto clearing and cordon duty, is stark testimony to the desensitizing effects of division of labor.
Now think about the GMC and the Bio-Security State and it’s forced injections and now increased death and disease everywhere through the lens of:
Sleepers
Distancing
Desk Murderers
Tiny Steps
Division of Labor
i was always the one to speak out or say no from a very young age maybe 9 or 10, i guess its just a personality trait rather than something learned
anyway heres a vid of the horse shove https://youtu.be/SCanMXJH0p4?t=22
Excellent! Yours is the first thing I've read this morning. I also, some three years ago read Christopher R. Browning book (🐧 1998 edition). It wasn't "easy" read.
Also with some "extra dimension", I suppose me being born and growing up in Poland (left mid 1981) daughter of Auschwitz and NKWD surviver. I like your clear, logical thinking and enjoy your writing very much. Yes, "best and brightest" being familiar with J..Peterson it came as a huge surprise to me too, it always does with persons who I consider much, much "smarter" than myself and,
somewhat, makes me feel better about my own cognitive processes.
I've been analysing it forever and constantly being mother to one son dbl +1 vcd, +flu shot in May, pregnant wife last year dbl cc'd and baby born Nov dutifully
presented for all available "protective" vaxx. (He is forty and otherwise smart, successful man but his wife is even smarter (sarc). Nothing could get through to them, she served me "you know Canberra has the highest percentage of highly educated, don't you?" as in argument for getting the jabs. How can you argue with someone like that (they live in Canberra). I tried and tried. My other son
(six yrs older) was like me from the start (something "fishy" with the way they're pushing it, we're very healthy, very slim chance of getting it, almost 100% survival rate etc). So here we are today, our small family, don't have to tell you my state of mind. Hope you don't mind me sharing. Once again, thank you for the great
work you're presenting.