How Can We Commit The Unthinkable?

Genocide: The Human Cancer

Israel W. Charny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429724862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide: The Human Cancer was commissioned by the Institute for World Order in New York and supported by a grant from the Szold National Institute in Jerusalem.

Notes

Notes to Chapter 1: Introduction to a Book about Life and Death

Epigraph from Irwin A. Berg, "Cultural Trends and the Task of Psychology," American Psychologist 20 (1965), pp. 203-207.

1. My own conviction about my mother's probable susceptibility to cancer because she was too sweet developed during the course of my psychoanalysis. I have since spoken to others who have come to the same conviction about a parent who succumbed to cancer.

By now, there is significant scientific literature on psychogenic contributions to cancer (among the many causes of cancer). There are many evidences of predisposing personality structure-also that the time of onset often follows a major emotional loss-and there are even data that indicate that the rate of growth of cancers is related to (and predictable by) the personality structure of the patient. In an extensive study of psychosomatic diseases, 1,337 medical students were studied during a sixteen-year period, beginning with their entrance to medical school. The physicians who developed cancer had personality characteristics and family histories similar to those who became mentally ill or committed suicide. They were low-keyed, quiet, emotional, self-contained and lonely. As children they were not close to their parents" (C. G. McDaniels, "Cancer Can Be Psychosomatic," Jerusalem Post, June 10, 1976). Recently there have also been fascinating serious attempts to stem the tide of cancer through integrated psychological and medical treatment (see Chapter 3, n. 12, for references to the work of Texas oncologist O. Carl Simonton, his wife, psychotherapist Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, and James Creighton; also Jeanne Achterberg and G. Frank Lawlis).

2. This, of course, is the larger message in the brilliant book by Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (New York: New American Library, 1962), and the movie with the same title.

3. Psychiatrist John Spiegel has pioneered significant theoretical concepts of the transactions or interplays among the individual, family, and society. Dr. Spiegel proposes a field of transacting systems composed of six levels: the universe, the soma or biological system, the psyche, the group, the society, and the culture (John Spiegel, Transactions: The Interplay Between Individual, Family, and Society [New York: Science House, 1971]).

Notes to Chapter 2: Normal Man as Genocider

Epigraph from Lionel Rubinoff, "Auschwitz and the Theology of the Holocaust," mimeographed (Address delivered to a colloquium sponsored by the Division of Theological Studies of the Lutheran Council in the U.S.A. and the Interreligious Affairs Department of the American Jewish Committee, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Columbus, Ohio, May, 1973).

1. Lewis F. Richardson, The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels (London: Stevens, 1960),

2. R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), pp. xiv, 49.

3. Throughout this book, I refer to genocide not from the point of view of the strictly legal definition, where there is the implication of a willful attempt to wipe out the identity of another people, but from the point of view of the generic meaning of genocide as mass murder or massacre.

4. Frederic Wertham, "New Dimensions of Human Violence," American Journal Psychotherapy 23 (1969), p. 374. In that 1969 publication-so many years after the events-Dr. Wertham makes this telling remark: 'The whole matter has been left in a twilight, historically and morally, and not a single psychiatric or pediatric organization in Germany or outside has as yet taken it up" (p. 375).

Dr. Wertham writes of one prominent psychiatrist: "Colleagues of his who knew him well and who condemn him for his 'euthanasia' work nevertheless say of him that he was 'an exceptionally good psychiatrist, especially kind to his patients and concerned about them day and night" (Frederic Wertham, "The Geranium in the Window: The 'Euthanasia' Murders," Chapter 9 in A Sign for Cain: An Exploration of Human Violence [New York: Macmillan, 1966], p. 174).

A further description of the execution of the mental patients, and its background in German medical thinking about eugenics, is provided by Stephen L. Chorover, From Genesis to Genocide (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1979).

5. Douglas M. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg (New York: MacFadden, 1961), p. 171 (original publication, 1947).

6. James R. Jaquith, Review of Peter Farb, Man's Rise to Civilization as Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), in Transaction 6:7 (May 1969), pp. 36-37.

7. Stuart C. Miller, "Our Mai Lai of 1900: Americans in the Philippine Insurrection," Transaction 7:1 (September 1970), p. 23.

8. Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (New York: Random House, 1968).

9. Judah Pilch, ed., The Story of the Jewish Catastrophe in Europe (New York: American Association Jewish Education, 1968). Quotation as cited is from the prepublication mimeographed edition; the same material, although rewritten, appears in the 1968 hardcover edition as Chapter 6, "The World Knew and Was Silent," pp. 205-214.

10. A. M. Rosenthal, Thirty-eight Witnesses (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). See also Leon Sheleffs remarks about the role of a society as a whole in choices to be bystanders in Chapter 9, text and notes 25 and 26.

11. Stanley Milgram, "Some Conditions of Obedience and Disobedience to Authority," Human Relations 18 (1965), pp. 57-76, and Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

12. David Rosenhan, "Some Origins of Concern for Others," in P. Mussen, N. Covington, and J. Langer, eds., Trends of Issue in Developmental Psychology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp. 134-153.

13. David Mark Mantell, "The Potential for Violence in Germany," Journal Social Issues 27:4 (1971), pp. 101-112.

14. Philip Zimbardo, "On 'Obedience to Authority,'" American Psychologist 29 (1974), pp. 566-567. Floyd L. Ruch and Philip G. Zimbardo, in their textbook, Psychology and Life (8th ed. [Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman, 1971], pp. 551-554), report at great length another incredible study that is not as well known. The subjects were students at the University of Hawaii who were assembled to hear a brief speech by a professor asking for their cooperation to assist in the application of scientifc procedures to kill the mentally and emotionally unfit. In the course of his remarks, the professor explained urbanely, "Euthanasia which means mercy killing ... is considered by most experts as not only being beneficial to the unfit, because it puts them out of the misery of their lives, but more importantly it will be beneficial to the healthy, fit, and more educated segments of the population. It is therefore a 'final solution' to a grave problem." The professor then added, "What is not clear, however, is which method of killing should be applied, which method is least painful and who should do the killing and/or decide when killing should be resorted to. For these reasons, further research is required and our research project is concerned with this problem." The results of the study were little short of incredible. Ruch and Zimbardo write: "It is likely that all 570 subjects would have said they disapproved Hitler's extermination of 6 million Jews, but when it was labeled differently and disguised as something noble, 517 accepted the basic premise and all but 33 even indicated what aspect of the job he or she would prefer to take part in. Not one of these college students said he or she would refuse to have a part in the undertaking." The study is credited to H. H. Mansson, "Justifying the Final Solution" (Paper presented at the International Congress of Psychology, London, 1969).

15. I. Shlomo Kulcsar, Shoshanna Kulcsar, and Lipot Szondi, "Adolf Eichmann and the Third Reich" in Ralph Slovenko, ed., Crime, Law, and Corrections (Springfield, Ill.: Charles Thomas, 1966), pp. 16-52. I. Shlomo Kulcsar, 'The Psychopathology of Adolf Eichmann," in Excerpta Medica International Congress Series No. 150: Proceedings of the IV World Congress of Psychiatry (Madrid, September 1966), pp. 1687-1689. I. Shlomo Kulcsar "De Sade and Eichmann," in Israel W. Charny, ed., Strategies Against Violence: Design for Nonviolent Change (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1978), pp. 19-33.

16. At least those were the results of just about all the traditional mental health examination procedures used with Eichmann. There was, however, one striking exception that must be reported. In the Szondi test, Eichmann was found to select pictures of killers to an incredible extent. This test is based on the subject's selection of pictures of different people from something of a "rogue's gallery." Szondi himself reportedly did a blind analysis of Eichmann's test performance and wrote that only rarely in history does such a killer appear. This writer is untrained in the Szondi test and along with most U.S. psychologists was educated to doubt the validity of the Szondi test because its theoretical underpinning seems contrived and is unsupported by a whole history of experiments done years ago, which showed that people do not extract accurate information from photographs. Given this bias, it is difficult to understand the apparent success of the Szondi test in contrast to the findings of accepted diagnostic procedures such as the Rorschach inkblot technique and the thematic apperception test, which did not show Eichmann as abnormal. In any case, it is still factual to conclude that according to a large variety of traditional measures differentiating normal from abnormal, Eichmann appeared more as a nonperson rather than as a sick person.

17. Thomas N. Merton, "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann," reprinted in Reflections (Merck, Sharp and Dohme) 2:3 (1967), pp. 21-23.

18. The same conclusion was reached by British psychiatrist Henry Dicks, who went back years after the war to examine in depth Nazi mass killers who were still serving their sentences for war crimes. "Neither fanaticism nor identifiable psychiatric disorders were crucial among them. They are mostly examples of weak-egoed emotionally deprived individuals. Their secret resentment, covered by conformity and unquestioning obedience under originally congenial social and group pressures and sanctions, broke surface, causing them to abrogate their earlier levels of 'civilized' behavior while acting their SS roles" (Henry V. Dicks, Licensed Mass Murder: A Socio-Psychological Study of Some SS Killers [London: Heinemann, 1972], jacket description).

What is perhaps most difficult to realize is that the "psychopaths" and "madmen" who are the leaders of many of the huge destructive events in history are also, in some intrinsic sense, human beings just like all the rest of us. The convenience of assigning these terrible men responsibility for the hells of their times should not deter us from the larger realization that at the present state of evolution of humanity, all of us carry a potential for terrible destructiveness.

The documentary Swastika depicts Hitler's family life at his Berchtesgaden retreat during the years 1933-1939. The film shows Hitler delicately pouring coffee at a children's birthday party, Hitler letting a baby play with his moustache, Hitler chatting with his secretaries about a movie. In a review of the film in the Washington Post, Kenneth Turan wrote: "Swastika, though perhaps difficult to take, is the most potent of anti-Nazi films simply because it shows us what people seem to be intent on forgetting, a lesson that cannot be learned too often: Hitler and his friends were not devils or robot clowns, but ordinary, everyday even banal folk. . . . The 'shock' of the film is its depiction of a Hitler who goes strongly against type, a man few people have ever imagined existed" (Reported by Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jerusalem Post, October 13, 1974).

A more recent review of the evidence of the normality of the Nazi killers is Hans Askenasy, Are We ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction to a Book About Life and Death
• Part One What Are the Origins of Human Destructiveness?
• Interlude
• Part Two When Does Man Commit Genocide?
• Part Three Why Can There Still Be Hope?
• Postscript
• Appendixes:
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Authors and the Book
• Index