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AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR Volume 23, pages 131137 (1997)

MASS HATE, by Neil Kressel. New York: Plenum, 1996, 340 pp.
A tale from the Holocaust tells of a Ukrainian village where the mass execution of Jews took place during the summer of 1941. The non-Jewish people from the village were quietly watching the massacre, when suddenly a woman burst out of the line of bystanders, aimed her fists at the killing squad, and shouted: Stop it! What do you think of yourselves? Are you crazy? It turned out that she was known as the madwoman of that village. This short tale shows to what extent those terrible events blurred the boundary between normal and abnormal, a boundary that we have been working ever since to re-establish in some meaningful way. In his book, Mass Hate , Kressel utilizes the current state of the art in psychology in an attempt to understand the motives of the perpetrators in four different genocidal contexts: the Holocaust, the Bosnian war, the massacre in Ruwanda, and the Muslim extremist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Although his intellectual and ethical effort is admirable, it again becomes obvious how little we know of and can account for the massive atrocious human behavior of our era. I am not sure we are many steps further from where Milgram was in 1975 when he stated: I am certain there is a complex personality basis to obedience and disobedience. But I know we have not found it (p. 212). In this sense, many of the earlier psychodynamic explanations by Dicks, Gilbert, and others, cited by Kressel, which tried to analyze Hitlers personality or those of other Nazi killers, seem quite futile to me. First, they were given in hindsight, after we knew the extent of the crimes these people committed, and they looked for explanatory predispositions. Second, they could be found equally among many people who never participated in mass killing [Rosenhan, 1967]. Perhaps we do know by now, as Kressel claims, that even if authoritarianism, ethnocentrism, and obedience play a major role in creating the personal predispositions for such events, it is not personality alone that stands behind massive rapes and killings, but rather peculiar combinations of situational and interpersonal factors. What is clear is that there unthinkable deed are repeated, surprising us again and again in the variety of times and locations in which they occur. Our surprise stems from an innocent belief that the progress of civilization will automatically hinder human beings from performing atrocities, especially through education and a higher standard of living as symbols of this progress. The rise of Nazi power and the atrocities they committed on Jews, Gypsies, and their own crippled and mentally ill (which, by the way, are not mentioned by Kressel) should have destroyed that innocent belief. Those atrocities were sometimes carried out by well-educated and well-to-do Germans. It seems, however, that we still cling to our belief. What else are we left with but this hope for progress in human nature after relinquishing older religious beliefs and secular ideolo 1997 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Book Reviews

gies such as Marxism and liberalism? Our innocent hope was probably reawakened by the end of the cold war (not mentioned by Kressel). We may have though that global peace will finally come and we will be able to invest our resources in creating a better world. The bloody events in Bosnia and the recent Muslim extremist acts of terrorism show us that we still have a long way to go before such hopes can materialize. In this sense, Bosnia bears a particularly frightening message. Not only is it located in Europe, which is for many the symbol of enlightenment, it is a country that not only preached multiculturalism but also exercised it. Forty-six percent of the marriages were cross-ethnic before the crisis. Still, when it came to the outbreak of violence in the nineties, mixed marriages, professional education, and well-being did not prevent mass rape and vandalism, which we attributed only to the barbarism of what some people define as lower cultures (as some would view Ruwandas genocide, for example). Kressel ignores a European tradition in social psychology that centers around social representations [Turner et al., 1994; Moscovici, 1976]. In my view, the European tradition is of importance to the present discussion because its focus is interpersonal rather than individualized (as is most of the American tradition). It can, therefore, account for what happens to people when they are suddenly stripped of their enemy as the relevant other by whom they defined themselves for years, perhaps for ages. They may become terribly anxious: Who and what are we now, if not the good guys who fight the bad ones? We may have to start a whole new and energy-consuming process of redefining ourselves from within, not through the negation of a threatening and unpredictable other. It is much easier to grab the next potential enemy instead of beginning this frightening process. This may be related to another issue that Kressel identifies: All these atrocities were carried out by men, especially young men. Can psychologists recognize a hidden fear of the liberated voice of women? If we consider the Muslim extremist, the Serb macho man (to a lesser extent perhaps also the Israeli and American male), is this not something they all have in common? Kressel, following Rummel (Power kills. Absolute power kills absolutely, cited on p. 252), believes in democracy as the human chance for reducing the danger of genocidal acts and processes. Clearly, the largest massacres of our century were carried out by totalitarian regimes, but I am afraid that this is only part of the story. The Parliament in England did not show much interest in the genocide that the Colonial British conducted in Kenya. The German Weimar Republic was transformed into a totalitarian Nazi regime through democratic or pseudo-democratic processes. Here we come to a core issue. Is genocide a product of mass hate or of mass indifference? Clearly it is the product of both. However, relying on the results from my interviews with descendants of Nazi perpetrators [Bar-On, 1989], I am afraid I found more traces of indifference toward Jews than hatred of them. This is also my problem with Goldhagens argument [1996]. We still know too little about the relationship between the indifferent bystander and the enthusiastic perpetrator. Except for a few experiments in social psychology, cited by Kressel, the bystanders role in the diffusion of responsibility, in the manipulation of dominance, and in the silencing of other, less legitimized voices is undetermined. I would suggest that behind each hating perpetrator stand nine indifferent bystanders who allow atrocities to take place by turning their blind eye. Once indifference is broken through, once the protest is out in the street, the massacre and rape had to stop. Even the Nazis became sensitive when the gentile wives of the Mischlinge went on a spontaneous public protest in Berlin, in 1943. The Nazis released

Book Reviews

their husbands (who were never arrested again) and kept a Rabbi at the Jewish cemetery until the end of the war to bury the dead [Bar-On et al., in press)! This is an example of what public protest at the right time and place may achieve even within totalitarian regimes, during wartime. Dan Bar-On Department of Social Sciences Ben Gurion University of the Negev Piersiva, Israel

REFERENCES
Bar-On D (1989): Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Bar-On D, Ostrovsky T, Frumer D (in press): Who am I in relation to the other?: German and Israeli students confront the Holocaust and each other. In Y. Danieli (ed): International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Plenum. Goldhagen D (1996): Hitlers Willing Executionaries. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moscovici S (1976): Social Influence and Social Change. London: Academic Press. Rosenhan D (1967): On being sane in insane places. Science 179:250258. Turner J, Oakes P, Haslam S, McGarty C (1994): Self and collective: Cognition and social context. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 20:454463.