Abstractifying Victims: from Individuals to Anonymised Masses
If you cease to see a person as an individual and only perceive them as part of an undifferentiated mass, it is much easier to kill them. This criterion overlaps significantly with the preceding concept of dehumanisation, though the linguistic aspect prefigures this; it would be hard to reach this behaviour if you hadn’t already, in your language, and therefore your mind, begun the process of dehumanisation.
Towards the end of the film The Third Man there’s a famous scene where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is up in a Ferris wheel overlooking post-war Vienna with our narrator, Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten). Lime, the smiling, contemporary devil, tempts the good man with these words: ‘Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever? If I offered you £20,000 for every dot that stopped, would you really tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?’
Again, though fictional, this example corresponds precisely to an extremely dangerous aspect of the human mind: the ability to strongly individualise ourselves and those we love – how extraordinarily complex and subtle are our minds and emotions! – while, at the same time, simplifying others’ lives. And in extreme cases (especially with perceived ‘enemies’), classifying all of ‘them’ as a collective, anonymised mass. Again I return to the example of Franz Stangl, interviewed by Sereny – a continuation of the previously quoted interview:
‘So you didn’t feel they were human beings?’
‘Cargo,’ he said tonelessly. ‘They were cargo.’ He raised and dropped his hand in a gesture of despair.
‘When do you think you began to think of them as cargo? The way you spoke earlier, of the day when you first came to Treblinka, the horror you felt seeing the dead bodies everywhere – they weren’t “cargo” to you then, were they?’
‘It started the day I first saw the Tötenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity – it couldn’t have; it was a mass – a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, “What shall we do with this garbage?” I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo …
‘There were so many children, did they ever make you think of your children, of how you would feel in the position of those parents?’
‘No,’ he said slowly, ‘I can’t say I ever thought that way.’ He paused. ‘You see,’ he then continued, still speaking with this extreme seriousness and obviously intent on finding a new truth within himself, ‘I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. I sometimes stood on the wall and saw them in the tube. But – how can I explain it – they were naked, packed together, running being driven with whips like …’ The sentence trailed off.
The word ‘cargo’ used here inevitably recalls the term used repeatedly by British financiers and traders involved in slavery and the transportation of slaves. To the bankers and insurers in the City of London, and other financial centres such as Edinburgh, the slaves had never been considered as human beings. That is why they were branded with hot irons (as cattle used to be branded), regarded simply as property to be traded. And on the occasions when a ship sank, deaths would not be referred to, rather cases of ‘lost cargo’.
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Without such a process of abstractifying victims, wars would be impossible. Here is a man who worked on one of the bombers involved in the destruction of Dresden describing his feelings, or lack of them:
You were on your way home, you’d done what you were supposed to do, and you never thought about what was happening on the ground. I mean if you did and you thought about it deeply, then you couldn’t do the job.
However terrible conventional bombing may have been, at least the bomber crews were risking their lives every time they flew a mission. Today we have entered an era of remote killing from the skies – drone warfare, where the ‘pilots’ no longer have to be in the planes that are dropping missiles and bombs, or even in the same country as their victims; in fact, they are often 8,000 miles away, on the other side of the world, operating the drones from computer terminals. Twenty-first-century technology means that ever greater distances between the killers and the victims exist, and this only serves to further anonymise the people killed, and further reduce the sense of personal responsibility of the perpetrators – both factors which make the process considerably easier for the killer. In this context, the abstractification of their victims, and the emotional detachment that follows from this, only increases.
The BBC journalist Stephen Sackur interviewed several RAF pilots who were working at a joint US/UK drone mission focussing on targets in Afghanistan, based at the Creech USAF base in Nevada. Wing Commander Jules Bell explained the set-up:
We’ve got something in the order of twenty to twenty-five screens that we can be looking at constantly … in simple terms what we’re using is satellite links from Nevada, which are uplinked from the US, they are downlinked to the aircraft that is flying in the Afghanistan theatre … We’re able, with a small time delay of perhaps two seconds, to fly the aircraft in the same way we’d fly any conventional aircraft … We have what we call a Ground Control Station, or GCS, [it] is perhaps caravan-sized, it typically [has] a crew of three – that’s our pilot, the sensor operator and the mission co-ordinator, and we all work as a team to operate the aircraft.
The decision to fire is ultimately made by the pilot himself, but we learn that they ‘would almost certainly be employing weapons at the request of the ground supported unit … and they are the people best able to gauge the requirement for that weapon’s effect’. Andy Bavistock, an information analyst, is interviewed. He believes he has what he calls ‘bigger situational awareness’ 8,000 miles away from the conflict zone, and because he’s ‘not got to worry about [his] own safety … [he] can concentrate on the mission at hand’. He also believes ‘you can tell when a group of people are moving tactically, or whether it’s a group of guys going to irrigate a field … if they’re combatants they’ll … move differently’. (I do not find his belief particularly reassuring.)
One of the most disturbing aspects of all of this is the way that the process of killing becomes so abstract that it utterly desensitises all those involved. Killing becomes completely routine, a matter of cameras and sensors and screens; no noise, no terror, no blood, no humanity – the cleanness of killing from your desk. And at the end of your shift you can just drive home, in time to read your kids a bedtime story. This is RAF officer Mark Jenkins, also then based at USAF Creech in Nevada:
Jenkins: It is a strange situation. I have a wife and two children out here with me … I go and do my job, then debrief, maybe spend ten minutes on the squadron, just winding down, chatting to people about what we’ve been doing today, and then I’ve got a forty-five-minute drive home, so I just stick the radio on, listen to a podcast, whatever, just drive home – and, by the time I’m home, I’m straight into family life.