Having discussed motivations for participation in geno-cide, I now turn to those factors that themselves are not sufficient for causing someone to participate in genocide but that can make participation more likely in the presence of one of the motivations. These factors have an impact on the participation decision, although none of them would suffice alone.
Although many of the factors discussed here have been mentioned as causes or reasons for participation in genocide throughout the lit er a ture, I believe it is impor tant to carefully differentiate these diff er ent types of factors— indeed, I believe this is one of my main contributions to the lit er a ture. Thus, many of the factors here will be familiar to the scholar of genocide, and it does not relegate the importance of the factor by stripping it of its causal effect. Instead, I hope that it brings more clarity into what impact we can reasonably assume the factors have.
Besides the following long list of facilitative factors that increase the motivation for and likelihood of people participating in genocide, there are also a number of factors that can inhibit participation, thus reducing an indi-vidual’s likelihood of participation. These facilitative and inhibitive factors work against each other in making an individual with a motivation to partici-pate more or less likely to engage in actions of perpetration. Predominantly these inhibitive factors are just the opposite of some of the facilitative factors presented here: proximity rather than distance, personal agency and promi-nence rather than group participation and anonymity, strong moral norms dictating pacifism or the value of human life, weak leadership, the presence of dissenters demonstrating the existent possibility of nonparticipation, a real risk of judicial prosecution, and so on. All of these are implicitly included in the Complexity of Evil model, and there is little analytic value in repeating them turned upside down, so this chapter will focus on facilitative factors.
3.1 Ideolog ical Framework
As suggested in the previous chapter when discussing ideologies, I argued that ideologies play a relatively small part as motivations for people to participate
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in genocide; however, they certainly have a strong impact on participation.
What I mean by this is that ideologies are seldom the motivation, the actual impulse for action, particularly not for low- level perpetrators as being studied here; instead, ideologies provide a framework within which it becomes neces-sary and good to kill the victim group (Eisner 2009, 53). This role of ideolo-gies in reframing the genocidal vio lence as morally legitimate and essentially necessary for the survival of the perpetrators renders ideologies significant for understanding the big picture of participation, even if they are not prominent as a stand- alone motivation. This will only be pos si ble when “the ideology in question resonates deeply and existentially with psychological dispositions” of the individual (Vetlesen 2005, 50). Instead of necessitating disengagement between the individual morals and the stipulated activities, as discussed in the following section, an individual’s desires, needs, and anx i eties can be har-nessed through a moral justification of the act of killing expected of him or her. This occurs commonly as a gradual moral transformation that little by little makes the killing seem morally right (Staub 2014, 503). This moral jus-tification seeks not only to make participation appear necessary and justifiable, but for less ardent supporters it can at least provide a way of communicating that the actions are permissible and acceptable. This is particularly impor tant for those individuals who have opportunistic or ingroup- focused motivations and see the ideology not even as encouraging but as allowing them to partici-pate in order to pursue their other motivations.
As Kjell Anderson (2018) argues, these rationalization strategies are tied strongly to the evolved moral framework and their interlinkage with the state that propagates them. Anderson (2018, 8) suggests that in genocide, “legiti-mate authorities may endorse criminal behaviour. The conflict between pre-viously held moral beliefs and the evolved moral context is resolved through perpetrator rationalizations. These techniques of neutralization allow perpe-trators to revise and reframe previously held moral rules so that they are con-sistent with perpetrators’ own actions in the evolved moral context. This moral context is inculcated through state power.” This points to the impor-tance of the changed moral context and its impact on the individual actor’s own moral codex and the realm of what appears as pos si ble and legitimate action (Anderson 2018). Furthermore, ideologies “provide individuals with a sense of identity, inspiration (including hope), certainty, and rationalizations for morally repugnant acts. Ideology conveys the perpetrators’ place in his-tory” (74). Adopting Sykes and Maza, Anderson (2018, 173) argues to differ-entiate between a reversal of morality (justifications, discussed here) and reductions of moral cost (excuses, discussed here as moral disengagement). It is impor tant to emphasize that this is not a deterministic pro cess, but that the moral context provides a changed incentive structure that diff er ent individu-als will react to in diff er ent ways depending on their personal dispositions (Anderson 2018, 93).
Facilitative Factors 129 However, this ideological framework is not just provided externally at the societal level but also constituted through an individual’s ethical framework, exemplified in Monroe’s identity theory of moral choice, which suggests that each person has an ethical scaffolding that is filled with life experiences and values:
Our individual ethical frameworks in turn produce an ethical perspective through which each of us views, pro cesses, and makes sense of events and their relation to us in a manner that particularizes the psychological influ-ences on moral choice. The resulting ethical perspective is both a general tendency to see the world and one’s self in it and a specific way of viewing a given situation at any one point in time. Moral acts are produced by the last part of this psychological pro cess, in which our ethical perspectives determine whether and how we will act by establishing both a menu of choice options and a sense of how another’s suffering pertains to us. (2011, 248–249)
This perspective is helpful as it delineates how individuals can come to accept categorizations of other human beings in ethical terms that relate to their self- perceptions and identities. The resulting perspectives guide their interpreta-tion of the world around them as well as what choices they believe are available to them. And given the longue durée of these ethical perspectives, many of these pro cesses will occur subconsciously (Monroe 2011, 283).
In both the section on moral justifications and that on threat construction I will devote more space to the case of Cambodia than I have done in other sections, as the justificatory strategies are multifaceted and the construction of the victim group as an enemy occurred along multiple lines and was abso-lutely arbitrary, making it an in ter est ing case to study in some additional detail for this facilitative factor.
3.1.1 Moral Justifications
One central moral justification for eliminating a victim group is blaming the victim, the belief that the victims brought their annihilation on them-selves, that they deserve their deaths for some reason (Waller 2002, 212). This justification is particularly effective when the blame attributed to the victim group is combined with a rhe toric of threat, portraying the victims as immi-nently dangerous (see section 3.1.2). Thus, one becomes morally exonerated for killing the victims, as it can be framed as self- defense or dictated by the difficult circumstances (Bandura 1999, 203). Being prepared to kill members of the other group becomes morally positive when it is “necessary for the safety and security of one’s own group” (Waller 2002, 186), and thus facili-tates participation for other reasons, or can be a motivation in and of itself (in the Complexity of Evil model it would be classed as fear). By portraying the killing as necessary and in the ser vice of a higher cause, the other wise heinous
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act becomes acceptable; sometimes it can even go beyond being justifiable and become “an outright moral imperative” (Waller 2002, 186). In this context, David Harrisville (2018) emphasizes for the Wehrmacht soldiers who com-mitted atrocities the importance of repeated justification of vari ous facets of their actions by which the individuals managed to reframe the context of the war as “righ teous” and their actions within this as necessary; in this way, they were able to cultivate a self- image of themselves as “decent men, loving family members, and respected members of a soldierly community by embracing military values and through their interactions with comrades and relatives”
(Harrisville 2018, 129).
Further, moral justification can occur when the killing is stipulated as morally necessary or virtuous through a propagated ideology— particularly, moral justification can be gained if it is framed religiously as divine legitima-tion (Sémelin 2005a, 256). While the orga nizalegitima-tional framework for genocide can be erected relatively easily through the state apparatus, it is impor tant that the ideas behind the genocide and the concurrent morals resonate with the population, or at least with the subset of the population who will be partici-pating in its implementation. As this is normally not the case, it is impor tant for any government or other authority to not just legalize but also legitimate the genocidal killing and thus provide a justificatory framework with which the perpetrators can identify and to which they can refer. The pro cess of legalization is impor tant, too, however, as it also contributes to the overall legitimation (Üngör and Polatel 2011, 58).1 Alex Alvarez (2001) identifies six
“techniques of neutralization” that fit well in this framework of justification:
denial of responsibility, in which perpetrators can say they had no choice;
denial of injury through euphemistic language (see section 3.2.4); denial of victim through placing blame firmly on the victim’s shoulders (see sec-tion 3.1.2); condemning the condemners— for instance, other countries critical of treatment of Jews that were nonetheless hesitant about raising immigration quotas for Jews during the Second World War; appeal to higher loyalties toward the nation; and denial of humanity (see section 3.2.1).
In the study of social dominance theory, the idea of legitimizing myths was developed by Sidanius and Pratto (1999). Legitimizing myths “consist of attitudes, values, beliefs, ste reo types, and ideologies that provide moral and intellectual justification for the social practices that distribute social value within the social system” (Sidanius/Pratto 1999, 45); the “use of the term myth is not meant to imply that these beliefs are epistemologically true or false, but rather that they appear true because enough people in the society behave as if they are true” (104). While in the original context this focuses on group- based social inequalities and equalities and practices of social domina-tion, it is easily applied to the ultimate group- based dominadomina-tion, that of anni-hilating the socially dominated group in genocide. Legitimizing myths justify social in equality, here the position of the victim group. The potency of such
Facilitative Factors 131 legitimizing myths manifests itself, in the context of this book, in how the myths impact the individual and help justify the genocide. The higher the degree of consensus in the society, the more the myths’ potency is enhanced, particularly if they are accepted by the victim group also (106). A legitimizing myth is also particularly potent if it is “strongly associated with and well anchored to other parts of the ideological, religious, or aesthetic components of a culture” or appears to represent a high degree of certainty or “truth,”
often suggested through religious or scientific validation (47).2
Once the killing has started, this attribution of blame to the victims is exacerbated by the so- called just world phenomenon, which refers to a human tendency to believe that the world is just and that because of this “ people get what they deserve and deserve what they get” (Waller 2002, 213; see also Staub 2002, 22). Thus, if a group is suffering and being killed, it must have done something or have a certain character that legitimizes this killing. While obviously tautological, it is nonetheless a psychological mechanism that helps facilitate moral alleviation. In essence, this is a mechanism with which to pro-tect ourselves from the fear that something similar could ever happen to us; by believing that the victims are entirely to blame for their ordeal, it allows the perpetrators to feel safe (Waller 2002, 217).
In Cambodia, the system was, to a certain degree, self- perpetuating and reinforced perceptions of enemies. Anyone who was arrested as an enemy had to have committed the mistakes they were accused of and must be guilty (KR29A, KR29B), because Ângkar was never wrong and thus as soon as they were arrested, the arrest must have been correct. A former S-21 guard puts it like this: “ Those who were arrested from outside to put inside this prison, all had committed mistakes. Before they arrested those people, they had infor-mation about [their membership in] the string. They did not just arrest people who had done nothing. It was known from confessions. . . . All prisoners had made mistakes. They interrogated those people. Sometimes, they interrogated one person and they could arrest two more people from the confession”
(KR24A).
This means that people who were certainly not CIA operatives were arrested on these charges and then tortured until they gave the names of others in their string, thus falsely admitting their guilt themselves but also incriminating others who were also not CIA or other operatives. These people were then arrested with the same degree of certainty that Ângkar was right, and the pro cess began anew.
These moral justifications are often provided as a narrative by the geno-cidal elites that the individual participant or groups of participants can accept within their own moral framework. This works particularly well when the discursive space is monopolized by these thoughts and alternative moral inter-pretations do not exist (Fujii 2004, 101). If there are counterdiscourses that claim immorality of the actions, it becomes much more difficult for the
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individual to morally justify the action and cognitive dissonance is likely to appear. In Armenia, the propagated importance of the Islamic faith (see also section 4.1.3) played an impor tant role, first in legitimizing the massacres, but also at a local level religious authorities “played a pivotal role in motivating and legitimizing the massacres” (Dadrian 1995, 150; see also Balakian 2010, 146) by providing religious absolution for the crimes committed. As the anni-hilation of the Armenians was declared a religious war (jihad), it legitimized killing people as a normal act of war, or even declaring it to be a “sacred reli-gious obligation” (Balakian 2010, 145).
A further form of moral justification is to show the danger that the vic-tims are purported to pose in order to emphasize the necessity and legitimacy of eradicating them. In distancing herself from the debate of dehumanization as a necessary condition for genocide occurrence, Rhiannon Neilsen (2015) has introduced the concept of toxification. More than dehumanization, toxi-fication explains the urgency and necessity of killing the victims, while both dehumanization and toxification can explain how it becomes permissible and legitimate to kill the victims. Neilsen differentiates two types of toxification.
The “toxic to the self ” variation has “perpetrators become convinced that the victims will, without fail and given the chance, murder the perpetrators. . . . Perpetrators subscribe to a kill before being killed zero- sum logic” (87).
“Toxic to the ideal” is the more abstract form by which victims are seen as
“toxic to the furtherance of human civilization, the perpetrators’ ideational real ity or utopia, or the body politic. . . . Victims are branded as necessarily fatal and equaling death for the body politic and/or the perpetrators’ society and future that signals the need for extermination” (87).
Toxification has been shown to be prevalent at the macro level as a fram-ing ideology in Rwanda and the Holocaust (Neilsen 2015, 87–89), as well as in Cambodia (Williams and Neilsen 2019); and while this may also resonate at the micro level and be perceived as morally justifying, there is almost no evidence of it having the impact of a full motivation (Williams and Neilsen 2019). Toxification is referred to by my interviewees, however, seldom refer-ring to explic itly toxic terminologies. An exception is, for instance, a former militiaman who subsequently was made head of the collective committee who described discourses about enemies at the time as referring to an “inter-nal illness” (KR20A), and a former military messenger and secretary who said that others in his unit would state that “the enemy will destroy the internal revolution; they were the virus in the revolution” (KR51B). Another person remembered the word “parasite” being used to refer to Buddhist monks and educated people, as they themselves contributed nothing to the community and lived off the work of other people (KR53A). This medical jargon was continued in how to deal with these enemies, as a former village chief and soldier from Kampong Thom explained the logic of “killing enemies in order to prevent it from infecting us” (KR31A). In notebook entries of two former
Facilitative Factors 133 Khmer Rouge cadres there is a warning of “a poisonous trick of the enemy”
(Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21571) and the demand to “make the enemy be a rat surrounded by people who destroy it” (Former Khmer Rouge Notebook D21598). Most references relevant to the concept of toxification, however, referred more broadly to the idea of lethality to the ideal, exempli-fied in the use of the terms “internal enemies” and “national traitors” of the revolution or of Ângkar (see also section 2.2.1).3
As discussed in section 2.2.1, the ideologies of the Khmer Rouge were not a reason why most people joined the organ ization originally, and they also do not constitute a real reason for almost all to engage in vio lence for the regime. Nonetheless, ideologies play an impor tant part in the genocidal pro-cess as they create a framework within which, first, the actions of the Khmer Rouge are defined as morally justifiable, even morally positive; second, the role of being Khmer Rouge has positive connotations and thus the tasks are morally not reprehensible; and third, the victims are portrayed as justifiably killed, they are constructed as enemies, and they are seen as people whom it is not only permissible to kill but legitimate and necessary to kill. In line with this, some interviewees speak about a diff er ent morality at the time and that in this system they did not think it was wrong; this is then reinforced by a positive perception of the Khmer Rouge and a thinking that the revolution and the Khmer Rouge was “correct because there were no robbery, no suppressing class and no corruption” (KR31B).4
The Khmer Rouge managed this by creating a context in which its new moral code became absolute, and as described in section 2.1.1 the will and moral of Ângkar and its resultant orders came to take on law- like characteris-tics (KR12A, KR19A, KR07A). Former cadres of the Khmer Rouge do not specify that people participated in killing because they themselves wanted the victim group dead, but nonetheless they did say that killers exhibited a belief
The Khmer Rouge managed this by creating a context in which its new moral code became absolute, and as described in section 2.1.1 the will and moral of Ângkar and its resultant orders came to take on law- like characteris-tics (KR12A, KR19A, KR07A). Former cadres of the Khmer Rouge do not specify that people participated in killing because they themselves wanted the victim group dead, but nonetheless they did say that killers exhibited a belief