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Authority, Conformity, Obedience and the Holocaust
By Bob Curtis
Today, many people in the U.S. say, 'We don't need to protect ourselves from tyranny; the Holocaust happened in the 1940's, and it's now the 21st Century - and besides, this is America, we Americans are more independent, people here would resist any authority such as Hitler.' Well, I'd like to think this is true, BUT there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
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First, consider this passage from the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize:
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"Spring 1944... People said 'The Russian army's making gigantic strides forward... Hitler won't be
able to do us any harm, even if he wants to.' Yes, we even doubted that he wanted to exterminate
us. Was he going to wipe out a whole people? Could he exterminate a population scattered
throughout so many countries? So many millions! What methods could he use? And in the middle
of the twentieth century!"
Sound familiar? And just look at how late in the war this was - 1944 - and even then these Jews doubted their imminent destruction at the hands of Hitler's troops. So, being in a certain year, decade, century, geographical location or whatever, does not necessarily keep one safe from tyranny, nor does present safety necessarily mean safety in the future.
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Second, we must look at some experiments conducted here in the U.S. by Stanley Milgram throughout the 1960's and 1970's, some 20-30 years after the World War II and the Holocaust (my source of information on these experiments is Social Psychology by David G Myers, p. 208-217). Milgram's feeling was that people in the U.S. would be more independent and more willing to resist authority when ordered to inflict pain on others. To prove this, his initial experiments were designed to see if an average American could be persuaded to inflict a cruelty equal to those cruelties performed under Nazi rule in Germany.
For each experiment, a 'teacher' and a 'learner' were brought into a room by an experimenter dressed in a lab coat (unbeknownst to the teacher, who was the actual subject of the experiment, the learner was actually an actor in league with the experimenter). They were both then told that the experiment was to see how physical punishment affected learning. The teacher then watched as the experimenter strapped the learner into a chair and an 'electrode' was attached to him. The teacher was then led into an adjoining room, where he could hear but no longer see the learner, and placed in front of a control panel labeled 'Shock Generator.' The control panel had a series of switches labeled with various levels of electrical shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts, in 15 volt increments. Various positions on the voltage dial were further labeled, from 'Slight Shock' on up to 'Very Strong Shock,' and even 'Danger: Severe Shock.' Under 435 and 450 volts was merely printed 'XXX.' The teacher was then given a long series of questions to ask the learner, and was told to shock the learner for every wrong answer; the shocks were to begin at 15 volts, but for every wrong answer the learner gave, the teacher was to increase the level of 'shock' given by the 15 volt incriments.
As the experiment went on and the 'shocks' were increased, the actor would begin to complain increasingly, first with simple grunts and then later with complaints about severe pain, cries to end the experiment, refusal to answer further questions, and finally even going totally silent (as if passed out or even dead); whenever the learner refused to answer, or was silent, the experimenter prompted the teacher to consider any non-responses to any question as wrong and to shock him accordingly. If the teacher asked to quit the experiment at any point, the experimenter prodded him to continue by saying things like 'Please continue,' 'The experiment requires that you continue,' 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' 'You have no other choice, you must go on,' etc. In later experiments, he changed various factors (such as supposed heart conditions in the learner) to see how they changed the results, but most of his experiments were based on this general scenerio.
Before his initial experiment in 1965, Milgram "described his experiment to 110 psychiatrists, college students and middle-class adults. They were then asked, how far would you go as the 'teacher.' Most felt that they would quit the experiment by around 135 volts, and none felt that they would go beyond 300 volts. They were then asked, how far would others go, and almost none of them expected anyone proceed all the way to 450 volts. In fact, on average the psychiatrists guessed that one in one thousand would go all the way to 450 volts.
The actual results, however, completely surprised and disturbed everyone involved. When the experiment was initially conducted, 25 of the 40 participants went all the way to 450 volts!. The disturbing conclusion here is that 65% of the teachers continued with the experiment, even when their learner asked to quit the experiment or when they seemed to be dying or to have died. In later experiments Milgram changed various factors and the results also changed, but in general the results were very similar.
Milgram said of the subjects of these experiments,
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"Some subjects were totally convinced of the wrongness of what they were doing... and felt that - within themselves, at least - they had been on the side of the angels. What they failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action. Political control is effected through action... Tyrannies are perpetuated by difficult men who do not possess the courage to act out their beliefs. Time and again in the experiment people disvalued what they were doing but could not muster their inner resources to translate their values into action." (1974)
And these are the independent, rebellious Americans everyone is relying on to not give in to tyrannical authority?!?!?
See Social Psychology: Obedience, Overview of Milgram's Theory and Milgram's own book Obedience To Authority for more info on Milgram's obedience experiments and theories.
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Third, consider this statement by Robert F. Melson, Professor of Political Science at Purdue University. He states
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"Since the Second World War many more people have been killed as victims of domestic
massacres and partial or total genocide's than by international war. State-perpetrated massacres
are a greater danger to the world community than war itself."
Stalin, Hussein and Milosovich are only easy, famous examples of such modern day tyrants... there are MANY others.
This CAN happen and IS happening in the here and now.
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Fourth, consider some real world examples of soldiers who were "just following orders."
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Adolf Eichmann, at the Nuremberg trials after world war two, said he was only following orders when he caused, together with others, the slaughter and torture of Jews as a part of the Nazi's "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."
Hannah Arendt said of Eichmann, "Eichmann did not hate Jews, and that made it worse, to have no feelings. To make Eichmann appear a monster renders him less dangerous than he was. If you kill a monster you can go to bed and sleep, for there aren't many of them. But if Eichmann was normality, then this is a far more dangerous situation."
See also The Trial of Adolf Eichmann
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William Calley, who ordered a slaughter of hundreds of innocent Vietnamese in the village of My Lai. In the trial regarding this incident, one participant recalled that Calley,
- "told me to start shooting. So I started shooting, I poured about four clips into the group... They were begging and saying, 'No, no.' And the mothers were hugging their children and... Well, we kept right on firing. They was [sic] waving their arms and begging..." (Social Psychology, David G Myers, p. 214).
See also The My Lai Courts-Martial 1970
As shown here, everyone has the potential of being the lackey of a despot, there's no particular nation
whose citizens or subjects are immune to the effects and lure of power, authority, conformity or blind obedience.
Armed with this evidence, it is my hope that our freedom to keep and bear arms,
as protected by the 2nd Article of the Bill of Rights, should with all our effort be maintained. Although
we are currently endowed with a great amount of freedom, given the right political and social circumstances this may not always be the case -
remember, the Roman Empire started out as a democratic republic...
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