You just get used to it.
How have people permitted great acts of violence in places like Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Cambodia, and Rwanda? They just got used to it. “To tell the truth, one did become used to it,” explained Franz Stangel, a Nazi commandant of the death camps of Sobibor and Treblinka.
Part of how the terrorist functionaries get used to it is that they often have some slight distance between themselves and those being maimed and murdered. As Dr. Johann Kremer, one SS physician explained (about his preference for doing pathology research on fresh human tissue): “When I had collected my information the orderly approached the patient and killed him with an injection in the vicinity of the heart. . . . I myself never made any lethal injections.”
I’m reading a wonderful book called King Leopold’s Ghost about the Belgian conquest of the Congo. King Leopold II tried to appear like a great humanitarian (appealing to racist notions in Europe) but was a greedy, land-hungry despot. His Belgian officials in the Congo inflicted unimaginable torture to people whom they were ostensibly trying to “help.”
Often Africans (including children) were beated with a chicotte, “a whip of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide, cut into a long sharp-edged corkscrew strip. Usually the chicotte was applied to the victim’s bare buttocks. Its blows would leave permanent scars; more than twenty-five strokes could mean unconsciousness; and a hundred or more—not an uncommon punishment—were often fatal.”
But usually the Belgians required other Africans (who were promoted to “foremen”) to inflict the punishment. That was the sliver of distance that allowed them to just get used to it.
There have been some monsters in the world’s history. But each of them has had thousands of functionaries who carried out their inhumane insanity. How could those thousands do it? They just got used to it.
And now, I’m wondering about the things I’ve just gotten used to. The inhumane treatment of fellow human beings comes in many forms.