angels & demons

ANGELS

HENRY OSBORNE

TUESDAY OCTOBER 22, 2013

DEMONS&

MOTIVATION

EVIL IN HISTORY

THE HOLOCAUST

• Mass murder or genocide of approximately six million Jews during World War II

• Programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi Germany

• German Reich and German-occupied territories

• Recent estimates indicate some ten to eleven million civilians (mostly Slavs) and prisoners of war were intentionally murdered

Image courtesy of Yad Vashem

RWANDAN GENOCIDE

• Mass slaughter of the Tutsis by the Hutus that took place in 1994

• Over 500,000 people were killed

• Culmination of longstanding ethnic competition and tensions

• Pro-peace Hutus, who were portrayed as "traitors" and "collaborators“ killed as well

• As an ideology, Hutu Power asserted that the Tutsi intended to enslave the Hutu and must be resisted at all costs.

Ntrama Church AltarImage courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

JONESTOWN MURDER/SUICIDE

• 909 victims (303 children)

• Died of apparent cyanide poisoning

• Murder of five individuals at a nearby airstrip

• Greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act until the September 11, 2001 attacks

Rev. Jim JonesImage courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

ABU GHRAIB TORTURE AND PRISONER ABUSE

From late 2003 to early 2004, during the War in Iraq, military police personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed human rights violations against prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison. They physically and sexually abused, tortured, raped, sodomized, and killed prisoners.

Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski (left), who was responsible for military jails in Iraq, meets with Donald Rumsfeld.

PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPERIMENTS1. MILGRAM EXPERIMENT

2. SHERIDAN AND KING EXPERIMENT

3. STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

MILGRAM EXPERIMENT

• A.k.a. Obedience Experiment

• Conducted by a young psychologist named Stanley Milgram in 1961 at Yale University

• Tested how malleable human conscience is in the face of authority

• Result: If the request is presented in the right way, almost all of us quite obediently become killers.

SHERIDAN AND KING EXPERIMENT

• Conducted by Charles Sheridan and Richard King in 1963

• Decided to repeat Milgram's experiment, introducing one significant difference. Instead of using an actor, they would use an actual victim who would really get shocked.

• They couldn't use a human for this purpose, so they used the next best thing — a cute, fluffy puppy.

STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

• Philip Zimbardo, Ph.D. was curious about why prisons are such violent places.

• Mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology department.

• Randomly assigned half of volunteers to play the role of prisoners and the other half to play guards

A FEW BAD APPLES…

SEDUCED INTO EVIL

• Provide people with an ideology to justify beliefs for actions.• Make people take a small first step toward a harmful act with a

minor, trivial action and then gradually increase those small actions.

• Make those in charge seem like a "just authority.“• Transform a once compassionate leader into a dictatorial figure.• Provide people with vague and ever-changing rules.

SEDUCTION CONT’D

• Re-label the situation's actors and their actions to legitimize the ideology.

• Provide people with social models of compliance.• Allow dissent, but only if people continue to comply with orders.• Make exiting the situation difficult.

DEHUMANIZATION

At the core of evil is the process of dehumanization by which certain other people or collectives of them, are depicted as:• less than human• non comparable in humanity or personal dignity to

those who do the labeling

NAZI COMIC BOOKS

FACES OF THE ENEMY

POSTCARD PHOTOS OF LYNCHINGS

The corpses of George and Ed Silsbee. January 20, 1900. Fort Scott, Kansas.

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“The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing

Edmund Burke

ANGELS

WHEN GOOD PEOPLE GO BADTUESDAY OCTOBER 22, 2013

DEMONS&