Genocide

Like several other students in the class, I am interested in doing my first blog on the Genocide theme.

It seems to me that many factors come into play that influence individuals to participate in genocidal behaviour. For example, biographical details of Klaus Barbie indicate that several social factors influenced his readiness to participate in the German atrocities of ww11. Academic failure, unemployment, poverty, need for companionship, and blaming others for deaths in his family and ruining his own life. Such circumstances placed Barbie (along with many others in Germany at the time) in a position where he was vulnerable to the propaganda of the Nazis.

Also, as argued by Bec in her blog, behaviour and identity change with changing situations. In his book "Ordinary Men", Christopher Browning highlights how, consistent with Milgram's experiment, humans can be made to harm others even if what they are doing goes against their own beliefs. "Ordinary Men" discusses the actions of a group of police officers in Poland who were conscripted in ww11 to kill Jewish prisoners on mass. None of these officers had killed before and some were friends with Jewish people. Of the police officers chosen for the task, all fired their guns at the Jewish prisoners, one or two chose to fire their guns to the side of the prisoners and therefore did not kill, and the remainder of the officers conformed with the instructions given to them, killing all prisoners. After all prisoners were killed, the officers returned to their normal lives, having committed crimes that they did not choose to commit, but felt compelled to commit because they were instructed to do so by what they saw as a higher and powerful authority. http://www.wowessays.com/dbase/af4/lvw182.shtml.