Victims’ Reactions Shaped Behaviour of Perpetrators – Witch Hunting, Gulag, Holocaust, Milgram Study
During witch-hunting, virtually all people, including majority of alleged witches themselves, believed that witches were indeed guilty in bad weather, food spoilage, misfortune, natural disasters, and other effects and phenomena. It was presence and gradualism of torture that was one of the factors that made most witches convinced in being possessed by evil spirits. Hence, witch-hunters could get more confidence, when witnessing how “witches” exposed their “real nature” and admitted being possessed. This uniform belief was one of the key factors in longevity of mass witch-hunting that spread for about 3 centuries with large numbers of witches being burned or killed (up to about 100,000 victims according to many sources). In such conditions, there were very few, if any, cases, when a witch-hunter could get insight (“Aha!” experience) and realize absurdity of their own behaviour.
During Nazi’s Holocaust, some Jews could believe in their own inferiority. However, most of them were still not convinced, even after spending months or years in concentrations camps, that they were inferior in relation to the Arian race. Hence, behaviour of Holocaust victims was characterised by resistance and preservation of their original beliefs. Similarly, other nations did not buy the idea about one super race on Earth. Uncooperative behaviour of Holocaust victims and other nations undermined the spirit of Nazis so that it existence was limited by about 13 years. Resistance of Jews, disapproval of Nazism by other nations, and public trials (like Nuremberg process) made many Nazis grasp their heads in the astonishment and shock in relation to their past actions.
Under conditions of severe torture, as it was the case with most witches, victims are able to recreate and falsify their testimonies so that to fit the ideas and suggestions imposed by the persecutors. This was also the case with thousands of Soviet civilians persecuted by the Soviet regime, especially in the 1930s-1950s. Stalin’s pupils were looking for organizations and names of other “enemies of people”. Their suspects, under conditions of extreme suffering, could often provide names of numerous “accomplices” who were also, as they believed, cooperated and directed from and by the enemy (western capitalism). This effect (falsification of memories) made leaders and organizers of Gulag Labour camps convinced that there were indeed numerous enemies, groups, and plots against the Soviet state. Hence, it is normal that modern Siberian FSB-KGB agents, who have developed under control of past mass Gulag murderers and who were never debriefed and explained the silly foundations of this hunt, are still under the influence of this decades-old mass paranoia. Inability of modern Russian leaders to have a clear view on silliness and primitivism of Stalinism further promotes existence of groups of Siberian agents who continue to murder civilians due to the fear of the insight (the “Aha” experience seems for them too frightful).
The simplest experiment on obedience to authority and gullibility of ordinary people, in making them murder accomplices, was conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. The experiment was reproduced with the same basic result in many countries. In these studies, in spite of extreme resistance of the learners (victims), who yelled, screamed, and demanded to stop their torture during the later part, well over 50% of subjects (“teachers”) continued punishment until to the presumably lethal end. Obviously, in such conditions of extreme uncooperativeness of their victims, Milgram’s subjects experienced increasing and severe emotional shock during last stages of the experiment and most of them could not become confident murder accomplices.
In all these situations, authorities managed to fool ordinary people using various excuses (“social well being”, “harmonious one nation Aryan world”, “universal communism”, and “science and learning”) into killing of totally innocent people. The ability of these subjects-perpetrators to get the basic insight (“Aha, I was fooled!”) into their manipulated roles (of being fooled) depended on reactions and “opinions” of their victims. Hence, perpetrators’ ability to have the insight ranged from nearly zero in case of witch-hunting and Stalin’s repressions and up to almost 100% in case of the Milgram study.
Artour Rakhimov, PhD – Moscow State University, currently a citizen of Canada, also writes about psychology, history, politics, sociology, and other humanitarian topics, while his main interest is his website http://www.NormalBreathing.com and prevention and treatment of chronic diseases. Normal Breathing: the Key to Vital Health.