Becoming Evil How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

by Waller, James

• ISBN13: 9780195189490
• ISBN10: 0195189493
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-11
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The first edition of Becoming Evil spoke unforgettably to a world shell-shocked by 9/11, a world that faced a new "war on terror" against members of an "Axis of Evil." With this second edition, James Waller brings us up to date on some of the horrific events he used in the first edition to illustrate his theory of extraordinary human evil, pointing out steps taken both forward and back. Nearly a third of the references are new, reflecting the rapid pace of scholarship in Holocaust and genocide studies, and the issue of gender now occupies a prominent place in the discussion of the social construction of cruelty. Waller also offers a reconfigured explanatory model of evil to acknowledge that human behavior is multiply influenced and that any answer to the question "Why did that person act as he or she did?" can be examined at two levels of analysis-the proximate and the ultimate. Bookended by a powerful new foreword from Gregory H. Stanton, vice president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and a devastating postscript that addresses current outbreaks of genocide and mass killing, this new edition demonstrates that genocide is a problem whose time has not yet passed, but Waller's clear vision offers hope that we can at least begin to understand how ordinary people are recruited into the process of brutality. Book jacket.

Author Biography

James Waller is Professor and Lindaman Chair of Psychology at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington

Table of Contents

Foreword	vii
Christopher R. Browning
PART I. WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OF EXTRAORDINARY HUMAN EVIL?
Introduction: A Place Called Mauthausen	3	(6)
The Nature of Extraordinary Human Evil	9	(20)
``Nits Make Lice''	23	(6)
Killers of Conviction: Groups, Ideology, and Extraordinary Evil	29	(26)
Dovey's Story	50	(5)
The ``Mad Nazi'': Psychopathology, Personality, and Extraordinary Evil	55	(39)
The Massacre at Babi Yar	88	(6)
The Dead End of Demonization	94	(42)
The Invasion of Dili	124	(9)
PART II. BEYOND DEMONIZATION: HOW ORDINARY PEOPLE COMMIT EXTRAORDINARY EVIL
A Model of Extraordinary Human Evil	133	(3)
What Is the Nature of Human Nature? Our Ancestral Shadow	136	(39)
The Tonle Sap Massacre	169	(6)
Who Are the Killers? Identities of the Perpetrators	175	(27)
Death of a Guatemalan Village	197	(5)
What Is the Immediate Social Context? A Culture of Cruelty	202	(34)
The Church of Ntarama	230	(6)
Who Is the ``Other''? Social Death of the Victims	236	(31)
The ``Safe Area'' of Srebrenica	258	(9)
PART III. WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?
Conclusion: Can We Be Delivered from Extraordinary Evil?	267	(14)
Notes	281	(22)
Selected Bibliography	303	(8)
Index	311