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Becoming Evil: Speaker addresses nature of genocide

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  • Becoming Evil: Speaker addresses nature of genocide

    University of New Hampshire
    May 2 2014


    Becoming Evil: Speaker addresses nature of genocide

    By Cole Caviston, Staff Writer


    Students crowded Memorial Union Building Theater I Wednesday night to
    listen intently to a lecture delivered by Dr. James Waller on the
    nature of genocide and the reasoning that ordinary people have for
    carrying it out, also known as "Becoming Evil."

    The event soon became packed and more students began arriving after
    the event began at 8 p.m., causing late-coming students to sit down in
    the aisle or listen from the doorway.

    Dr. Waller was introduced by his daughter Hannah Waller, the president
    of Amnesty International UNH. She described him as a "huge inspiration
    of why I want to do the work I want to."

    The talk was filled with anecdotes from his experiences researching
    genocide, from exhuming mass graves in Bosnia to interviewing the
    perpetrators of Rwandan Genocide. Dr. Waller presented his lecture
    through PowerPoint that touched upon the three main points of his
    research.

    His first point addressed what the historical scope of genocide and
    what it looks like today.

    Waller described the 20th century as "the age of genocide," in which
    the greatest mass killings and ethnic slaughters were carried out,
    from the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan Genocide and
    the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

    "The conservative estimate is 60 million killed in genocide in the
    20th century," Waller said. "People who thought they were protected by
    their state, but their state turned on them and tried to kill them."

    Waller next addressed whom it was that carried out the acts of
    atrocity. He was careful to distinguish between architects responsible
    for the policy or the bureaucrats who implemented it, but rather the
    rank and file who killed the victims in person.

    "There is never a case where a regime cannot find people to carry out
    killings," Waller said.

    There is no definitive answer to know how many killers it takes to
    carry out genocide, but most of the guilty parties, which often number
    in the thousands, are never brought to justice.

    Waller addressed what he believes to be the myths surrounding
    genocide. He disputed the idea that ideology is the basis for evil
    behavior, as he believes that not everyone is imprinted in the exact
    same way and may well be motivated by other emotions, such as greed.

    He also mentioned the idea that the way we think influences how we
    behave is misleading, when actually modern research suggests that how
    we act affects how we think.

    "The reason for slavery in America was for economic purposes, but
    afterwards racial ideas of superiority were adopted to justify the
    existence of slavery," Waller said.

    The idea that perpetrators are purely pathological (the "Bad Nazi
    Thesis") was proved to be inaccurate at the Nuremburg trials where the
    defendants were given personality and intelligence tests, with results
    that placed all but one of the defendants as having above average
    intelligence.

    Waller quoted W.H. Auden, saying that "evil is unspectacular and it is
    always human" to describe how he came to realize that the origins for
    most of the perpetrators that he interviewed were remarkably ordinary.

    "I was struck more by the ordinariness of who they are, of their life
    outside of the evil that they have committed," Waller said.

    Towards the end of the lecture Waller discussed why he believes the
    study of genocide matters. He stressed the importance of understanding
    and humanizing the perpetrators, who had not done the same for their
    victims.

    "This is not to emphasize, sympathize or apologize for the evil
    they've committed, but to understand why they commit these types of
    atrocities," Waller said. "If we can understand how ordinary people
    become capable of this extraordinary evil, we can start to understand
    the ways to shift that behavior in a different direction."

    Dr. Waller is a social psychologist and professor at the Cohen Center
    of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Keene State College, a department
    that is one of the oldest for Holocaust research studies in the
    country. He is the author of the book Becoming Evil: How Ordinary
    People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, which is scheduled for a
    third edition release this year.

    "I study the worst thing in the world, maybe, but what I'm hopeful and
    optimistic about is that what I study is a problem created by humans,"
    Waller said. "If it's a problem created by humans, it's a problem that
    can be solved by humans and I absolutely think it's a problem we can
    overcome."

    Amnesty International UNH and UNH STAND sponsored the lecture.

    http://www.tnhonline.com/news/becoming-evil-speaker-addresses-nature-of-genocide-1.3166371#.U2Pxf8aKDIU



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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