“On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head.”
How much of a shitty person do you have to be, to snipe little kids in the head?
That’s the point of ‘The Banality of Evil’ and the Milgram experiments.
There is nothing special or different about the Israelis, or for that matter the Nazis. They were normal people.
The only silver lining about the Milgram experiments is that they showed that if people were aware that the default nature of human beings was to follow orders, no matter how horrible, they would be inoculated, somewhat, to following those orders.
Please note, Israel is committing an unjustified horrible fucking genocide. None of this is an excuse for that. But you better recognize that there isn’t too much that differentiates you from those snipers, because if you don’t recognize that then you could be one of them in the future.
But you better recognize that there isn’t too much that differentiates you from those snipers
Hard disagree; the snipers, much like most of the IDF, despise Palestinians and don’t see them as humans. Saying it’s a problem of following orders blindly is like saying the KKK had a problem of people following orders blindly. During peaceful protests the IDF competed with who could shoot the most knees; this is not a following orders problem, it’s a nature of settler colonial society problem.
You’re right, but I’m gonna flip the script anyway
There is not a significant difference between the way IDF soldiers treat Palestinians and the way carnists treat animals. When you cease to see a being as deserving of human freedoms, you become a monster.
Genetically, yes, if I was born into a settler society, was accepted, and was given carte blanch to merk kids etc etc. but fortunately by existing I wound up with a bunch of critiques of nationalism. Orders are easier to follow if it’s not just your commanding officer but also your entire society telling you to shoot the kid. Your friends in the unit and in wider society will call you a hero and buy you drinks and will laugh at your jokes about it. It simply isn’t the same as your CO telling you to shoot and you having a 60% chance of pulling the trigger, let alone eagerly do it. (on this point, Milgram talks about the appearance of “legitimacy” of authority, for the experiments to work you have to believe in the legitimacy of the “Scientist” actor, which requires that you have beliefs about scientists in the first place)
While I think there is some validity to Milgram’s experiments, they were typically run on a particular sort of person brought up in our modern hierarchical society, who believe in the moral character of those hierarchies etc. They are also not a total explanation for why say… it is Israeli snipers are doing this routinely. It also doesn’t explain where those orders come from and why. Also, you don’t know if they’re being given orders or if they’re just shooting at opportunity targets of their own volition.
That’s not to say I’m immune to propaganda or whatever. I am, however, probably immune to Israeli propaganda at this point (at least the sort that would lead to shooting 5 year old Palestinians in the head). I have a hard time even thinking of how I would justify killing a 5 year old even if they were a die hard reactionary, let alone lazily headshot one in the street because I felt like it. The IDF tiktoks and telegram videos are pretty gleeful and snipers are rarely considered the most compassionate soldiers. That’s not to say I couldn’t ever have been, in the right environment and the right military giving orders, but at this point I don’t think I could be.
(Also, I hate that Milgram and the Stanford prison experiment get lumped together, the Milgram experiment had controls and structure and was repeated a bunch of times with different groups and victims, whereas the stanford experiment had no control, structure, and had a lot of active involvement from Zimbardo who somehow had a career after it. Obviously they’re both cases of experiments that would not pass a modern ethics committee.
There is some more writing on this outside of Milgram. Teddy Adorno did some writing on “The Authoritarian Personality” which talks about hierarchical thinking, including following orders (but also about giving orders and how legitimate you view orders). He does some of his own science, but I thought it was pretty shoddy tbh, but he does a literature review as well and offers a passable critique and conversation. There’s also discussion (in other books) about the Einsatzgruppen, which suggested even in pretty Nazi operations, only about 20% of people eagerly followed the direct order to execute partisans, 60% of people were pretty grumpy about it and were psychologically negatively affected, and 20% would kick up a fuss and you’d likely remove them from execution squad. One of the reasons for the mechanisation of the final solution was the psychological harm firing squads were doing to German soldiers.
This is all from memory, sorry, I used to be more interested in this subject directly)
How much of a shitty person do you have to be, to snipe little kids in the head?
I’ve seen the frothing hatred Israelis express towards Palestinians; they’re taking the opportunity to take out all their hatreds and to play out all their sickest fantasies while they can. We’re seeing what the colonizers who genocided the Native Americans were doing and would have done with modern weapons. This isn’t a problem with individuals, it’s a settler colonial society problem.
Less a necessarily bad person, and more an ideologically influenced one, I’d wager. Sure, there’s probably a couple psychopaths mixed in too
I’d argue that if ANY ideology can convince you it’s ok to shoot children in the head, you’re already a shitty person and/or psychopath.
No, that’s the scary thing about ideology. Nearly anyone can be convinced to become a killer. Psychopathy isn’t required.
A psychopath can kill a child and be fully cognizant of their innocence and humanity. They know it’s wrong and just don’t care. That’s not what most are doing.
Ideology acts as a buffer, so these occupation soldiers don’t even acknowledge the children as innocent or human. Just “animals” - the soldiers truly don’t believe they’re doing anything wrong.
They all deserve to be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, but they aren’t psychopaths. They’re just like us and you have to reconcile with that.
You should read about the Milgram Experiments. And the Stanford Prison Experiment.
There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes into work every day and has a job to do.
- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
The best defense against Nazism is to recognize that Nazis were ordinary people like ourselves. The scary thing about Nazism is not that Nazis were unusual monsters but that they were not. No society is immune to fascism, and no person can be sure they are. The same goes for military brutality and war crimes. The people who do it are for the most part like us, not unusual psychopaths.
Fair, but that argument stops working when it’s a large portion of a society. Our understandings of right and wrong are somewhat a social construct, and so subject to social change. All it really requires is a variation of ‘us v them’ mentality for most people to accept it as fact.
If the influence of ideology is enough to convince you to snipe children in the head, you’re still a bad person. Weird take to be presented with children who were shot by a weapon that’s purpose built for accuracy and rush to defend the person that pulled the trigger. Edit: grammar
It’s the same way I can’t completely blame Hamas fighters for everything they did on them being bad people, either.
It’s a way of acknowledging that the difference between me/you and them is not their actions themselves, but primarily their targets.
It’s why simply removing the ‘problematic’ individuals on either side can’t fix anything, and we should keep that in mind lest nothing can change.
