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| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
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489 |
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| Genocide |
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by a skillful surgeon's scalpel, will kill the
patient.”108 (Similarly, the Ache, an Indian group
in Latin America, who are hunted by Paraguayans, are described by the latter as
“‘rabid rats’; and rabid rats must be exterminated.”)109 Turkish doctors also played a large part in the genocide
of Armenians; and one has been quoted as saying, “My Turkishness prevailed
over my medical calling.”110 Turkish leaders also
asserted their need to destroy the Armenians as a way of revitalizing their
empire, of curing their people.
Here the white-coated doctor replaces
the black-robed priest as arbiter of death and immortality. The medical figure,
the biological soldier, becomes in fact a biological general in the campaign to
kill death.
The task is Sisyphean rather than utopian: no amount of
killing can bring about the desired solution. So one keeps trying, keeps
killing, commits oneself to the principle of killing not just one’s
victims but every last one of them. The primal images are those of death,
immortality, and murderous cure. |
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| The Agents |
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Genocide requires two groups of people: a professional
élite that formulates and supervises the killing, and professional
killers who kill. Well before these groups are enlisted for the actual killing,
they are influenced by what can be called an atmosphere of genocide. There
seems to be something murderous in the air, stories of mass killing that are
both disbelieved and believed. It becomes a kind of “middle
knowledge” — something one knows and does not know, or acts upon
without clearly knowing, or knows and does not act upon.111 It is a combination of knowledge and numbing, but the
knowledge seeps through.
There may be a period of impasse and
confusion, as occurred in Germany in about March 1941, during which the
genocidal dynamic takes shape. The killing project comes to be perceived as the
only overall “solution” to a series of dilemmas. Initiatives from
below (based on perceptions of what the leader or leaders desire) converge with
attitudes, orders, and indirect messages from above in a sequence that is
unlikely to be traceable to a specific document but that nonetheless takes
definite form, is systematically enacted, and involves a vast number of people
working in concert as perpetrators. The process is both arcane and secret on
the one hand, and ordinary and almost respectable on the other. |
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| The Killing Professionals |
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| Genocidal projects require the active participation of
educated professionals — physicians, scientists, engineers, military
leaders, lawyers, clergy, university professors and other teachers — who
combine to create |
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THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
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Page 489 |
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