Business Week Online is featuring an interview with psychologist Robert Jay Lifton on "The Environment Creates the Atrocity" 05/18/04. He has some especially interesting comments from his study of the 1968 My Lai massacre. It comes as part of a discussion on those in Iraq who resisted illegal orders to torture prisoners:
You're right to focus on that because it's a very hopeful phenomenon. I once interviewed for many hours a man who had been at My Lai and who had refused to fire. He pointed his gun to the ground and made it very clear to everybody that he wasn't firing [at the My Lai villagers]. That made him a little fearful that the other soldiers might turn on him because the pressure toward atrocity can become so great that the person who in some way counters it may become vulnerable to the disdain or even violence of the group.
Psychologically, there were three sources to his restraint. One was a certain religious conscience from his Catholic background. Second, a sense of being a loner and, therefore, not so easily influenced by the group. But the third was the most interesting and perhaps the most important factor -- his sense of military honor prevented him from firing.
It turns out that he was a man who had had trouble finding himself in life, entered the military, loved it, excelled, and planned to make it his career -- and then was appalled by what he found in Vietnam and at My Lai in particular. This was a violation of his military idealism. In Iraq, we don't know exactly the motivations of those who resisted the atrocity-producing situation, but I think that this notion of military honor could turn out to be important.
I should note again, as I mentioned in an earlier post, that despite the title BW put on the interview, Lifton is not condoning or excusing the individuals who violated the law in the torture cases. He's looking at the conditions that make such misconduct more likely.
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