i know there's some connection between the dance i just watched by pina bausch and terrorism but i have to figure how exactly to make that connection. pina said she wanted to see inside the person/people doing the violence. reading "mass hate: the global rise of genocide and terror"--"our century has taken butchery to a new level...worst of all, it has spawned legitimizing ideologies that have provided misguided inspiration to tens of millions...the only hope lies in understanding the human impulse to hate and, more important, the forces that transform that impulse into action...What does it say about human nature, that sizable chunks of modern societies, in this case thousands of Serbs, can participate in the mass rape of women and children, the murder of unarmed thousands, the destruction of whole communities of human beings? "We were ordered to rape so that our morale would be higher," claimed Borislav Herak from a Bosnian military prison in Sarajevo. "We were told we would fight better if we raped the women."...In a matter-of-fact monotone, he described how he would select his victims from an ever-changing supply of Muslim girls and women kept at the Sonja Cafe near Sarajevo, an alleged "rape camp."...Are the roots of Herak's crimes to be found in his moral upbringing, his political views, his prejudices, his family life, his ambitions? What are we to make of Herak, the man? When sentenced to death, he did not object. He asked for some cigarettes. The questions we ask about Herak apply to most participants in crimes of mass hatred, including terrorists." Hannah arendt--"banality of evil"--analysis of Eichmann trial--"his prime motivations included a sense of duty, a willingness to obey authority, and a bureaucrat's drive for advancement. Arendt's disturbing thesis about the everyday, banal origins of heinous acts has received dramatic support from several ingenious experiments conducted by social psychologists...A central question is whether the crimes of Auschwitz, for example, were carried out by everyday, "normal" people who found themselves yielding unavoidably to the pressures of "abnormal" circumstances.
posted by Liza 23.5.03