Something I've taken an interest in lately is state-sponsored violence, with a focus not on the state or the victims but the violators. Most of the time violators are lumped in with the state, but that assumes a level of free will that I think is too optimistic. Violators don't have power; the state does. Note that I'm not talking about the Kitty Genovese innocent bystanders (for one, there's no state involved in that); nor am I talking about "Good Germans", who for the most part didn't actively
do anything.
This started because I went to a screening of a documentary about the coup-massacre in Indonesia in 1965 - you know how it goes, it's #9 in terms of deaths of
late twentieth-century democides. This is obviously something that's become much more complicated for me as of late, but I have slowly come to accept that my father was a violator in this case. I also know that he later became at least somewhat of a victim, by virtue of his own choosing. I have also heard that people that killed Communists later developed massive psychological problems, hallucinating/ seeing ghosts of their victims, et al. I used to be very, very bitter toward people with high
F-scale scores, probably because I always thought that I would never electrocute people because an authority figure told me to. But the problem with the Milgram Experiment is that most violators don't violate under sterile conditions - they have already been told by the media and the state that they are in mortal danger, that they must kill or be killed (by the state or by the victims), and they're often in panic mode. In the case of Indonesia in 1965, it looks pretty certain that what happened is the military, hunting for Communists, basically handed people (especially young men) machetes and told them to kill prisoners to prove that they were not Communists themselves. The effect of patriotism for a people whose nation was so newly independent and who were being taught constantly to exalt this new nation also can't be understated. When I asked my aunt about this she just kept saying, "they were a threat to the nation". My aunt has never really changed her perspective. I also strongly doubt that she directly hurt anyone except in a riot. My father, on the other hand, probably did.
Anyway, I have no idea if my father ever had a high F-scale score, or what he would have done in the Milgram Experiment. I'm not sure I even believe in that method of evaluating people anymore for lack of realism. But what I wonder about is how being a violator changed him.
Because, you see, I was reading this
article about the correlation between bullying and suicidal thoughts - both for the bullied and the bullies. And a lot of the comments predictably read like this: "I/ My child was bullied and I want all bullies to commit suicide and spend eternity in the lowest circle of hell." But I agree with this comment: "Also, bullies are often not popular kids either. They provide entertainment for popular kids (by kicking the victim around - which 'well-adjusted' popular kids often seem to enjoy watching) but are not considered 'one of them' either. When evaluating a victim-bully situation, teachers and school administrators should also ask, 'Who’s eating the popcorn at this show, anyway?' " Well, this was not a popular comment. Many people simply did not care; others said that popular kids
were the bullies (which may be true in some cases but often is not, for the same reason that the state hands civilians machetes during a democide: to diffuse blame and encourage later complicity, and to keep a moral high ground for future use); they also said that the teachers and administrators were the ones eating popcorn. I think that may be true, at least as far as administrators go. But I lump these pathetic administrators together with the popular kids, and together they become "the state". I think the favoritism shown in high school by authority figures destroys the separation between popular kids and the administration. Just look at prom. This alliance between the administration and the popular kids is what makes the popular kids hegemonic (gives them all the power). It's what makes high school ridiculous.
It's not a perfect correlation to state-sponsored violence, granted. But there are some similarities. Especially when you look at bullies who are physical tormentors rather than psychological mean girls - a lot of psychologists have spent a lot of time saying there's no difference between them (and there may not be in terms of the effect on the victims), but different types of kids bully in different ways. Words aren't traceable; bruises are. Anybody can spit toxin, but it takes a lot more to physically assault someone. Mean girls don't often grow up to become social delinquents because I think verbal predation is a kind of abuse society condones, especially for girls. Same goes for the ostracizers - that's just society spitting out the parts it doesn't like, to quote The Lost World - and the state does the same thing all the time, through laws, and has no bones about it. No one has any bones about ostracization. Obviously, ostracizers don't fall off the tracks. They're the ones setting the tracks.
But children who are physical abusers do fall off the tracks, and they're not part of the state. They're violators, acting on behalf of "the state" by committing socially "unacceptable" wrongdoing. If perchance there are any negative repercussions, the state can withdraw without evidence of harm and throw the violators under the bus. Ask an Indonesian Army official who killed 1 million Communists in 1965 and they will invariably tell you that "the masses" did, out of self-birthed anger and chaos. Popular kids don't commit suicide - bullies commit suicide, concentration camp guards commit suicide, U.S. soldiers coming back from tours commit suicide, at very high rates. Simply saying that they all should have committed suicide is missing the point in my opinion. As I think the same commenter later added, "We as society should not be grateful or feel justified that anyone would feel they should take their own, or anyone else’s, life.
That means that as a society we have failed (emphasis mine)."
Of course, in the case of something like 1965 in Indonesia, social destruction seems to have been the aim of the state, which wanted to "re-order" everyone - which is insane, but there you go. Some leaders really seem to think the best way to change society is to destroy it. Suharto, as I'm sure I've written, was pathologically afraid of "the people", that amorphous mass. And wow, getting half of them to kill the other half, that's pretty damn ingenious. It certainly does mean that he ended up with, in the '70s and '80s, a population of the silent and the guilt-wracked (and the poor). And as most people are the types to cling to security and plans and God, I'm not surprised that most people were willing to sacrifice political freedom for economic gain and a blurry, altered nationalist history - creature comforts, so to speak. Such a compromise is in Indonesia's case better worded as a "contract of silence" between the state than the surviving population. The state made it enormously difficult for people who felt betrayed by the state, like my father. It's hard not to notice that the graduate students at the forefront of the anti-government Malari incident of 1975 were of the perfect age to have been anti-Communist teenagers in 1965 - eager to help a nation that was just as old as they were, eager to be just like the revolutionaries (because that's what the state told them they were, revolutionaries - and the Communists were the counter-revolutionaries) they'd been told to worship all through school, eager to defend Indonesia and Islam - not to mention younger and weaker and more afraid than the soldiers who gave them these orders. My father would have been eighteen in 1965. He would have been an ambitious and fiercely patriotic student, Muslim, and Javanese: a native son, and perfect for the job. The children of Communists would have been too ostracized to become leaders of any student movement in 1975. Those student protesters were native sons. And I deeply believe that they felt betrayed. Suharto and ABRI had promised them a better state than the one Sukarno was building; what they ended up with was something worse. The fact is, my father was helping the military kill Communists in 1965 and he was a staunchly Socialist (code word for Communism, which you cannot explicitly say in Indonesia to this day) student protester by 1975 - he's known as a Socialist political theorist to this day. But of course this being the Suharto era, anyone that wanted to renege on the "contract" that was the 1965 killings was going to get royally fucked.
So maybe a good question is who becomes and remains the violator and who gets to join the state. Some violators certainly do move up in the ranks, if they perform well: General Wiranto, for one. The U.S. Ambassador and the UN are not on speaking terms with him because of his human rights violations in East Timor but he is nonetheless running for President of Indonesia next year (and has his own political party, Hanura - the People's Conscience Party). It doesn't say so on his wikipedia page but the biography distributed at the Independence Day concert he sang at (he sang a song about worshipping God as well as "When I Fall in Love") blatantly said that he was head of some paramilitary youth group that fought Communists in 1965. My father would be the same age as General Wiranto, if he were alive. He wasn't the head of a paramilitary youth group, but he was part of, and perhaps head of, the local chapter of KAPPI, the high school students' action front that was formed to "fight the Communist threat". I know that he did not want my mother or me to know about his actions in 1965 (which is why I had to ask his younger siblings) but I also feel that knowing his history has helped me understand the depth of the conviction of his beliefs later in life.
And for that matter, can we all become violators, under the right stress? I don't think there's any way to reproduce an experiment that would accurately test this without violating all sorts of international laws and moral codes.
There's a great story by Robert Coover that I wish I had access to but don't (I read it in Harper's years ago, and their archives are not freely available online) called "Stick Man". Basically it's about a literal stick man who's brought into our world "
to represent officially for us the human condition, as we understand it. We feel somehow you can encapsulate it in economical ways difficult to achieve for those of us with a, what can one say, more complex personal architecture." But one of the things that the humans have Stick Man do - more for their own voyeurism than any kind of deep introspection - is hurt his newly invented companion, Stick Woman. And that's a good representation of state-sponsored violence.
Anyway, I leave you with the song
"Murderer" by Low, which puts a nice religious spin on things (and the band members are Mormons, if that helps):
One more thing before I go, one more thing I'll ask you, Lord
You may need a murderer, someone to do your dirty work
Don't act so innocent - I've seen you pound your fist into the Earth
and I've read your books - seems that you could use another fool
Well I'm cruel, and I look right through...
You must have more important things to do, so if you need a murderer, someone to do your dirty work...
