Ideology

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it is in the nature of the human being to seek justification for his actions.

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and other’s eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions. This cannot be denied, nor passed over, nor suppressed. How, then, do we dare insist that evildoers do not exist? And who was it that destroyed these millions? Without evildoers there would have been no Archipelago.

Daniel Goldhagen on "exterminationist anti-semitism"

Goldhagen, Daniel. Hitler’s Willing Executioners : Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. 1st Vintage books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Goldhagen develops the view that societies foster certain axiomatic principles, ideas and assumptions that are unquestioned and even unrecognized. He sees a new such axiom developing in Germany in the 19^th century.

Pages 71, 72

“Klemens Felden…has done a content analysis of fifty-one prominent antisemtic writers and publications that appeared between 1861 and 1895 in Germany. The findings are starling. Twenty-eight of them proposed ‘solutions’ to the ‘Jewish Problem.’ Of those, nineteen called for the physical extermination of the Jews. During this pre-genocidal era of European civilization—when consciousness of the mass human slaughter of the First and Second World Wars, let alone of genocide as an instrument of national policy, did not exist—fully two-thirds of these prominent antisemites took their beliefs to their extreme logical consequences and uttered, indeed called for, a genocidal response.”

“By the end of the nineteenth century, the view that Jews posed extreme danger to Germany and that the source of their perniciousness was immutable, namely their race, and the consequential belief that the Jews had to be eliminated from Germany were extremely widespread in German society. The tendency to consider and propose the most radical form of elimination—that is, extermination—was already strong and had been given much voice. German society continued to be thoroughly antisemitic, as it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century, yet the nature of the transformed, modernized racial antisemitsim suggested more comprehensive, radical, even deadly ‘solutions’ to the perceived ‘Jewish Problem.’”

A young child during the Cambodian genocide, tries to understand the Khmer Rouge from what her father tells the family.

Ung, Loung. First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006.

pp. 14, 92

In 1975 Loung Ung is fleeing with her family. They have left Phnom Penh and try to remain inconspicuous to the Khmer Rouge or anyone who might report them to the authorities.

Her father tells the family: "'The Khmer Rouge are executing people perceived to be a threat against the Angkar [the Khmer Rouge central command]. This new country has no law or order. City people are killed for no reason. Anyone can be viewed as a threat to the Angkar--former civil servants, monks, doctors, nures, artists, teachers, students--even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence.'"

In a new village, they try to pass as peasants. "Ma also has to be extra careful because she speaks Khmer with a Chinese accent. Pa fears that this will make her a target for the soldiers who want to rid Cambodia of outside ethnic poison... Pa says that the Angkar is obsessed with ethnic cleansing. The Angkar wants to rid Democratic Kampuchea of other races, deemed the source of evil, corruption, and poison, so that people of the true Khmer heritage can rise to power again."

Tim Seiter, "What The The Most Influential Text on Cannibalism Can Teach us About Studying History," History News Network Oct. 27, 2019.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/173404

[C]olonizers do in fact use cannibalism as a tool to claim what is not theirs. In my own studies on the Karankawa Indians of Texas, Anglo-American settlers regularly used rumors of these Native Peoples’ cannibalism to justify wanton murder. In one vivid instance, Anglo-Americans supposedly stumbled upon some Karankawas cannibalizing a colonist’s young child. “The Indians were so completely absorbed in their diabolical and hellish orgie, as to be oblivious to their surroundings, and were taken by surprise.” The colonizers massacred all of the Karankawas except “a squaw and her two small children,” but after the Whites “consulted a little while...they decided it was best to exterminate such a race” and proceeded to murder the three remaining survivors.