Anyways, my post which links to one of yours is here:

http://www.infactah.com/2007/01/illegalise-alcohol-jail-alcoholics.html

There’s also a link to a recent interesting radio debate regarding the topic which you wrote so well about recently.

If you can stomach it Amnesty have written a truly harrowing report into how rape is being used systematically as a weapon of war in may conflicts historically and currently including in Darfur and Colombia at present.

In Bosnia women were deliberatly impregnated so that they would carry Serbian babies as an act of ethnic cleansing.

In Sudan, women who have been raped are often no longer accepted by their husbands and are too ashamed to flee to the refugee camps in Chad.

In Rwanda women were raped to spread AIDS

Rape is a horrific attack on a woman, but these men know the long term impacts of rape on the communities. They aren’t simply raping women to abuse them but to destroy entirely any communities that survive the war and ensure long term domination.

And it’s not just men that participate. In Darfur, the Janjiwid are often accompanied by choruses of women which sing songs to egg the men on.

I don’t know how people can do this.

Empathy is a necessary step in understanding, but on the other hand evil has a way of overleaping the boundaries in which identification is possible, just as you manage to achieve it. – as you eloquently point out. I think the experiences of those involved in conflict resolution (and of psychoanalysts) bear this out: at some point you have to get beyond empathy. If you force yourself to empathize at all costs you risk turning yourself into a misanthrope.

And you too are completely right Rochenko. Indeed, as is hinted in the introduction to the above piece, I’d intended to examine the atrocities from just that angle. I’m aware of Zimbardo’s experiments of course, but I’m more familiar with the specifics of Milgram’s Yale experiments (detailed in all their disturbing glory in his book, Obedience to Authority) and had intended using them as illustration of how easy people can be induced into depersonalising others.

However, as I read more and more about DRC, I became more and more emotionally unsettled by the reports and this resulted in the above crie de coeur. I may revisit the topic sometime from my originally intended psychoanalytic angle if I can stomach it.

I guess my article is something of a bad show, given that I’m soon to begin training as a psychoanalyst. But hey, it was late and I challenge anyone – even the coldest academic – to remain emotionally neutral having spent the best part of 24 hours reading about DRC.

In face-to-face interactions, the strength of one’s identification with an ideology, a social role, or just a set of rules can be enough to depersonalise both self and other – sometimes by itself this is enough to completely override one’s capacity for empathy (the bureaucratic regime of death camps; to a lesser degree, Zimbardo’s Stanford experiments) or is at least enough to allow any latent capacity for sadism to be used for this purpose.

Such structures make an immense propagation of evil possible; but its the impersonality of this (the lack of a core of ‘evil’, something like a diabolical principle) that is truly terrifying.

I have been searching the internet recently to try and get a picture of what has really happened during the Democratic Republic of Congo’s recent election. I stumbled across some frightening blogs, articles and stories. I have studied the DRC for…