Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [100]
“Sometimes they were wrong,” the sergeant says, but nonetheless we treated them all the same way.
The debate about torture has properly focused on its legality, its morality, and its utility. As social psychologists, we want to add one additional concern: what torture does to the individual perpetrator and to the ordinary citizens who go along with it. Most people want to believe that their government is working in their behalf, that it knows what it’s doing, and that it’s doing the right thing. Therefore, if our government decides that torture is necessary in the war against terrorism, most citizens, to avoid dissonance, will agree. Yet, over time, that is how the moral conscience of a nation deteriorates. Once people take that first small step off the pyramid in the direction of justifying abuse and torture, they are on their way to hardening their hearts and minds in ways that might never be undone. Uncritical patriotism, the kind that reduces the dissonance caused by information that their government has done something immoral and illegal, greases the slide down the pyramid.
Once a perpetrator has decided on a course of action, he or she will justify that decision in ways that avoid any conflict between “We are the good guys” and “We are doing some awful things.” Even the most awful guys think they are good guys. During his four-year trial for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, Slobodan Milosevic, the “Butcher of the Balkans,” justified his policy of ethnic cleansing that caused the deaths of more than 200,000 Croats, Bosnian Muslims, and Albanians. He was not responsible for those deaths, he kept repeating at his trial; Serbs had been victims of Muslim propaganda. War is war; he was only responding to the aggression they perpetrated against the innocent Serbians. Riccardo Orizio interviewed seven other dictators, including Idi Amin, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, Mira Markovic (the “Red Witch,” Milosevic’s wife), and Jean-Bédel Bokassa of the Central African Republic (known to his people as the Ogre of Berengo). Every one of them claimed that everything they did—torturing or murdering their opponents, blocking free elections, starving their citizens, looting their nation’s wealth, launching genocidal wars—was done for the good of their country. The alternative, they said, was chaos, anarchy, and bloodshed. Far from seeing themselves as despots, they saw themselves as self-sacrificing patriots.19 “The degree of cognitive dissonance involved in being a person who oppresses people out of love for them,” wrote Louis Menand, “is summed up in a poster that Baby Doc Duvalier had put up in Haiti. It read, ‘I should like to stand before the tribunal of history as the person who irreversibly founded democracy in Haiti.’ And it was signed, ‘Jean-Claude Duvalier, president-for-life.’”20
If the good-of-the-country justification isn’t enough, there is always that eternally popular dissonance reducer: “They started it.” Even Hitler said they started it, “they” being the victorious nations of World War I who humiliated Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, and Jewish “vermin” who were undermining Germany from within. The problem is, how far back do you want to go to show that the other guy started it? As our opening example of the Iran hostage crisis suggests, victims have long memories, and they can call on real or imagined episodes from the recent or distant past to justify their desire to retaliate now. For example, in the centuries of war between Muslims and Christians, sometimes simmering and sometimes erupting, who are the perpetrators and who the victims? There is no simple answer, but let’s examine how each side has justified its actions.
When, after 9/11, George Bush announced that he was launching a crusade against terrorism, most Americans welcomed the metaphor. In the West, crusade has positive connotations, associated with the good guys—think of the Billy Graham Crusades; Holy Cross’s football team, the Crusaders; and,