Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [96]
Some victims justify their continued feelings of anger and their unwillingness to let it go because rage itself is retribution, a way to punish the offender, even when the offender wants to make peace, is long gone from the scene, or has died. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens gave us the haunting figure of Miss Havisham, who, having been jilted on her wedding day, sacrifices the rest of her life to become a professional victim, clothed in self-righteous wrath and her yellowing bridal gown, raising her ward Estella to exact her revenge on men. Many victims are unable to resolve their feelings because they keep picking at the scab on their wound, asking themselves repeatedly, “How could such a bad thing have happened to me, a good person?” This is perhaps the most painful dissonance-arousing question that we confront in our lives. It is the reason for the countless books offering spiritual or psychological advice to help victims find closure—and consonance.
Whether it is Jim and Diane, the Schiavo and Schindler families, or the Iran hostage crisis, the gulf between perpetrators and victims, and the habits of self-justification that create it, can be seen in the way each side tells the same story. Perpetrators, whether individuals or nations, write versions of history in which their behavior was justified and provoked by the other side; their behavior was sensible and meaningful; if they made mistakes or went too far, at least everything turned out for the best in the long run; and it’s all in the past now anyway. Victims tend to write accounts of the same history in which they describe the perpetrator’s actions as arbitrary and meaningless, or else intentionally malicious and brutal; in which their own retaliation was impeccably appropriate and morally justified; and in which nothing turned out for the best. In fact, everything turned out for the worst, and we are still irritated about it.
Thus, Americans who live in the North and West learn about the Civil War as a matter of ancient history, in which our brave Union troops forced the South to abandon the ugly institution of slavery, we defeated the traitor Jefferson Davis, and the country remained united. (We’ll just draw a veil over our own complicity as perpetrators and abetters of slavery; that was then.) But most white Southerners tell a different story, one in which the Civil War is alive and kicking; then is now. Our brave Confederate troops were victims of greedy, crude Northerners who defeated our noble leader, Jefferson Davis, destroyed our cities and traditions, and are still trying to destroy our states’ rights. There is nothing united about us Southerners and you damned Yankees; we’ll keep flying our Confederate flag, thank you, that’s our history. Slavery may be gone with the wind, but grudges aren’t. That is why history is written by the victors, but it’s victims who write the memoirs.
Perpetrators of Evil
The first shot I saw [from Abu Ghraib], of Specialist Charles A. Graner and Pfc. Lynndie R. England flashing thumbs up behind a pile of their naked victims, was so jarring that for a few seconds I took it for a montage…. There was something familiar about that jaunty insouciance, that unabashed triumph at having inflicted misery upon other humans. And then I remembered: the last time I had seen that conjunction of elements was in photographs of lynchings.5
—writer Luc Sante
It may sometimes be hard to define good, but evil has its unmistakable odor: Every child knows what pain is. Therefore, each time we deliberately inflict pain on another, we know what we are doing. We are doing evil.6
—Israeli novelist and social critic Amos Oz
Did Charles Graner and Lynndie England know what they were doing, let alone believe they were “doing evil” while they were deliberately inflicting pain and humiliation on their Iraqi prisoners and then laughing at them? No, they didn’t, and that