The Psychology of Dexter - Bella DePaulo [97]
Neither was there any great sexual satisfaction or a sense of power obtained from the taking of a human life. He was just doing his duty, a middle-manager in the Khmer Rouge genocidal regime, calmly ordering the deaths of thousands of people. Just like the vast majority of middle managers in a corporation or a government bureaucracy, Duch was trying to be as efficient as possible, carrying out his bosses’ orders.
The psychiatrists who assessed him confidently ruled out psychopathy or sadism as motivating factors in his actions. They did note, though, that Duch was the sort of person who liked to conform to orders given by those he saw as his superiors and that he could be very angry toward those he saw as his enemies.
I agree with the observations of the court-appointed psychiatrists. Duch answered questions put to him by the judges and prosecutors with precision, using phrases like “based on my analysis” or “according to the documents.” On the margins of files he had written notes like “did not confess” and in another “kill them all.” He was business-like and ruthlessly efficient, if you like, but these attributes are hardly a sign of mental illness or any known personality disorder.
Of course, being precise, showing confidence, obeying authority, and even expressing anger toward those who you ideologically oppose are hardly confined to genocidal prison commanders or Rwandan machete-wielding Hutu mobs. Indeed, if anything people with these traits support the views of world-renowned psychologist Stanley Milgram. In his famous “obedience to authority” experiments, Milgram demonstrated how ordinary people obey commands leading to pain, even to death, given by those in authority. The psychologist’s experiments found that university students and others were happy to administer electric shocks to volunteer subjects just because a white-coated professor told them to do so.
Duch was very much like that, too. Francois Bizot, French anthropologist and author of The Gate, and also one of the few to escape alive from S-21, was told by Duch that he did not especially like his job but that he was willing to do almost anything that his superiors asked of him in order to obtain their approval. Like other journalists or scholars who had witnessed or studied those engaged in genocide, Bizot believed that the crimes Duch carried out could have been carried out by thousands of others.
Duch is far from being an exception in terms of having strong conforming personality characteristics when others who have committed genocide are considered. Historian Zygmunt Bauman made a simple but devastatingly chilling observation in Modernity and the Holocaust. “The most frightening insight brought about by the Holocaust and what we learnt of its perpetrators,” he noted, “was not the likelihood that this could be done to us but the idea that we could do it.” As David Chandler, who wrote the definitive history of Duch in Voices From S-21, notes, “if the significance of S-21 (or the Holocaust for that matter) could be reduced to a single sentence Bauman’s is the one.”
Indeed, many of the senior Nazis who executed or imprisoned inmates had personalities not dissimilar to Duch. They were not monsters—just ordinary men, who thought they knew right from wrong. When Rudolf Hoess, commander of Auschwitz, was asked if he ever stole or enriched himself from inmates, he replied, “What sort of man do you think I am?” Like Duch, Hoess had his own sense of morality but a perverted one at that.
Admittedly both Duch and the Nazi commanders were hardly in “normal” situations, controlling as they did the lives of thousands of their captives during times of great conflict. And war and civil strife are unique environments that we know often increase the chances of occurrence of genocide and other human rights abuses. We