The New York Times has an excellent brief essay reviewing landmark studies that showed the Fine Line Between `Normal’ and `Monster’.
In 1971, a Stanford University study by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo involved a group of twenty-four students were randomly given the roles of prisoners and guards in a study that simulated prisons. The study was to last for two weeks but was terminated after one week as the guards become increasingly violent and aggressive towards their prisoners . . . abusing and humiliating them sexually. Left to their own devices without adequate supervision from the outside, guards quickly lose track of what is appropriate and will often begin to use inhumane methods on prisoners . . . the corrupting influence of absolute power over other individuals coupled with the need to manage uncooperative populations.
Another study from forty years ago by Dr. Stanley Milgram at Yale involved the use of authority and blind obedience to unreasonable orders. Students were told they were participating in a study of the effects of pain on learning. They were told to give increasingly painful electric shocks to subjects, all the way up the scale to a very painful and lethal level. Most of the students had guilt and mental anquish as they administered the shocks but sixty-fiver percent of them went all the way up to delivering the lethal dose. Luckily, the subjects were actors and the students administering the fake pain jolts were the real subjects.
Such research is no longer done, partly as there have been too many instances of collapse of morals and control on the part of the subjects. Left to their own devices, many people will abandom their values and just plain fuck their fellow man in right royal fashion.
With the increasingly brutal and strange images being revealed regarding the US camps in Cuba and the Iraqi prisons, folks are turning to these old studies to try to understand what went wrong.
This in no way excuses soldiers who did the torturing nor does it in any way excuse their superiors. While it may seem typical for guards to abuse prisoners in these kinds of circumstances, it is no excuse. Most guards do their jobs right. Most soldiers follow orders with honor. Most commanders care for their men and manage them well. The system broke down . . . there is no excuse, just as we cannot excuse the Nazi War Criminals or the men who populated the Killing Fields with corpses or the Iraqi Thugs who Filled Mass Graves before the so-called American Liberation or the torturers who ran Andersonville or hundreds of other examples of man abusing his fellow man . . . no, the temptation to fall may be there and the tendancy for power and isolation and extreme pressures from authority may have contributed to these acts of inhumanity against other human beings . . . but part of being human is to stand up and say “no” to these baser instincts, to allow ourselves to cling to our values, to be better than the evil that infects so many. There is no excuse. Apologists need to step back and ask themselves if these actions would have been acceptable if they had been perpetrated against their own friends or family. I think not.
Prisoners should be treated as prisoners . . . but they are also fellow members of humanity . . . if we treat them as anything less then it is we who have abandoned the human race, not our enemies.
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