LIFE

The Cost of Knowing and Our Thirst for Cruelty

What is it about evil, evil doing, and mankind to allow such to occur in front of our own eyes?

On March 13, 1964, in Queens New York, a 28-year-old bartender was raped and chased by her assailant down the street outside her apartment. She was attacked and stabbed three times, once in front, twice in her back. The victim eventually died from her injuries — asphyxiation from a stab to the lung. The incident took place around 3.15am within a duration of 30 minutes. In the police report, these facts were determined by 38 witnesses.

None of the 38 witnesses called the police. The name of the victim was Kitty Genovese.

This is no ordinary case. Like Helen of Troy, Genovese’s murder became one that launched a thousand ships. It became symbolic of the cold and dehumanizing effects of urban life. Abe Rosenthal, who would later become editor of the New York Times, wrote in a book about the case:

“Nobody can say why the 38 did not lift the phone while Miss Genovese was being attacked since, they cannot say themselves. It can be assumed, however, that your apathy was indeed one of the big-city variety. It is almost a matter of psychological survival, if one is surrounded and pressed by millions of people, to prevent them from constantly impinging on you, and the only way to do this is to ignore them as often as possible. Indifference to one’s neighbor and his troubles is a conditioned reflex in life in New York as it is in other big cities.”

Dubbed as the “bystander effect”, Genovese’s death led many studies on human behavior in regards to staged emergencies. What they found was as revealing as it was disturbing: the one factor above all else that predicted helping behavior was how many witnesses there were to the event. Bibb Latane of Columbia University and John Darley of New York University conducted a series of studies to understand why this was the case.

In one experiment, Latane and Darley had a student alone in a room stage an epileptic fit. When there was just one person next door, listening, that person rushed to the students aid 85% of the time. But when subjects thought that there were four others also overhearing the seizure, they came to the students aid only 31% of the time. In another experiment, people who saw smoke seeping out from under a doorway would report it 75% of the time when they were on their own, but the incident would be reported only 38% of the time when they were in a group.

Their conclusion was: “When people are in a group, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will meet the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem isn’t really a problem.” — Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

“When people are in a group, in other words, responsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will meet the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem isn’t really a problem.’”— Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

I’ve always been fascinated by brutality and murder. When I started my career as a journalist, I was drawn to the news desk when there was a new or an active homicide case. I was not attached to the crime desk but that didn’t stop me from wanting to learn how it worked.

There were times my colleagues from the news desk would stop to go to the toilet and vomit when working on their story. The editor of photography would be silent, pouring over the negatives with a magnifying glass at the light boxes, discerning what photos can be featured in the newspapers, and what are crucial but couldn’t.

“We can’t make folks throw up over their breakfast,” the editor once explained to me when I asked why he had to carefully choose and later opt for “tame” photos. “There’s also the government’s censorship rules we need to follow. Our Prime Minister isn’t for the truth in this country.” He’d wink at me when he said that. He was referring to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, known for his Draconian rules.

It wasn’t just about respecting the victim’s identity, it was to decrease visual and cognitive impact. If it was a decapitated body and the head had rolled a few meters on the road, the news outlet would select a photo of the bushes where the body was found.

It was the early 2000s and I was a rookie writer. The editor loved that I was always so curious to learn. “You’re such a busy body,” he remarked when I’d stand by the door on my break cycles watching his team work. “But that’s what a journalist is about, and why people dislike us. Make them fear us for the truth. Otherwise you’re just a rubbish writer.”

What captivated me most was the conversations I eavesdropped at the cafeteria. It sounded like a plot from an Agatha Christie’s novel. We know how the body was discovered, but what really happened? Who did it? Why?

“Stabbings that are done on the neck and above would point towards the crime of passion,” they’d compare analyses. “It was premeditated from the way the murder happened without a break in. The victim was found with her clothes partially on, her face covered. The victim knew the perpetrator.” They’d go on and on. I could tell they were fascinated with the brainstorming. They’d place their bets and resume their work.

I often wondered what use could I have been if I had seriously pursued my interest in behavioral science. Imagine the kind of writing I would have done. Perhaps, they would have amounted to something more purposeful, and life-saving, than for sheer creative entertainment.

The problem was Behavioral Science was not offered at the universities in Malaysia when I was growing up. That area of business only became a hot topic after the American series Crime Scene Investigation (CSI) Las Vegas hit the television screens. It spawned to become a huge franchise with CSI Miami, New York, and Cyber, in total amounting to 828 episodes across 38 seasons of television. By then I had moved on to education and became a teacher. If I have one regret, not striving hard to join Quantico is one of them.

In 2012 my thirst for crime was resurrected. I came across a documentary that questioned how I saw crime and punishment.

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.” ― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

In 1965 to 1966, Indonesia underwent a political upheaval that led to the downfall of President Sukarno and the commencement of Suharto’s three-decade authoritarian presidency. Anyone part of the Communist Party (PKI) and considered as Communist-sympathizers were captured, tortured and killed. Ethnic minorities and atheists were also thrown into the wanted categories which led to Indonesia’s dark episode of mass killings, or better known as politicide and genocide.

According to historical reports, “the killings began as an anti-communist purge following a controversial attempted coup d’état by the 30 September Movement. It was a pivotal event in the transition to the New Order and the elimination of PKI as a political force, with impacts on the global Cold War.”

The government hired ordinary folks to be their guns-for-hire, and they willingly did it for the love of their country, in the name of peace. Stanford University’s Dr. Philip Zimbardo would term that as “blind obedience”.

Within a year, the atrocities amounted to approximately 1 million deaths, although some sources claim the total stands at 3 million. Research and declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

These death squad leaders were never caught, tried and punished. Many went to live successfully as businessmen, politicians, and as advisors and affluent members to the present day ruling government.

This chapter is blanked out in Indonesia’s history books. The younger generation of Indonesians are intentionally left in the dark, unaware of what took place from 1965 to 1966 — until filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer came along.

Oppenheimer was in Indonesia when he spoke to Anwar Congo. Congo was one of the executioners during the Indonesian reign of terror in 1965. In fact Oppenheimer couldn’t believe his luck when he discovered that Congo was one of the masterminds. At his own admission, Congo said he personally saw to the killing of one million people. He was even proud of the fact.

What shocked Oppenheimer was Congo’s candid openness to his confession, and his willingness to address the facts. But what chilled Oppenheim to his bones was the fact that Congo and his men of executioners were nostalgic, without repent and unapologetic about what they had done. For them, taking lives was loyalty to their country. An act of honor. “You did it, and to your best ability because it was for the benefit of the country to get rid of the unwanted and nefarious entities that could thwart freedom, peace and solidarity of modern Indonesia.” That was their blanket understanding and resolution, claiming that the deaths were necessary for what Indonesia is today.

“But what about the women and children you tortured and killed?” asked Oppenheimer. Congo replied, “As enemies of the state, they’re all the same.”

Oppenheimer was as disturbed as he was intrigued by Congo’s willingness to share that he offered Congo an opportunity to make a documentary out of it. Congo jumped at the offer, another shocking milestone for the European filmmaker.

Oppenheimer took the liberty to make a request: Congo and his surviving executioner friends re-enact their killings and talk about their actions openly.

Despite a bit of hesitation from some of Congo’s more affluent friends, they eventually agreed. For the greater aspect of the deal, Congo and his friends felt that to tell their story was a continued act of patriotism. Once again, they didn’t and couldn’t see their mass killing history as a crime. For them, it was a job they were tasked to accomplish by the government. They were handpicked, that made them invincible.

At the helm of Oppenheimer and his partners’ direction — Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian (kept anonymous to avoid political persecution) — Congo reenacted how he tortured, brutalized and took the lives of men, women and children. It was during one of his violent re-enactment being in the shoes of a victim about to be decapitated with a wire, Congo was given a dose of his own medicine.

In one scene after asking his colleague to remove the wire around his neck, Congo turned to Oppenheimer and described how uncomfortable it was to portray the scene as an actor. He wanted it to be as authentic as possible for the film. Oppenheimer replied: “But you get to live. Those men, women and children you killed, cried and begged you knowing they weren’t going to be alive by the time you’re through.”

It was at that moment that Congo felt an unwarranted epiphany — that what he did was unnatural, inhuman and real. Congo started retching uncontrollably at the thought of it.

They were handpicked, that made them invincible.

Oppenheimer’s film ‘The Act of Killing’ became Congo’s psychological journey facing the topic of genocide themed on the banality of evil. It went to win numerous awards and received widespread acclaim. The movie isn’t banned in Indonesia but responses have been muted to this day for obvious reasons.

Many went to criticize that perhaps Anwar Congo was deceived by the European filmmaker into “confessing his sins on camera”, but that is far from the truth.

In many interviews, according to Oppenheimer, the two main subjects in the film, Anwar Congo and Herman Koto, watched the film and neither felt deceived. Oppenheimer says that upon watching the film Congo “started to cry…Tearfully, he told me: ‘This is the film I expected. It’s an honest film, a true film.’ He said he was profoundly moved and will always remain loyal to it.”

“This is the film I expected. It’s an honest film, a true film.’ He said he was profoundly moved and will always remain loyal to it.” — Anwar Congo, The Act of Killing

Oppenheimer, seeing Congo so moved and almost ashamed for what he had done, said this to him. “You’re only 70 years old, Anwar. You might live another 25 years. Whatever good you do in those years is not undermined by the awful things in your past.”

Anwar Congo died on October 25, 2019, at the age of 82. He lived a life of plenitude, of wealth and of immeasurable success as an affluent figure in Indonesian society. A whole lot more than the men, women and children he killed.

In 1963, Hannah Arendt, a Jewish political thinker who had escaped and survived Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany, documented the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.

Throughout the trial, Eichmann displayed neither guilt for his actions nor hatred for those trying him, claiming he bore no responsibility because he was simply “doing his job”. In his own words, he did his “duty… only obeyed ‘orders’, but also obeyed the ‘law’”.

Judith Butler wrote as commentary on Arendt’s observation on Eichmann’s banality of evil, to which she underscored:

The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked “intentions” insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing. She did not think he acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term “thinking” had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.

By writing about Eichmann, Arendt was trying to understand what was unprecedented in the Nazi genocide — not in order to establish the exceptional case for Israel, but in order to understand a crime against humanity, one that would acknowledge the destruction of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, communists, the disabled and the ill. Just as the failure to think was a failure to take into account the necessity and value that makes thinking possible, so the destruction and displacement of whole populations was an attack not only on those specific groups, but on humanity itself. As a result, Arendt objected to a specific nation-state conducting a trial of Eichmann exclusively in the name of its own population.

Following the trials at Nuremberg, I saw the dilemma of the Chief United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson of Nazi war criminals following World War II. Where do we draw the line between what was evil and what was perceived as evil; and what could be tried within the framework of “recognized” international law as opposed to the laws in Germany at the time of Hitler’s rule?

It isn’t a clear line to say the least.

It would mean anyone who knew of the atrocities — be it the population of Germany, including the allied forces — is liable to be put on trial and be punished. How does knowing and taking action be any different to knowing and feigning ignorance in the context of what transpired?

What is it about evil, evil doing, and mankind to allow such to occur in front of our own eyes? I acquiesce with Thomas Harding’s astute (albeit lengthy) review and observation:

“To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, the Nazi war criminal’s actions stemmed from her well-known phrase “banality of evil,” not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss’s case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, “normal,” sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others.”

But then again, there is always the issue of context and society’s perception of evil based on the given circumstances. It appears formulaic in theory but is never consistent in practice. There are many angles to look at and to stab at the matter.

In the case of Kitty Genovese, out of 38 witnesses, why did no one call the police but was willing to witness the attack? How does it feel to outlive the deceased knowing that something could have been done to save her life? Is there remorse?

How are they (and we) able to live in knowing and ignorance, outrivaling shame and guilt?

The lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that 38 people heard her scream; it’s that no one called because 38 people heard her scream. Ironically, had she been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived.

Yet at the end of the day, what does that really tell us about who we are, about human behavior in the eyes and hands of evil and deviltry throughout the course of history?

Sometimes I question myself, what’s with the fascination for the macabre I’ve a propensity to dive into, and for dark tourism when I travel? Is it to seek justice, or to relish in the crime?

We are who we are. The question is can we live with the truth of who we are, and with the things we’ve done?