Seminar Three
Warfare, genocide and ethnic conflict
The elixir of violence

In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, journalist Chris Hedges argues that war is an elixir that envelopes us with a common cause. War is a narcotic that can give a social group a common high, a common purpose.

The Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted the Stanford Prison experiment in 1971, in which twenty-four college student volunteers were randomly divided into “guards” and “inmates” and placed in a mock prison environment. Within a week the study was abandoned, as the students were transformed into either sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners. Zimbardo has compared this to the Abu Ghraib prison event in Iraq.

In a New York Times interview in 2007, Zimbardo was asked: “So you disagree with Anne Frank, who wrote in her diary, ‘I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.?” Zimbardo answered yes, he disagrees: “Some people can be made into monsters. And the people who abused, and killed her, were.”

“Thrill” attacks on the homeless in U.S. cities took a violent upswing in 2008 and 2009, when the economic recession and rising unemployment caused the ranks of street people to swell. Hate crimes, beatings, rapes, and murders were directed against these vulnerable people.

A blurb appeared in an undercover publication announcing an upcoming “hobo convention” and said: “Kill one for fun. We're 87% sure it's legal.” Many homeless people in Las Vegas moved to the flood tunnels beneath the streets, where flash floods occur after heavy rains. Some of these “refugees” stated that they felt safer underground in the dark, even with the risk of floods, because attackers wouldn't seek them out there.