Gladiators of World War II Series >> .
The
Schutzstaffel (SS; literally "Protection Squadron") was a
major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany, and later throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II. It began with a small guard unit known as the
Saal-Schutz ("Hall Security") made up of NSDAP volunteers to provide security for party meetings in Munich. In 1925, Heinrich Himmler joined the unit, which had by then been reformed and given its final name. Under his direction (1929–45) it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. From 1929 until the regime's collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of security, surveillance, and terror within Germany and German-occupied Europe.
The two main constituent groups were the
Allgemeine SS (General SS) and
Waffen-SS (Armed SS). The Allgemeine SS was responsible for enforcing the racial policy of Nazi Germany and general policing, whereas the
Waffen-SS consisted of
combat units within Nazi Germany's military. A third component of the SS, the
SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV), ran the
concentration camps and
extermination camps. Additional subdivisions of the SS included the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) organizations. They were tasked with the detection of actual or potential enemies of the Nazi state, the neutralization of any opposition, policing the German people for their commitment to Nazi ideology, and providing domestic and foreign intelligence.
The SS was the organization most responsible for the
genocidal killing of an estimated 5.5 to 6 million Jews and millions of other victims in the Holocaust. Members of all of its branches committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II (1939–45). The SS was also involved in commercial enterprises and exploited concentration camp inmates as slave labor. After Nazi Germany's defeat, the SS and the NSDAP were judged by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to be criminal organizations.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking surviving SS main department chief, was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the
Nuremberg trials and
hanged in 1946.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel
Syndrome E .
A syndrome is a group of biological symptoms that together constitute a clinical picture. And E stands for evil. With
Syndrome E, Itzhak Fried
(1997,
The Lancet) identified a
cluster of 10 neuropsychological symptoms that are often present when evil acts are committed – when, as he puts it, ‘groups of previously nonviolent individuals’ turn ‘into repetitive killers of defenceless members of society’. The 10 neuropsychological symptoms are:
1.
Repetition: the aggression is repeated compulsively.
2.
Obsessive ideation: the perpetrators are obsessed with ideas that justify their aggression and underlie missions of ethnic cleansing, for instance that all Westerners, or all Muslims, or all Jews, or all Tutsis are evil.
3.
Perseveration: circumstances have no impact on the perpetrator’s behaviour, who perseveres even if the action is self-destructive.
4.
Diminished affective reactivity: the perpetrator has no emotional affect.
5.
Hyperarousal: the elation experienced by the perpetrator is a high induced by repetition, and a function of the number of victims.
6.
Intact language, memory and problem-solving skills: the syndrome has no impact on higher cognitive abilities.
7.
Rapid habituation: the perpetrator becomes desensitised to the violence.
8.
Compartmentalisation: the violence can take place in parallel to an ordinary, affectionate family life.
9.
Environmental dependency: the context, especially identification with a group and obedience to an authority, determines what actions are possible.
10.
Group contagion: belonging to the group enables the action, each member mapping his behaviour on the other.
Fried’s assumption was that all these ways of behaving had
underlying neurophysiological causes that were worth investigating.
Note that the syndrome applies to those
previously normal individuals who become able to kill. It excludes the wartime, sanctioned killing by and of military recruits that leads many soldiers to return home (if they ever do) with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); recognised psychopathologies such as sociopathic personality disorder that can lead someone to shoot schoolchildren; and crimes of passion or the sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain.
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Neuroscience gives an interesting physiological model of the emotion of
empathy as a complex, dynamic process that unites executive, premotor and sensorimotor functions. It recruits, in particular, the
ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the
orbitofrontal context (OFC), with which the vmPFC overlaps in part, and which is crucial for the processing of emotions generated in the
amygdala – an evolutionary ancient structure within the limbic system. Lesion to the OFC impairs emotional feeling – and with it, decision-making. With his
‘somatic marker hypothesis’, the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles has shown how bodily feelings that participate in signalling emotions, processed in the OFC and vmPFC, enable appropriate, socially situated decision-making, thereby informing our evaluations of the world, including our moral sense.
In the phenomenon of diminished affect, hyperactivity in these same areas of the frontal lobe inhibits activation of the amygdala. Studies have shown dysfunctional activity of the OFC in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder. It thus might also be involved in the obsessive nature of ideas about one group that justify murderous intent against its members. And the sense of elated hyperarousal – such as that induced by cocaine – that entrains action upon these ideas involves processing in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). In short, in cases of Syndrome E emotional pathways in the brain no longer regulate judgment and action. A breakdown occurs in the feedback between the amygdala and higher, cognitive cortical structures. The acting self splits away from the feeling self, a phenomenon that Fried calls ‘cognitive fracture’. He believes that, under given circumstances, about 70 per cent of the population can be subject to it and be able to take part in crimes as part of a group – as might have happened in the Stanford prison experiment, despite caveats regarding its results.
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The acting self of the individual with cognitive fracture feels no empathy. But empathy is not always a reliable guide to appropriate behaviour – we don’t feel empathy for the insects dying because of climate change, for instance, but we can decide rationally to act against the disaster. It can even lead to bad decisions with regard to those at whom it is directed – a surgeon who feels empathy for the patient under drapes should really not operate. There is such a thing as a surfeit of feeling. The psychologist Paul Bloom at Yale University has argued ‘against empathy’, in a 2016 book of that title and elsewhere, suggesting that ‘rational compassion’ is a better barometer with which to evaluate our environment and how we should act upon it. That is to say, members of a group whose mission is to kill its perceived enemies might have the ability for emotional empathy for their group, and no rational compassion for their perceived enemy.
.......
Along with what Fried calls this
‘catastrophic’ desensitisation to emotional cues, cognitive functions remain intact – another Syndrome E symptom. A torturer knows exactly how to hurt, in full recognition of the victim’s pain. He – usually he – has the cognitive capacity, necessary but not sufficient for empathy, to understand the victim’s experience. He just does not care about the other’s pain except instrumentally. Further, he does not care that he does not care. Finally, he does not care that caring does, in fact, matter. The emotionally inflected judgment that underlies the moral sense is gone.
Such a state involves the fusion of identity with a larger system within which occurs the splitting of the feeling self and the cognitive self, and the concomitant replacement of individual moral values with that system’s norms and rules. Chemistry is operative throughout, as it is in all cerebral and somatic functions – and tweakable by pharmaceuticals. The neuroscientist Trevor Robbins at the University of Cambridge has studied ‘pharmacoterrorism’, and how, for instance, the amphetamine Captagon – used, inter alia, by ISIS members – affects dopamine function, depletes serotonin in the OFC, and leads to rigid, psychopathic-like behaviour, increasing aggression and leading to the perseverance that Fried lists among the Syndrome E symptoms. It shuts off social attachment, and
disables all emotional feeling (empathy included), a condition called
alexithymia.
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The neuroscientist Mathias Pessiglione and his team in Paris have also shown a central role for vmPFC in value-attribution to a stimulus or an idea, whereby we choose to undertake an action based on its attractive reward or its aversive outcome. But when this function is overstimulated, new inputs – such as cries for mercy – have no impact on the attribution of value to the idea, for instance that ‘all you people deserve to die’, and action cannot change. It becomes automatic, controllable by an external agent or leader, independently of any sense of value.
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Certain socio-psychological conditions in childhood – such as an absent father or an unstable mother, and a history of foster care – affected the development of identity, in some cases eventually leading to the need to subsume it into a wider group with a transcendental message. Again, group trumps family. As the anthropologist Scott Atran has shown, conflicts are often intractable and non-negotiable because they are conducted in the name of absolute, spiritual values – secular or religious – and not for any utilitarian outcome. These values can seem highly attractive – stronger than family ties.
https://aeon.co/essays/is-neuroscience-getting-closer-to-explaining-evil-behaviour
The lure of fascism: Fascism promised radical national renewal and supreme power to the people. Are we in danger of a fascist revival today?
Lying for science: Psychologists used to manipulate and deceive their subjects with impunity. Did the end justify the means?
https://aeon.co/essays/is-it-ok-for-psychologists-to-deceive-their-test-subjects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamila_Shamsie ..
