At The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, one looks up a rise to the open-air pavilion where row upon row upon row of rusting, steel boxes hang from the ceiling. One comes under the roof and walks among them at eye level. Each has etched upon it the name of a state and county and following, the names of those who were lynched there and the dates of their murders. One walks down a platform deeper into the caskets, the boxes, the steel now at chest level, now above one’s head, now far above. One has to look up at row upon row upon row. People talk in whispers or are silent. On both walls long gray plaques begin the story of what happened to those who are named. An attendant told me that some visitors fall to their knees and cry; others are happy that this place has been made, finally, and that the names can be spoken aloud; others never utter a sound – only slowly walk on, looking, turning about, sometimes sitting, and still others cannot go on but turn back, overcome.
In Ukraine the agony caused by Russia’s invasion continues, now in its 63rd day. Mass graves of murdered civilians are found in each town Russia gives up. Rape as a tool of terror has been documented. There have been reports of ‘filtration camps’ where Ukrainians forcibly deported by Russian forces … disappear.
Days after having returned from Alabama and with each new report from Ukraine, I am thinking about those who committed the murders (and who are committing them as I write this) and how they came to do so. Maybe the germ is simply a part of the species and takes its purest form in ideas of justification, that any bestial action can be justified if the actors agree to believe in the necessity for taking the action. The question then becomes how do they hold their belief in the face of the suffering of their victims? That is the mystery.
Those tens of thousands of human beings who participated in the lynching of over 4000 documented murders (there were many more whose victims are still being uncovered) — what did they think they were doing when they hauled men and women and sometimes children to trees, bridges, open fields, public squares and shot them, hung them, burned them alive, cut them to pieces for souvenirs, sent photos of their bodies on postcards to friends and family announcing the carnival-murders.
Those Russian pilots who launch the air-strikes against hospitals, the soldiers who shoot old men and women in the head and who rape and pillage in villages to which they lay waste – what do they think they are doing?
Maybe it goes to a germ in the species – that too many of us can convince ourselves of anything and then act accordingly, and then stuff it all into some neat little compartment where it may not even trouble our sleep or cross our minds when we play with children.
For example, Putin and his soldiers say and do this:
The Ukranians are Nazis. The Ukrainians are not a separate people. Ukraine should not exist. Therefore, kill them, deport them, turn their country into wreckage.
Whites who lynch said and did this:
Black people are vicious. Black people are a separate species. Black people must be controlled. Therefore, kill them, terrorize them, exile them, turn their homes, churches, communities into wreckage.
The theme is the same. To justify killing a group, dehumanize them. Make them into caricatures of violent, ever untrustworthy ‘things’ unlike ‘good’ human beings who can never be a threat to our safety. Dehumanizing them always means making them a threat. A threat to the wellbeing of a nation or a race must be made unthreatening. The State and individuals may be let loose to defang the threat, and if the propaganda manufactured by those in power has been relentless and effective in delineating the harm caused by the threat (and the potential harm to come), then increasingly violent methods may and will be used to control, even obliterate the threat.
When they confront the suffering of those they see as threats, the agents of this terror, whether Russian troops or white participants in lynching, have already adopted the mind-set necessary to tolerate the cries and pleas of their victims.
They take one of two approaches: either they harden themselves, become mechanical in their actions, build a routine of murder and perhaps even become angry at their victims for being the cause of their violence (because they are awful, we must do this – therefore, our violence is their fault) or become berserkers, one of a howling, self-annihilating mob and take savage delight in cruelty. The sociopathy of mobs is well known.
In either case, most of the killers walk away believing themselves good individuals who love their children and practice charity and are law abiding. They have had to perform a task, one that had its unpleasant moments, but one that was necessary. Afterward, they slip back into normalcy, shaking off their murders the way one would shake the rain off a coat.
Murder was simply a means to an end, except that these kinds of racial or ethnic murders never have an end, only a pause. The propaganda will continue because those in power keep their power by promoting the threat – the threat will always be there. It will rise up again. The end is never attained. Vigilance is necessary. Be alert, The enemy is there. The enemy is always there.
