ABSTRACT
Introduction While most people are taught that killing fellow human beings is wrong, they are sent to war with the instruction that killing is necessary, honourable, and even heroic. In the beginning, this contradiction will therefore be difficult for many people to cope with or to justify in their own minds.Thus in most wars, the soldiers who actually have to carry out the killing of the ‘enemy’ need to be mobilised mentally through a complex procedure of indoctrination and training.Throughout history,most societies have evolved very similar patterns of behaviour in the context of warfare and the methods of preparing the nation or group to justify the mass killings involved. Most people are then able to carry out the killing of their ‘enemy’with minimal inhibition or even with enthusiasm. Once people have ‘bloodied their hands’, as it were, then killing appears to become easier, even to the point of addiction. Killing can take place at an individual level, one person killing another
(homicide) in self-defence, or due to personal animosity or feud.The killer usually knows the victim, so the act is more personal. Killing can also take place collectively, with members of one group killing members of another. Here, group membership determines the killers and the killed.This kind of collective killing takes place in situations of racial riots or war and can be quite impersonal.Usually social sanction and encouragement for killing are present in these circumstances; people are given a ‘license to kill’. Indeed, it may be seen as a social duty or responsibility,mixed with righteous anger and ‘militant enthusiasm’ (Lorenz 1966). Although the psychological characteristics of individual killing differ from those involved in collective acts, and while it may be misleading merely to extrapolate from the individual to the collective level, there is some degree of overlap. This chapter will look at aspects of individual killing that may help in
understanding collective killing, as well as explore the factors involved in mass killing found during war.36
