I often hear that it’s a moral imperative to learn from the great 20th century atrocities, that these events are a window into what humans are capable of, and we must find those impulses in ourselves to make sure we do not follow in their footsteps.
It's just exhaustion most of the time when it gets to the actual point. You see it in how folks stumble forward to be shot in Ukraine or Syria in modern times on camera. It's a walk on wobbly legs that someone who's does something like Muay Thai or equivalent recognizes where someone knows they have to move but are too gassed to comprehend or care what's going on anymore at that moment.
I feel the article and comments written around this dance around that there is a physicality to the events here that go beyond sheer will (couple comments here even reek of 'rip to those guys but im built different). You can say you will have the strength of will to keep your hands up in the 5th round of a fight but will means fuck all when all you can think about is the burn of exertion on your lungs as you eat jab after jab. The same principle applies except its illness, lack of food and sleep.
That and they’ve probably seen what happens to the people who don’t just go along. You want to stay alive for another little bit or get kicked to death right now?
The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, a book about the psychology and sociology of disasters, offers some clues to your mystery. Contra to movie depictions, in real life disasters people rarely panic. Instead, they pick up their belongs, gather together with others, and calmly wait to be told what to do. The average person becomes passive and sheep-like. On the flip side, in the presence of one or a few people who give a call to action, people perform well and are surprisingly pro-social. Of course, this raises two questions. First, what makes leaders different? And two, why did humans evolve to be this way?
I suspect we evolved that way because we aren’t very good at group decision making so it works out better if the group just follows one person. Even if that person is the most retarded person in the group.
Its obvious why a collective needs to be compliant to a single plan in an emergency, you can’t have everyone farting around putting their own brilliant idea forward, there just has to be a single direction and quick movement.
Leaders don’t just pop-up spontaneously though, groups would have a hierarchy already sorted out. They’d all know who it was who was going to tell them what to do, and that person would be selected by whatever mechanisms that group had evolved to deal with the place they lived in and the people they needed to be to live there.
Leaders do actually pop up in stress situations. The kind of leadership you need in peaceful times and the leadership you need when everyone is about to die is quite different.
Watching what kinds of combat leaders are successful and what kind are utter failures is instructive. My point of view is that it has to do with stress responses and lack of panic. If you don't panic when the adrenaline rush hits you and you have the confidence of conviction, you are that leader. Almost all people panic in that kind of situation.
Unfortunately, these traits are found in psychopaths quite often.
Two reasons come to mind. One is hope. Something may yet change just before it's your turn. A last minute reprieve or change of orders. The second is fear. Maybe there are things worse than death (pain, torture, humiliation... not just of self but of loved ones to be made an example of). Horrible thoughts to think but plausible.
This piece is so naive, and so insulting to the memories of those who have been victimized by monsters. Being tortured to death and watching your community be tortured to death because of your actions is actually worse than being shot point blank. That is what happened to people who stepped out of line.
>"that those behind you also run and a few slip away in the chaos"
Not to say that everyone was acting rationally, but this suggests a game theory issue that explains why people who were thinking about making a move didn't want to be the first to do so, so no one did. Your best survival odds from making a move come about 5 seconds after someone *else* does so first.
I think the answer to the question "why didn't they physically fight?" is very simple: people who've lived in a civilized (i.e. pacified) country are uncomfortable with using force towards others, even when they feel they're in the right (as someone who escaped from a super violent country, I see that as a really good thing, actually).
What are you going to do with your life the day after you kill someone to escape? That'd destroy your self-image as a civilized person.
I think a better question to ask is why didn't they foresee such a massacre and argue against it (or just escape) before it was too late? Movements like Nazism don't come into power overnight.
Interesting theory. I just took a look at the homicide rate and Europe has had a lower homicide rate in the entire 20th century than America does today. That's strong evidence that they were pacified even during world wars.
The quality of life quickly deteriorates when society gets violent. Everyone will start cheating stealing and defrauding each other. Love will become much more scarce. Technologies will go out of existence. Life will suck so hard. Trust me, I've been there.
In this extreme situation, a spiritual response might supersede the adrenaline-driven reflexes of fight, flight, or freeze. Perhaps the reason many people appear to calmly accept their fate when facing a 99% certainty of death is choice not resignation. Reflecting, meditating, or praying in those ultimate moments may be a conscious response, not a passive one. Rather than waste the precious little time left on a battle they cannot win, they focus on what remains within their control. In doing so, they transcend instinct, stepping into something ultimately human, perhaps sacred.
Most of the survivors I have heard of were left for dead among the bodies of others shot at the same time. No one has time to check that everyone on the pile is really dead. Genocide is a lot of work
But if you are the only one to try to escape you'll for sure receive a lot of attention and bullets. My grandpa chose the latter and it went down exactly as expected.
I grew up hearing enough stories from Holocaust survivors to have some sense of why there was so little resistance. For one thing, the threat came in stages. First, there were the laws about public life, losing one's job. Then, there was the forced move into the ghetto. Then came the deportations. It didn't happen all at once. People found a way of living after each transition, so by the time any given individual was taken, there was nothing to be done.
There was also the problem of collective action. Suppose there was someone proposing resistance. Were they a provocateur? Would following get one killed sooner perhaps with reprisals against the area or family? How effective would the resistance be? There's a fantasy in the US that owning a bunch of guns protects one from the government if it goes evil, but it would at best be a militia, and armies beat militias all the time if they lack extensive local support.
Look at slave rebellions in the US. They were common enough, but they were put down ruthlessly, usually with vicious public executions to send a message. That practice continued even after slavery ended. Towards the frontier, they were often effective. There was some place to run, but in more central areas, how far could the rebels get before getting captured, returned and brutally killed? When you read the stories of Blacks who left, they tell that they had to leave quickly and furtively.
If you were living in Frankfort when the Nazis came to power, where would you go, to the Alps? The Swiss wouldn't have you. The local Germans would turn you in. Even if you left the country, the world wasn't eager to take in refugees. The US closed its doors. The British, despite the Balfour Declaration, didn't let refugees into Palestine. All too many who left Germany were sent back.
It doesn't help that the goons murdering people were professionals, and those being murdered were amateurs. It's a comforting fantasy that resistance at just the right time would have made a difference. There is a chance, but the odds are poor. There has to be some place to escape to. There has to be a recognizable weak spot in the slaughter that offers an opportunity.
People do escape. A lot of Jews did leave Germany early in the Reich. They had to surrender most of their assets and have some place to go. I heard one story of a jeweler who was allowed to leave with his car and spent the days before his exit rebuilding it with silver bumpers and disguised gold inlay. In elementary school, the father of a friend had been a Russian POW in a Nazi camp and escaped by wearing the skin of a dead cow held on with pine rosin. The other millions of Jews and Russian POWs were murdered.
Don't blame the victims for failing to fulfill some Hollywood fantasy. Consider how few slave rebellions were successful. Consider how few POWS escaped internment camps. Consider how few prisoners escape and avoid capture. Worse, escape is often not enough. There are plenty of refugee camps around the world, even today, full of people who did escape but now have nowhere to go.
We educated people often make fun of the yokels who say "They can take my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands," but viewed in this light, they don't seem entirely ridiculous.
Well think of how this goes down. A leader takes control, focuses on some small fraction of the population (immigrants, some ethnic minority, etc) and targets them. Not out right jail/death to start with, economic penalties, social penalties, shame, bigoted talk/media/policies, and related all hidden behind patriotism. Of course the most aggressive defenders of said minority are jailed/killed/disappear. Things keep ramping up till the targeted minority is in jail/concentration camps. Suffering endless indignities, possessions confiscated, families broken up, terrible food, terrible bed, lack of sleep, bullying, no medical care, rape, etc. Somewhere along the line the most aggressive will lash out, might hurt a guard, etc.
By the time you are being shot that's a long journey where if you had it in you to fight back you already would have, your spirit is broken, your body is broken, you are hungry, have malnutrition, likely sick and have been beaten for the smallest or made up offenses for months.
Question is, have we learned our lesson and speak up and organize as soon as leader targets whatever the most unpopular minority is?
I also wonder if there’s fear of making the pain or death worse. E.g., if making it difficult would increase the odds of you being killed brutally or being tortured, or having the collective/people after you punished for your actions.
Stuff like this also happens if you’re in a literal army.
I was reading about the battle of Cannae, where a Roman (and Italian) army of 60-80,000 was slaughtered by a Carthaginian (plus Spanish and Celtic) army of 40-50,000, to the point where all but 20,000 Romans sided and about 5,000 Carthaginians.
A lot of people question, even if surrounded, how a larger army could be slaughtered to such an extent by a smaller army using swords and spears. Why didn’t they fight to the death?
There are some explanations- the Romans panicked and were disorganized as a result and 20,000 did escape. Another is that many died in a crowd-crush. And some reports talk about how Roman soldiers, panicked, exhausted, and despairing, basically just waited for their turn to be killed.
I’m sure there’s a unique type of group psychology at work in these situations. Counterpoint to Cannae is Rourke’s Drift or Reno’s company at Little Bighorn, where absurdly outnumbered units with no hope of relief maintain a disciplined resistance for multiple days.
The group psychology of a cohesive and experienced military unit in dire straits cannot be compared the the crowd mind of a wildly disparate, randomized group of demoralized civilians, I don't think.
Of course, they’re very different contexts. That might actually be relevant to the original question though- in a military context, everyone has some level of training and mental preparation along the lines of “if X bad thing happens, your job is to do Y. If that fails, do Z”. Civilians would be way less prepared to cohere around a group action.
That said, I picked those 2 examples because they were not elite military units. They were mostly conscripts from the bottom of their respective societies. Rourke’s Drift was a hospital full of convalescents, and at Little Bighorn the company commander was drunk and panicky. Regardless, NCOs and poorly-paid teenagers were able to remember the plan and stick to it.
Fight, flight and freeze are various responses to fear. Some fled these disasters, or tried to, and some did resist. There were Jews who joined resistance groups against Nazi occupation and extermination (only to be often betrayed by the anti-semites in those groups ). Many, however, perhaps relied on hope, the knowledge that past pogroms blew over after a time, and you just had to keep your head down, and in some cases, religious leaders or others with community authority encouraged compliance, believing that this would elicit a better outcome. And of course, the victims were lied to: “We are just resettling you.” And as another commenter suggested, when you are done, you are done; it can be impossible to draw the energy needed to resist out of nowhere. I think we need to avoid blaming the victims. Surely, if they had seen any option they would have taken it. It's unlikely that we are any wiser or stronger than them.
It's just exhaustion most of the time when it gets to the actual point. You see it in how folks stumble forward to be shot in Ukraine or Syria in modern times on camera. It's a walk on wobbly legs that someone who's does something like Muay Thai or equivalent recognizes where someone knows they have to move but are too gassed to comprehend or care what's going on anymore at that moment.
I feel the article and comments written around this dance around that there is a physicality to the events here that go beyond sheer will (couple comments here even reek of 'rip to those guys but im built different). You can say you will have the strength of will to keep your hands up in the 5th round of a fight but will means fuck all when all you can think about is the burn of exertion on your lungs as you eat jab after jab. The same principle applies except its illness, lack of food and sleep.
That and they’ve probably seen what happens to the people who don’t just go along. You want to stay alive for another little bit or get kicked to death right now?
The Unthinkable by Amanda Ripley, a book about the psychology and sociology of disasters, offers some clues to your mystery. Contra to movie depictions, in real life disasters people rarely panic. Instead, they pick up their belongs, gather together with others, and calmly wait to be told what to do. The average person becomes passive and sheep-like. On the flip side, in the presence of one or a few people who give a call to action, people perform well and are surprisingly pro-social. Of course, this raises two questions. First, what makes leaders different? And two, why did humans evolve to be this way?
I suspect we evolved that way because we aren’t very good at group decision making so it works out better if the group just follows one person. Even if that person is the most retarded person in the group.
Its obvious why a collective needs to be compliant to a single plan in an emergency, you can’t have everyone farting around putting their own brilliant idea forward, there just has to be a single direction and quick movement.
Leaders don’t just pop-up spontaneously though, groups would have a hierarchy already sorted out. They’d all know who it was who was going to tell them what to do, and that person would be selected by whatever mechanisms that group had evolved to deal with the place they lived in and the people they needed to be to live there.
Leaders do actually pop up in stress situations. The kind of leadership you need in peaceful times and the leadership you need when everyone is about to die is quite different.
Watching what kinds of combat leaders are successful and what kind are utter failures is instructive. My point of view is that it has to do with stress responses and lack of panic. If you don't panic when the adrenaline rush hits you and you have the confidence of conviction, you are that leader. Almost all people panic in that kind of situation.
Unfortunately, these traits are found in psychopaths quite often.
To deal well with natural and other disasters.
Two reasons come to mind. One is hope. Something may yet change just before it's your turn. A last minute reprieve or change of orders. The second is fear. Maybe there are things worse than death (pain, torture, humiliation... not just of self but of loved ones to be made an example of). Horrible thoughts to think but plausible.
Rather, it was hopelessness. Resigned to fate. Also, executioners may have made gruesome examples of others who resisted.
Yeah the possibility of suffering before death is probably what keeps people in line.
I think that's very plausible. On another note thou, hope might be the worst killers of them all. And puts this tweet into context.
https://x.com/naval/status/1027776399329898496
This piece is so naive, and so insulting to the memories of those who have been victimized by monsters. Being tortured to death and watching your community be tortured to death because of your actions is actually worse than being shot point blank. That is what happened to people who stepped out of line.
But the author is clearly describing a situation in which said community is already being tortured/shot to death
>"that those behind you also run and a few slip away in the chaos"
Not to say that everyone was acting rationally, but this suggests a game theory issue that explains why people who were thinking about making a move didn't want to be the first to do so, so no one did. Your best survival odds from making a move come about 5 seconds after someone *else* does so first.
Interesting thoughts. Thanks for sharing.
I think the answer to the question "why didn't they physically fight?" is very simple: people who've lived in a civilized (i.e. pacified) country are uncomfortable with using force towards others, even when they feel they're in the right (as someone who escaped from a super violent country, I see that as a really good thing, actually).
What are you going to do with your life the day after you kill someone to escape? That'd destroy your self-image as a civilized person.
I think a better question to ask is why didn't they foresee such a massacre and argue against it (or just escape) before it was too late? Movements like Nazism don't come into power overnight.
Many of the men involved were WWI veterans and in any event were not living in a time remotely comparable to ours in terms of pacification.
It had not occured to me until now how much death many of those people may have already seen in their lives.
Interesting theory. I just took a look at the homicide rate and Europe has had a lower homicide rate in the entire 20th century than America does today. That's strong evidence that they were pacified even during world wars.
why embrace civ at all for an identity?
Why not bask in feral barbarism?
The quality of life quickly deteriorates when society gets violent. Everyone will start cheating stealing and defrauding each other. Love will become much more scarce. Technologies will go out of existence. Life will suck so hard. Trust me, I've been there.
In this extreme situation, a spiritual response might supersede the adrenaline-driven reflexes of fight, flight, or freeze. Perhaps the reason many people appear to calmly accept their fate when facing a 99% certainty of death is choice not resignation. Reflecting, meditating, or praying in those ultimate moments may be a conscious response, not a passive one. Rather than waste the precious little time left on a battle they cannot win, they focus on what remains within their control. In doing so, they transcend instinct, stepping into something ultimately human, perhaps sacred.
Beautifully written
Most of the survivors I have heard of were left for dead among the bodies of others shot at the same time. No one has time to check that everyone on the pile is really dead. Genocide is a lot of work
But if you are the only one to try to escape you'll for sure receive a lot of attention and bullets. My grandpa chose the latter and it went down exactly as expected.
People in the ghetto were weakened first by starvation, disease. They had already reached a very hopeless state of mind.
I grew up hearing enough stories from Holocaust survivors to have some sense of why there was so little resistance. For one thing, the threat came in stages. First, there were the laws about public life, losing one's job. Then, there was the forced move into the ghetto. Then came the deportations. It didn't happen all at once. People found a way of living after each transition, so by the time any given individual was taken, there was nothing to be done.
There was also the problem of collective action. Suppose there was someone proposing resistance. Were they a provocateur? Would following get one killed sooner perhaps with reprisals against the area or family? How effective would the resistance be? There's a fantasy in the US that owning a bunch of guns protects one from the government if it goes evil, but it would at best be a militia, and armies beat militias all the time if they lack extensive local support.
Look at slave rebellions in the US. They were common enough, but they were put down ruthlessly, usually with vicious public executions to send a message. That practice continued even after slavery ended. Towards the frontier, they were often effective. There was some place to run, but in more central areas, how far could the rebels get before getting captured, returned and brutally killed? When you read the stories of Blacks who left, they tell that they had to leave quickly and furtively.
If you were living in Frankfort when the Nazis came to power, where would you go, to the Alps? The Swiss wouldn't have you. The local Germans would turn you in. Even if you left the country, the world wasn't eager to take in refugees. The US closed its doors. The British, despite the Balfour Declaration, didn't let refugees into Palestine. All too many who left Germany were sent back.
It doesn't help that the goons murdering people were professionals, and those being murdered were amateurs. It's a comforting fantasy that resistance at just the right time would have made a difference. There is a chance, but the odds are poor. There has to be some place to escape to. There has to be a recognizable weak spot in the slaughter that offers an opportunity.
People do escape. A lot of Jews did leave Germany early in the Reich. They had to surrender most of their assets and have some place to go. I heard one story of a jeweler who was allowed to leave with his car and spent the days before his exit rebuilding it with silver bumpers and disguised gold inlay. In elementary school, the father of a friend had been a Russian POW in a Nazi camp and escaped by wearing the skin of a dead cow held on with pine rosin. The other millions of Jews and Russian POWs were murdered.
Don't blame the victims for failing to fulfill some Hollywood fantasy. Consider how few slave rebellions were successful. Consider how few POWS escaped internment camps. Consider how few prisoners escape and avoid capture. Worse, escape is often not enough. There are plenty of refugee camps around the world, even today, full of people who did escape but now have nowhere to go.
We educated people often make fun of the yokels who say "They can take my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead hands," but viewed in this light, they don't seem entirely ridiculous.
Well think of how this goes down. A leader takes control, focuses on some small fraction of the population (immigrants, some ethnic minority, etc) and targets them. Not out right jail/death to start with, economic penalties, social penalties, shame, bigoted talk/media/policies, and related all hidden behind patriotism. Of course the most aggressive defenders of said minority are jailed/killed/disappear. Things keep ramping up till the targeted minority is in jail/concentration camps. Suffering endless indignities, possessions confiscated, families broken up, terrible food, terrible bed, lack of sleep, bullying, no medical care, rape, etc. Somewhere along the line the most aggressive will lash out, might hurt a guard, etc.
By the time you are being shot that's a long journey where if you had it in you to fight back you already would have, your spirit is broken, your body is broken, you are hungry, have malnutrition, likely sick and have been beaten for the smallest or made up offenses for months.
Question is, have we learned our lesson and speak up and organize as soon as leader targets whatever the most unpopular minority is?
Apparently not. It's happening again all over the world.
I also wonder if there’s fear of making the pain or death worse. E.g., if making it difficult would increase the odds of you being killed brutally or being tortured, or having the collective/people after you punished for your actions.
Stuff like this also happens if you’re in a literal army.
I was reading about the battle of Cannae, where a Roman (and Italian) army of 60-80,000 was slaughtered by a Carthaginian (plus Spanish and Celtic) army of 40-50,000, to the point where all but 20,000 Romans sided and about 5,000 Carthaginians.
A lot of people question, even if surrounded, how a larger army could be slaughtered to such an extent by a smaller army using swords and spears. Why didn’t they fight to the death?
There are some explanations- the Romans panicked and were disorganized as a result and 20,000 did escape. Another is that many died in a crowd-crush. And some reports talk about how Roman soldiers, panicked, exhausted, and despairing, basically just waited for their turn to be killed.
I’m sure there’s a unique type of group psychology at work in these situations. Counterpoint to Cannae is Rourke’s Drift or Reno’s company at Little Bighorn, where absurdly outnumbered units with no hope of relief maintain a disciplined resistance for multiple days.
The group psychology of a cohesive and experienced military unit in dire straits cannot be compared the the crowd mind of a wildly disparate, randomized group of demoralized civilians, I don't think.
Of course, they’re very different contexts. That might actually be relevant to the original question though- in a military context, everyone has some level of training and mental preparation along the lines of “if X bad thing happens, your job is to do Y. If that fails, do Z”. Civilians would be way less prepared to cohere around a group action.
That said, I picked those 2 examples because they were not elite military units. They were mostly conscripts from the bottom of their respective societies. Rourke’s Drift was a hospital full of convalescents, and at Little Bighorn the company commander was drunk and panicky. Regardless, NCOs and poorly-paid teenagers were able to remember the plan and stick to it.
Fight, flight and freeze are various responses to fear. Some fled these disasters, or tried to, and some did resist. There were Jews who joined resistance groups against Nazi occupation and extermination (only to be often betrayed by the anti-semites in those groups ). Many, however, perhaps relied on hope, the knowledge that past pogroms blew over after a time, and you just had to keep your head down, and in some cases, religious leaders or others with community authority encouraged compliance, believing that this would elicit a better outcome. And of course, the victims were lied to: “We are just resettling you.” And as another commenter suggested, when you are done, you are done; it can be impossible to draw the energy needed to resist out of nowhere. I think we need to avoid blaming the victims. Surely, if they had seen any option they would have taken it. It's unlikely that we are any wiser or stronger than them.
They’re reconciled to the fact that resistance is hopeless? They're frightened to the point of literal paralysis?