Thread by @AliceAvizandum

enjoying the second tranche of Northern Ireland war crimes revelations, the first being the staff that was impossible to cover up or of which the troops were actively proud

but now we’re getting into the stuff which even the paras had the sense to think, maybe it’s better if we keep this between us. posed death cars, skull ashtrays, all that

anyway this same pattern happened with the French in Algeria, more or less

also the Americans in Vietnam. I hesitate to call it universal but

like obviously everyone *knows* when you’re torturing people, or when you massacre a village, so that’s just public domain. you have to wait like 30 years before people find the finger bone necklaces and such

and you’ll get like deathbed confessions and posthumous memoirs that are all like ‘yeah actually everything they accused us of, we did, and also many worse things’

plus there’s like this substrate of war crimes that will never be verifiable because they’re so low-order. if you want to shoot up some farmers, or like veer the truck off the road because you want to hear what children sound like when they get run over, mostly that is unrecorded

at least, unrecorded in a way that anyone takes seriously

pretty sure this idea of the really baroque murders coming out later even holds for the Nazis - the undeniable facts of the Holocaust first, but even stuff like Mengele’s experiments and skin lampshades had to like slowly seep into pop culture before it became public knowledge

I suppose that’s always going to work to the war criminals’ advantage, because by then it gets hopelessly tangled up in rumour and myth and horror movies and even pornography, like the ‘stalags’ about SS dominatrixes

It also sounds unserious, in a way - if you’re a historian trying to understand the coldness of genocide or of torture, it seems like this weird alien imposition, like a fantasy. if you’re trying to make the crooked-path argument that the people doing the killing were *ordinary*

then it either dynamites your work or forces a radical reassessment of what ‘ordinary’ means if it turns out that they were prying out teeth to use for arts and crafts projects

it’s this kind of absorption in the subject where you read so many memos and lists authorising killings that you start to implicitly believe that people think in memos and lists too, instead of that just being how they write things up

historians are always very keen to understand these things structurally and organisationally, and that’s important but I think it misses the orgiastic element

there’s a thing that keeps cropping up in war records of the SS killing groups in the east where they’ll end up getting blind drunk and shooting people for three days, without a pause, and I suggest that that is less well understood as a military operation and better as a party

the standard narrative is that these were ordinary-ish guys who got so traumatised that they had to be wasted, and the death camps were invented because it would be less hard on them, psychologically

I don’t doubt that they got traumatised, but there’s this strange unwillingness to believe that any of them might have enjoyed it. I suspect a lot of them had a great time

But this is a really, really, really, really unfashionable view, for a historian. The last big work on this in this example was called Hitler’s Willing Executioners and it immediately got savaged from every quarter

Instead it’s now felt more correct that the Nazis were an unstable alliance of bumbling oafs who accidentally did a whoopsie instead of an unstable alliance of bumbling oafs who wanted to kill Jewish people and did so at great scale

Likewise the idea that in Rwanda, ordinary people were persuaded to hack their neighbours’ children to death because of ‘hate radio’ alone

Or that in Bosnia ordinary people could operate a dedicated rape camp for the women they captured because of some battles against the Ottomans in the 16th century, and mystical ~ancient Balkan blood feuds~

I suspect that more people are just looking for an excuse to indulge in all of this kind of cruelty than anyone wants to admit, and that ‘the banality of evil’ was Hannah Arendt getting fooled by a Nazi for the second time in her life

this thread is approaching liberal guy tweeting length, but I’d just say to bear in mind with this alt-right shit, with migrants, with abortions, with LGBT rights: the cruelty is the point, and we haven’t begun to fathom the depths of it