PAUL HOLLANDER
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of Stasi may qualifY as such a prototype in whom a variety of unappealing
personality traits and ideological convictions were mutually supportive, as
David Pryce-Jones observed:
He had risen from rigging show tri3ls to run the Stasi in 1957 ...
Thuggish and greedy, he was also vain. The list which he drew up of
his 250 medals and orders covered eighteen pages ... in an echo of
Herman Goering .. Iin his office] ... is a portrait of Felix
Dzerzhinsky, Lenin's policeman and killer- in-chief, a death mask of
Lenin .. .
The arguments sketched above are in obvious and stark contrast to that
popularized by Hannah Arendt and taken up with seeming relish by many
Western intellectuals and the general public in the last few decades: the
belief that mass murderers were ordinary, "normal" people, undistinguished
by any moral stigma or deformi ty, who found themselves in si tuations
which led to their brutal behavior, and that virtually anybody could become
one under the appropriate circumstances. (The receptivity to this thesis
points to a strong social critical impulse: if all of us are so corruptible, it says
something about the type of society that produced us; collective responsi–
bility, "complicity" removes the moral distinctions between perpetrator
and all those who were spared only by luck to be thrust in the same roles;
attention is diverted from the individual to the social circumstances and
pressures.) Stanley Milgram's ingenious experiments on obedience to
authority have also been strongly supportive of this point of view.
It may of course also be argued that the four categories outlined can–
not be easily separated, that they overlap especially when both material and
"moral" incentives playa part. Thus, reportedly the Hungarian political
police officers "were trained ... for devotion, blind discipline and were at
the same time filled with a consciousness of mission and professional pride
.. .Their self-confidence was further inflated by the fact that they could fill
their pockets with various allowances, bonuses and benefits ..."
If
Nazi leaders engaged in the large-scale extermination of civilians
could shift responsibility to higher authority and ultimately to Hitler, their
Communist counterparts had an even more helpful device at their dispos–
al to accomplish similar ends: the myth of the infallibility of the Party.
(They could also rely on beliefs deriving from Marxism- Leninism, espe–
cially the notion that they were on the right side of the historical process.)
It
was an article of faith among them that the Party was a unique, chosen
instrument of history and historical justice. Whatever served the purpos–
es and policies of this entity was beyond judgment. George Kennan's
