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Do you believe “Jane Doe’s” accusation of the seven Chi Phi fraternity brothers at Cornell University of drugging and gang-raping her?

That is the question central to this ongoing fracas that has animated the English-speaking world’s commentariat class (particularly the New York Times, for some reason). Strip away everything—contradictory statements made by Jane Doe, controversial legal standards, questionable witch hunt analogies, extremely cringe social media posts from would-be femme-vigilantes, and a dose of gross misogyny here and there—and that is the only question that really matters to most people in this newest proxy war for the eternal Battle of the Sexes (or ham-fisted attempt at resurrecting “metoo” culture). It’s also the hardest and easiest question to answer, at least for me. On the one hand, I have no idea. I have my suspicions, and assumptions, and biases, just like everyone else, but the truth is I can’t possibly know and neither can anyone else outside of the situation involved. And yet, I do believe Jane Doe, in the sense that I believe she believes her own characterization of the events in question, just as I believe that the seven accused believe their characterization of the events in question.

I’m not going to relitigate the story itself, mostly because there are enough commentaries out there that would likely do a better job than me, and also because I don’t want to turn History Impossible into a disturbing variation of a sordid erotica Subreddit discussing consent-blurring group sex. I will say that it is obvious that people are, at least in part, using their imaginations fueled by pop cultural reference points to paint a picture of what happened, and it seems to fall into two camps. On the one hand, you have people imagining the most notorious scene from Hubert Selby Jr.’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, in which the character Tralala is brutally raped by a cavalcade of sailors and ne’er-do-wells on a dirty mattress in a vacant lot. On the other, you have people thinking about scenes they swear they’ve never watched involving infamous porn star Bonnie Blue. Having read the available details on the case (and it doesn’t take long to do so), it’s clear to me that the truth lies between these two interpretations, and mileage should only vary on what part of that spectrum the truth lies.

The contemporaneous commentary should begin and end there, as far as I’m concerned, at least until the claims see their day in court, as they should given their severity. But this case, like so many before it, is riven with fuzzy, often contradictory details that will likely never see the light of day, and will not even matter if they do at least to those watching everything unfold. This is a function of how we absorb scandal as a society, but more importantly—and disturbingly—it is a function of how rape or even “just” accused rape has always been handled and perceived by societies, from today and well into antiquity. The point is, unless someone actively admits to committing a crime—whether rape or perjury—or there is other irrefutable evidence one way or another, there is never going to be a clear answer for anyone because there are usually only two people who know what is true and what is false (and even then, that can be shaky, thanks to the fallibility of memory and interpersonal perceptions), and both of those people have every reason to believe and state their version of the events in question.

Surprising as it might sound, it really has always been this way, and our forebears recognized this, usually with more sophistication than is often given credit. It is often the case, for example, that in centuries past, the word of a woman was never taken seriously, but that was less of a function of active hostility toward a woman’s word and more of a function of uncertainty and the consequences for such accusations. In that sense, nothing has changed. While women of lesser economic or social means or at the brunt of an invading army could not reassure themselves of this, it’s important to remember that no one of lesser means or at the brunt of an invading force could reassure themselves of anything we would recognize as basic human rights today. However imperfectly, we absolutely must remember that this expectation of rights and decency has massively expanded in the past several centuries in ways unthinkable to the vast majority of humans who have ever lived.

So when an accusation of something unthinkable—that is, rape, considered the “crime of crimes” by medieval chroniclers—was made against someone of means and status by someone of means and status, we are provided a window into how such accusations were handled in times long forgotten. And as unbelievable as it might sound, it is not significantly different than how such accusations are approached today, both for better and for worse. The best way for us to understand this is to look at a story from medieval France, where a knight and a squire faced off against one another in a battle to the death over the accusations made by a woman, where the truth of the matter could only be settled by God’s judgment.

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In the spring of 1386, the knight Sir Jean de Carrouges knelt before the seventeen-year-old King of France, Charles VI and appealed to him for justice, the only kind that could be approved by the young King. Speaking loudly so the gathered crowd of clerics, nobles, courtiers, and the men-at-arms could all hear his accusation, Carrouges proclaimed:

Most excellent and sovereign lord, I do hereby charge that during the third week of this January past, one Jacques Le Gris, squire, did feloniously and carnally know my wife, the Lady Marguerite de Carrouges, against her will, in the place known as Capomesnil. And I stand ready to prove this charge by my body against his and to render him either dead or vanquished at an appointed time.

I can imagine that with this accusation, there was a moment of deathly silence through the Salle de Conseil. Jean de Carrouges was a well-known knight, by then 50 years old and dedicated servant of the realm, and the accused, Jacques Le Gris was a well-known squire to the Count Pierre d'Alençon. Most present, the King included, likely also knew that the knight and the squire had a long history, having started as comrades and friends and slowly becoming adversaries and eventually even enemies. Their animosity had supposedly cooled two years before, with the two men seemingly reconciling, but now, quite literally, the gloves were off.

After the accused Le Gris arrived in Paris to answer the Parlement’s summons—having, against his lawyer’s wishes, forgone his “benefit of clergy,” which protected educated and clerically-connected men like Le Gris from kingly jurisdiction—the King and Parlement bore witness to Carrouges’ official challenge, with the knight throwing down his gage of battle as official declaration in the even more vaunted halls of the Palais de Justice. Le Gris, arguably just as prideful as his accuser, denied the charge that he had raped Carrouges’ wife, the beautiful Lady Marguerite, and picked up the gage, and accepted the challenge. All that was left was for the Parlement to conduct its official inquiry into the matter and issue its approval or disapproval of the requested trial by combat between the two men. This inquiry would result in multiple versions of the same conflicting stories told by both men, one speaking on behalf of his wife and the other speaking on behalf of himself.

The inquiry took place over the course of several months, during the sweltering summer of 1386. Studying this era of history can be difficult for want of surviving documentation, and the inquiry’s oral testimonies and transcripts no longer exist, but the French Parlement’s official records still do, including a summary of the inquiry that has since been translated from the original Latin and used as the centerpiece for Eric Jager’s monumental account of the Carrouges-Le Gris affair, The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial By Combat in Medieval France (and popularized by its 2021 adaptation directed by Ridley Scott). As Jager explains, this document “runs to nearly ten densely written folio-sized pages in faded brown ink” and “includes the knight’s itemized charges against the squire, based on his wife’s sworn testimony, followed by the squire’s lengthy and formidable defense.”

Carrouges’—and by extension, Lady Marguerite’s—testimony was recorded first, with the knight claiming that upon meeting the Lady at a gathering the year before the attack, Le Gris, “a notorious libertine,” became completely infatuated with her and decided to “add her to his long line of conquests,” in Jager’s words. Carrouges’ overall claim actually extends beyond the central charge of rape, with him claiming that Le Gris had “foully committ[ed] rape, adultery, treachery, incest, and perjury” (with the incest charge relating to Le Gris’ status as godfather Carrouges’ first, then-deceased son). Marguerite’s testimony to her husband, communicated to Parlement, was deeply disturbing. According to her, while her husband was away in Paris and her mother-in-law Nicole de Carrouges was running an errand twelve miles away from her chateau where Marguerite was staying, Jacques Le Gris and his companion Adam Louvel came to the house.

Gaining entry under false pretenses, Le Gris proclaimed his love for the lady, “more than any other,” and added, “Everything I have is yours.” Marguerite claimed that she told the squire how inappropriate this was, and he changed tactics, forcing her to sit on a bench with him where he promised to help her husband with his money troubles, essentially asking her to prostitute herself for such a benefit. When this failed to move Marguerite, she claimed that Le Gris’ tone instantly changed. “You will go upstairs with me whether you want to or not,” he said coldly. Marguerite claimed his companion Louvel then barred the door and she began to shout, “Haro! Aidez-moi! Haro!” imploring anyone to come help her, though no one came, and she was dragged upstairs and into a nearby bedroom by the two men. While Louvel stood guard outside the door, Le Gris attempted to pin Marguerite to the bed, but she claimed her struggles were too much for him. That was when Le Gris called for Louvel to come help him, and both men managed to tie Marguerite to the bed. That did not stop her from screaming, so, as Jager describes it, “the squire took his leather cap and roughly stuffed it into her mouth to silence her,” and then, according to Carrouges’ testimony, Le Gris “had his desire of her against her will.”

In answer to these claims, Le Gris had mounted a frank, but sweeping defense: the crime had never occurred, since he was nowhere near the scene of the alleged crime that day. According to the squire, he had, in Jager’s words, “seen or spoken with Marguerite on only two occasions—the present litigation before the Parlement of Paris, and the social gathering, ‘at least two years ago,’ at the home of Jean Crespin,” the location where Carrouges and Le Gris had buried the hatchet with regard to their previous quarrels. Contradicting Carrouges’ and Marguerite’s testimony, Le Gris claimed that in the six-hour window during which Marguerite was alone in her mother-in-law’s chateau, he had been at Argentan with two friends all morning—the time of the alleged attack—and well into the evening. He also claimed to have several other witnesses who would attest to his presence at Argentan throughout the course of the day. Therefore, he could not have been where Carrouges and his wife claimed he had been the morning of her alleged attack.

Having claimed complete innocence of even knowing or seeing Marguerite, it fell upon Le Gris to provide an alternate explanation for her accusation against him. To accomplish this, he was notably blunt: not only had Marguerite made a false claim against him, but she had made a false claim altogether. According to Le Gris, when the Lady Nicole de Carrouges returned from her errand, she found Marguerite “happy and mirthful, showing no sign of any displeasure.” In other words, as Jager puts it, “the implication is obvious: does this sound like a woman who just a few hours before had been brutally attacked and raped?” This claim was based on previously-obtained testimony from Nicole de Carrouges and it does indeed call Marguerite’s alleged state of mind into question, but it’s important to note that Le Gris’ interpretation was, by design, vital for proving his alleged innocence of the crime.

But if she had not been attacked at all, why would Marguerite have made this accusation? According to Le Gris, it boiled down to his on-again-off-again feud with her husband, Jean de Carrouges, and his notorious deficiencies as a knight and, more importantly, as a husband. As Jager explains, Le Gris claimed that “while married to his first wife, Jeanne de Tilly, [Carrouges] fell into an ‘insane jealousy,’ forcing her to lead such an austere life that she died an early death.” Damningly, Le Gris also claimed that “Carrouges tried to get his first wife to say that Le Gris had slept with her—‘which the said wife, wise and good, refused to do, since it was not in any way true.’” Thus, this newest accusation by Carrouges was, in essence, “part of a long pattern of lies and enmity” against Le Gris. Carrouges’ alleged poor character extended to his current wife, who was, according to Le Gris, beaten by Carrouges shortly after his return from his trip to Paris. Following this attack, Carrouges supposedly “forced Marguerite falsely to accuse the squire of having raped her,” despite his wife supposedly never making this charge before. As Jager concludes:

This last clause [claiming Marguerite never made the claims in the first place] was crucial, since it reduced the knight’s entire set of charges to a vicious falsehood coerced out of his wife in a fit of rage to avenge himself on the innocent squire. It also painted a new picture of Marguerite, with fresh bruises from her husband’s fists, now forced to collaborate in a further violence to herself, a violence to her mind and soul, by falsely accusing the squire of a heinous crime.

Jean de Carrouges was given a chance to respond, and he vehemently denied many of the squire’s charges and claims, particularly those regarding his allegedly abusive nature with women in his life, but also the attacks against his wife’s noble character. His counter-claims to Le Gris’ testimony rested upon a very fair point: why would Carrouges lie about such a vile crime when he, in requesting a trial by combat, put his “soul, body, wealth, and honor,” as well as that of his wife’s, at stake? More to the point, Carrouges argued, his wife was “chaste and honest,” using Le Gris’ own words to describe her, and had brought incredible scrutiny upon herself in making this claim, and she had maintained this claim “firmly and constantly, without any change or variation,” despite the scrutiny and risk to herself. This is also a fair point since, it must be noted, if the duel went forward and Carrouges fell in battle, Marguerite would also be rendered guilty in the eyes of God, and as punishment, be burned at the stake as a heretic.

With the respective cases made, all that was left to determine was if this proposed trial by combat would move forward. This rested on the findings of Parlement’s inquiry, which proceeded throughout the rest of the summer, during which new pieces of evidence were uncovered, some of which supposedly damaged Carrouges’ and Marguerite’s testimony. These included a set of letters that, unfortunately, have not survived and can’t be fully scrutinized, but whose existence is confirmed by a courier’s expense receipts and the statement made by the bailiff of Caen, Guillaume de Mauvinet, who ordered the letters delivered to Paris. Mauvinet also told the courier to report “by word of mouth certain other secret things not to be committed to writing,” which also remain lost to history. However, as Jager explains, “these new letters and reports seem to have been a further attempt to damage the knight’s case by discrediting Marguerite’s testimony.” While this should of course be taken with a grain of salt, it also demonstrates that at the time there were circumstances that cast uncertainty over who was telling the truth in the case.

In addition, Le Gris’ alleged co-accomplice Adam Louvel was summoned to face questioning, was arrested, and “put to the question,” that is tortured, as part of his interrogation. An interesting, if morbid, facet of this development is that torture was becoming more common in medieval France as part of the judicial process, while duels were becoming less common. We don’t know the specifics of the kind of torture Louvel endured, but Jager explains that “standard techniques included the strappado, where the victim’s hands were tied behind his back with a rope by which he was winched off the ground and then suddenly dropped, as well as the rack, ‘fire applied to the soles of the feet,’ prolonged sleep deprivation, immersion in cold water, and water forced down the throat to the point of suffocation.” Despite enduring such torture, Louvel never confessed anything that differed from the accounts offered by Le Gris, casting further doubt on Carrouges and his wife.

Despite these newfound discoveries, the fact remained: no one truly knew what happened on the day in question except the person who made the accusation and the person being accused. Because of this, the solution was clear: the duel would proceed. After all, when the truth could not be ascertained one way or another based on the available evidence, only God remained as a reliable witness. His favor, Parlement (and much of France) believed, would be granted to the man who spoke true and that would have to suffice. As one of the priests presiding over the duel would say, the outcome of the trial would determine “the damnation of the one who is in the wrong, in both soul and body, as a result of the great oaths they have sworn, whence they will be judged by the sentence of God.”

When the day of the duel came at the end of 1386, both combatants—now both knights, with Le Gris being granted equal standing with Carrouges—took their oaths referenced by the priest, as did Marguerite, who was shackled to her own viewing platform for the length of the duel itself, which could well have lasted several days. This was not to be. The knights began by charging one another on horseback, pointing sharpened lances at one another; a deadlier version of the kind of duel you see as a contemporary Renaissance Faire. Neither knight speared the other, but both of their horses were killed when the knights switched to axes and began hacking at one another. They eventually switched to short swords and faced each other on foot. Carrouges was wounded in the thigh and began bleeding profusely, leading the hushed crowd (who were forbidden from cheering or making any kind of audible reaction at this solemn event) to likely believe the battle was going in Le Gris’ favor.

But Carrouges suddenly gained the upper hand, grabbing Le Gris by his helmet and forcing him to the ground. The important thing to remember about medieval combat is that both men were carrying over sixty pounds of metal, in which it was difficult to move, especially when laid out on the ground, as Le Gris now was. Straddling Le Gris, Carrouges began attempting to pry open Le Gris’ helmet visor, both so he could access the weak point of Le Gris’ throat and, likely, so he could look his opponent in the eye. As he did this, history records that Carrouges began shouting on repeat, “Confess! Confess your crime!” Eventually breaking the lock on Le Gris’ helmet, Carrouges finally could see his enemy, and screamed again, this time with a dagger to Le Gris’ throat: “Confess!”

What happened next is nothing short of remarkable. A dagger at his throat, ready to pierce his flesh any second, Le Gris had a chance to finally admit what Carrouges had been alleging, perhaps saving himself from such a grisly fate. And yet, as the dagger’s tip dug into his flesh, he shouted with all his might, so the gathered onlookers and Carrouges alike could hear: “In the name of God, and on the peril and damnation of my soul, I am innocent of the crime!” Barely missing a beat, Carrouges shouted back: “Then be you damned!” And with that, as Eric Jager describes it:

Carrouges put the point of his dagger to the squire’s underjaw, while bracing the helmet with his free hand, and with all of his remaining strength drove the sharp thin blade into the exposed white flesh, sinking the weapon into his enemy’s throat up to the hilt. A spasm shook the squire’s body, and blood spurted from the wound. Le Gris’ eyes fluttered rapidly open and shut, and his throat gurgled with his final choking breaths. His body shuddered again under the knight, and then his limbs relaxed and he lay still. Carrouges remained astride his enemy for another minute or two, until he was sure Le Gris was dead. Then he got slowly to his feet, leaving the dagger stuck in the lifeless body stretched out on the blood-soaked sand.

Weak with exhaustion and loss of blood, Carrouges loosened his visor and turned to look at his wife. Marguerite now clung to the rail [of her viewing platform], wiping away her tears. As the crowd quietly watched, the couple exchanged a very long look, both seeming to gain strength as they locked eyes. Turning around to face the royal stand, Carrouges bowed to the king. Then, nodding to each side, he acknowledged the huge crowd, who gaped in awe at the bloody scene before them. The knight, hoarse with thirst and hunger, then titled back his head and shouted into the air as loudly as he could:

“Ai-je fait mon devoir?” (Have I done my duty?)

Ten thousand voices—silent since the beginning of the duel, on pain of the severest penalties—now answered as one:

“Oui! Oui!”

Le Gris was dead, and with his death, God’s judgment had been rendered. He was thus guilty of the crime with which he had been accused, and Marguerite had spoken true.

And yet, doubts lingered in everyone’s minds, including Le Gris’ own lawyer, Jean Le Coq, whose surviving diary sheds light on both his favorable impression of Marguerite de Carrouges’ consistency in her testimony as well as his doubts about his own client. In a particularly relevant entry of his diary, Le Coq wrote that Le Gris “told me that when he heard the news that Carrouges intended to prosecute him in this matter, he immediately went to a priest to make confession.” This in and of itself proves nothing one way or the other, but as Jager writes, “both combatants in the duel would have [had] ample time to confess their sins before they met in battle,” and yet “Le Gris apparently took no chances with his immortal soul.” However, this flies in the face of Le Gris’ final protest of innocence—when his life was literally hanging in the balance—as well as Le Coq’s observation “that many knights swore they saw him with the Count of Alencon throughout the entire day in question.”

But the matter had been settled, and Carrouges and his wife would continue to live their lives, handsomely compensated by the king, and have three children, who would be known forever as the progeny of the victor of France’s last trial by combat. Carrouges maintained his and his wife’s honor, and was celebrated for it for the rest of his days, until he died while participating in the Last Crusade to the Holy Land in 1396. While the trial by combat cemented his and his wife’s word during their lifetimes, later chroniclers and historians, including Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, would cast doubt on Marguerite’s story. Decades after the event, there were unsubstantiated stories about an escaped felon being the true criminal and Marguerite had either somehow mistaken him for Le Gris or, like Le Gris himself had claimed, had been coerced by Carrouges into accusing his rival. This claim would be repeated throughout the centuries, even into the 20th century, with little in the way of evidence being provided.

Nevertheless, the story of the Carrouges-Le Gris affair has been defined by conflicting interpretations for over six centuries. Despite defending his client, Le Gris’ lawyer Le Coq neatly summed up the reality of the case better than anyone else, revealing that the medieval mind was perhaps more complex than we often give it credit, when he wrote in his diary that “No one really knew the truth of the matter.”

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All that can indeed be said is that no one really knew what had happened between the squire and Marguerite de Carrouges, if anything happened at all. We certainly don’t know today, but it is clear from the historical record, no one back then knew either. As is often the case in stories of rape and other forms of sexual assault today, the people of the time were aware that, typically, the only people who truly knew what happened in the case of rape were the alleged victim and alleged perpetrator. This was, the medieval mind reasoned, why God’s judgment needed to enter the picture. Leaving these matters up to God, archaic as it sounds, actually demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the fallibility of witness testimony and perils of self-preserving instincts by both parties involved in a rape case. The accuser has every reason to make their case as strongly as they do, and the accused has every reason to deny the accusation with unlimited vociferousness.

There is a misconception about medieval life that crimes such as rape were not taken seriously because women were not considered, well, people. Rape victims were sometimes forced to marry their rapists and spousal rape wasn’t even a concept, so it is understandable that one might imagine the Middle Ages as a time “where rape was rampant and scarcely considered a crime,” to use Eric Jager’s words. It’s also certainly true that wives were considered a form of property—more a representation of family and property, but property nonetheless—but this patriarchal instinct actually forced the issue to be taken just as seriously, if not moreso, than it is taken even today. As Jager explains:

Medieval law codes and actual trial records show that rape was considered a felony and a capital offense. The law in France […] usually followed Roman practice, according to which rape—defined as forcible sexual intercourse outside of wedlock—was punishable by death. Philip de Beaumanoir, a 13th century authority on French law, states that the punishment for rape is the same as that for murder or treason—namely, “to be dragged through the streets and hanged.” And even in wartime, leaders often tried to restrain their men, as when the English soldiers who captured Caen in 1346 were ordered on pain of death not to harm any of the town’s women, although many troops disregarded this warning.

Rape, a capital crime, was therefore not just taken seriously, but so was the accusation of it. After all, the accused’s life was literally on the line when it occurred. Therefore, the approach to proving or disproving accusations was as meticulous as one could expect, with the only meaningful differences between the process today and then being the technology available, as well as legal and social standards. With the same kind of seriousness, then, came the same kind of shortcomings, which again, often boiled down to the fact that oftentimes only two people knew the truth of the matter, as seen in the case of the Carrouges-Le Gris affair. Hence, the invocation of God’s judgment being the final word; literally or figuratively—however one decides to interpret the concept of divine judgment—it truly was the only source of unbiased truth outside of the accuser’ and accused’s universe.

Of course, in the 21st century, we don’t have the option of invoking God’s judgment anymore, and we are probably better for it as far as legal standards go. We also don’t require female accusers to make their accusation via their husbands, fathers, or male guardians. However, we can’t pretend that we are much better at omniscience than the god our medieval forebears worshiped. We also can’t pretend that even with different social and legal standards than those of our forebears that we are meaningfully more enlightened than them. That rape was a heinous crime—again, considered the “crime of crimes”—was just as recognized then as it is now, and men were not the only ones to say so. While few medieval women had the opportunity to speak for themselves publicly the way they do today, that was typically the case for everyone outside of the educated clergy, not just the women. And when women did speak on the subject, they did so unequivocally. Christine de Pisan, a French court writer, explained in her 1405 tract The City of Ladies that women “take absolutely no pleasure in being raped. Indeed, rape is the greatest possible sorrow for them.” [Emphasis added].

While a case can be made that rape was punished less often in the medieval era than it is today, this was thanks less to ingrained misogyny (or what we often hear called “The Patriarchy” or “rape culture”) and more thanks to a lack of political clout or social standing. These limitations applied to all victims of all crimes, especially if the alleged perpetrator had the social standing and political clout that their alleged victims lacked. The requirement of a male proxy to make an accusation is certainly retrograde by today’s standards, but as we saw with the Carrouges-Le Gris affair, a raped noblewoman was seen as an affront to her husband as much as it was an affront to herself, meaning the incentive to make the accusation was no less apparent than it otherwise would be.

One might be tempted to say that these kinds of limitations, particularly surrounding social standing and political clout, remain the case today, and anecdotally, I suppose one could make that case. But the fact remains that rape is prosecuted and leads to conviction far more often today than ever before, with the United States Sentencing Commission reporting that in 2024 alone, 1,430 convictions for sexual abuse were handed down. As a proportion of accusations, that number remains small, probably far too small, but that speaks more to standards of evidence, which, for a crime like rape, are high for a reason and must account for the uncertainty that plagues sexual abuse cases. Sadly, it must be said that the tragic trade-off that comes with sufficiently high legal standards is that across time, to use Jager’s words, “rape was a serious crime for which the law provided heavy penalties, [but] in practice it often went unpunished, unprosecuted, and even unreported.”

This suggests an unresolvable (or at least difficult-to-solve) paradox: either rape is a crime worthy of the severest punishment and thus deserves a higher standard of evidence, or it shouldn’t be considered so serious and thus allow for lower standards. I make no case one way or the other. But I do maintain that, if we examine the historical record, there is a continuity in our understanding of such a perversely intimate crime: rarely is anyone is ever going to fully know the truth of the matter apart from the people allegedly involved. The Cornell case, like the Carrouges-Le Gris case, rests upon the sworn testimony of two parties who both have every reason to convince everyone (including themselves) that their version is the truth. The Ridley Scott adaptation of The Last Duel, despite some of its issues, adds a very sophisticated angle thanks to the superb script by Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Nicole Holofcener, in which the perception of the main characters matters more than just their claims.

In their version, Jacques Le Gris flatly denies the crime, but admits privately that he did sleep with Marguerite, but that it was consensual, and calling her refusals part of a flirtatious game that all women are expected to play when sleeping with a man outside of wedlock. There is no evidence that the real Le Gris ever admitted or believed this, but by adding this detail, Affleck, Damon, and Holofcener added a plausible explanation for why Le Gris protested his innocence of a crime until the bitter end. This does nothing to exonerate him from the alleged crime if he was in fact guilty of it, but it reveals yet another angle for why allegations of sexual assault can be so fraught. If one party perceives the behavior of the other one way, and the other party perceives it another, but both agree that something—in this case, sex—happened, then in effect, neither and both parties can and often do come off as dishonest and, in effect, self-serving. At that point, to use one of my favorite phrases, mileage simply varies on the imaginations and biases of those observing the drama from afar.

This helps explain, to my mind, why so many—both in 21st century America and 14th century France—become so emotionally invested in these stories. The uncertainty of others’ motives and perceptions, and the brutal fact that none of us actually know the truth of the matter, forces us to simply rely on what we do know, which often only comes from our own experiences and again, imaginations, and the evidence that often results from investigations into these alleged crimes will only support our own conclusions derived from these things. When we so deeply personalize an alleged crime that has nothing directly to do with us, being reminded that we will never know what truly happened is always going to feel like an affront of the highest order, whether we believe the Jane Doe of the story, or the man or men she has accused of committing a truly heinous crime.

I don’t personally believe in God. But when it comes to sordid stories involving Ivy League frat house gang-bangs or alleged assaults in the Middle Ages, I do believe that if there is only one party that will ever truly know what happened in those rooms and most others where such crimes are allegedly committed, it is God. How we, in our quasi-secular age, can reconcile that with our desire for certainty in the name of justice is anyone’s guess.

Hey everyone. No preamble here. Just a nice bonus as a thank you for your continued support. As the title suggests, this is an audio adaptation of an essay I wrote about the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and how it led me to reflect on my generation, that is millennials, seems to believe about itself regarding trauma, adversity, and the future.

This is available to all subscribers, so please consider supporting my work if you want access to ad-free versions of History Impossible like this one.

We often hear about how the Second World War was more morally nuanced and complex than we have been led to believe. This is, to a certain extent, very true. The Axis powers meted out a level of genocidal destruction and suffering upon tens of millions of people across the world, decimating generations in places as far flung as Poland and the Philippines, and Croatia and China. To call their actions existential by their very nature is to arguably undersell the threat they posed. The Allies realized these were the stakes and were eventually faced with a very real question: what would it take to stop such a threat? It required what many have come to believe was the unthinkable: meeting destruction with destruction. And in meeting the Axis violence with more violence did indeed bring the war to its ultimate end.

But was it the right thing to do?

This episode of History Impossible aims to address that question, one that has vexed generations of historians and commentators, and inflamed debates that last until this very day. The immense fury with which Allied air forces pummeled German cities, particularly Dresden and Hamburg, has been well-covered, including on this very program. But perhaps the most shocking devastation came on the night of March 9-10, 1945, when the United States Army Air Force conducted a daring raid over Tokyo, resulting in a death toll that dwarfed even that created by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki several months later. The fires of war became more literal than they had ever been, and it had all been part of a deliberate campaign to crush the spirit of the Japanese. The bombers, and eventually the United States, accomplished their mission to bring the Empire of Japan to its knees. The suffering of the millions under Hirohito’s boot would be brought to an end. But at what cost?

Many will go into this story with an answer to that question in the affirmative or negative at the ready. I thought I did. I came out the other side less certain, and I hope all of you who listen do as well. Because uncertainty should is something with which we should all be more comfortable, especially when it comes to the subject of war, even when we make defensible decisions.

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I hope you’ll pardon a more off-the-cuff reflection on my part here, rather than the usual deeply-researched material that appears on History Impossible. But like a lot of people out there, the 25th anniversary of 9/11 got me thinking about these things and I used that as an opportunity to try and get all of this out of my system. There are a lot of generalizations in here with which some of you might take issue, so please sound off, but please do NOT take this as me trying to sell you some kind of gospel. This is my own way of coping with the world in which we find ourselves (maybe turning 40 this year has something to do with it too). Anyway, think of this as a loose, semi-historical interpretation of the Millennial generation that may require a deeper, more properly historical analysis in the future.

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Like a lot of people out there in the world, I was trying to find a way to write about 9/11 on its inauspicious 25th anniversary. There really is not much to say, including where I was and what I was doing (for what it’s worth, I was 15 and walking into Spanish Level 3 and saw the TV on), that hasn’t already been said by so many people. But a corner of the discourse, particularly on Instagram reels (and likely TikTok) of all places, really piqued my interest, which is the disconnect between Zoomers’ perceptions of 9/11 and that of my generation, Millennials, particularly of the older vintage (freshly-minted 40 year old here!). Namely, the Zoomers apparently just don’t get it. They don’t get why there was such importance attached to that day, by Boomers and Xers, but especially with Millennials. And honestly, why would they? They were either in diapers when the Twin Towers fell or they didn’t even exist yet. We can’t expect them to understand, just as I am sure they can’t expect Gen Alpha (or whatever comes next, Gen Beta?) to fully grasp the enormity of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But this discourse definitely got me thinking about the historical place Millennials like me occupy, and how cultural markers existed during our childhoods and early adolescence. Namely, that it was largely an uninterrupted parade of optimism throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were certainly problems and conflicts—no era of history is completely idyllic—but the 1990s in particular were a very positive time. It was the only time in my life that there was a budget surplus in this country, just to give you all an idea of how remote that time actually feels. But it was actually a time of innovation, particularly around technology, which Millennials were at the forefront of using. I remember my first dial-up modem connection at home—1998, I want to say—was remarkable. I remember using Google before there was even the “I’m feeling lucky” button. There was also a cultural renaissance, particularly with film (it’s not hard to get any cinephile going about 1999 and for good reason), but also with television (Star Trek was at its peak, and The Simpsons was creating a comedic vocabulary, to just name two titans). Music was exciting, and always feeling fresh and new; grunge, pop-punk, alternative, hip-hop, R&B, and electronic music changed everything.

Obviously, again, a lot of this is nostalgia, but it’s also indicative of how the pre-9/11 world was something truly different than what came afterward. Because it was. 9/11 was not just a national trauma; it was a generational trauma, where we all realized our safety was no longer guaranteed. This is hardly an uncommon observation, by Millennials or otherwise. However, I part from the apparent consensus in that I think the traumatic process for Millennials began earlier than 9/11. Al-Qaeda’s attack on America was a significant moment, but for Millennials, I believe, it served as confirmation of something we already suspected for a few years. That was because in 1999, something unthinkable and seemingly unprecedented occurred. That is, the mass shooting at Columbine High School.

Mass shootings did not begin at Columbine, it should be said. In fact, the first reported school shooting was in 1840, when the law professor John A.G. Davis was assassinated by a student taking part in the riots occurring at the University of Virginia. But Columbine was different, largely because of the media coverage, but also because of the scale and the mythos that began to surround the event. While it took many years for the reality of the Columbine shooting to emerge—namely that the main perpetrator was a true psychopath with annihilationist tendencies, and his buddy was largely just a lost loser along for the ride—the response to the mass killing was one dominated by external explanations. It was the music the killers listened to (usually claimed to be Marilyn Manson, though the killers had no interest in his music). It was the violent video games they played (it’s true they played Doom, but they became fixated on mods that replicated their future crime after they decided to commit that crime). It was the lack of meaningful security at school. It was access to firearms. It was literally anything that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation, which was the fracture that existed in the killers’ minds. No one (or very few) could face that possibility, so the blame turned outward, and Millennials, largely encouraged by media coverage and their parents’ worries, came to believe however subconsciously that even the relatively safest place outside of home, that is school, was a potential combat zone.

We lived with that perception every day for the two years that followed Columbine. Emergency procedures in the case of such an event were drilled into school staffs. In early 2001 when I was a freshman, my high school experienced a bomb threat and despite the incredibly flimsy evidence that the threat was actually real (it turned out it wasn’t), all 2,000 students were evacuated across the street to the YMCA gymnasium within 15 minutes. The teachers were well-prepared, and the chaos one might expect from a bunch of teenagers being told they didn’t have to go to class for the rest of the day was minimal. It was a really fun day and everyone was in good spirits, but that was because we had internalized the potential threat. We’d had two years to do so. But that threat was still confined to one thing: schools. The trauma of the Columbine mass shooting was a disruptive force, and it affected the wider culture for sure, but the threat remained relatively contained. That all changed on September 11, 2001.

To say 9/11 changed everything is an understatement. Outside of the school setting, things previously taken for granted—freedom from mass surveillance, freedom from buffed up state security apparatuses, and freedom from rampant and performative patriotism, to name just a few—quickly became normal. War was no longer an abstract idea or something that would conjure memories of the smashing 100-hour victory of the Gulf War and instead became tethered to the cultural memory of the Vietnam quagmire, thanks largely to war-skeptical Boomers. Millennials, at least those old enough to vote, were now the fighting generation and there was a very real, if ultimately deeply misguided fear of a resurgent military draft, especially after coalition forces engaged with Iraq in 2003. Dissent against that war took on a new meaning, but in my memory, it was mostly driven by the aforementioned Boomers tapping into their own experiences with Vietnam, and less by a bubbling awareness by war-anxious Millennials at the grassroots. I’m not saying Millennials were manipulated into being war-anxious—as the bodies of American servicemen began to pile up, it became a very reasonable concern—but the Boomer-driven anti-war rhetoric certainly fed into and off of that concern.

The best way to illustrate the post-traumatic malaise that began to fall over Millennials in the years following 9/11 is not to point to large-scale geopolitical developments, but rather, to look at the culture we consumed. While there were certainly exceptions, some of the most popular films of the era, especially produced after 2003, were relentlessly pessimistic, cynical, or otherwise dark, seeming to peak in 2007 (contrary to the fans of 1999, the best year for films in my lifetime, if you ask me) with releases like Zodiac, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Michael Clayton, Gone Baby Gone, There Will Be Blood, and No Country for Old Men all plunging us into some of the bleakest views of the human condition seen in films since the heyday of the late 1970s. Music popular with Millennials, particularly those who had dabbled in the 90s and early 00s incarnations of the goth and punk scenes held over since the 1980s, took on a similar edge, if only in aesthetics. I haven’t bothered to look at the actual numbers, so forgive me if I’m wrong, but I find it hard to believe that Hot Topic did not see its best years in sales from around 2001-2008. The rise of emo and screamo bands—known for trafficking almost exclusively in a kind of anguish—as well as the persistence of hard industrial rock and angry punk music were a testament to this. Look no further than Gerard Way directly citing 9/11 as the inspiration for him to quit his illustration job to form his monumentally successful pop-punk/screamo band My Chemical Romance.

Culture in the 2000s, even at its brightest, always had a harder edge. Even the sun-dappled underrated soap drama masterpiece The O.C. rarely paused in its indulgence of teenage characters grappling with alcoholism and drug addiction, suicidal stalkers, and even attempted murder. This was also the height of cynical turptitude with shows such as Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, where the monster-of-the-week formula pioneered by The X-Files in the 1990s was copy-pasted but with the twist of “depraved sexual crime of the week.” And lest we forget, this was the era of self-destructive reality and competition shows like Fear Factor, The Swan, and the beginning of the nightmare we call the Real Housewives franchise. The point was always, seemingly, the same: people are vile animals—how can we dispute this? See with your own eyes!—and no where and no one is safe.

This isn’t to say that Millennials were all miserable. While one shouldn’t necessarily generalize too readily, it’s safe to say that most of us weren’t beyond the usual angst that accompanies adolescence. We were in high school and then college, and despite all the disruptions that 9/11, the War on Terror, and the Iraq War had wrought, the world kept turning and adulthood was fast approaching. For a clear majority of Millennials, college was a foregone conclusion. It was a logical continuation of the education we were receiving even as the world seemed to fall apart after the Twin Towers collapsed. This was before—right before—the 2010s bloat of higher education administration, Title IX overreach, and the rise of safetyism. Individual expression and freedom were still at a premium, and we all believed that our personal development was just part of the process, enabled by the collegiate experience, of becoming gainfully employed adults. Then the autumn of 2008 came around and the “Great Recession” we had been hearing about for around a year finally reached its apex, just as many of us graduated from school and matriculated into the job market that was supposedly waiting for us.

The generational trauma associated with the Great Recession was different than the ones felt immediately after the Columbine massacre and 9/11, in that it was more slow-moving and one that Millennials began to discover for themselves on an individual level, as opportunity after opportunity for gainful employment disappeared, especially for those of us who saw fit to pursue a degree in the liberal arts. Given the proliferation of memes out there about “feminist puppet theater” majors and the like, it might be surprising to learn that the degree itself was what was supposed to matter, not the area of expertise we studied. While my own degree—psychology—was plenty useful, especially if I deigned to try and continue my education, I knew many others whose own degrees were woefully inadequate to face the job market, and who simply reentered academia as students to weather the economic storm. It might have worked in the short term, but many were not spared from the economic devastation that awaited us, and the downstream effects continued for the next several years.

Employment certainly bounced back as the years went by, thanks also to the rise of the gig economy, but a third painful lesson about perpetual uncertainty and danger was being drilled into the heads of Millennials in the late 2000s and early 2010s thanks to the Recession. The mileage on how well we rode this period out varies of course, but the explosion of late 00s/early 10s party culture helps reflect our desire to live in the moment and not concern ourselves with the potential consequences for pounding shots, snorting powders, and swallowing pharmaceuticals of which our parents’ generation could only dream. The irony of engaging in risky, perhaps even nihilistic behavior while also being imbued with the sense of the world’s danger is not lost on me, but it’s not an uncommon coping mechanism. Thus, if anything, it adds weight to the notion that we were a generation that identified itself with subsequent mass traumatic events. As best I can tell, this helps explain a lot of cultural trends that began to become mainstreamed as more and more millennials entered the workplace, including radical redefinitions of “harm” and “justice.” Such things, I wager, would not have taken on such a radical purchase if the world the Millennials believed they were promised had not changed the way it did; after Columbine, after 9/11, and certainly after the Great Recession’s downstream effects, the last of which simply seemed to be the final confirmation of everything we had come to believe about the world.

Every generation “loses it innocence,” in one way or another. For the Greatest Generation, it was the Great Depression and World War II. For Boomers, it was the killing of JFK (and arguably to a lesser extent, the Manson murders). But for Millennials, we had a trilogy of traumas (plus a good epilogue), and none of them seemed to have a silver lining. The Greatest Generation saw unprecedented wealth creation. The Boomers further reaped those benefits and were largely able to replicate them and instill that optimism in their progeny, however misguided it was. But for Millennials, everything just seemed to get worse. I don’t want to make too much of these traumas or start engaging in the unearned, performative pessimism that has become such a tiresome shorthand among many of my cohort. But I do understand such sentiments. The supposed norm of school shootings, the greatest attack on American soil by a foreign power since the War of 1812, and the greatest financial crash of living memory were very effective at embedding within the generational psyche that no one was safe and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. By the time the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there was less shock than there might otherwise have been. The pandemic and how our government handled it was just further confirmation of what those previous traumas suggested was the nature of existence.

As annoying and even dangerous I find “trauma discourse,” I actually find it less surprising as a trend when I think about the historical events that punctuated the cultural gestation of Millennials. Similarly, the meme about Millennial drinking patterns and drug use being, well, kind of crazy makes a lot more sense. Not as an excuse for these things, but as an explanation for the mindset that drove so many of us to those behaviors and outlooks. Unfortunately, though, I do believe it also inculcated within us a fatalistic attitude that has robbed many my age of the ability to meaningfully take ownership over our lives and express real agency. It’s not that Millennials were coddled, it’s that many of us became convinced that the world happens to us, rather than the reality, which is that we engage with the world. Parenting and education play parts in this dynamic, for sure, but bad parenting and bad education simply reinforces the attitudes created by events outside of our control.

One can see how this has manifested long term with at least some Millennials, specifically those who feel the need to announce their desire not to have children as an act of selflessness. It’s usually paired with a vague invocation of “the world today” in so many words, sometimes supported with references abstract dangers like climate change, systemic racism, war and genocide, and now especially A.I., but with very little effort to meaningfully address the agency being enacted with that decision. My partner and I have been together for over 16 years, and she and I have no desire to have children. When this comes up in conversation, which is thankfully rare, one can sense a sort of excitement on the part of people who immediately assume it’s because we can’t bear the thought of bringing a child into “the world today.” For a while, I simply shrugged it off and let people believe what they wanted to believe about my and my partner’s decision, but I’ve come around to simply being honest: we are not having children because we don’t want to have children.

I have long suspected that the people who proclaim their desire not to have children for abstract, external reasons are actually kind of ashamed about not producing progeny. That is, of course, their business. But it reflects what I’m talking about when it comes to how Millennials have been affected by a full decade of traumatic events (to say nothing of the profound disruptions created by the COVID-19 pandemic) where it has conditioned many of them to believe not just that they have no agency, but that to believe one has agency is an exercise of dangerous naivete. One can see how this has fed into politics with very little trouble, spanning the entire political spectrum, with an ever-present acceptance of illiberal means at best and authoritarian prescriptions at worst. It is not worth relitigating 21st century American illiberalism here; there are far better places for that and the evidence exists in polls. The point is that the pillars of individual liberty—which are built in a belief in individual agency—have lost their appeal, and the reason for this, above all other reasons in my opinion, lies in mass psychological disposition. Any Psychology 101 class will teach you that dispositions have many ingrained aspects, but they are also conditioned over time. When an entire generation is conditioned to believe that nothing is certain and nothing is safe as a matter of course thanks to a rapid succession of generational traumas, such an outcome is hardly surprising.

As fundamentally dishonest, irritating, and, well, silly, as I find this rise of performative pessimism on the part of Millennials and the Zoomers rapidly following suit, I want to make it clear: I get it. My choice to not engage in such apocalyptic prognosticating was simply that: a choice. Admittedly, my natural contrarianism has played a part as well. I have been hyper-sensitive (one could say far too sensitive) to serious, complex concerns becoming social signaling trends for decades at this point. But it was not an easy choice to make, especially the longer I studied history and politics. As anyone who reads or listens to my work knows, there are some dark periods of history, where the human condition reveals itself to be little better than the kind seen with chimpanzee tribes in the wild. And yet, we aren’t chimpanzee tribes in the wild. We are subject to incredible forces much larger than ourselves—my fascination with pandemics and natural disasters in past episodes should make it clear that I do accept this reality—but at bottom we are all the same: creatures capable of making choices, even if those choices are bad ones.

The idea of a coddled generation or two doesn’t scare me; the idea of a generation that believes we can’t make any meaningful choices for ourselves without being destroyed is an idea that does. As Cormac McCarthy wrote in Blood Meridian, we look out at the world and see “a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear.” But McCarthy wasn’t saying that we need to despair at the darkness of that vast, uncaring universe to which we are all subjected. He was invoking the awe that we should feel at that universe. With awe, one hopes, comes respect. And respect is a choice, and that respect allows us to engage with that universe instead of just cowering in fear and waiting for it to make our decisions for us.

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In this newest episode of History Impossible we’re joined a second time by Richard Lim, host of the This American President podcast, who last appeared on this program a couple years ago to discuss the insane, contentious election of 1876. He is also the author of a new book, Refusing a Crown: How George Washington Changed the World, which releases on October 13, 2026, and covers the most significant aspect of America’s first president: his restraint from seizing power that almost certainly would have remained his.

In this episode, Richard and I spoke about his new book, about Washington’s enduring character, the best and most important of the Founders, the role of deism, the constitutional foundations of the American experiment, and why figures like Washington prove that this experiment endures for a reason, even as it has faced many trials and challenges until this very day (among other topics). The polarization that plagues United States politics in the 21st century is, after all, nothing new, and Washington was among those who recognized this potential, and yet created an example that is easily forgotten. Richard aims to—and I believe succeeds—remind us that there was more to Washington than his supposed inability to tell lies about cherry trees and crossing a river during the Revolution, revealing that he was far more than some “presidential messiah.”

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“Because remember: Russia is a religious experience.” Those are the oft-repeated and well-said words by the host of The Eastern Border podcast, my good friend Kristaps Andrejsons. They are well-said because there are very few alternatives for explaining Russian actions, rhetoric, and political culture over the past near half-decade in its World War I-style conflict with Ukraine. The Russian religious experience, made emblematic by Kristaps’ and my favorite shared punching bag Aleksandr Dugin, is a phenomenon best understood as a more formalized and colossal version of what ISIS was ten years ago, and it helps explain why Kristaps believes the spiral of the Russian state as we currently know it is beginning in 2026.

In this episode, we discuss the potential for collapse and its consequences (including the potential proliferation of nuclear weapons), as well as the barriers of understanding between the West and East, the state of media coverage and perils of sponsorship, the use (and potentially misguided fear) of AI, and Kristaps’ new book that he is releasing serially on his Substack and Patreon. As is always the case with Kristaps, it was a wide-ranging, enlightening, and fun conversation, and I think it sheds a light on the history being made in his part of the world, as well as the motivations that lay behind it. Russia’s dark autumn (another Kristaps coinage) is almost here and having Kristaps as our Gonzo guide for that coming darkness is a blessing more of us should appreciate.

As mentioned in the episode, if you would like to donate to the Car4Ukraine Eastern Border Summer Campaign, please go here and make your donation.

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Antizionism, as it has become, has been having a bit of a moment for going on three years. It is a tough nut to crack, given its various claims of varying legitimacy and, as we have covered more than once on History Impossible, its increasing tendency to veer into outright antisemitism, especially by those looking for a supposedly intellectual and moral veneer for their racial and geopolitical fixations. Part of the reason for this confusion is the complex intellectual history of the position, which, after 1948, became more complicated than the relatively straightforward debate over Jewish statehood before, during, and after the Holocaust.

To help make sense of this complicated intellectual history, I was thrilled to be joined by Kile Jones of The Inverted World Substack, which, along with his work for the Times of Israel, has helped map out this historical trajectory and challenge many of the preconceived notions held by many who take their anti-Israel positions for granted. We discussed this trajectory, as well as a number of other subjects, including the time Kile met with Noam Chomsky, his transition from card-carrying Marxist to an old-fashioned liberal, and many other things. It was a great conversation, hopefully the first of many, and I hope you all enjoy the journey we go on together.

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I recently wrote a piece exploring the concept of American identity, primarily through the prism of the immigrant experience, and it got me thinking more about the complexities of American identity, so I wanted to chat with someone who I know has discussed these matters at length. This resulted in a great conversation with the awesome of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and The Radicalist Substack, where we tackled all sorts of angles, including ethnic enclaves, assimilation, patriotism, the collision of values, and the nuances of free speech and freedom of association, all in the context of understanding American identity and the importance of what David calls the constellation of our values. There were some moments of (very mild) disagreement, but I felt like I learned a lot and it helped me defend my own position while considering alternatives that had not previously.

Because it is America’s 250th Anniversary Month, I felt like this would serve as an excellent addendum to my Fourth of July reflections, and wanted to share it with all of you amazing subscribers and supporters, completely free. Please check out and support David’s work, and, if you can, support what FIRE does. And please stay tuned very soon for a new episode of History Impossible!

Also I will be in Philadelphia at FIRE’s Student Network Conference July 17-19, so if you’re in the area, drop me line here; I may be able to venture out for a meet up.

Thanks again, as always, for listening.

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Hey everyone, don’t worry, I have not forgotten you. We have some awesome things coming very soon, and because this is America’s 250th birthday, I figured I’d write my own reflections on American identity, that for-some-reason-always-controversial topic. This is much more stream of consciousness than usual, so please forgive its meandering style. But I hope you enjoy what I have to offer on this auspicious day.

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I will be the first to admit that historians, political commentators, and other kinds of theorists often tend toward the negative valence of the human experience. War, conflict, tragedy, suffering. These have always been the things that define narratives, and for good reason. And there has been no shortage of stories that can be classified in those ways during the shared lifetimes of both Millennial and Gen Z Americans. Therefore it is unsurprising that examples of strife that our generations have faced since the dawn of the 21st century have come to define how many of us perceive life. Global terrorism reaching its apex on September 11th, 2001, the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, the Great Recession, the rise of unchecked populism, the COVID pandemic; those are the big stories, all with their own terrifying side quests and disturbing subplots. Thanks to our collective fixation on these objectively dramatic and terrifying stories, amplified by 24 hour news channels (which truly changed everything at the turn of the millennium) and later social media, that negative valence of the human experience became seen as the norm.

More disturbingly, however, was the shift toward recognizing that negative valence as a kind of moral virtue. Like many, I have been (and probably still am, to some extent) very guilty of this habit. Recognizing evil, malice, cruelty, and injustice is quite important; it is a very effective way to demonstrate one’s moral compass. Given this, it can very understandably feel crass to celebrate something—like a nation and its history—that has racked up a tally of evil, malicious, cruel, and unjust actions in its past. In the case of the United States, look no further than our infamous use of slavery, or our violent dispossession of thousands of indigenous peoples, or our many imperial interventions and adventures overseas. And yet, it does not feel like there is any kind of meaningful reflection that comes alongside this recognition; it often feels more like a pose, or, like I implied a moment ago, a signal. It also only ever seems to come from those born in the United States, and never from those who came here to make a new life for themselves and their families, especially from countries with far different values than our own.

This was on my mind this morning, on America’s 250th anniversary, as I sat drinking my coffee with my partner Molly. She is an immigrant to this country, having moved to the United States when she was nine years old, and therefore has an immigrant’s perspective on the country. It is usually a fool’s errand to try and generalize perspectives, but more often than not I have encountered a very similar perspective from immigrants to America, especially from non-Anglophone countries. The main thing is that, while they recognize the horror stories like those I mentioned above, they also reject the idea of America being defined by those horror stories. And they certainly reject the notion that recognizing these horror stories as being some kind of moral virtue. After all, why would they buy into that? They are the ones who came here, after all. The point Molly ultimately made was that it has become easy for us to forget the success stories, or the stories about how we came out the other side of those tragedies and calamities.

“So why do you love America?” I asked her.

She considered the question for a little while before saying, “It’s valuable to be different, or unique, rather than be punished. And that you can communicate and express yourself however you want. You know, that we have rights, and people can and do get in trouble if they take away your rights.”

I pointed out that the negative valence people, as I suppose I’ll call them, would claim that those things aren’t true for everyone at all times in the United States and that, at times, they have a point. She simply frowned and said, “well yeah, but that’s not what I mean. The fact that they can even make that claim, and complain about it publicly, and sometimes even become adored or even rich saying it is what makes things different than places like China.” In other words, however imperfectly these features manifested in our culture, both now and across time, the fact that it’s even possible is a blessing, and something for which she is grateful. That imperfection, she explained, is expected everywhere; the fact that it’s not expected here is both a.) an incredible mindset that can be cultivated, and b.) a sign of immense privilege.

This kind of framing is something that has increasingly resonated with me in the sixteen years I’ve spent with this woman, and even gotten to appreciate first hand as I have gotten to know her family, and especially so after we visited China many years ago. China is a different place in many, many ways than it was in 2012—after all, that was the year Xi Jinping first seized power—but Molly’s core observations about Chinese culture contrasted with American culture hold to this day. They also mirror things I have been told by other people I’m fortunate enough to have in my life who come from authoritarian and post-authoritarian cultures. My friend Kristaps Andrejsons of the Eastern Border podcast has made this abundantly clear over the years I’ve gotten to know him. His stories of what he was told by fellow Latvians after revealing his plans to be a podcaster were the same as what Molly or any other Chinese person would likely hear: in essence, “why the hell would you do that?” The expectation is to get a “real job.” There can be a lot of unpleasant naysayers—haters, if you will—one comes across in the United States, but by and large, the American ethos is “you do you,” if not, “That’s awesome! You do you!”

This enthusiasm is something worth loving. But I think enthusiasm is the secret to understanding the far more difficult question I asked Molly after asking what she loved about America. That is, the question that has always vexed our culture, and likely will never stop: what does it mean to be American? Molly frowned at this and stared into space, sitting in silence for a very long time. Finally, smirking, she said, “Hot dogs and beer.” This answer is fascinating because I had literally no idea what she meant, but I also figuratively knew absolutely what she meant.

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So what does define American identity? It isn’t a shared ethnic makeup. It isn’t a particular brand of religious belief. It isn’t a shared language. It isn’t even the civil creeds laid out in our Constitution or the spirit of our Declaration of Independence from the British Empire. American identity is none of those things. American identity at its best is simply reciprocal excitement about individual and group differences.

That claim can sound counterintuitive, especially in a country that places such obvious weight on its institutions and founding documents. Some of these things are vital to the nation functioning as it does. The Constitution structures political authority and adjudicates conflict; a shared language, however loosely enforced, enables commerce and public life; certain civic norms like free speech, associational rights, and religious liberty make pluralism possible in the first place. But those are civic and social arguments. They explain how the system operates. They do not fully explain why it holds together.

People might object to the idea that we get excited by individual and group differences, pointing to persistent instances of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment, which has not just grown in the past decade or so, but has also been a feature of our populist politics since at least the early-to-mid 19th century. On the surface, that seems like a fair criticism. But it doesn’t explain the very real excitement we see play out between our native-born population and foreign-born visitors, especially during recent viral moments like those seen during the World Cup this year, when national difference becomes spectacle, celebration, and shared curiosity rather than threat. The key here is that the excitement is reciprocal.

You see, when we get immigrants to this country who share our excitement at our shared differences—usually introduced through food—that’s the glue that binds us together. Food is the most obvious and least controversial medium, but it stands in for something larger: a willingness to participate in exchange rather than retreat into insulation. That reciprocity then often expands into discussing and learning about the cultural differences we have, from linguistic idiosyncrasies to stories of strife. When it comes down to it, humans—not just Americans—love to learn about one another. What makes America unique is that this desire has become hard-coded into our culture. We are obviously imperfect in our ability to tap into that cultural coding, especially when incentivized not to do so by politics and other priorities, but imperfection, again, is the norm. The standard is still there, and if you’ll permit a little American exceptionalism, it at least appears to be quite unique to us, at least from the perspective of immigrants and visitors to our country.

The best way to understand this is to look at how Americans respond to overt expressions of cultural insularity, particularly when it comes in the form of ethnic or religious enclaves. There is a reason that enclaves make most Americans uncomfortable, both outside and inside them. It’s not suspicion of foreigners or simple bigotry; it’s a suspicion of people not buying into the reciprocity of excitement. Enclaves are, by their very nature, in a perpetually defensive posture, and that, in turn, makes everyone outside of them suspicious. But unlike the ghettos that Europeans shuffled their Jews into many centuries ago (or the outright expulsions indigenous Jews saw throughout the Middle East after 1948), in America most ethnic or religious enclaves are voluntary and thus relatively rare, and they, in fact, help reveal that mechanism that binds us: excitement.

Obviously, our freedoms make it impossible to ban voluntary enclaves—and that is all for the good—since generally speaking, enclaves are perfectly legal to create as long as no laws are violated that prevent actual discrimination of those outside of them (or against those who opt into them). But they represent the exact opposite of what has always made America work, and at a gut level, most Americans recognize this and thus disapprove of it. Enclaves make our capacity for reciprocal excitement over differences essentially impossible. If you’re excited about us, we will be excited about you, and if you’re here and not excited about us, what the hell are you doing here to begin with? That’s the American attitude—the American cultural glue.

That is what is meant by “beer and hot dogs.” Beer and hot dogs are particularly American in their symbolic power, of course. But beer and hot dogs can mean anything; they represent our ability to come together not despite our differences but because of them. This symbol could just as easily be baijiu and dim sum, or falafels and lemonade. The point is not the meal itself, but the exchange it represents: a mutual recognition that difference is not merely to be tolerated, but enjoyed, displayed, and shared. Thus, at 250 years, that may be the closest thing the United States has to a unifying principle—not sameness, not even agreement, but a kind of ongoing, reciprocal curiosity.

…

I am not here to say that one needs to be wholly grateful for what we have as Americans. People can feel however they want. And am I saying that we should not criticize America’s more unseemly features in its history? Am I saying that we should celebrate America for good or ill? Am I saying that we should love it or leave it? Obviously not. Am I saying that focusing on the negative valence of our history, especially after doing the impossible and making it 250 years, is a poor substitute for a personality or identity, or as a means to demonstrate moral sophistication thanks to the negative valence people like me have normalized over the past 25 years or so?

You bet I am.

There is no sophistication in oikophobia, which is essentially what focusing on America’s failings actually is. Americans who do this are no different than the shadows they are boxing, the avatars of imaginary mandatory nationalism they need to believe exist in order to justify their meaning-seeking. Those kinds of people and forces do exist, but the amount of meaningful control they actually exert is nonexistent. Again, all one has to do is speak to the immigrants in their lives, especially if they came from a place that does not have our same standards of reciprocal excitement and curiosity baked into their own culture. They will tell you stories about real mandates, real shadows with form and substance, which you and I have never actually experienced.

The promise of moral sophistication is extremely tempting, especially when it is seemingly so easy to obtain. But it’s often just another form of self-gratification. In the case of native-born Americans finding nothing to like about their own culture or history, there is certainly a lot of masochism fueling the impulse. But at its core, it is really just another form of chauvinism, something I have spoken about at length on History Impossible. To believe that America can do no right is not meaningfully different from believing that America can do no wrong; in fact, it is functionally the same: to provide a shortcut to a sense of moral sophistication. The reality is America can and often has done both right and wrong. It is not special in this regard. It is special in its own, peculiar ways that cannot be neatly fit into categories of “wholly good” or “wholly bad.” That is what is worth celebrating. That and, of course, beer and hot dogs.

Happy birthday, America.

Hey again everybody. I know I just dropped a big essay on all of you adapted from my final research paper in grad school, and many of you might still be working through it, but I wanted to give everyone another little bonus for all of your patience waiting for the proper big historical episodes of History Impossible. It’s been a while since I’ve done an…

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Hey everyone. I am happy/sad to report this is my last proper research paper that I have written for my time in graduate school, outside of my still-to-be-completed master’s thesis. But this one quickly became my favorite piece of academic writing I have done so far because it marries two of my great interests: the history of the Third Reich and psychology.

The seeming theme of History Impossible this year is about the end of the Second World War and in what sense it was, well, made sense of. That’s the theme of the research conducted here, the theme of all this Third Reich historiography I’ve been doing, the theme of the upcoming special episode, and the theme of the final episode of “The Muslim Nazis,” which is indeed being worked on as we speak. It makes sense that such a theme would resonate with me, but it also resonates with everyone who studies the war and its effects. I’d even go so far to say that I understand the position a lot of revisionists—both those I have criticized directly and not—find themselves in. The more one does a meta-analysis of the Second World War, the more chance of getting gobsmacked one seems to have.

It makes sense. Everything about this conflict, including its supposed heroes and villains and what they did, is unthinkable. There is no other way to put it. And instead of embracing this enormity, it breaks brains and requires explanation and a desire to put everything in a box; revisionists simply don’t like the current box. In a sense, that’s what inspired my research for this paper, along with the impressive film Nuremberg from 2025 that starred Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring. As we’ll see with this paper, the efforts to understand the Third Reich and how things got to the point that they did began even before the Second World War started. This speaks to its strangeness and its significance to history and, as we’ll also see, the drive to diagnose it at the deepest level possible.

Thanks, and enjoy.

—AVS

…

“Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?”
—Bret Easton Ellis

“The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
—Bertrand Russell

“Kelley found some darkness in every person. Gilbert found a unique darkness in some. They were both right.”
—Joel E. Dimsdale

It was June 11^th, 1945. The Second World War had yet to fully conclude in the Pacific Theater, but the Allies had been victorious in Europe for over a month. Despite the finality of this victory, and of the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler’s demise at his own hand, it had quickly become clear that there were more questions than answers forming among the Allies. How had things escalated this much? How had the Nazis managed to exceed the destruction of the First World War so quickly? How had so many crimes on a never-before-seen scale—the crimes that would come to be known as the Holocaust—managed to occur under the very noses of so many Germans? What kind of men could even do these crimes? Were they mad? Or were they truly evil monsters? Answering these questions had vital importance to many within American academia, from a variety of different fields including medicine, neurology, the arts, administration, and psychology. Leading a group of professors was the psychiatrist Dr. John Millet, and on that day, he drafted a letter to be sent to the chief prosecutor in what would become the famous Nuremberg trials, United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. The letter’s primary purpose was requesting that these experts get hold of the war criminals’ brains after they had been executed, with the letter reading as follows:

Detailed knowledge of the personality of these leaders […] would be valuable as a guide to those concerned with the reorganization and re-education of Germany. […] In addition to the psychiatric interviews it would be desirable to make a number of psychological tests such as the Rorschach. […] If and when the accused has been convicted and sentenced to death, it would be desirable to have a detailed autopsy, especially of the brain. Therefore it is urged that the convicted be shot in the chest, not in the head. [Signed,] John Millet.¹

An agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) named Sheldon Glueck echoed and even spelled out these sentiments three days later in a letter written to Major General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of that organization. Glueck wrote that “a chief aim of the [Nuremberg] trial […] will be to convince posterity of the facts and to interpret those facts and the entire Nazi leadership from the points of view of law, medicine, and sociology. For the first time in history, a thorough scientific study of the types of mentality possessed by the German military, political, and industrial insiders will be made.”² Both of these letters demonstrate the enthusiasm many had for trying to understand the very nature of those they rightfully saw as the embodiment of evil on earth. Such measurements—the brain’s post-mortem and the Rorschach test—were considered the cutting edge for their time. There had been a growing chorus of speculation surrounding the psychology of the Third Reich since its very beginning, and now that they had been defeated, the victors could study their enemy up close and, so the thinking seemed to go, with few ethical limits or questions.

The professors eventually got their chance to study the literal mind of a Nazi. Justice Jackson had ultimately supported both proposals from Glueck and Millet, and had already allowed the Army to send in a psychiatrist in August of 1945, when the unthinkable happened that October: one of the accused war criminals held at Nuremberg, the Nazi politician and head of the German Labour Front Robert Ley, had hanged himself in his cell, using a towel that he had turned into a noose by ripping it into strips and fastening it to his toilet pipe. Within hours, Ley’s brain was extracted and sent to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. The neuropathologist found evidence of damage to the frontal lobe, likely caused by a head injury Ley had incurred during the First World War, and exacerbated by chronic abuse of alcohol, confirming what many assumed: Ley’s brain was abnormal. When the media learned of these findings, they began to trumpet the news, with the Washington Post proclaiming in their headline, “Nazi Ley’s Brain Found Diseased.” Surely this helped explain, many reasoned, how and why the Nazis’ reign had seemed so deranged. Despite another neuropathologist named Dr. Nathan Malamud of San Francisco offering a second opinion, backed up by microscopic analysis, that Ley’s brain did not show any signs of true pathology, the American media continued to promote the idea of the diseased Nazi brain. However, no one actually studying the Nuremberg criminals was resting on their laurels quite yet.

Ley, along with the other defendants, had already been analyzed by the U.S. Army psychiatrist, Dr. Douglas Kelley, as well as the Army psychologist, Dr. Gustave Gilbert, among others. Both were developing their own ideas about the nature of these men’s minds—men who included the Reichsmarshall himself, Hermann Göring, and other high-ranking Nazi officials and military figures—but Kelley had put it most bluntly after Robert Ley’s suicide, writing in his preliminary report on the Rorschach tests that had been conducted, “since Ley kindly made his brain available for postmortem examination, we were presented with the rare chance to verify our [...] findings.”³ It had become a matter of course that the Third Reich and its crimes would not just be understood, but quite literally, diagnosed, and Kelley, along with Gilbert, would be at the center of finding that diagnosis, arriving at what seemed to be completely different conclusions, but what would, with time and despite some later setbacks, be demonstrated to be complementary ones.

Arriving at a diagnosis of the Third Reich and its leaders has been at the root of many questions raised about the history of the Nazi years, but it had a wider impact on many fields of study that go beyond history, not least of which, psychology. With the collapse of the Third Reich, the destruction wrought by World War II, and the realization of the Holocaust’s extent, deeper questions about human nature were given a new lease on life, thanks to many developments and advancements in the relatively new field. Sigmund Freud had long been a household name, and had indeed made his own commentary on the Nazis known, alongside many of his followers and critics alike. However, the Nuremberg trials and the role of psychologists in their judgments made a much more lasting impact on the field. This impact would experience a number of diversions, beginning with Hannah Arendt’s reportage of the SS man Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961, but it found its origins in the differing interpretations of the two main psychological experts that spent time with the Nazi war criminals in 1945-1946: Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert.

This paper addresses the extent to which the Kelley-Gilbert debate shaped the development of the theoretical frameworks that experimental social psychology used to explain perpetrator behavior. This paper also examines how Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” thesis overrode the influence of the Kelley-Gilbert debate on social psychology’s perpetrator frameworks during the subsequent decades of intellectual development. Finally, this paper assesses what was potentially lost in Arendt’s intervention, namely the missed opportunities in understanding crimes against humanity. The Kelley and Gilbert debate, I argue, offered vitally complementary insights into Nazi ordinariness, but their debate went cold after 1958, missing an opportunity for synthesis, and allowed Arendt’s provocative reframing as mere “banality” to fill this void, directly inspiring the most influential social psychological studies for decades to come and thus shaping the development of social psychology. That is, until recent challenges that resurrected both Kelley’ and Gilbert’s assertions, and revealing their complementary nature.

The paper thus contributes to the preexisting historiography, which often connects the work of Kelley and Gilbert to the later observations by Arendt, but has so far neglected to interpret Arendt’s contributions as a potential diversion in the development of social psychological theories of evil. In other words, the intellectual through-line observed in this paper is a novel one that attempts to bridge the gap rather than simply note the continuity. Thus, in attempting to chart this intellectual history of modern social scientific attempts to diagnose evil, it follows the lead of historian Peter E. Gordon, who wrote that “intellectual history resists the Platonist expectation that an idea can be defined in the absence of the world,” and instead “tends instead to regard ideas as historically conditioned features of the world which are best understood within some larger context.”⁴ In other words, our psychological understanding of evil did not sprout from the ground, unbidden; it was thanks to our attempts at diagnosing the Third Reich.

…

Attempts at psychologically diagnosing the Third Reich occurred well before the Nuremberg trials themselves, beginning even before the Second World War began. In fact, these attempts appeared shortly after the Nazi Party seized power in 1933. Most psychological commentary was based heavily on the principles of Freudian psychoanalysis. The unconscious mind held the key, many of these analysts believed, to understanding how and why Germany had transformed so completely in such a short period of time; it held the key to understanding the people who led this new Germany, particularly its Fuhrer. This was why Hitler inspired so much close, behavioral scrutiny from psychoanalysts. As medical historian Daniel Pick writes, “it was noted by a number of commentators that the personality of Hitler, his style of performance, and the panoply of rituals that surrounded him and his henchmen inflamed his followers far more deeply than they knew,” leading to what many of these analysts believed was a “an erotic and destructive enjoyment at stake in politics.”⁵ It mystified many observing the Nazis’ rise to power that there seemed so little resistance, at least effective resistance, against their ascent and increasing belligerence. Therefore, the explanation had to be internal; thus, psychological.

Those searching for the key to Hitler’ and the Party’s continued success acknowledged political realities and historical grievances, “but the unconscious, charismatic effect of the Fuhrer was widely recognized to be of central importance,” which was reinforced by the widespread coverage of Nazi propaganda material that depicted “mass enthusiasm,” such as the footage of the Nuremberg rallies of the mid-1930s.⁶ The Third Reich’ and the Fuhrer’s popular support was thus frequently conflated with psychopathology and seen as something alien, understood the same way as one might understand a novel virus; contemporaries in government and media certainly “wondered if the Chancellor [Hitler] was out of his wits,” which included the likes of George Orwell, to whom “the madness of Hitler [was] assumed.”⁷ As a more pointed example, the American journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote an article for Cosmopolitan in 1931 (followed by a book in 1932 called I Saw Hitler!) in which she famously characterized Hitler as a “little man.” She later doubled down on her charge in an interview with the New York Times after the Nazis’ seizure of power, in which she called the dictator “the apotheosis of the little man in Germany,” further extending her analysis to include the German people, who were “the victims of a war-defeat psychosis” who “were taught to believe the German military machine could not fail” and that “when Hitler tells them it did not fail, but was betrayed, they believe it.”⁸

These sentiments had intellectual merit at the time. Within the dominant Freudian psychoanalytic school of thought, this was completely normal; the Nazis and those who followed them were the mass embodiment of “illness,” which was seen as “the price of the impossible conflict between unconscious desire and social restraint,” and leading to “fears of sociopolitical degeneration and a wider sense of cultural malaise,” in the decades following the First World War.⁹ Freud’s daughter Anna, a psychoanalyst in her own right, wrote in 1936 that victims of aggression often identified with their aggressor, representing “a preliminary phase of superego development and, on the other, an intermediate stage in the development of paranoia.”¹⁰ This observation, among others, “was soon taken up in interpretations of the psychology of Nazism and even sometimes of concentration camp inmates,” demonstrating the influence of a psychoanalytic approach when trying to make sense of the nascent, and eventually dead and buried, Third Reich.¹¹

The psychoanalysts’ assessments of the Third Reich were mostly theoretical, especially before the outbreak of war, but military intelligence officers with the OSS interested in psychoanalysis decided to turn theory into practice with the analysts’ help and guidance, especially after the outbreak of war in 1941. Dr. Walter Langer was one of these analysts. He had studied with the Freud’s in Austria and assisted in their and other anti-Nazi activists’ escape in 1938, developing a keen personal interest in finding a psychopathological explanation for what was unfolding in Germany. Back in the United States in 1941, Langer, with the help of his brother William, applied for and received funds from “Wild Bill” Donovan, chief of the OSS. Langer did work on troop morale, but he also produced a “report on the unconscious phantasmagoria in Hitler’s mind,” that “would finally see the light of day after decades as a secret document: The Mind of Adolf Hitler became a surprise best-seller in the early 1970s.”¹²

Langer’s report had a number of issues, mostly involving the use of speculations and assumptions that could not and cannot be disproven, but it makes for a compelling document. It is certainly steeped in hindsight to point out, but it is noteworthy that Langer’s report accurately predicted, based solely on his interviews and observations of the man, that “one outcome was highly likely: the German leader would carry on to the end, staying true to his desire,” finally seeing a clash “between his wishes and reality,” leading to “his mind [collapsing] altogether, even as his political regime and military organization came apart around him,” and “a final total breakdown.”¹³ Langer also interviewed figures like Hitler’s old friend, and later enemy, the industrialist Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who was able to sketch out a fairly detailed image of the Fuhrer and his personality characteristics, at least as he saw them. As Pick summarizes, Hanfstaengl would “[recall] how the leader would enter in states of what he called ‘destructive madness,’” and “claimed that Hitler was a madman who understood life through the ‘muzzle of a gun,’”; but most significantly Hanfstaengl presaged a similar diagnosis of the German people when he warned that “German culture […] was producing a nation of ‘Machine Beasts.’”¹⁴

While Langer’s report has its limitations, it was a hit with military intelligence. It provided a vector for understanding the enemy, particularly its leader. The idea of the Fuhrerprinzip was understood by U.S. military intelligence as a very real thing, not simply propaganda, so understanding the Fuhrer was key to understanding the German people who supported him; the theories of crowd psychology from Gustave Le Bon would only take them so far, so grasping the inner world of the Fuhrer became paramount. This was, after all, part of the shared premises of Nazism and fascism, in which “the party would gather the people into a unity,” with an “ideological promise […] of unity, singularity, and resolute direction: only through total allegiance to the masterful leader […] could the hopeless confusion of modern life be ended.”¹⁵ The notion of “understand the Fuhrer, understand the people” thus became the lodestar for the intelligence community.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, they would not get the chance. While Langer had written nothing about suicide as the likely outcome of the Nazis’ defeat, when Hitler and much of the upper echelons of the Third Reich including Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler killed themselves, his assessment of Hitler reaching a total final breakdown likely felt eerily prophetic to those who had read his report. Nevertheless, as it quickly became clear in the months that followed VE Day, there were other high-ranking Nazis who could be questioned and profiled and, hopefully, provide the diagnosis that so many had been trying to find. Even better, all of these Nazis would be in a completely controlled—that is, experimental—environment: the jail cells at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice.

…

Little did the two psychological professionals at the center of the coming debate likely know, the essence of their debate had already emerged, and not exclusively from fellow psychologists. It had actually come from two very influential media commentators: the aforementioned Dorothy Thompson and George Orwell. Echoing Putzi Hanfstaengl’s lament about Germany becoming a nation of “Machine Beasts,” Dorothy Thompson, had, while still assigning Hitler the role of proverbial band-leader of the Third Reich phenomenon, described the German people as “the accompaniment of a tom-tom of mechanized howls from a drilled mob — howls that seemed to come from the throats of ten thousand robots.”¹⁶ While Thompson’s early assessments of the Fuhrer suggested a belief in his madness, she had become more concerned with exposing the danger of a charismatic leader who could, in all likelihood, whip any people up into a frenzy. Conversely, Orwell had become less concerned with “drilled mobs,” and more with the idea that “creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present,” and that there were indeed those who simply possessed “a Fascist streak.”¹⁷

These interpretations echoed the growing split among psychologists and psychiatrists regarding the particularity of the Third Reich and its crimes that had become clear by 1943 with the publication of two separate inquiries by New York psychiatrist Richard Brickner, and Vienna-born psychiatrist and former prisoner of the Nazis, Bruno Bettelheim. As Daniel Pick summarizes, “Brickner’s Is Germany Incurable? and Bettelheim’s work on camp inmates, ‘Individual and Mass Behavior,’ pointed the way towards two different trajectories of post-war thought: the former concerned with localizing the horror of Nazism to the German ‘case’; the latter suggesting that, under given conditions, certain victims—perhaps any victims—might start to think and even function like perpetrators,” the latter case logically expanding into the idea that anyone could become a perpetrator of heinous crimes.¹⁸ Apart from the pointed allusions of media commentators like Thompson and Orwell, this diagnostic split had remained confined to academic journals and monographs like those written by Brickner and Bettelheim, but it was about to grow in notoriety and significance thanks to the arrival of Dr.’s Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert at Nuremberg.

That debate emerged from the needs created by the Nuremberg trials, which sought to create a new precedent in which the international community would, collectively, charge a foreign state with a crime (and a crime that had to be defined; that is crimes against humanity). In that spirit of expanding the purview of a typical court, the judges and prosecutors had to first address the basic question of whether any of the defendants were, in fact, mentally ill and therefore unfit to stand trial. While there was some controversy with Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess’ fitness due to his claims of amnesia, and other more outlandish behavior from figures like the propagandist Julius Streicher, none of the twenty-two defendants were deemed unable to testify. However, there were more than practical, legal reasons to consider that had more to do with providing answers to a deeper question that many psychologists had been trying to puzzle out for years; in the words of historian Laurence Rees, “was there, as popular mythology suggested there might be, a Nazi personality type?”¹⁹ The incentive to address this question, as previously covered, had been in place for over a decade. Finally, there was a chance to find answers, though they would come in pieces rather than as a whole.

Kelley was the first to arrive at Nuremberg in August of 1945 and immediately got to work trying to make sense of his subjects, as he saw them. By Kelley’s own estimation, he spent around eighty hours with each prisoner, though as psychiatrist and historian Joel E. Dimsdale explains, “he may have stretched things a bit,” in his telling, since “the defendants arrived in Nuremberg on August 12, 1945, and Kelley left in January 1946.”²⁰ Based on his notes and the number of pages dedicated to each criminal, he almost certainly spent the most amount of time with Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, but he provided assessments of every one of the defendants in his 1947 memoir, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals. This memoir provides insight into Kelley’s assessments of the defendants themselves, and how he saw his own role in assessing them. Kelley believed that “as a scientist I regarded my duty in the Jail to be not only to guard the health of men facing trial for war crimes but also to study them as a researcher in a laboratory,” because “Nazism was a socio-cultural disease which, while it had been epidemic only among our enemies, was endemic in all parts of the world” and thus required “prepar[ing] a vaccine or serum that will protect against it.”²¹ He concluded his psychobiographical sketches of the twenty-two prisoners with a relatively speculative portrait of Hitler based on the testimonies of his subjects and preserved medical records, writing that “the Hitler legend can be rendered relatively harmless only if we help all the world to see Adolf Hitler as he actually was,” or, as he later put it, “an abnormal and a mentally ill individual.”²² This was, in essence, an early version of the “never again” argument, intended to inoculate the reader from manipulation by a Hitler-like figure in the future.

Despite labeling the Fuhrer as mentally ill, Kelley was quite insistent that the people who followed him, including his closest followers, were anything but. He painted a picture of a country enthralled by a capable, intelligent, and socially adaptable madman of extraordinary skill; certainly unique as an individual, but by no means different in terms of those capabilities. There were, in other words, no shortages of human beings who had possessed similar qualities to Hitler, who possessed them at the time and who would possess them in the future. And given that the prisoners under his care were all sane by most measures, and thus recognizable to him even as an American, there was no reason to doubt that “there is no real difference between the individual German and the individual American,” psychologically speaking.²³ Most powerfully and famously, Kelley claimed that “the Nazi leaders were not spectacular types, not personalities such as appear only once in a century,” and only shared three things: “overweening ambition, low ethical standards, [and] a strongly developed nationalism which justified anything done in the name of Germandom,” plus “the opportunity to seize power.” Dramatically concluding, Kelley proclaimed:

Let us look about us. Have we no ultranationalists among us who would approve any policy, however evil, so long as it could be said of advantage to America? Have we no men so ruthlessly eager to achieve power that they would not quite willingly climb over the corpses of our minorities, if by so doing they could gain totalitarian control over the rest of us?²⁴

Kelley had clearly developed a dim view of the sociopolitical nature of humanity, informed largely by his time spent with the twenty-two accused war criminals at Nuremberg, particularly the time he spent with Hermann Göring. According to Kelley himself, “of all the Nazis tried at Nuremberg, the one who made the greatest impression [was] Göring.”²⁵ Some scholars tend to put an even finer point on it, given Kelley’s own mental deterioration in the decade that followed the war, marked by alcoholism and a deep depression, culminating in a dramatic suicide in 1958 that mirrored Göring’s own method: ingestion of cyanide. Jack El-Hai points out that “there was more behind Kelley’s choice of that particular poison and that exceedingly rare form of suicide,” considering that he kept a loaded gun in his office, strongly suggesting that it had been “a deliberate evocation of Göring’s defiant suicide and the Reichsmarschall’s pose of a hero backed into a corner.”²⁶ Dimsdale concurs, going even further by citing contemporaneous articles covering Kelley’s suicide, which were “quick to note the link to Nuremberg and Göring,” leading to “dark questions and speculations […] as to where Kelley got the cyanide,” including the “San Francisco Chronicle report[ing] that Kelley’s poison ‘was brought back from the war criminal trials,’” and “the New York Times [taking] the matter further, stating that the cyanide was ‘one of several capsules Dr. Kelley had brought home from Nuremberg. The capsules had been discovered on Hermann Göring.’”²⁷ In the aftermath of his death, rumors of who supplied the cyanide to whom became more notable than Kelley’s own work. But Kelley’s own assessment of Göring’s own suicide carries with it the most weight, writing that “[Göring’s] suicide, shrouded in mystery and emphasizing the impotency of the American guards, was a skillful, even brilliant, finishing touch, completing the edifice for Germans to admire in time to come” [Emphasis added].²⁸ It is a striking addendum to his otherwise critical assessment of the infamous Reichsmarshall.

Göring’s influence was at the center of Kelley’s diagnosis of the Third Reich, as most scholars and Hollywood screenwriters tend to claim. During their interviews, Kelley found the Reichsmarshall “a man of charming manner (when he chose to be charming), of persuasive speech, and of excellent intelligence bordering on the highest level [with] a keen imagination and good educational background,” which was paired with “no sense whatsoever of the value of human life, of moral obligation, or of the other finer attributes of civilized man when they conflicted with his own egocentric aims.”²⁹ Even as a prisoner, “he still maintained his extroverted reaction patterns, his need for attention, his narcissistic bodily fixations,” as well as “his dominant drives, his ability to visualize clearly his goal, and his willingness to attain his end regardless of the cost,” complete with “all the forcefulness, brutality, ruthlessness, and lack of conscience which made him the ideal executive for Adolf Hitler.”³⁰

These broader observations largely fall in line with Kelley’s eventual replacement, Dr. Leon Goldensohn, who characterized Göring as “up and down […] always playing to the public,” and one who “can turn on a smile and turn it off like a faucet, almost at will, mechanically.”³¹ In addition, Goldensohn observed that Göring’s “attitude toward Hitler was quite different in reality [...] than it seemed to be from his testimony in court during his defense,” to which Göring replied that “’as a loyal German and a follower of Hitler, I accepted orders as orders,’” and that “’I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities and ungentlemanly actions,’” which quickly contrasted with his callous sentiment that the “’drunken Robert Ley […] did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started [because] he was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand.’”³² It was these characteristics, as well as those of Göring’s compatriots, that led to Kelley’s own counter-intuitive conclusion about the relative normalcy of the Nazis, as far as their mental health went (their Fuhrer’s notwithstanding). Kelley’s own compatriot, Dr. Gustave Gilbert, would ultimately come to a much different conclusion.

Gilbert arrived in Nuremberg in October of 1945, and like Kelley, “desperately wanted in at Nuremberg to study and characterize the depravity of the Nazi leadership,” but where Kelley saw them as specimens for his lab, “Gilbert didn’t find them interesting in Kelley’s dispassionate way but loathed them and told them so.”³³ This almost certainly colored his impressions of the accused criminals, but he took diligent notes and produced two books out of his experience profiling them, unlike Kelley’s one. A fluent speaker of German of Austrian Jewish heritage, Gilbert took his position at the prison very seriously, which contrasted with Kelley’s own manner, and this led to clashes between the two men that were likely just as personal as they were professional. Their ultimate conclusions also differed, though not in the sense that Gilbert believed the Nazis were insane; quite the contrary. Generally speaking, Gilbert “diagnosed the defendants as narcissistic psychopaths whose lives were formed by a diseased German culture,” in which they “represented a unique category of psychopathology.”³⁴ They were not insane, in other words; but they were different from everyone else.

Gilbert’s first book was more detailed than Kelley’s, more resembling Goldensohn’s own work in which he reproduced the questions and responses of the defendants and recapitulated the trial proceedings as he recalled them, including the prosecution’ and defense’s statements, “refrain[ing] from embroidering the data with too much psychological speculation, leaving that to later collaborative studies which would be more comprehensive and objective than my own immediate reactions could possibly be.”³⁵ And indeed, this was the point; “as a reviewer from the New Yorker put it […]: ‘The author lets the defendants talk for themselves and introduces himself into the picture very little.’”³⁶ It was not until he later published The Psychology of Dictatorship in 1950 that he clarified his conclusions on Nazi psychopathology.

Gilbert claimed “that authoritarian leadership, like any other, reflects the nature of the culture in which it emerges,” and “is expressed […] in the social values developed among the leaders of the given culture,” leading to “motivational development in interaction with society and culture, so that the individual level of explanation cannot be fully understood without reference to the social and vice versa.”³⁷ This framing allowed Gilbert to explain that the Nazis were, in fact, unwell; as individuals, as an organization, and as a culture, but all thanks to the singular influence of a dictator. To help make this case, Gilbert spent much of the first section of his book exploring the psychology of Adolf Hitler himself, pointing to the “dark recesses of Hitler’s libido there lay the smoldering ashes of violent, unresolved Oedipal conflicts,” leading him to embrace, and thus encourage others to embrace, a “rigidly obsessive development of aggression.”³⁸ By placing Hitler at the forefront of his argument, Gilbert telegraphed his conclusions about where the Third Reich, and the German people, had gone wrong.

As Gilbert saw it, understanding Hitler was key to understanding, and thus diagnosing, the Third Reich. Drawing from his experiences interviewing the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg as well as the growing body of knowledge and scholarship about those who had died, Gilbert finally concluded that “the irrational behavior of the crowd may not determine the decision [to wage war], but the emotional tensions of the leader in an authoritarian system do determine it,” and that the evidence available “leads inevitably to the conclusion that the final decision to go to war and commit genocide was determined by the irrational obsession of a dictator to ‘exterminate my enemies.’”³⁹ In addition, unlike Kelley, Gilbert was not convinced that dictatorship was as easy as flipping a proverbial switch; conversely, Gilbert characterized “the struggle between democracy and dictatorship as fundamentally a struggle between two modes of social organization and value systems developed in [the] process of adaptive social behavior.”⁴⁰ The Third Reich could not just happen anywhere; authoritarianism and dictatorship needed to be value systems in and of themselves. The United States was not akin to Nazi Germany, no matter how tempted one might be to draw parallels; they had distinct cultures and distinct value systems, in which one produced democracy, however flawed it might be, and the other produced a violence-obsessed dictatorship.

Gilbert had more reason than Kelley to come to this conclusion. While Kelley was looking at the accused war criminals with a detached eye that placed everyone on a morally neutral playing field, Gilbert had no interest in doing that. Evil was evil and the evidence was right in front of his eyes. In addition to that, Gilbert had witnessed far more than Kelley had, having stayed in Nuremberg many months longer than Kelley. In particular, Gilbert witnessed the Soviet Union’s prosecution during the trial, and what he witnessed was far more disturbing than even the film that had been shown during the United States’ prosecution. One of the Soviet prosecutors named Lev Smirnov displayed a film titled Atrocities Committed by the German Fascist Invaders in the USSR, which depicted “a basement [where], the narrator explained, human corpses had been rendered into soap,” as well as “a pile of decapitated bodies, stacked near large vats [while] severed heads were heaped nearby in a bin.”⁴¹ These images had a profound effect on the court, and this likely included Gilbert, who even “agreed that the film had hit the mark even more than the one the Americans had shown.”⁴² Gilbert also clearly came to this conclusion before finishing his time at Nuremberg, believing that the defendants were always paying attention to how their circumstances changed during the trial, thus showing that he saw most of those in his charge as more calculated than they might let on, and therefore exhibiting what he would later define as an authoritarian personality.

Gilbert’s view on the authoritarian personality was also shaped by his time spent with the Nazi leaders, and like Kelley, it was deeply informed by his interactions with Hermann Göring in particular; they also “both agreed that Göring was venal, corrupt, and brutal.”⁴³ However, unlike Kelley, Gilbert ultimately saw Göring in relatively simple terms: as a criminal psychopath, unable to muster any real empathy or humanity. In describing him in his second book, Gilbert believed that “Göring continued to use the Nazi ideology as a camouflage for his own aggressive narcissism,” thus connecting ideology with psychopathology, and making it clear that he saw the two as codependent.⁴⁴ This was further evidenced by “the persecution of scapegoats [serving] a three-fold purpose: (a) distraction and suppression of criticism of the Nazi regime; (b) the conditioning of public opinion to accept an aggressive ‘defense against our enemies’; (c) material incentives for the faithful,” all of which satisfied Göring’s narcissism, “least of all the third” purpose.⁴⁵ While genocide was “something that shattered [Göring’s] entire frame of reference,” that did little to shatter his—or, by Gilbert’s estimation, Germany’s—complicity in it, for it was part and parcel with Hitler’s own ambitions, and Germany was in thrall.⁴⁶ In the end, Gilbert assessed Göring as “a ruthlessly aggressive personality camouflaged by a disarming amiability when it suited his purpose; cyclothymic in affect, extremely narcissistic in his ego-gratifications, but lacking in moral courage which might have given his heroic fantasies more than theatrical substance.”⁴⁷

All of this helped explain Gilbert’s attitude toward Göring, which was less detached interest, and more moral disgust, something he could not hide. As the psychiatrist Goldensohn reported, “I knew that Gilbert, the psychologist, had been on rather strained terms with Göring,” which likely came from the fact that Gilbert did indeed see the Reichsmarshall as a deranged criminal at a deeper level than one simply of socialization, and treated him as such.⁴⁸ Göring did little to dissuade anyone from characterizing him this way, proclaiming to Goldensohn during their time together that “’frankly, it is my intention to make this trial a mockery,’” adding later that “’if I really felt that the killing of the Jews meant anything, such as that it meant the winning of the war, I would not be too much bothered by it.’”⁴⁹ For Gilbert, Göring represented the Nazi personality and the perversion of German culture. As Gilbert bluntly concluded in his Nuremberg Diary, “Göring died as he had lived, a psychopath trying to make a mockery of all human values and to distract attention from his guilt by a dramatic gesture.”⁵⁰

In the end, Kelley’ and Gilbert’s interpretations of the war criminals could not have sounded more different; the garrulous Kelley saw the potential for a Nazi war criminal in everyone, while the dour Gilbert saw a developed, distinct Nazi personality. As Laurence Rees summarizes, “Douglas Kelley maintained […] that the Nuremberg defendants were not only ‘essentially sane’ but that ‘such personalities […] could be duplicated in any country of the world today,’” while “Gustave Gilbert […] believed that the psychological evidence showed how ‘diseased elements of the German culture’ were ‘inflamed to epidemic proportions under the Nazi regime.’”⁵¹ While both men emphasized the importance of social forces in their work, it was clear that what divided the two interpretations was a greater emphasis on nature versus a greater emphasis on nurture in generalizing the Nazis. Kelley clearly came out in favor of the nurture argument, writing that “insanity is no explanation for the Nazis,” and that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.”⁵² This aligned with his later warning about how, in essence, the Nazi menace could just as easily happen in the United States. Conversely, Gilbert carefully laid out “the chief psychosocial qualifications of leadership for a revolutionary dictator,” which included “(a) the social resolution of frustrations in a manner which had a certain resonance in the needs of the people at the time, and (b) aggressive pursuit of goals which had a deceptive identity of purpose with the ulterior motives of other leaders and groups in that culture and abroad,” while also acknowledging that there was a “crucial relationship between any leader and his supporters” informed by the leader’s “purposes and values.”⁵³

The debate quickly turned into “acrimonious arguments between Kelley and Gilbert about the nature of the Nazis’ diagnoses,” resulting in a lack of mediation between the two schools of thought; “Kelley […] saw little to be gained by including ‘narcissistic psychopaths’ in the same boat as patients with depression or schizophrenia,” while Gilbert merely saw criminals like Göring as “psychopaths [who] bore the mark of Cain,” and could not be helped in their deeply-rooted pathology.⁵⁴ This difference of biases proved unshakable and turned into “squabbling and accusing each other of having purloined each other’s notes,” and later threats of lawsuits over the matter, as well as accusations of ethical violations.⁵⁵ They went their separate ways, with Gilbert writing his second book and Kelley turning to a career in television. The debate’s essence became forgotten, and in 1958, when Kelley committed suicide, there was no chance it could ever meaningfully reignite again. The door had been left open for a new diagnosis to be applied to the Third Reich, and in 1961, Hannah Arendt would provide it.

…

“Is Eichmann in all of us?” wondered the New York Times headline on May 26^th, 1974, reflecting the controversial claim that had been circulating for well over a decade. Discussing the series of experiments run by the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram from 1961-1962 that claimed “to show that the ordinary person, in situations of ‘normal’ obedience to authority, would do things which go against decent or humane behavior,” the article summarized CBS’ “Sixty Minutes” co-anchor Morley Safer’s own assessment during the show’s segment on Milgram that “in introducing the experiment, if concentration camps were ever created in the United States, it would not be difficult to staff them.”⁵⁶ Had the Kelley-Gilbert debate remained active during the previous two decades, this summary would have been redolent of Kelley’s own claims regarding the nature of Nazi evil. The article’s author Daniel Bell, however, did not agree, and in fact took major umbrage, writing that “Mr. Milgram is simply promoting, wittingly or unwittingly, a liberal platitude that in the end erases any grounds for moral responsibility, on the basis of saying ‘we can all’ be guilty,” and that all the experiment had revealed was that “the subject in Mr. Milgram’s experiment was simply in a stacked situation where he had no recourse to independent judgment.”⁵⁷

Bell’s refutation of Milgram’s experimental methods, ethical dimensions, and ultimate conclusions were not, in fact, unique for the time; they had been inspiring debate within the psychological field for many years (and would for many years to come). Bell’s outrage had simply helped maintain the controversy’s mainstream status and keep it in the public consciousness for longer still. However, the reference point was perhaps less clear; most understood what was meant by Milgram’s references to the Third Reich, but why was there a reference to Eichmann—that is, the infamous SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, by then many years dead—when discussing an experiment conducted by a Yale psychologist? The reason was simple: Eichmann, and specifically one woman’s assessment of him as he sat in a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, had inspired Milgram’s obedience experiments in the first place.

The famed philosopher Hannah Arendt had arrived in Jerusalem in April of 1961 to cover the trial of Eichmann for the New Yorker. Eichmann had been tracked down and captured by Israel’s Mossad in Argentina the year before, with the sole purpose of putting him—a supposedly key functionary of the Nazis’ Final Solution—on trial for his crimes. It had been fifteen years since the Nuremberg trials, but the moral imperative of putting Eichmann on trial (and, to many participating, arriving at a guilty verdict) was as strong in 1961 as it had been in 1945-1946. Arendt did not exactly know what to expect apart from her own disgust at Eichmann’s monstrous crimes: arranging the transportation of millions of European Jews from all over the continent to the locations where they would be slaughtered en masse. But as she watched the middle-aged, bookish-looking man in the glass box at the front of the courtroom, she was shocked at what she heard. She was “surprised to discover on the stand a nondescript man who did not even distinguish himself by a special dislike for Jews,” and believed that “the most striking thing about Eichmann, for a supposed criminal mastermind, was his dullness,” thus making it clear that “Eichmann was monstrous precisely because he was not a monster.”⁵⁸ Everything about Eichmann, and by extension the Third Reich, was deeply and unsettlingly evil, Arendt began to believe, because of how normal the personification of that evil appeared to be.

Following the trial and after Eichmann’s unceremonious execution in 1962, Arendt adapted her New Yorker coverage into a full length book, which was published in 1963 under the title Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In her book, she fully fleshed out her case for Eichmann’s normalcy, her book’s subtitle previewing exactly what she was about to lay out. Eichmann had made an impression on Arendt and a number of other observers in the Jerusalem court for a number of reasons. First was his plea of innocence, “to each count Eichmann pleaded: ‘Not guilty in the sense of the indictment,’” along with protests that “’with the killing of Jews I had nothing to do. I never killed a Jew, or a non-Jew, for that matter—I never killed any human being. I never gave an order to kill either a Jew or a non-Jew; I just did not do it,’” though Arendt also wrote that by the end of the trial, “he left no doubt that he would have killed his own father if he had received an order to that effect.”⁵⁹ His splitting of hairs regarding the question of his guilt (or responsibility) left less of an impression made by “half a dozen psychiatrists [who] had certified him as ‘normal’—’More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,’ one of them was said to have exclaimed,” leading to “the hard fact that his was obviously no case of moral let alone legal insanity.”⁶⁰

Ultimately, Eichmann was banal, both as a criminal and as a man, who only spoke one language; that is the language of the soulless bureaucrat, one focused only on his career. As she explained, “officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliche,” leading to the perception by psychiatrists and others that he was indeed normal.⁶¹ This made it clear that Eichmann’s “inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”⁶² In Eichmann, Arendt saw the depth of evil that could only be explained by this banality; his cliches lasted to the bitter end as he headed to the gallows and proclaiming that “’We shall meet again,’” to the gathered observers, offering a “lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”⁶³ Perhaps most disturbingly of all, Eichmann’s case was generalizable, perhaps to the scale of the Third Reich itself, because “the trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal,” indeed suggesting that “this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”⁶⁴

The intellectual power of this assessment, as well as Arendt’s clever arguments, cannot be underestimated. Her “courtroom portrait of that quintessentially obedient Holocaust ‘manager’ became a classic, an indispensable starting point of discussion.”⁶⁵ It was felt in all fields, particularly history where Arendt’s claims created some controversy, including “a storm of denunciations and threats,” with the celebrated historian Barbara Tuchman “[giving] voice to the public anger,” writing in the introduction of Gideon Hausner’s Justice in Jerusalem in 1968 that “’the attractiveness of the thesis is that by shifting guilt onto the victim, it relieves everyone else.’”⁶⁶ But the power of Arendt’s argument was felt most keenly in the world of psychology. The Third Reich and the Holocaust had certainly not been forgotten among psychological researchers, but it did not still possess the same moral imperative that it had in Kelley’ and Gilbert’s day. Gilbert had continued to practice and write, and was even called to testify during the Eichmann trial, but beyond that, there had not been much in the way of motivation to litigate Nazi evil as there had been. Eichmann’s trial and Arendt’s coverage had changed that, particularly with the young Stanley Milgram.

Whether he was aware of it or not, Milgram had become part of the intellectual lineage forged by the forgotten Kelley-Gilbert debate. This is not to suggest the interest in diagnosing the Third Reich had waned; indeed, as psychologist Robert M. Farr writes, “coming to terms with the Holocaust set the research agenda in social psychology for decades following the end of the war. It was difficult for many to understand, never mind to come to terms with, what had taken place in the death camps.”⁶⁷ For his part, Milgram had been following the Eichmann trial with great interest and had been “moved and fascinated by Arendt’s controversial thesis,” beginning his experiments only three months after the start of the trial.⁶⁸ He was among those, like Kelley, who wondered “what if there was nothing demonically ‘special’ any of [the Nazis] at all?” and Arendt’s observations of Eichmann seemed to suggest this, observing as many had, “the machine of the state and the chemistry of the group that was most horrifying.”⁶⁹ After all, so many Nazis had claimed to be following orders, and there was no reason to disbelieve them, including Eichmann, whose supposed thoughtlessness had been so pointedly observed by Arendt. This was how Milgram conceived of what became known as his series of obedience experiments, conducted between 1961 and 1963 (though planned as early as 1960). There were some variations but the general procedure went as follows:

Under the guise of an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning, the teacher-subject, seated in front of the shock machine, was instructed to give increasingly painful shocks to the learner, who was seated in an adjacent room and not visible to the subject, each time he made an error on the word-matching task [he had been given].⁷⁰

The most famous variation of the experimental design involved the learner, who was an experimental confederate (that is, who was in on the deception), crying out in pain at increasing severity, eventually going silent, as if to simulate their having lost consciousness—and even dying—from the shocks. Any time the teacher-subject protested or expressed concern during the procedure, the researcher in the room, often dressed in a white lab coat, simply, but firmly, replied that the experiment required the teacher-subject to continue. At the conclusion of the experiments in 1963, Milgram “found that in a controlled laboratory environment, more than 65 percent of his subjects could be readily manipulated into inflicting a (seemingly) lethal electrical charge on a total stranger,” far outweighing the estimated one percent predicted by a group of psychologists and psychology students that Milgram had interviewed prior to the experiments.⁷¹

The results were staggering and disturbing to many when they were published in 1963. Milgram claimed that “obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to political purpose,” and believed that the results suggested that “the tendency to obey those whom we perceive to be legitimate authorities” could very easily override “the disposition not to harm other people.”⁷² This was a difficult prospect for many people to accept, and it became a national story, especially when the New York Times reported that the experiment had “also shown, however, that such people do not enjoy being cruel. In fact, some of the subjects became distraught.”⁷³ This led to a greater backlash, both because of the dark implications suggested about human nature—namely, the apparently then-open question, “was there a hidden Nazi in two-thirds of the good citizens of New Haven?”—but also because “some deemed the experiments unethical,” thanks to the distress caused to the subjects of the experiment.⁷⁴ As reported in a New York Times review of Milgram’s later book on the subject, “the experiments themselves were a cause of distress and debate among professional psychologists, and Milgram came in for harsh criticism for having both devised and gone through with them,” and he was “accused of unethical practices; in manipulating his subjects and in not protecting them beforehand from what might be the consequences upon them of their behavior in an extremely stress‐filled experimental situation.”⁷⁵ These accusations have followed his experiments ever since. Nevertheless, Milgram seemed to have proven Hannah Arendt right and demonstrated that his experiment had “provided the scientific underpinnings for [her] ‘banality of evil’ perspective,” by “insist[ing] that such behavior could indeed be studied and, by applying the tools and language of social science, he helped forge a new perspective.”⁷⁶ Milgram directly addressed the Arendt connection in the book he published in 1974 about the obedience experiments, in which he stated that:

After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare to imagine. The ordinary person who shocked the victim did so out of a sense of obligation—a conception of his duties as a subject—and not from any peculiarly aggressive tendencies. This is, perhaps, the most fundamental lesson of our study: ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.⁷⁷ Little did Milgram seem to realize, his perspective had already been suggested, at least to a certain extent, during the Kelley-Gilbert debates in postwar years, but had indeed become largely forgotten by the 1960s and 1970s.

Milgram’s obedience experiments may have been controversial, both then and now, but they nevertheless “endure as a powerful form of folklore, useful in explaining situations in which a person suddenly finds herself doing something untoward.”⁷⁸ This suggestion about human nature—and thus, the explanation for the Holocaust and diagnosis of the Third Reich—was compounded by similar experiments conducted by social psychologists, including the bystander apathy experiments conducted by John Darley and Bibb Latané in 1968 (which revealed the bystander effect phenomenon, in which intervention became less likely with greater numbers of people present), and even more infamously, the prison experiment conducted at Stanford University in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo (a fellow graduate student of Milgram’s, it should be noted).

Zimbardo’s experiment, in which “volunteers were told that Stanford was studying prison behaviors and that they would be randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a simulated prison experiment,” quickly ran out of control, with many of the volunteers assigned as guards engaging in their roles with disturbing zeal, leading to Zimbardo canceling the experiment before it had been completed.⁷⁹ The drama that had unfolded had not necessarily been part of the experimental design but it supposedly had disturbing implications. As Zimbardo himself later explained in the New York Times, “normal, healthy, educated young men could be so radically transformed under the institutional pressures of a ‘prison environment,’” and this suggested that “the subjects’ abnormal social and personal reactions are best seen as a product of their transaction with an environment that supported the behavior that would be pathological in other settings, but was ‘appropriate’ in this prison.”⁸⁰ The guards’ disturbing behavior—which included abusing and humiliating the prisoners in increasingly creative ways—was not indicative of anything wrong with them psychologically; they were, in fact, merely inhabiting roles. The experiment suggested that “social context alone could foment a phenomenal amount of nastiness,” which in turn suggested that “power corrupted, and brutality emerged.”⁸¹ Zimbardo’s prison experiment, even more problematic in its implementation than Milgram’s, had added to the notion posited by Arendt (and by extension Douglas Kelley) that normal, everyday people, and even people deemed intellectual elites like students at Stanford University, were perfectly capable of engaging in monstrous behavior due to socialization. Everyone had, in so many words, an inner Adolf Eichmann.

Given the preexisting ethical questions regarding Milgram’s own experiments, much more scrutiny was given to Zimbardo’s, both on ethical grounds and in terms of his conclusions, with many “critics [arguing] that such studies cannot generalize to the Third Reich” and that his experiment “was like a fraternity hazing gone bad.”⁸² This is certainly possible, and much evidence was gathered in the decades that followed that challenged the social psychological findings of these various studies and, by extension, Arendt’s assessment of Eichmann and the Third Reich. Critics suggest a flattening had occurred, in which “Milgram can be seen as setting up the scene, Zimbardo start[ed] from the already scripted scene,” and more problematically, “Milgram [had] psychologized the past of the Nazi era,” while “Zimbardo […] pre-empted forms of torture to come, creating, as it where, a rationale for so-called psychological torture.”⁸³ These sorts of problems are rooted in the criticism of the most high-profile social psychological studies conducted in the field’s history (particularly those from Milgram), and those were essentially derived from Hannah Arendt’s observations of Adolf Eichmann. There were indeed problems with both.

In the decades that followed, more information about Nazi war criminals, as well as their motivations, had continued to come to light. Milgram’s conclusions in particular had been challenged on psychological and historical grounds over the decades, with S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher pointing out that “[the banality of evil] thesis loses credibility under close empirical scrutiny,” by its ignoring of “copious evidence of resistance even in studies held up as demonstrating that conformity is inevitable” and of “the evidence that those who do heed authority in doing evil do so knowingly not blindly, actively not passively, creatively not automatically.”⁸⁴ Other, broader critiques of Milgram’s conclusions involved his use of “strictly monocausal terms,” an assumption “that the process of obedience to authority operates uniformly across levels of a social hierarchy,” and a failure “to describe the type of gradual and irreversible conversion process that […] transformed basically ordinary medical professionals into autonomously evil actors.”⁸⁵ Other critics pointed out that socialized genocide was insufficient because it provided credence to the Nazis’ frequent defense of just following orders; in fact, “the orders may have provided an opportunity for the expression of more powerful, emotion-based motives,” while “there [was] little or no evidence of moral opposition or distress by the killers,” which contrasted with the behavior of many of Milgram’s subjects (whose experience in a college psychology lab was, it must be said, far different than that of a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front).⁸⁶

There was also the matter of Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt’s own conclusions about him. As more information became revealed about the supposedly banal face of evil, it became clear that he was not as much of a boring, cliché-spouting bureaucrat as Arendt had suspected. Indeed, while hiding in Argentina, Eichmann was interviewed by the Dutch Nazi collaborator and member of the Waffen-SS, Willem Sassen. During the course of these interviews, which were eventually published in Life magazine in two parts under the title “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Eichmann frankly admitted, as the titles of each installment suggested, “I transported them... to the butcher” and “To sum it all up, I regret nothing.”⁸⁷ More consequently, tapes of the Sassen-Eichmann interviews were uncovered in 2022, revealing that Eichmann believed “’had we put 10.3 million Jews to death, then I would be content and would say, ‘’Good, we have destroyed the enemy,’‘’” and that “’I didn’t care about the Jews deported to Auschwitz, whether they lived or died.’”⁸⁸ This completely runs counter to the picture that Arendt painted of Eichmann. This shows that it was not as clear that Arendt’, Milgram’, or Zimbardo’s observations were as definitive as they might appear.

Nevertheless, despite all of these valid critiques of the post-Arendt boom of social psychological assertions about the learned capacity for evil, including Arendt’s own, these assertions remained not just valid, but doctrinaire and popular, especially when seemingly supported by historical evidence, such as that provided by the likes of Christopher Browning in his landmark work Ordinary Men. This helps explain the resistance experienced by later psychologists when they explored the idea that some things were more ingrained than many liked to admit. The developmental psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen observed that human cruelty is very much connected to psychopathic characteristics; that is, that psychopathic individuals have psychopathic brains and thus, when they engage in cruelty, they are doing something that is as much a part of their inner nature than it is something to which they have been socially conditioned. Baron-Cohen explains that “psychopaths are blunted in their moral development,” thanks to a number of factors including an inability to “fear punishment,” and “less of a startle reflex […] to a loud sound or to an object looming toward them,” leading to a diminished or even completely absent capacity for empathy.⁸⁹ Their brains even register differently on neurological scanners, such as fMRIs and MRIs, particularly in a major part of what Baron-Cohen calls the empathy circuit, or the ventral part of the medial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), which activates when people think about their own or other people’s feelings. In psychopaths, “just as we might predict, abnormalities in the empathy circuit are seen,” producing “a problem in the frontal lobes because these are meant to provide ‘executive control’ over action, stopping us from doing what could lead to punishment.”⁹⁰

It seems likely that based on many of the previously described assessments of many of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, like Eichmann, or Göring, that they too would have shown similar abnormalities. The lack of available insight or technological capabilities at the time of both trials certainly makes this impossible to say, and it certainly is not to say that the diagnosis of the Third Reich begins and ends with psychopathy. But it does suggest that after Hannah Arendt’s intervention in Jerusalem, there had been a lack of psychological insight that could well have been a boon to everyone interested in diagnosing the Third Reich. That is, of course, excepting the insight that had been provided by both Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert.

…

Primo Levi once stated that “Auschwitz defies ‘understanding,’ or at least understanding in terms of the culprits’ rationality,” while at the same time “reject[ing] the idea that the perpetrators could be categorized, for the most part, as abnormal, especially sadistic individuals.”⁹¹ Nevertheless, many tried, especially in the decades following the Second World War, to thread this needle; to explain why so much suffering had been caused by people so supposedly normal in their disposition. That seeming contradiction was explored most famously by Hannah Arendt as she covered the Eichmann trial in 1961, and was furthered by the social psychologists who, instead of looking for previously obtained evidence, simply appeared to take her observations at face value and find evidence that confirmed them. What these psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo and others discovered was valuable insight about the nature of phenomena like obedience and role fulfillment and indeed, they appeared to be providing a scientific basis for Arendt’s observations and thus, a profound diagnosis for the Third Reich that, in its own provocative way, implicated everyone.

One can only speculate why the Arendt framing was so intellectually attractive to so many scholars and experts in various fields, but it seems likely that it was an attempt to essentially refute Levi’s observation; after all, to say something so profoundly and tragically human as the Holocaust defies understanding feels like abdicating responsibility. In making these observations that supposedly implicated everyone, however, Arendt’, Milgram’, and Zimbardo’s observations implicated no one. After all, if everyone had a little Eichmann within them, and given how banal he supposedly was like all of us, what made him—an actual war criminal, even partly responsible for the murder of millions—special or even worthy of meaningful condemnation, to say nothing of the death penalty? If anything, by morally flattening the Nazi war criminal into something recognizable in all of us, it calls into question human agency itself, and thus our ability to make destructive choices that deserve punishment of any kind. To say embracing this paradox opens a window for nefarious apologia, revisionism, and justification of unspeakable crimes is putting it mildly.

Not only were Arendt’s observations misguided—something she eventually admitted, to far less media attention, after the Frankfurt trials of twenty-two SS guards stationed at Auschwitz in 1963-1965, “giving recognition to the fact that there was another face to the Holocaust besides that of the dutiful bureaucrat”—but their downstream effects on the intellectual history of the Holocaust were profound.⁹² As Eichmann biographer David Cesarini once wrote, “Anyone writing on the subject today works in the shadow of Hannah Arendt. Her notion of ‘the banality of evil’, combined with Milgram’s thesis on the predilection for obedience to authority, straight-jacketed research into Nazi Germany and the persecution of the Jews for two decades.”⁹³ Her provocative reframing of Eichmann—and thus, Nazi war criminals and the Third Reich in general—as generally banal was such that it inspired the most influential social psychological studies for decades to come—that is, the Milgram and Zimbardo experiments, as well as others following their lead—and thus shaped the development social psychology with very little resistance in either the psychological or historical fields. The impressive work by Holocaust scholars such as Christopher Browning and others who demonstrate that the horror of the Final Solution was the result of social pressures, if only in part, helped reinforce what had become an intellectual tradition, with only slight challenges.

This paper has attempted to make the argument that the true Third Reich diagnosis had already been achieved, at least in a complementary sense by the psychological experts, Douglas Kelley and Gustave Gilbert, appointed to the prisoners at Nuremberg. Neither of their arguments were solely persuasive on their own. Kelley’s heavy focus on the ordinariness of the criminals, including the likely psychopath of Hermann Göring, led to him seeing more of himself and others in them than he probably would have liked, and subsequently underestimated what it would take to convince regular citizens—American, German, or otherwise—to commit monstrous crimes. Gilbert’s focus on the criminals’ pathology as part of an authoritarian and dictatorial value system, inspired by a psychologically unwell Fuhrer that attracted similarly unwell individuals to positions of power, led to him seeing something deeply wrong with German culture at the time of the Third Reich, and likely missing the role that general socialization—significantly part of Kelley’s equation—provided. But instead of contradicting one another, these were complementary insights into Nazi ordinariness and pathology, and later research, inspired by Arendt’s flawed interpretation of Eichmann, missed this opportunity for synthesis, thanks largely to the debate going cold after Kelley’s suicide. As much influence as Arendt’s thesis and the subsequent psychological studies by the likes of Milgram and Zimbardo enjoy, the growing body of evidence bears this out.

What was also lost without the synergy of the Kelley-Gilbert debate leaving room for these developments is the role of agency in the actions of criminals, both in the context of an authoritarian state and in the context of pathological behavior. As Daniel Pick has explained, “something like Nazism might be commonplace in ‘us’ [but] this thought has always had to be balanced against the fact that there is no equivalent of, or precedent for, Auschwitz.”⁹⁴ This balance was never properly struck, despite a few less-known monographs engaging with the debate in the decades that followed that mostly focused on Kelley’ and Gilbert’s use of Rorschach tests, but it might indeed have been if the arguments made by Kelley and Gilbert had been synthesized into one, and we do see this when looking at both the margins of historical and psychological research.

For example, in the 1980s, the psychologist and historian Robert Jay Lifton had interviewed many former Nazis, especially those who had taken part in medical experimentation and atrocities, and come to the conclusion that things were more complex than learned or socialized savagery. Contra Arendt’s (and by extension Milgram and Zimbardo’s) assertions, Lifton explained, the Nazis were not “faceless bureaucratic cogs or automatons,” and were, in fact, “actors and participants who manifested certain kinds of behavior for which they were responsible.”⁹⁵ In other words, Lifton’s theory of the case was that while the Nazis were indeed ordinary human beings, they fundamentally made themselves extraordinary by doing what they did. Lifton emphasized the fact that “in order to [perform demonic acts] the men themselves changed,” and even went so far to reframe what killing innocent people actually meant: a medicalized form of “killing as a therapeutic alternative,” all in service of a biomedical vision of the world driven solely—particularly, uniquely, in other words—by Nazi ideology, which could be called a “biocracy,” or a type of “theocracy, a system of rule by priests of a sacred order under the claim of divine prerogative […] of cure through purification and revitalization of the Aryan race.”⁹⁶

Lifton had managed to nuance the arguments that had been taken for granted among many social psychologists and a growing number of historians by particularizing Nazi ideology in this way. He also particularized the perpetrators via his observations on the “doubling” that so many of the titular Nazi doctors engaged in to justify their actions, where there is a “division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self” in which the “humane self can be joined by a ‘professional self’ willing to ally itself with a destructive project, with harming or even killing others,” and, thanks to the biomedical vision of Nazism, allowed them to believe that “if you are curing a sickness, anything is permissible.”⁹⁷ When examining Lifton’s arguments, one starts to see a striking similarity to Gilbert’s own assertions about the war criminals’ socialization played a part in allowing them to develop a true pathology, which was indeed unique to Nazism, but never downplaying the notion that the Nazis were indeed people with motives and defense mechanisms recognizable to the rest of us, per Kelley’s own assertions.

Insights like Lifton’s, however unwittingly synthesizing the Kelley-Gilbert debate, would echo through the emerging field of perpetrator studies, which aims to bring nuances like his to bear when explaining the human capacity for evil in a way that avoids the monocausal trap unwittingly laid by Arendt. As criminologist Augustine Brannigan explains, given the wealth of both historical and psychological evidence we have gathered over the decades since World War II, the Nazis’ ability to “produce an over-control over their citizenry” to make them complicit and participants in genocide was “not a function of obedience to bureaucratic authority, but an overidentification with the political leadership that cultivates a powerful sense of duty characterized by both pathological altruism and a sense of fatalism,” which was, as it happened, “reflected in Eichmann’s testimony” in 1961.⁹⁸ In addition, perpetrator studies expert Alette Smuelers—ultimately a defender of Arendt’s thesis—acknowledges that “obedience, conformity, group dynamics,” do indeed play a part in genocide, but so too do “many other social-psychological mechanisms,” leading to a true multi-variate explanation lacking in the previous scholarship derived from Arendt’s conclusions.⁹⁹ However, synthesizing Kelley’ and Gilbert’s arguments made eighty years ago accomplishes the same thing. Kelley and Gilbert both saw the criminals of the Third Reich for what they were: complicated individuals that were part of a singularly-minded ideological system that, in the end, necessitated the genocide of a supposedly eternal enemy. While it is certainly a shame that an opportunity for a more accurate Third Reich diagnosis was missed as the Kelley-Gilbert debate moldered following the Nuremberg trials, leading to decades of compelling, if still inadequate, theorizing, one can also reasonably say that it is better late than never.

Better late than never though this may be, this delay in diagnosing the Third Reich may also suggest something deeper: that there were, and thus always will be, limitations to psychologizing history. The limitations of psychologizing historical figures long dead is problematic enough, but how does one psychologize something as complex as a society, particularly one as chaotic as the Third Reich? A society is made up of individual people, each with their own motivations, dreams, fears; that level of granularity makes it incredibly difficult to generalize, perhaps even impossible, especially many decades on. And lest we forget, cultural and political norms, as well as historical circumstance, can easily overwhelm our understanding of individual psychology, and neglect the role of agency. In addition, by focusing on the pathologies of the leaders or the social forces that help facilitate their will, it potentially neglects factors like institutional capture or even breakdown. While it is certainly possible that understanding the mind of an all-encompassing personality like Adolf Hitler can be accomplished through thorough biographical analysis, how can one be certain that understanding him, or understanding any of the Third Reich’s leadership, allow us to accurately understand—or diagnose—the whole of German society that lived under their collective boot? We may be able to understand the psychological contours of the Third Reich’s system and the personalities of those who directed it, but to claim that this gives us a window into the soul of an ordinary German—from the small town baker that voted for the NSDAP in 1933, to the Einsatzcommando with the blood of a hundred innocents on his hands—is quite possibly a fool’s errand.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963.

Bell, Daniel. “Is Eichmann in All of Us?” New York Times, May 26, 1974. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/05/26/archives/is-eichmanna-in-all-of-us-eichmann-in-us-all.html?searchResultPosition=14.

Elms, Alan C. “The Crisis of Confidence in Social Psychology,” American Psychologist (October 1975), 967-976.

Freud, Anna. The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, rev. ed. London: Karnac Books, 1966. Accessed via: https://psptraining.com/wp-content/uploads/Freud-A.-1936-1993.The-ego-and-the-

mechanisms-of-defence.-London-Karnac-Books.pdf.

Gilbert, Gustave M. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1947.

Gilbert, Gustave M. The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1950.

Goldensohn, Leon. The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses, edited by Robert Gellately. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Kelley, Douglas M. 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals. London: W.H. Allen, 1947.

Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986.

Marcus, Steven. “Obedience to Authority An Experimental View. By Stanley Milgram. illustrated. 224 pp. New York: Harper & Row.” New York Times, January 13, 1974. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/01/13/archives/obedience-to-authority-an-experimental-view.html?searchResultPosition=10.

Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. New York: Harper & Row, 1974.

Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963), 371-378.

New York Times Editorial. “Hitler Power Seen in Middle Class; Dorothy Thompson, Back From Germany, Calls Him ‘Apotheosis of the Little Man.’” New York Times, May 12, 1933. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1933/05/12/archives/hitler-power-seen-in-middle- class-dorothy-thompson-back-from.html.

Orwell, George. “Wells, Hitler, and the World State,” in Critical Essays. London: Secker & Warburg, 1946). Accessed via: https://www.telelib.com/authors/O/OrwellGeorge/essay/CriticalEssays/wells_hitler.html

Ring, Kenneth. “Experimental Social Psychology: Some Sober Questions About Some Frivolous Values.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3 (1967), 113-123.

Sullivan, Walter. “65% in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain; Yale Experiment Shows Many Became Distraught Over Cruelty but Did Not Stop.” New York Times, October 26, 1963. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1963/10/26/archives/65-in-test-blindly-obey-order-to-inflict-pain-yale-experiment-shows.html?searchResultPosition=5.

Thompson, Dorothy. Let the Record Speak. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939.

Zimbardo, Philip. “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer.” New York Times, April 8, 1973. Accessed via: https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/a-pirandellian-prison-the-mind-is-a-formidable- jailer.html?searchResultPosition=12.

Secondary Sources

Baron-Cohen, Simon. The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Blass, Thomas. The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

Brannigan, Augustine. Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Cesarini, David. Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer”. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006.

Dimsdale, Joel E. Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

De Vos, Jan. “From Milgram to Zimbardo: The Double-Birth of Postwar

Psychology/Psychologization.” History of the Human Sciences 23, no. 5 (2010), 156-175.

El-Hai, Jack. The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of the Minds at the End of World War II. New York: MJF Books, 2013.

Farr, Robert M. The Roots of Modern Social Psychology, 1872-1954. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Fenigstein, Allan. “Milgram’s Shock Experiments and the Nazi Perpetrators: A Contrarian Perspective on the Role of Obedience Pressures During the Holocaust.” Theory and Psychology 25, no. 5 (2015), 581-598.

Gordon, Peter E. “What is Intellectual History? A frankly partisan introduction to a frequently misunderstood field.” Unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, revised Spring 2012.

Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995.

Haslam, S. Alexander, and Reicher, Stephen D. “Contesting the ‘Nature’ of Conformity: What the Milgram and Zimbardo Studies Really Show.” Public Library of Service Biology 10, no. 11 (2012), 1-4.

Hirsch, Francine. Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Tribunal After WWII. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Lemov, Rebecca. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men. New York: Hill and Wang, 2005.

Mandel, David. “The Obedience Alibi: Milgram’s Account of the Holocaust Reconsidered.” Analyse & Kritik: Zeitschrift fürSozialwissenschaften 20 (1998), 74-94.

Pick, Daniel. The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Rees, Lawrence. The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. New York: Public Affairs, 2025.

Smeulers, Alette, Maartje Weerdesteijn, Barbora Hola, eds. Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019.

NOTES:

1. Robert Houghwout Jackson Papers, box 107 (Library of Congress), quoted in Joel E. Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice: The Enigma of the Nazi War Criminals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 58.

2. Ibid., 59.

3. Douglas Kelley, “Preliminary Studies of the Rorschach Records,” 45-48, quoted in Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice, 80.

4. Peter E. Gordon, “What is Intellectual History? A frankly partisan introduction to a frequently misunderstood field.” Unpublished manuscript (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, revised Spring 2012), 2.

5. Daniel Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess, and the Analysts (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9.

6. Ibid., 10.

7. Ibid., 24, 101.

8. “Hitler Power Seen in Middle Class; Dorothy Thompson, Back From Germany, Calls Him ‘Apotheosis of the Little Man.’” New York Times, May 12, 1933.

9. Ibid., 16, 17.

10. Anna Freud, The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense, rev. ed. (London: Karnac Books, 1966), 120.

11. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 19.

12. Ibid., 32-33.

13. Ibid., 149.

14. Ibid., 139.

15. Ibid., 87.

16. Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939), 217.

17. George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler, and the World State,” in Critical Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 1946), 98.

18. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 172.

19. Laurence Rees, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History (New York: Public Affairs, 2025), 316.

20. Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice, 63-64.

21. Douglas M. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg: A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (London: W.H. Allen, 1947), 12.

22. Ibid., 204, 235.

23. Ibid., 237.

24. Ibid., 239.

25. Ibid., 51.

26. Jack El-Hai, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of the Minds at the End of World War II (New York: MJF Books, 2013), 210.

27. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 152.

28. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, 76.

29. Ibid., 52, 64-65.

30. Ibid., 75-76.

31. Leon Goldensohn, The Nuremberg Interviews: An American Psychiatrist’s Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses, ed. by Robert Gellately (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 101.

32. Ibid., 118.

33. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 64.

34. Ibid., 144, 145.

35. Gustave M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1947), 10.

36. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 177.

37. Gustave M. Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship: Based on an Examination of the Leaders of Nazi Germany (New York: The Ronald Press Company, 1950), 6, 14.

38. Ibid., 64.

39. Ibid., 299-300.

40. Ibid., 304.

41. Francine Hirsch, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Tribunal After WWII (Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020), 231.

42. Ibid., 232.

43. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 93.

44^. Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, 100.

45. Ibid., 102.

46. Ibid., 106.

47. Ibid., 109.

48. Goldensohn, Nuremberg Interviews, 119.

49. Ibid., 130, 131-132.

50. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, 397.

51. Rees, The Nazi Mind, 316.

52. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, 3.

53. Gilbert, The Psychology of Dictatorship, 297.

54. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 146.

55. Ibid., 148.

56. Daniel Bell, “Is Eichmann in All of Us?” New York Times, May 26, 1974.

57. Ibid.

58. Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), 226, 227.

59. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 21, 22.

60. Ibid., 25, 26.

61. Ibid., 48.

62. Ibid., 49.

63. Ibid., 252.

64. Ibid., 276.

65. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 246.

66. Dimsdale, Anatomy of Malice, 168.

67. Robert M. Farr, The Roots of Modern Social Psychology, 1872-1954 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 153.

68. Lemov, World as Laboratory, 227.

69. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 219.

70. Thomas Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 94.

71. Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston: Back Bay Books, 1995), 141.

72. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963), 371, 378.

73. Walter Sullivan, “65% in Test Blindly Obey Order to Inflict Pain; Yale Experiment Shows Many Became Distraught Over Cruelty but Did Not Stop,” New York Times, October 26, 1963.

74. Lemov, World as Laboratory, 227.

75. Steven Marcus, “Obedience to Authority An Experimental View. By Stanley Milgram. illustrated. 224 pp. New York: Harper & Row,” New York Times, January 13, 1974.

76. Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World, 268.

77. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 5-6.

78. Lemov, World as Laboratory, 227.

79. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 178.

80. Philip Zimbardo, “The Mind is a Formidable Jailer,” New York Times, April 8, 1973.

81. Dimsdale, The Anatomy of Malice, 179.

82. Ibid.

83. Jan De Vos, “From Milgram to Zimbardo: The Double-Birth of Postwar Psychology/Psychologization.” History of the Human Sciences 23, no. 5 (2010), 171, 172.

84. S. Alexander Haslam & Stephen D. Reicher, “Contesting the ‘Nature’ of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show,” Public Library of Service Biology 10, no. 11 (2012), 3.

85. David Mandel, “The Obedience Alibi: Milgram’s Account of the Holocaust Reconsidered,” Analyse & Kritik: Zeitschrift fürSozialwissenschaften 20 (1998), 5, 6, 7.

86. Allan Fenigstein, “Milgram’s Shock Experiments and the Nazi Perpetrators: A Contrarian Perspective on the Role of Obedience Pressures During the Holocaust,” Theory and Psychology 25, no. 5 (2015), 589, 594.

87. “Eichmann Tells His Own Damning Story,” Life, November 28, 1960 & December 10, 1960.

88. Nirit Anderman, “Long-lost Recordings of Eichmann Confessing to the Final Solution Revealed,” Haaretz, May. 23, 2022.

89. Simon Baron-Cohen, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 78, 80.

90. Ibid., 29, 81.

91. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 251-252.

92. Blass, The Man Who Shocked the World, 276.

93. David Cesarini, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Boston: Da Capo Press, 2006), 15.

94. Pick, The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind, 249.

95. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1986), 5.

96. Ibid., 12, 15, 17.

97. Ibid., 418, 464, 488.

98. Augustine Brannigan, Beyond the Banality of Evil: Criminology and Genocide (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 206.

99. Alette Smuelers, “Historical Overview of Perpetrator Studies,” in Alette Smuelers, Maartje Weerdesteijn, Barbora Hola, eds. Perpetrators of International Crimes: Theories, Methods, and Evidence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 19.

“The formation of reactions against certain impulses give the deceptive appearance of a change of content, as if egotism had become altruism and cruelty had changed into sympathy. The formation of these reactions is favored by the fact that many impulses appear almost from the beginning in contrasting pairs; this is a remarkable state of affairs called the ambivalence of feeling and is quite unknown to the layman. This feeling is best observed and grasped through the fact that intense love and intense hate occur so frequently in the same person.”
—Sigmund Freud

“There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses.”
—Eric Hoffer

“We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of others.”
—François de La Rochefoucauld

…

On April 12th, 2026, Ezra Klein, the 2000s policy wonk boy-wonder, wrote for the New York Times an article the reheats the usually-reasonable argument that left-liberals’ inability to engage with their critics is the Democrats’ real problem. While the main thrust of the article focused on the somehow-continually-rising neutron star of internet leftist punditry—and, to name just one recent example of internet leftist brain vomit, bemoaner of the Soviet Union’s collapse—Hasan Piker, Klein shared what are apparently his thoughts on Zionism and anti-Zionism. In the article, Klein repeats a variation of an argument that has become a bit of a meme at this point, given that it is going on three years since the massacre of October 7th, 2023, kicked off the series of events that, almost certainly, has led to the U.S. and Israel’s 2026 war on Iran. That argument, in Klein’s words, is as follows:

Anti-Zionism is rising as a response to what Israel is doing. It will simply not be possible to treat it as a marginal viewpoint that can be shamed or shunned into invisibility. Yes, antisemitism often cloaks itself in anti-Zionism. So don’t do the antisemites’ work for them. If you keep telling people that if they oppose the Jewish state then they must hate the Jewish people, eventually, they will believe you.

When looking at this line, which has been making the rounds among Israel-focused commentators, without squinting too hard, it comes across as a perhaps-reasonable, most-certainly-framed-as-pragmatic approach to winning elections as a Democrat in the foreseeable future; emptily performative pledges of rejecting “AIPAC money” certainly suggest it. Maybe that’s true; I honestly don’t know, nor care, as long as this newest incarnation of the “JQ” doesn’t become a major plank of any politician in the running for the 2028 ticket. It’s just not that important, all things considered. But what is important is the voodoo morality play in which Klein, and an increasing number of otherwise-smart people, are engaging. It is probably one of the more galling inversions of how we, at least should, understand agency when it comes to human behavior, both in the present and in the past. The argument essentially goes like this:

“The recent rise of antisemitism or dislike of Israel didn’t come from nowhere. It’s obviously a reaction to Israel’s behavior since October 7th if not long before!”

Or, the ostensibly more nuanced version:

“The recent rise of antisemitism or dislike of Israel might not be just because of Israel’s actions, but it’s obviously not not a factor!”

Really? Is it really that obvious? There has indeed been a rise in measurable antisemitism and a decline in measurable support of Israel, particularly among young voters. But to simply attribute that to people being aware of alleged war crimes or misbehavior on the part of the IDF, or to resentment—as Klein suggests—at being called antisemitic for having a fixation on Israel and its behavior, strikes me as, to be blunt, stupid and ethically childish. This is primarily because the “anti-Zionist position” has not changed since it became the de facto position of people identifying as postcolonial or anti-imperialist leftists over half a century ago. As Eli Kowaz writes:

For most of the people who hold anti-Zionist views today, the framework came first. Not as a response to Israeli conduct, but as a prior — built over decades in activist spaces, campus culture, and international institutions long before Gaza. The question isn’t what Israel did to produce this moment. It’s what was already waiting when the moment arrived. [Emphasis added]

Blaming Israel for people unaffected by things Israel does or does not do—that is, 99% of Americans—disliking the Israeli government, Israeli citizens, or, most unfortunately, Jews as a whole including those in the diaspora, is not a nuanced position. This is despite being framed that way by people like Klein, or anyone else; not when similar “nuance” is not granted to any other conflict or state, including those of our own allies (after all, where are people blaming any anti-Arab sentiment on the atrocities committed by the Houthis in the Yemeni Civil War?). This double standard exists all over the place, but this is a particular problem on the American left; the American right was already playing around with this argument (and way of thinking) for years. There is distrust or even hatred of Ukraine in America’s right wing coalition; I personally think that position is steeped in conspiratorial thinking, a weird proxy for postliberal fantasies that involve Russia, and other pseudo-intellectual premises, but at least it’s more consistent with their distrust or even hatred of Israel. Much of the American left has no such consistency, flawed as it might be. But the point is that neither of those positions—a knee-jerk distrust or hatred of Israel or Ukraine (or any country with whom the United States is allied, for that matter)—are coming from an informed, or honest place.

To be clear at least about my position on things: people can hate Zionism, or Israel, or, yes, even Jews, all they want. But what they cannot do is pretend that it is coming from some magically nuanced and informed place that also just so happens to provide an agency-free cover for the person hating Zionism, Israel, or the Jews. This is peak “look at what you made me do” schoolyard bully logic. Such logic is the jet fuel that powers the populist impulse that has been infecting American psychopolitics for the last decade and a half. If it were based on being informed, then the people engaging in such anti-logic—especially those who should clearly know better, like Klein—would realize the exact same kind of thing they are now defending is something they would find abhorrent if they saw it in a different, historical light. Because Americans have done this song and dance before, where we use stories of horror and strife overseas to create justifications for distrust, conspiratorial thinking, and bigotry here at home, as if the former has anything to do with the latter.

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In 1937, the Japanese Empire attacked and invaded China and, in many ways, marked the true beginning of the Second World War. There had been localized conflict in northern Manchuria as early as 1931, but total war broke out across China in July of 1937. It was a smashing defeat for the Chinese, resulted in the occupation of Shanghai, and left the way open for the Japanese to invade and occupy the Chinese capital of Nanjing.

The Japanese forces entered Nanjing in December of 1937 and the genocide known as the Nanjing Massacre—sometimes the Rape of Nanjing—began almost immediately. The destruction seen in Shanghai had been shocking, as could be expected, but no one observing (or likely experiencing) the violence brought upon by the Japanese Imperial Army to the people of Nanjing to be so horrific. The late historian Iris Chang immortalized this horror in her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and there are far more stories from this phantasmagorical event to tell than can possibly be covered here, but the essence of what Chang described cannot be ignored. Amid systematic mass executions of thousands of Chinese civilians, there were killing contests held by the Japanese, often via the method of beheading with a katana, something witnessed by many Chinese and even glowingly reported on in Japanese newspapers. One witness and miraculous survivor, Tang Shunsan, recalled that after each bound prisoner was beheaded, the Japanese soldiers would shout in unison “Kill and count! Kill and count!” as one of the men would pick up the head and toss it into a pile. Tang was able to survive after getting buried by corpses and playing dead for several hours.

There were also hideous stories of death by torture, including live burials and subsequent crushing, mutilation, burning, freezing by exposure, being fed to dogs, and other ghoulishly creative methods. There were also, of course, almost uncountable cases of mass rape, with the Japanese soldiers paying no mind to age in the most literal sense. Iris Chang, calling it “one of the greatest mass rapes in world history,” cites Susan Brown Miller, who “believes that the Rape of Nanking was probably the single worst instance of wartime rape inflicted on a civilian population with the sole exception of the treatment of Bengali women by Pakistani soldiers in 1971,” and that it probably “surpasses in scale even the raping of women in the former Yugoslavia” in the 1990s.

The point, Chang later explains, is that “there seemed to be no limit to the Japanese capacity for human degradation and sexual perversion in Nanking.” Unlike Japan’s closest European ally, Nazi Germany, the Japanese government and media, at least initially, did very little to hide what they were doing. Indeed, it was clear many were proud of it. Thus, many Americans, especially those who followed international news, were aware of all this horror and many were disgusted. But China was still a world away, and the desire to avoid entanglement in another global war was still strong in 1937-1938, at least among much of the populace (if not in the Roosevelt administration). That all changed on December 7th, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the American forces stationed at Pearl Harbor.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was shocking; thousands were dead, seemingly out of nowhere. War was immediately approved by Congress and declared. The almost 130,000 Japanese Americans, thanks to their heritage and, in many cases, familial connections to the home islands, were immediately seen as suspect by many of their non-Japanese countrymen. Many first generation Japanese immigrants had already been compiled onto FBI lists for several months before the Pearl Harbor attack, thanks to the increasingly tense situation between the Japanese Empire and the United States. It seemed clear to many in the federal government that the Issei (first generation) and even Nisei (second generation) Japanese Americans posed a legitimate security risk, given the situation with Japan.

Nevertheless, some early reports likely sounded promising. For example, basing his claims on the intelligence reports of the Navy’s Lieutenant Commander K.D. Ringle, the syndicated newspaper columnist John Franklin Carter (and spy for President Franklin D. Roosevelt) wrote the following to FDR:

There will be no armed uprising of Japanese […] The essence of what Munson [another private spy for FDR] has to report is that, to date, he has found no evidence which would indicate that there is a danger of widespread anti-American activities among this population group. He feels that the Japanese are in more danger from the whites than the other way around. […] There will undoubtedly be some sabotage financed by Japan and executed largely by imported agents or agents already imported. There will be the odd case of fanatical sabotage by some Japanese “crackpot.” […] Japan will commit some sabotage largely depending on imported Japanese as they are afraid of and do not trust the Nisei.

Indeed, these intelligence reports portrayed the second-generation Nisei as profoundly loyal, with the aforementioned Munson writing another report to FDR one week later that estimated “90 to 98 percent [of Nisei] are loyal to the United States,” and that “They are not Japanese in culture. They are foreigners to Japan.” These kinds of distinctions would ultimately matter very little, which became clear on February 19th, 1942, when FDR signed Executive Order 9066, which read, in part, as follows:

Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.

The day after this order was issued, the Secretary of War authorized the creation of Military Areas as part of the Western Defense Command under the command of Lieutenant General John DeWitt. In these areas, concentration camps would be set up. Who would populate these concentration camps had already been established by a Stanford lawyer and member of the Washington Army National Guard named Karl Bendetsen who sent a memo to Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, titled “Alien Enemies on the West Coast.” The memo painted a picture of a Japanese American fifth column, implicating even the second generation Nisei, who, less than a year before, were being called 90-98% loyal to the United States. Indeed, as the memo stated:

A substantial majority of the Nisei bear allegiance to Japan, are well-controlled and disciplined by the enemy, and at the proper time will engage in organized sabotage, particularly should a raid along the Pacific Coast be attempted by the Japanese. […] This will require an evacuation and internment problem, of some considerable proportions.

This pre-9066 sentiment had not even been limited to internal memos circulating within the administration’s War Department. It made appearances in national media as well, under the byline of the incredibly influential Washington D.C., columnist Walter Lippman, who wrote a widely-circulated column, appearing in the Washington Post, the New York Herald Tribune, and literally hundreds of other newspapers across the nation. The February 13th, 1942, column read, in part, as follows:

The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and without. […] It is a fact that there has been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast. From what we know about Hawaii and about the fifth column in Europe, this is not, as some would like to think, a sign there is nothing to be feared. It is a sign that the blow is well-organized and that it is held back until it can be struck with maximum effect. […] There is the assumption that if the rights of a citizen are abridged anywhere they have been abridged everywhere. Nobody’s constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield.

Lippman’s influence cannot be overestimated; as historian Richard Reeves writes about Lippman, he “was essentially writing to an audience of one: Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Acting more as a chorus to Lippman’s antagonizing column than as representatives of all their constituents, the Congressional representatives of California, Oregon, and Washington signed a letter to FDR that read, “We recommend the immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese lineage, and all others, aliens and citizens alike, who presence shall be deemed dangerous or inimical to the defense of the United States from all strategic areas.” The pressure was clearly enough, because less than a week later, FDR signed Executive Order 9066 and handed the necessary authority over to the War Department, who quickly began setting up assembly centers, relocation centers, and internment camps, most of them dotting the American southwest and interior of the West Coast states.

To say Japanese Americans were wholly unprepared for the evacuations would be a mischaracterization. Many War Department representatives like John McCloy would travel to various Japanese American enclaves, particularly in big West Coast cities like San Francisco, to meet with community leaders and discuss the evacuation process. But to paint this as a more humane version of what the Third Reich had been doing to German Jewish citizens would be missing the point and be painting a distinction without much of a meaningful difference, at least in the years before Kristallnacht. Japanese Americans were aware of the looming day of their internment—of the literal stripping of their constitutional rights as citizens—and many acted accordingly.

That was the case with Hideo Murata, an Issei from Monterey County in California, as well as an American veteran of the First World War and recipient of “Honorary Citizen” status thanks to that service. After confirming with the Monterey County Sheriff (and long time friend) Alex Bordges that evacuations were happening, “Murata went to a hotel in Pismo Beach, paid for a room, and shot himself in the head. In his left hand, he clutched the [Honorary Citizen] testimonial from [the United States government,” to quote historian Richard Reeves’ account. This, tragically, would not be as uncommon as one might hope as evacuation day loomed and in the years that followed. As Reeves reminds us, “[Murata] was not the first or the last Japanese American suicide.”

Japanese Americans were quickly hit with travel restrictions and curfews that did not apply to anyone else as the evacuation plans began to take shape. They were given a chance to sell of whatever valuables they couldn’t carry, usually for a pittance so small it would be laughable if it wasn’t such an indignity. For example, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, the Kobayashi family—a relatively successful farming family with a barn, land, crops, livestock, equipment, and a home sold it all for $75, about $1,519 in 2026 money. In scenes mirroring necrophagous Germans absorbing looted and abandoned Jewish businesses across the Atlantic, non-Japanese Americans gobbled up abandoned Little Tokyo storefronts in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities for a song after their owners were evacuated by the National Guard.

The tragic indignities of evacuation could be seen even more acutely with the evacuation of the Japanese American population of Bainbridge Island, near Seattle, Washington. They were to be transported by rail down to Manzanar, “a barren, wind-whipped ghost town 230 miles northeast of Los Angeles in the eastern foothills of the Sierras, on the road between tiny places called Independence and Lone Pine,” to quote Richard Reeves again. Despite the softened framing from the likes of the Seattle Times, it quickly became obvious that what was happening to all of these families lugging what little baggage they could carry. As Richard Reeves summarizes:

Thirteen of the marchers that day were seniors at Bainbridge High School, who had not been allowed to attend their senior ball the night before because of the 8:00pm curfew for all American Japanese. Many of the white residents of the island lined the ferry road, some of them crying and calling out to friends in the march. Some of the spectators were holding the dogs and cats of the evacuees, who were not allowed to carry pets. Many of the dogs had stopped eating when they were taken from their owners, and died within a week or two. […] There was no music and no crowd of white residents waving and crying when the families of Bainbridge arrived at Manzanar. There were construction workers, some of them Japanese volunteers, banging together 504 tar-paper barracks, each barrack divided into six units of sixteen by twenty feet. The camp was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guard towers with machine guns pointed in toward thirty-six blocks of barracks.

Like all stories of internment, aspects of normalcy creeped in during the years the America’s Japanese population was kept behind barbed wire. However, normalcy is the way people cope with what is decidedly abnormal, or even intolerable. And it was clear, at nearly all times, that the Japanese American experience from 1942-1945, was anything but normal, in the sense that whatever had been normal for the internees was long gone. This is reflected in many of the diaries, letters, and recollections of those who were interned at camps like Manzanar, or Tule Lake, or Topaz, or assembly centers like Fresno, or Salinas, or Tanforan. This is seen in the account by Tanforan internee, Charles Kikuchi:

Mom is gradually taking things into her own hands. […] For 28 years she had been restricted in Vallejo, raising children and doing homework. […] Now she finds herself here with a lot of Japanese, and it has given her a great deal of pleasure to make all these new social contacts. Pop, on the other hand, rarely leaves the house and still retains his contempt for the majority of the Japanese residents. His attitude is intensified when he sees that Mom is gradually moving away from him. I have a suspicion she rather enjoys the whole thing. She dyed her hair today, and Pop made some comment that she shouldn’t try to act so young.

These changes might seem relatively minor, but it pays to remember that none of these changes would have occurred had Japanese Americans not been uprooted and put in these camps to begin with. Families throughout the camp system would fracture thanks to these circumstances, with particular fissures occurring between the Issei and Nisei. While such generational divisions between immigrants is perfectly normal, it got exacerbated by the camp system and the mindset into which it had put everyone. Kikuchi observed this, in that he saw Nisei more “taking things in stride” and “thinking about the future,” but it was not a firm rule. In fact, many of the Japanese Americans that defied evacuation orders were themselves Nisei, and were most aware of and offended by the indignity of internment. One of them, a Quaker student at the University of Washington named Gordon Hirabayashi, wrote the following in a letter from May of 1942:

This order for the mass evacuation of all persons of Japanese descent denies them the right to live. It forces thousands of energetic, law-abiding citizens to exist in a miserable psychological and horrible physical atmosphere. […] It kills the desire for a higher life. Hope for the future is exterminated.

There was plenty of reason for many Japanese Americans to feel such hopelessness, especially when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decided in 1943 that curfew and general restrictions on Japanese American movement were in fact constitutional, given the state of war. Not only was the wider American culture not particularly on their side, neither was the law that supposedly protected everyone equally and blindly. Hirabayashi devoted himself to his Christian principles that he had inherited from his parents—Christian converts from Japan, which was hardly any more common in the early 20th century than it was centuries earlier—but not all Japanese Americans felt that way or had such perspectives or principles toward which they could turn. “Life,” as Richard Reeves explains, “continued to be a struggle,” with circumstances in the camps sometimes taking “a tragic turn.” As Reeves continues:

There had been suicides and suicide attempts and more than a dozen Japanese men had been killed or wounded by soldiers guarding them in the relocation centers and in Justice Department camps and jails. On May 12, 1942, a man named Kanesaburo Oshima was killed by a sentry at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a temporary center for the so-called dangerous aliens. The next day, Ichiro Shimoda, a forty-five-year-old gardener from Los Angeles who had served in the Japanese army as a young man and was arrested on the day Pearl Harbor was attacked, was badly wounded by another guard at Fort Sill. He was known to be mentally unstable and had twice attempted to kill himself by trying to bite off his own tongue. An FBI report dated May 18, 1942, said he was shot twice while trying to climb over a camp fence. On May 16, 1942, Hikoji Takeuchi was shot at Manzanar by a military police private named Edward Phillips. A WRA [War Relocation Authority] investigation report quoted his commanding officer, Lieutenant Buckner, as saying that guard service was so monotonous that MPs “welcomed a little excitement, such as shooting a Jap.”

Legal and moral indignities had, clearly, turned into outright abuse and violent persecution by the authorities responsible for the now-hundreds of thousands of Japanese American internees. Abuse was by no means the norm across the board, but the circumstances had created a pervasive atmosphere of “frustration and fear,” in which the threat of violence became endemic to the internee experience.

As is often the case in concentration camps, the violence began to turn inward from the internees themselves. Sexual assault, while never reaching epidemic proportions, did still become more common than it otherwise would have. Even before internment occurred, there was an instance of a gang of thugs taking advantage of the situation, with “a woman [being] assaulted by men who forced their way into her home posing as FBI agents,” as reported by the Densho Japanese American Legacy Project. In describing the inward turn of the violence, the report continues that “within one month of the opening of Tanforan, three rapes and at least two attempted assaults” had occurred, with very little if any attempt to find the perpetrators occurring.

Internal discord and even violence became even more systemic as angry Kibei—that is, second generation Japanese Americans who had been at least partly educated in Japan before returning to the United States—formed anti-American gangs and, as Richard Reeves describes, “began to terrorize residents [of the camps] they considered spies or collaborators for the [Roosevelt] administration […] traveling in groups during the day, then harassing and beating the residents they did not like, usually at night.” This led to a community council member named Fred Tayama almost being beaten to death. Most of the time, camp administrators ignored these gangs and outbreaks of violence, “saying it was up to the Japanese to settle things among themselves.”

Obvious as it might seem, it must be stated that such circumstances were not particularly appreciated by the wider American public. Obviously, as described earlier, there was, by no means, a singularly delighted reaction to the evacuation and internment of Japanese Americans among the wider American public; many non-Japanese neighbors and friends expressed grief and outrage at seeing members of their community treated this way. However, the compassion Japanese Americans experienced from some of their neighbors and friends was by no means the norm. According to a poll conducted by the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1942, 93% of Americans supported the relocation of Japanese Issei while only 1% opposed it, and nearly two-thirds of Americans supported the internment of Nisei while only one quarter opposed it. To most Americans, any and all Japanese—Issei or Nisei or otherwise—were a liability in a time of war, especially one that had begun the way this one had for Americans.

With such broad public support of the measures made possible by Executive Order 9066, not much in the way of justification was required. However, justifications proliferated, as if many of those supporting—or enabling—the evacuations and internment realized how such policy looked, especially vis-à-vis the war with Nazi Germany, whose policies of internment were well-enough-known. Much of the justifications for the internment of Japanese Americans were either on-the-nose racism, or, more nefariously, reeking of post-hoc moralizing. In the case of the former, angry and threatening notes started getting shoved under the doors of Japanese-owned businesses, like that of the Tamaki family in San Francisco on the eve of evacuation, with the one addressed to them reading, “This is a warning. Get out. We don’t want you in our beautiful country. Go where your ancestors came from. Once a Jap, always one. Get out.”

Townsfolk in various places near the Manzanar camp even went on the record, with a local barber proclaiming that “We ought to take those yellow-tails right down to the edge of the Pacific and say to ’em, ‘Okay boys, over there’s Tokyo. Start walkin’.” More chillingly, a flight instructor in Inyo County proclaimed, “It’s a plain case of survival of the fittest. It’s either us or the god-damned Yellow-bellies! What are we waiting for? The Army needs target practice on those sons-of-bitches.” Shopkeepers in California concurred, putting up signs in their windows saying things like, “This restaurant poisons both rats and Japs,” “Open hunting season for Japs,” and, in the case of a barbershop, “Japs shaved: Not responsible for accidents.”

However, it was the previously mentioned post-hoc moralizing that strikes a particular chord when thinking about overseas events being used to justify at-home bigotry in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Many Americans were indeed aware of and horrified by the atrocities taking place in the Pacific, well before the attacks on Pearl Harbor. It was well-covered in the media and while there was not nearly the reach or technological capability possessed in the 1930s-1940s as there is today, plenty of what was occurring in China was reported by a number of American foreign correspondents.

As Iris Chang explained, the three main American journalists stationed in China during the Nanjing Massacre—Frank Durdin of the New York Times, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, and C. Yates McDaniel from the Associated Press—“made an enormous impact” in raising international awareness of the Empire’s crimes. They “[wrote] riveting stories that were splashed across the biggest and most prestigious newspapers in the United States,” and, like many international observers, even took part in trying to save as many Chinese civilians from the awful fate that had befallen so many. Even if they had not felt the moral pull to do the right thing in these instances, these men could not have forgotten what they had seen and experienced, and, they reasoned, neither would anyone else who read their copy. As Chang summarizes:

On December 15, most of the reporters left Nanjing for Shanghai to file their stories. Their last day in the city was grisly. On the way to the waterfront, the reporters literally had to drive over several feet of bodies under the Water Gate, where dogs were already starting to gnaw on the corpses. Later, as they waited for their ship to arrive, they saw the Japanese military line up one thousand Chinese men, force them to kneel in small groups, and shoot each of them in the back of the head. During the execution, some of the Japanese were laughing and smoking, as if they greatly enjoyed the entire spectacle.

Later, the AP’s McDaniel encountered another group of Chinese prisoners, one frantically pleading with him on hands and knees to save him from being murdered like everyone else. McDaniel remembered: “I could do nothing. My last remembrance of Nanking—dead Chinese, dead Chinese, dead Chinese.” These tragic sentiments were seen by millions, amplified further still by newsreel footage provided by Norman Alley and Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone titled “Butchery and Looting Reign in Nanking.” Japanese media tried to create PR spin, but the damage had been done, and American audiences were outraged at what they saw.

However, after the Pearl Harbor attacks, any chance of principled moral outrage on behalf of the Chinese suffering from the rapacious assault by the Japanese Empire gave way to full-on nativist paranoia and bigotry, and that Chinese suffering was reduced to mere post-hoc justification for the state-enforced expulsion and internment to come. The Japanese Empire’s continued expansion throughout southeast Asia, as well as the outbreak of war between Japan and the United States, did not help matters either. As Richard Reeves writes, “whatever goodwill there had been toward Issei and Nisei after Pearl Harbor was gone as news arrived daily of seemingly invincible and brutal Japanese armies running wild through the Philippines, Burma, Hong Kong, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies,” leading to an atmosphere in which “tolerance of any kind was replaced by fear.”

While many were honest about their motives—such as columnist Henry McLemore, who wrote in both the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Chronicle that “personally, I hate the Japanese and that goes for all of them”—layers of more “high-minded” justifications for distrust, hatred, and expulsion began to appear almost immediately after the Pearl Harbor attacks, most of which had nothing even to do with the war. “Crime and Poverty Go Hand in Hand with Asiatic Labor,” blared the Chronicle on December 10th, 1941, as well as “Japanese a Menace to American Women,” emphasizing supposedly systemic problems with the Japanese American population that went beyond base fear. The Seattle Times ran a story involving two Nisei businessmen being indicted for allegedly trying to sell three industrial-grade storage tanks to the Japanese forces occupying China, thus linking the supposed Japanese American fifth column to the imperial ambitions of Emperor Hirohito. William Randolph Hearst was at the forefront of this kind of framing that highlighted Japanese atrocities, and escalated it into an all-out campaign as the war continued, providing fodder for those looking for such high-minded rationale to justify the maltreatment of their countrymen. It became all the easier to create a demonic image at home, within Americans’ reach, once the war began in earnest in 1942.

In the summer of 1942, the Japanese Army stormed the city of Nancheng and began a reign of terror nearly as horrific as the one that befell Nanjing five years earlier, and was followed up by a wave of experimental biological warfare conducted by the notorious Unit 731, who unleashed approximately 300 pounds of paratyphoid and anthrax germs onto the region after the army had destroyed the city. When the news broke in the spring of 1943, the New York Times would claim that “the Japanese have chosen how they want to represent themselves to the world. We shall take them at their own valuation, on their own showing. We shall not forget, and we shall see that a penalty is paid.” Similarly, the Los Angeles Times stated that “to say that these slayings were motivated by cowardice as well as savagery is to say the obvious. The Nippon war lords have thus proved themselves to be made of the basest metal.”

What neither of these publications admitted was that this operation had been conducted as a direct response to the United States’ own Doolittle Raid the year before, with the Japanese Army specifically targeting Nancheng’s citizens who had assisted the Doolittle raiders that had crashed in the Chinese countryside (just shy of seventy airmen in total). While it did nothing to justify the response made by the Japanese—which included torturing the Chinese civilians who had cared for the injured raiders and then later helped them escape—everyone involved in the raid’s planning, especially including Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle himself was fully aware and even predicted that there would be a wave of destructive vengeance that would follow his own vengeance-driven raid on the Japanese capitol, as explained by historian James M. Scott. This darker aspect of the Nancheng massacre—the “Rape of Nancheng” as some came to call it—was only revealed by the wartime recollections of the American missionaries stationed there, with one of them, a Reverand Charles Meeus, writing the following:

Little did the Doolittle men realize, that those same little gifts which they gave their rescuers in grateful acknowledgement of their hospitality— parachutes, gloves, nickels, dimes, cigarette packages—would, a few weeks later, become the telltale evidence of their presence and lead to the torture and death of their friends!

In the United States, there was certainly growing understandable outrage as the fighting in the Pacific intensified, and as stories of the brutal treatment of American POWs, and the overall carnage of the fighting made their way home. But as we have already seen, the reality was that many Americans were already prepared to hate the Japanese as a whole, even if they were their own neighbors. That turn may have seemed sudden, as if Pearl Harbor alone had created it. But at least one person had seen the writing on the wall as early as 1932: the Rabbi Rudolph Coffee of Oakland. In an editorial for Jewish News of Northern California, Rabbi Coffee wrote the following about a sad-looking Japanese American gardener who had smiled at him as the rabbi complimented his work:

I have harbored a distressing thought. Can it be that the white man is letting his innermost feelings about Japanese atrocities in China react upon this innocent gardener? Unfortunately, some mass-minded individuals will link all Japanese in one groove, quite unconscious of the startling fact that a poor Jap gardener in the United States may be just as opposed to Japanese militarism as were the innocent Germans in our midst to the tactics of Deutschland’s Kaiser.

At this point, it would perhaps be too obvious to say that Rabbi Coffee’s remarks proved tragically prescient. But they were. Almost a decade before Pearl Harbor, he identified the logic that would later help justify the incarceration of Japanese Americans: the projection of anger at an empire abroad onto innocent people at home, many of whom had little or even nothing to do with the empire in question. The concentration camps were not the outcome of some cool-headed grasp of strategy or justice. They were the result of fear, racialized and displaced, made easier to manage by turning neighbors into symbols of a global enemy and the architects of their own misfortune; a misfortune that many Americans, as often appears to be the case, were all too happy to endure.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: “if those urban blacks didn’t act like such thugs, then less people would be afraid of them.” Or, perhaps more pointedly to this comparison, “then more people would support causes like Black Lives Matter.”

It sounds pretty ugly, doesn’t it?

Let’s be blunt. The latter example is the same logic being employed by Ezra Klein when he says rising anti-Zionism is being caused by Israel’s actions, and the former is the same logic being employed by anyone blaming the increase in antisemitism in the Western world on Israel’s actions; both kinds of justifications are increasingly common. But more to the point of this entire essay, if it wasn’t yet obvious, is that it’s also the same logic people used 85 years ago when they justified the internment of hundreds of thousands of their own countrymen by citing the barbaric actions of an overseas empire—far more barbaric than anything Israel has done both in scale and character, for what it’s worth, shocking as the Gaza War has been in its violence and destruction.

The choices we make are always part of an ecosystem of incentives; no choice is an island, so to speak. But a choice is still a choice, especially when it is applied to groups of people and in general terms. Just because the proverbial elephant we all ride is governed by emotions and impulses does not suddenly make the conclusions that come from those emotions and impulses understandable, much less defensible. This is to selectively apply agency, the lifeblood of populism, discrimination, and eventually, crimes against humanity. It’s not speech or expression or “dangerous ideas” or anything like that; it’s the true belief that one has no control over one’s own hatreds, and that those you hate are in absolute control. This was the case with Japanese Americans, particularly after the Pearl Harbor attacks, and much of that could be reduced to typical race hatred. Considering that antisemitism is more of a skeleton key that purports to explain the ills of the human experience, rather than typical race hatred, the significance is even more profound. The discontent, the distrust, and the hatred all come first; the justifications come later.

After all, before a single American GI set foot in the South Pacific, much less was killed by a Japanese banzai charge, Americans needed very little encouragement to indulge in race hatred that allowed them to celebrate the internment of their own countrymen. There might have been fear of the carnage to come that would consume so many American families, and at least that can be understood with hindsight, but no such excuse can be made for the people who have made hating Israeli forces and the Israeli government for their alleged (and quite possibly real) crimes and then see their proxies in American Jews. Perhaps, god forbid, that will change. But so far, it has not changed, and American moral hand-wringing over Israel’s conflicts has done very little to show itself as anything other than a vulgar kabuki.

When I told her what I was writing in this essay, my partner Molly asked me who this essay is for. That is a fair question (and a good one especially if you’re writing from a place of frustration). I think it was mostly for me, as a way to vent, as essays like this often begin; as Andrew Fox recently wrote, “I am furious at the antisemitism pouring through the West, confident and shameless.” I am pretty furious, at both the antisemitism, but also the willful hypocrisy, double-standards, and historical illiteracy that, as always, seems to animate it. But if I was to pinpoint an audience that I believe needs to hear what I’m saying, I’ll suggest that it’s for anyone who has vaguely or even poorly-defined animus toward any group of people or even particular state. It doesn’t even have to be Israel, though that state and its people are certainly the most relevant ones here.

There is a shocking amount of outsourcing of animus today. Seemingly no one can just be honest about where they are coming from. It brings to mind the famous line from Hans Landa—yes, a fictional character—in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds when explaining why he finds Jews distasteful: “You don’t like them. You don’t know why you don’t like them, all you know is that you find them repulsive.” Many people engaging in such animus outsourcing do well to embrace their inner Hans Landa. Or, if one is to be perhaps less uncharitable (or at least use a real life example), be more like the managing secretary of Salinas Valley’s Grower-Shipper Association Austin Anson, who told the Saturday Evening Post in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attacks, “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japanese for selfish reasons. We might as well be honest. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man.”

It is difficult to be so forthright with one’s own priorities and biases, and especially socially unacceptable bigotries; as we have seen, it was as difficult nearly a century ago as it is now, except for the rare exception like Austin Anson and others like him. No one wants to be seen as being hateful of anyone for any reason, and yet, here we are, always hating. So, then as now, we search for reasons bigger than ourselves to justify something so base, so human; thus, so truly and fundamentally small.

This has been an issue since October 8th, 2023, when protests, vandalism, and the like might have been understandable (if a bit tone deaf) if they had solely occurred outside of Israeli embassies. It would have (and did, when it occurred) sent the message that the Israeli government under Netanyahu was the problem. But then the protests, vandalism, et cetera (eventually including violence) quickly started appearing outside of Jewish community centers, Jewish synagogues, and Jewish gatherings. Whenever I have pointed out the self-evidently ghoulish vibe and underlying suggestions this created, inevitably I would be met with dismissive responses of “well, this is about Zionism.” To which I would say, and I say even louder now, “who the fuck are we kidding here?”1 If this were about “Zionism,” and the purveyors of Zionism, and not a lazy conflation of Jews with Zionism, why not target the most significant (and most problematic) promoters of that ideology; that is dispensationalist Evangelical churches? Not that I want to see such protests, vandalism, and threats of (or real) violence disrupting those people’s lives either, but should there not at least be some consistency on this question if we are not to assume there is some self-selected, conspiratorial, and obviously bigoted reasoning going on?

Of course not. And this kind of inconsistency has continued long enough—going on three years—without being meaningfully addressed. So a new script and moral license needed to be and has been provided by Ezra Klein and those like him, and one that sounds very familiar indeed. After all, if one can’t bring oneself to call a spade a spade, it can be extremely handy to have proxies to give you all the justification needed for remaining complicit or even acting as a participant in the newest incarnation of the world’s oldest hatred.

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Hey everyone, it’s good to be back with all of you. I’ve just finished a lengthy writing session for grad school—my final semester of classes!—as well as some family issues that needed my immediate attention during most of March. But I’m back with a new special, historiography-focused episode of History Impossible. It was actually not one I was planning…

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Hello all. Some quick housekeeping before we get going here. I’m currently on the road, and haven’t had time to do as much work on the show or the Substack as I would like, but I am really happy to give you guys this newest essay. In case you missed it, there are a couple interviews I recently released that I’m really happy about.

First was my conversation with the journalist Eli Lake where we discussed the phenomenon of radical politics joining forces with Islamist radicals across the 20th century, particularly in the context of Iran, but also delving a little deeper into the “Green-Brown alliance” I’ve discussed on the show. You can check that out HERE.

Next was my conversation with the host of the Crackpot History Podcast, in which we discussed his mission to demystify stories and figures that are engaging with poor interpretations of history in order to advance, we’ll say, disagreeable political projects and beliefs. We discussed his work critiquing Darryl Cooper, host of the MartyrMade podcast, and his current series critiquing Scott Horton’s recent book Provoked, which lays the blame for the Russo-Ukrainian War at the feet of the West. You can check that one out HERE.

Anyway, that’s all I have for all of you. Please enjoy this essay that I honestly didn’t think I would stick with thanks to its stranger (than usual) subject matter, but it worked out. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

…

“I seek to describe the quite extraordinary atmosphere in which such things have become possible. I call that atmosphere anarchy; but insist that it is an anarchy in the centers where there should be authority. Government has become ungovernable; that is, it cannot leave off governing. Law has become lawless; that is, it cannot see where laws should stop. The chief feature of our time is the meekness of the mob and the madness of the government.”
—G.K. Chesterton

“We are always unhappy when are changing our nature. We are concerned that we fool with Mother Nature we will be made to pay a price. I will tell you in advance that what you are going to hear from me is the good news. I bring glad tidings. I am the optimist in today’s crowd. I not only think that we will tamper with Mother Nature, I think Mother wants us to.”
—Willard Gaylin

“I never asked for this.”
—Adam Jensen

…

It should not be surprising for me to say this, given that my beat is events and experiences of the past, but is not often that I directly write about the future. I may make implications and show that the past can somewhat inform us on what the future might hold, at least in terms of social and psychological trends and tendencies. But it is hard for me to avoid thinking about the future, especially the immediate future, since I am a fan of science fiction, particularly of the dystopian near-future variety. So when I read the recent profile of Looksmaxxer Clavicular in the New York Times, it got me thinking about the future and, thanks to my appreciation of near-future dystopian science fiction, what it resembled.

According to the profile, Clavicular—real name Braden Peters—and those like him have one goal in mind: “ascending” to aesthetic perfection (that is, looks) by any means necessary, in order to become more socially dominant. That can mean substances, surgery, and even self-mutilation. No cost is too great to achieve this goal. As the New York Times profiler Joseph Bernstein explains, this goal comes from a “bizarre argot and nihilistic worldview, in which the universe is a Darwinian nightclub full of aggressive men jockeying for status.” There are several implications that have come from this worldview—not least of which is a sort of black-pilled, extremely online misogyny common among incels and their subgroups—and the political associations are hard to avoid.1 However, once I became more aware of the Clavicular phenomenon (and it is a phenomenon if his social media metrics are anything to go by; 100,000 dollars a month streaming on Kick is nothing to sniff at), I started to sense that something felt familiar.

The year 2011 feels like an eternity ago, but that year, a video game was released that I had been looking forward to for a while. It was part of a long-running series that had gone dormant for almost a decade called Deus Ex, a cyberpunk dystopian universe set in the near future. The first two games—to which we will return later—took place further into the 21st century than many of humans living today will likely never see (2052 and 2072, respectively), but the new one, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, was a prequel that took place in—take a deep breath—2027.

When Human Revolution was released and I played through its 15-20-hour campaign, I, like millions of other players, was captivated by everything about it. But what captivated me most was this vision of the future it painted, one that I almost certainly would live to see. So as the years ticked by and 2027 started becoming more of a reality than a fictional forecast, I started looking to see if there was evidence we were heading in the direction predicted by Eidos Montreal’s masterpiece. Now, the vision for this future created in 2011 decidedly does not resemble our current present in 2026, or likely what the world will look like next year, especially in terms of societal aesthetics, urban development in some places (namely places like Hengsha Island, Shanghai, and Detroit, Michigan, both shown in the trailer above), and other specifics that will never perfectly (or even, in some cases, slightly) match up when predicted by speculative fiction. This can indeed be seen in the above-linked trailer. Nevertheless, there seems to be one thing that held true in the past decade and a half since Human Revolution was released, and that is the central theme that seems to drive both its and our society in the late 2020s: the idea of human-engineered perfection, particularly via new technologies, and particularly in a period defined by a decline of greater meaning.

One can certainly point out, and it would be fair to do so, that for the developers of a dystopian sci-fi video game to highlight such changes in 2011 was not particularly insightful, since we were already experiencing the early stages of such problems, with the birth pangs of 21st century American populism (the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, representing a rejection of supposedly meaningless American institutions, both political and religious) and online social networks making way for social media and smartphones becoming the norm. But to me, that smacks of hindsight bias; it is certainly true that those phenomena were beginning to coalesce and give us the picture shared by Human Revolution and our current era, but no one (or at least almost no one) lived as if those phenomena were coalescing. And coalesce they have.

These voids are depicted in Human Revolution and, like any good dystopian science-fiction, done in a very literal way to make sure as many people as possible pick up on them, in which the protagonist of the game, Adam Jensen, has become so heavily augmented with technology—in a nice nod to Robocop, no doubt an inspiration for this game’s setting and themes—that the question of whether or not he is even a human being is frequently called into question. In parts of the story, particularly when talking to characters of a more traditional, religious outlook, this question is expanded to include quite possibly everyone who has taken part in human augmentation, which has simply gone past giving people artificial limbs and organs who need them, and now includes people voluntarily sacrificing their (if you’ll pardon the cliche) god-given components in order to improve themselves. Or, in the vernacular of a one Braden “Clavicular” Peters, to “ascend.”

The civil unrest we see play out in Human Revolution is no less eerie in its resemblance to our own, despite it having everything to do with the story’s themes and specifics, and nothing to do with immigration restriction or, in a flashback to 2020, strained racial relations amid a global pandemic. When seen through a historical and psychological lens, civil unrest is almost always an act of meaning-making en masse; while the unrest we have seen play out during the 2020s has had more to do with political anger, and the unrest we see play out in Human Revolution has more to do with resisting human augmentation and preserving what it means to be human, both share the same impulse: to inject meaning into a world where meaning itself is being called into question or is even believed to flat-out not exist at all.

This brings us back to the curious case of Clavicular. To reiterate, as the New York Times piece put it, Peters’ outlook is a profoundly nihilistic one. And yet, unlike many black-pilled reprobates peppering cyberspace, Peters, to his credit I suppose, has taken matters into his own hands. He still does not believe that there is any greater meaning beyond beauty; he would likely agree with the maxim shared by a particularly vile character from Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2016 masterpiece The Neon Demon that “true beauty is the highest currency we have,” accentuated later by the film’s lead when she says that “beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

Nevertheless, Clavicular is, through his Looksmaxxing regimen, creating meaning to replace its absence. And the way he is creating meaning is by, regardless of whether one agrees with his methods or his thesis or even likes anything about him, perfecting himself through technology. He is not replacing his limbs, but he is injecting himself with drugs to, in his mind, improve them; he is not getting pieces of inorganic material implanted in his face or any other part of his body (yet), but he is supposedly creating microfractures in his jawbone to change its shape. The point is, in a crisis of meaning, humanity has a tendency to try and create it, and, to bring this back around to history and—for the moment—away from video games and future speculation, it is not the first time that notions of engineered perfection through technology (and a bit of social engineering) have been attempted to fill the fathomless void that threatens to swallow us all.

…

When one hears the word “eugenics,” one often thinks of the ghoul in human form we know as Dr. Josef Mengele, and, if they are unfortunate enough to read about his more sadistic experiments, is inclined to believe that it was only done for the man’s sick predisposition. In the case of Mengele (as well as other human experimenters, such as Japan’s Shirō Ishii), this was likely true, though there was always a layer of pretense that matters for what we are discussing here; that is, a pretense of the “eugenic health” of the people, often (though not always) reinforced by sincere notions of racial purity. That pretense, however cynical it was in the case of Mengele and many other medical sadists of the half-century before the end of the Second World War, was a very real belief particularly in the United States, and well before the rise of the Third Reich in Germany. As the famous psychologist and writer Robert Jay Lifton wrote in his incredible book, The Nazi Doctors:

There had been plenty of racial-eugenic passion in the United States, impulses to sterilize large numbers of criminals and mental patients out of fear of “national degeneration” and the threat to the health of “the civilized races,” who were seen to be “biologically plunging downward.” Associated with the American eugenics movement was a biomedical vision whose extent is suggested by the following quotation from a 1923 book by [psychologist and eugenicist] A.E. Wiggam: “The first warning which biology gives to statesmanship is that the advanced races of mankind are going backward; […] that civilization, as you have so far administered it, is self-destructive; that civilization always destroys the man that builds it; that your vast efforts to improve man’s lot, instead of improving man, are hastening the hour of his destruction.” [Emphasis added]

While sterilization programs and worse became symbolic of what eugenics truly meant in practice, Lifton is careful to explain that eugenics had two expressions: “positive” and “negative.” Negative eugenics involved the destruction and elimination of bad traits (through practices like sterilization and, as the Nazis would demonstrate, euthanasia and mass murder), while positive eugenics involved the promotion and, ideally, propagation of good traits (through incentivizing large, single-demographic families and prohibiting abortion). How those traits were defined—that is, what was “good” and what was “bad”—is certainly what is most problematic about late 19th century/early 20th century eugenics, especially given where it ended up in the 1930s-1940s, but it is important for us to recognize because it allows us to understand the key goal of eugenics: to perfect mankind. As Lifton explains, “doctors were active in research on people viewed as hereditarily gifted, and in helping to enlist the medical profession for what was called the ‘fostering of talent.’” The idea that any kind of positive social constructions would save the day was out; improving human beings at root was in.

Of course, the idea that men were born good or born bad (to use reductive terms) was largely academic and hardly universally agreed upon. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was the cutting edge and went against what was, up until then, largely common sense. Criminals were criminals because they were desperate; they might be morally defective, the old thinking went, but that could be fixed with prayer and, perhaps, hard work. Not so, those on the cutting edge believed; it was eugenic destiny. Even if that were somehow true, that prayer could save a man’s soul, if he were defective from birth, he would still be unfit for tomorrow’s newer, better world. And why should we, the eugenicists likely wondered, wait to pray and educate the dregs of our society out their lot when we can just consider them lost causes and promote those who are not? This kind of thinking was largely reserved for those among the economic and intellectual elite—the influencers of the day, one might say—but it began to have influence and even inform policy.

Eugenics began its inglorious ascent in the cultural imagination largely thanks to one man: the English polymath and cousin to Charles Darwin, Francis Galton. While his most infamous theory certainly gained ground it probably never should have, he was no fool. As Daniel Okrent writes in his book The Guarded Gate, “Galton’s major discoveries—among them the individuality of fingerprints, the movement of anticyclones, the statistical law of regression to the mean—elevated his obsessive collection of data from triviality to significance. But for every one of his substantial contributions to human understanding, he probably hit upon a dozen that were trivial.” It is difficult to fit eugenics into such a generalization because some of the ideas underpinning eugenics—that we do, in fact, contain genetic differences that can, to one extent or another, be grouped together, for example—are true, but it is no doubt true that Galton and those who followed his example got carried away with generalizations and conclusions.

Probably the most significant of these generalizations and conclusions involved Galton’s belief that talent was heritable; this included knowledge-based talent, and by extension, artistic talent, among other things. While there are certainly elements within these fields that could be considered heritable, this was an area where Galton certainly overstated the case. Inspired largely by his elder cousin Darwin’s research into natural selection, Galton began his research. As Okrent summarizes:

If the development of species was not guided by a divine hand, he reasoned, neither were the minds of men. As physical qualities were provably heritable, so much be “peculiarities of character.” Darwin had defined the principles of natural selection in the animal world; now Galton dared to adapt them to the lives of humans. In the words of Galton’s protégé, disciple, and biographer Karl Pearson, “the inheritance of mental and moral characters in man [became] the fundamental concept in Galton’s life and work.

Ultimately, Galton collected a list of several hundred “notabilities” from a four hundred year period and concluded that about one in six were related to one another, thus “proving…what exactly?” in Okrent’s words. “Looked at today,” he continues, “Galton’s research and his conclusions seem risible. His sources were at best problematic, his measures of eminence arbitrary (they were in many cases measures of fame, not accomplishment).” In other words, Galton, like many excitable social scientists, had not done his diligence in applying experimental controls and almost certainly had a conclusion toward which he was groping before he even selected his “subjects.” This did not matter to Galton at the time (or his intended audiences), and he simply dressed up his claims with “a series of eccentric extrapolations,” to use Okrent’s words again. As an example, Galton would claim that, “Most notabilities have been great eaters and excellent digesters on literally the same principle that the furnace which can raise more steam than is usual for one its size must burn more freely and well than is common.”

This circus of claims and disconnected data eventually turned into Galton’s 1869 work, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences, in which Galton would expand his wild claims into even wilder ones, supported by ad hoc historical anecdotes about Roman genealogies and, as Okrent writes, “some extremely acrobatic math to calculate that precisely 1 in 3,214 ancient Athenians who reached the age of fifty was ‘illustrious.’” The book was not particularly well-received when it released, with the London-based Saturday Review wrote disparagingly of the “disjointed facts, inert and lifeless […] logically worth nothing.” Galton’s spirits were lifted when the great Darwin wrote to him to praise his little cousin’s efforts at expanding his thoughts of trait heritability, and gave Galton’s ideas the shot in the arm they needed when he openly praised him in his 1871 work, The Descent of Man, writing that “We now know, through the labors of Mr. Galton, that genius […] tends to be inherited,” and that “it is certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers run likewise in families.”

This support from Darwin was enough to keep Galton’s ideas very much afloat to allow other luminaries of the time to praise and promote these ideas; ideas that would, gradually but rapidly, develop into programmatic eugenics. These promoters included inventor Alexander Graham Bell and the suffragist Victoria Woodhull. Bell, in addressing the National Academy of Sciences in 1883, proclaimed “if we could apply selection to the human race we could also produce modifications or varieties of men.” Supporting his claim, he stated “if the laws of heredity that are known to hold in the case of animals also apply to man, the intermarriage of congenital deaf-mutes through a number of successive generations should result in the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.”

Woodhull went even further, claiming that “the criminal and vicious classes were made so by their mothers during gestation,” later becoming an early advocate for negative eugenics by proclaiming that “[carriers of] hereditary sensuality and vice”—that is, prostitutes, gamblers, drunks, criminals of any kind—were “a crime against the nation.” Elevating women to the status of voting citizens would therefore, in Woodhull’s mind, prevent such maladaptive behavior from occurring in the first place. Woodhull’s comments in particular show how power a seemingly utopian idea like eugenics truly is, when it can be adopted and molded to support another idealistic program so easily. This started to become increasingly apparent as the eugenics bug began to bite across the Atlantic Ocean in the early 20th century.

Eugenics made its debut into American respectability in 1906 at the third annual conference for the American Breeders Association (ABA), with the storied Washington Post declaring in a headline, “Science to Make Men and Women Better.” As Okrent summarizes, “By adding human breeding to its remit, the ABA began the first American effort to elevate Galtonian theory into something both programmatic and, at least as conceived, scientific,” with the ABA’s committee being a who’s who of scientists and intellectuals that would “bring eugenics into wide public consciousness, introduce it into the nation’s political debate, and elevate it into the realm of respectability.” And it was indeed respectable; it was seen as a true science on the cutting edge, endorsed by leading universities such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and the University of Virginia. Eugenics research and advocacy was funded by the Carnegie Institution, and major media and elites amplified it—eugenics conferences were front-page stories in Science magazine, other popular magazines favorably covered “better breeding,” and public intellectuals and foundation-backed experts promoted sterilization and immigration restriction as rational social policy. Eugenics was, as they might have said at the time, the bee’s knees.

The full story of eugenics’ legitimization and its downstream effects is a long one (and one I hope to cover in greater depth one day on History Impossible), but perhaps needless to say, it was not one without ghastly consequences, not least of which being the Nazis’ use of it to disastrous ends, as mentioned earlier. But one need not even reference the Third Reich’s crimes to demonstrate just how destructive those consequences ultimately were. The main thrust of Okrent’s scholarship deals with one of those consequences, namely that of immigration restriction on the basis of eugenics deeming European immigrants—particularly Jews, Italians, and Eastern Europeans—unfit to “pollute” the American populace, arguably (and demonstrably in some cases) consigning them to a much worse fate as early 20th century Europe continued its path of self-immolation.

Then there were the sterilizations. Throughout the early-to-mid-20th century, approximately 60,000–70,000 Americans underwent state-ordered or supported sterilizations in the United States, primarily under eugenics laws targeting those deemed “unfit” (that is to say, the “feeble-minded,” criminals, or even the poor). Programs appropriately peaked in the 1930s–1940s across 32 states; my own state of California alone performed around 20,000, or one-third of the national total, between 1909 and 1979. And as a native Minnesotan (and U of M alumnus), I would be remiss not to mention the role the University of Minnesota and its Eugenics Society in legitimizing the practice of compulsory sterilization. The Society’s president, Charles Fremont Dight, is also worth highlighting if only because he was a bit of a pen pal with Adolf Hitler, writing to the Fuhrer in 1933, praising the Nazis’ new sterilization law and sharing materials about American eugenics efforts.

But most disturbingly of all, there were the instances of human experimentation, most infamously represented by the syphilis experiments conducted on 600 impoverished black American men from Macon County, Alabama. The study, titled “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” included 399 infected with syphilis and 201 without. No one was deliberately infected with syphilis as is often claimed in more conspiratorial versions of the story, but the subjects were deceived with promises of free care for “bad blood,” given placebos like aspirin, and subjected to painful spinal taps misrepresented as therapy. More to the point, even after penicillin became widely available in the 1940s, officials actively withheld it, even intervening to prevent participants from getting it elsewhere, in order to study the degenerative effects of the neurosyphilis that ultimately killed most of the men.

Truly distasteful as this was, it paled in comparison to a series of studies that were conducted in Guatemala in the late 1940s, which were under the direction of Dr. John C. Cutler and the overall approval of Dr. John F. Mahoney, who were also involved in the Tuskegee experiments. In the Guatemalan version of the experiments, American doctors deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis as part of the wider effort to understand and treat the disease. As Martin J. Tobin explains in a 2022 paper for the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, because half a million Americans were infected with syphilis every year, “investigators drew up plans for an experimental model wherein infection would be induced in healthy subjects,” in order to develop better protection against the disease. Only uncovered in 2010 by historian Susan Reverby who was researching the Tuskegee experiments, the details of these experiments truly beggar belief and are best left alone, but as Tobin summarizes:

The original plan was to induce syphilis in prisoners in Penitenciaría Central through sexual intercourse with infected prostitutes and then test the efficacy of prophylactic regimens. When the American physicians encountered unexpected difficulties, they began to conduct studies on Guatemalan soldiers, inmates in the country’s only mental hospital, and children in the national orphanage. Because the rate of infection resulting from intercourse with prostitutes was lower than expected (<10%) the NIH-sponsored researchers attempted to artificially inoculate subjects with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid.

Unlike the cases of mass sterilization or immigration restriction in the United States or even the racial policies of the Third Reich, the connection to eugenics with such human experimentation is less clear on the face of it, but the connection is nevertheless there. Many historians and bioethicists now explicitly link the Tuskegee syphilis study and those like it (such as the Guatemala study) to eugenic ideology and to a broader “scientific racism” that grew out of the U.S. eugenics movement. Some of the main physicians who initiated and ran the experiments were trained at the University of Virginia, then a major center of eugenics teaching, where race was treated as a biological determinant of disease. These same physicians were publicly aligned with the eugenics movement thanks to their membership in the American Eugenics Society, and scholars argue that Tuskegee functioned as a vehicle for testing a eugenic hypothesis: that “racial groups were differentially susceptible to infectious diseases,” in the words of historians Paul Lombardo and Gregory M. Dorr.

While there was no direct effort to sterilize anyone through these studies or any attempt to control breeding patterns, the core premises—biological racial difference, differential susceptibility, and the expendability of black or Guatemalan lives in the name of racial science and social hygiene—are continuous with the mentality of the American eugenics movement. And lest we forget, such premises were all in service to another, simpler, broader premise: that the human being could be perfected, if only the imperfections could be weeded out root and stem. But more to the point, we should not forget that this dream of perfecting humanity largely began with a single source—a bit of an oddball named Francis Galton—and that this source’s ideas gained intellectual currency and respectability seemingly out of nowhere, and before anyone realized what was happening, it had largely swelled well out of any semblance of control.

…

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the protagonist Adam Jensen is very clearly meant to stand right in the middle of the existential battle over what it means to be human thanks to the proliferation of this new technology that has challenged, if not obliterated, everyone’s preconceptions. He is in the middle because, as he famously puts it, “I never asked for this.” The technology that makes up most of his body was put in him while he was on the brink of death (or perhaps, the game implies, already dead; this opens up a whole new can of philosophical worms). The point is, he had no choice to be part of this fight, and yet here he is; an emblem of it, thankfully (for him) fighting in the shadows, instead of the front lines where he could be made a symbol for the people in this world, rather than just the millions of us playing in it. That kind of pressure would do a number on anyone.

But this puts him in a unique position to understand just what the hell has happened to this world. The problem is that he doesn’t have time to understand the world; he has to save it, and save it he does, because that is usually what you’re supposed to do when you’re playing a video game. And yet, it does not take away from what we have seen and experienced in this game: a very real, if disturbing and pessimistic vision of humankind in our very near future. That is what ties together all of the games in this franchise, even though they were all released at different parts in our history, when we all had different concerns about our future.

The first game was released in 2000, when everything seen within it—a global pandemic that seemingly doesn’t effect elites, civil unrest and conflict, conspiracies at the highest level of government, to name just a few—were mere references to the best episodes of the X-Files. And yet, they resonate with anyone playing the game even today, well over two decades after it released, precisely because of the sociocultural anxieties that seem to have been presaged. It isn’t even the previously-mentioned details (or the eerie fact that one can’t find the World Trade Center when looking at the New York City skyline; again, this game came out in 2000) that can cause one’s breath to catch in their throat. It is the sheer audacity of this story to claim—accurately—that one of the most pressing questions to the United States (or the world) would be the role artificial intelligence plays in everything, particularly governance.

The second game was released in 2003, when the War on Terror was in full swing and civil liberties were appearing to be snatched away all in the name of security and, ironically, liberty, so the game’s marketing and dialogue frequently invoked the fear of terrorism and freedom. And yet, it was a story that fundamentally questioned the nature of government as a concept and, given the advancements being made in technology and communication in the world of 2072, what a government should look like and how should it reflect human will as that becomes ever-globalized. What would be required for such a shift that shows no signs of slowing down? A post-democracy, governed by a merged AI-human hybrid messiah? Perhaps.2 That is indeed one of the proposed solutions to the problem of inherent “otherness” created by human augmentation, intense and seemingly eternal inequality, and sclerotic (if not non-existent) democracy.

The third game, as we’ve discussed, went back in time and looked at how the quest for human perfection started down the bleak path where the first game began. The fourth game, a direct sequel to the third that takes place two years later in 2029, looks at the aftermath of the first cataclysm that comes from such a quest, and shows us that civil liberties and human rights are extremely malleable things that can always be redefined in service of a new, yet always familiar, ideal. Overwrought as the concern often was, there was a growing concern about civil liberties given the growing animus toward immigration across the West at the time of the game’s release in 2016; there was even some controversy surrounding the fourth game, with its invocation of a “mechanical apartheid.”

The concerns depicted in this trailer remained and continue to remain relevant to many people, especially so, ten years later; this applies just as much to those experiencing profound anxiety over ICE raids in places like Minneapolis in 2026 to those who experienced profound anxiety over COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine passports in 2020-2021. The specifics are different, as are the people experiencing anxiety, and so too are the specific plot points of the appropriately-subtitled Mankind Divided that saw humans without augmentations called “naturals” and those with them “gonks.” However, the cognitive mapping in all cases is the same and the writers of this game—and all of the other games—understood that.

The real tragedy was that there was never a follow-up to the fourth installment thanks to supposedly disappointing sales numbers. The Deus Ex series’ specific plot points, entertaining and compelling as they are, honestly pale in comparison to its world-building and sophisticated exploration of such vital and shockingly prescient themes. As much as I have always appreciated most incarnations of Star Trek as a fan of science-fiction, Deus Ex is a true triumph in terms of depicting a future I don’t have to imagine, at least compared to Gene Roddenberry’s strange post-scarcity neo-socialist utopia. Ironically, perhaps, there have been moments in Star Trek’s canon where it has been stated that humankind’s purpose is for us to better ourselves. As explained above, Deus Ex has made the same claim. However, Star Trek has often made the implication that, thanks to that aforementioned strange post-scarcity neo-socialist utopia being the setting, human beings currently are not pursuing that same goal today. To pursue betterment (or perfection) for its own sake is seen, per Star Trek, as transcendence of our current or older form as a species; per Deus Ex (and I agree with this), it is merely a continuation of the norm, with the warts and all that come from the human condition. Hence, why entries in the Deus Ex series feel like a downright fortune teller and those in Star Trek feel like a doe-eyed fantasy (though there are of course some moments in the various series that deal with the theme of engineered perfection at an individual level; lest we forget, the classic villain Khan was the leader of genetically engineered ubermenschen).

The alternative to engineered perfection, especially in the context of creating meaning where none supposedly exists, is often framed as a dedication to some version of “purity,” often in religious terms, and if we are indeed in the opening stages of a new culture-wide embrace of engineered perfection (which could also be said to include GLP-1’s, improved plastic surgery, and, of course, Looksmaxxing), I doubt that would change. As much as I find all claims of “purity” to be generally distasteful, I have increasingly found myself to have more intellectual sympathy for such claims; in other words, I may not like them or their implications, but I completely understand why these claims of “purity” can resonate. This is partly thanks to my experience playing the Deus Ex series, but it is also thanks to my unease and moral disgust regarding past attempts at engineered perfection in our not-so-distant history. Near future dystopian stories of a hypothetical “mechanical apartheid” might be unsettling enough, but true stories of forced sterilization, human experimentation, and genocide from the recent past are downright terrifying. What terrifies me is not the idea that these are all “the same”; what terrifies me is that they all come from the same psychological impulse.

It must be said that this could be much ado about nothing. There have been plenty of memes made and commentary had about how, well, silly this whole Clavicular thing is. Despite my high-minded attempts to connect this phenomenon to the history of eugenics and the speculative dystopian fiction of relatively high-brow video games, “Looksmaxxing is,” as Katherine Dee recently put it, “what our society already encourages: endless self-optimization toward nothing, a life of becoming.” This could just be more cultural wheel-spinning. As Dee further explains, “The Human Potential Movement [of the mid-20th century] promised that everyone could be more. What we live with now is the hangover, the conviction that we must be. What Looksmaxxing offers is potential itself as a terminal condition, becoming that never arrives, a body always in progress and never in use.” It could well be that the inherent silliness of the Looksmaxxing meme will be a barrier to entry to anyone searching for meaning in a meaning-starved world.

So yes, it might indeed be silly for me (and probably is) to project into our near future based on the antics of a weird guy IRL streaming on Kick and how his quest for perfection kind of sounds like the calls for eugenic health a century ago. But lest we forget, the idea of a former reality TV show host with the verbal IQ of an eight year old boy and overall-consummate-douchebag running for president, much less winning (twice, NON-CONSECUTIVELY) was just as silly, especially since he resembled populist clowns of our past from Denis Kearney to Huey Long, not the monstrosities of Hitler or Stalin. History is full of things we recognize as silly, often for good reason, but they exist, have influence, and most importantly can reflect broader trends, nonetheless. I have no idea if this is one of those times because neither does anyone else. But I would not be surprised if the cultural historians of the 2050s see a through-line to their present that includes some of the silliest things we see happening now.

I am wont to often say, and for good reason, that history is not something that gives us one-to-one analogies. A Gen-Z influencer calling itself “Clavicular” is not literally the same thing as the intellectuals, politicians, and other elites promoting the eugenics craze of 100 years ago. Clavicular and this trend he currently embodies is also not literally the same thing depicted in the world of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. But all three examples—two real, one fictional—share the same impulse. That impulse—of engineered perfection—is the same regardless of external context, and one to which we should never ignore, especially if it begins to grow as a trend. Trends often begin with individuals and it does not take long—especially in the 21st century—for such trends to expand into something far larger than niche communities. And the trend of attempting engineered perfection is indeed one we have seen before, and it did not end well. There is no reason to believe such a thing would end well again if it became more widespread, especially when it is clear that the thing that deeply gnaws at people like Clavicular is the world’s supposed dearth of real meaning.

In other words, this has less to do with “Clavicular” than it does with what he and many like him—in the past, present, and in the future—are pursuing. He might be a punchline (and he is certainly that), but what he is searching for, for our entertainment and commentary, is much more than social media clout, if we are to take him at face value. What he is searching for has endured for all of human history: meaning. And for many people throughout history, meaning often comes from the pursuit of perfection. Countless numbers of people have pursued this goal via these means with far more primitive technology and have created far more devastating results, especially when their obsessions are bought up to scale. As Edwin Black wrote in his book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race:

Mankind’s quest for perfection has always turned dark. Man has always existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength.

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