Abstract
A bitter irony of mass dictatorship is that perpetrators became self-asserted victims in retrospect. Many perpetrators among the kleine Leute perceived themselves as victims, explaining apologetically that they were forced to commit crimes. Given the substantial degree of popular backing, self-mobilization, consent from below and plebiscitary acclamation enjoyed by the regime, people were indeed very likely to be “victims” of their own complicity. Rank-and-file perpetrators alleged they happened to be just in the wrong place at the wrong time of the mass killing. Some of them asserted they never fired a shot. Others acknowledged they did, but they claimed implausibly that they were blameless instruments of the alien will of an overwhelming power. Like Adolph Eichmann, many a middle-ranking desk murderer claimed when challenged that he (or she) had never pulled the trigger, never killed, never slapped the victim’s face and even had never been an anti-Semite. In a travesty of Kant’s categorical imperative, Eichmann claimed that, as a loyal civil servant, he was obeying not only orders, but the law.
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Lim, JH. (2016). Victimhood. In: Corner, P., Lim, JH. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43763-1_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43763-1_34
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