News on Youtube Jan 29 2018

"I think I've always been interested in the psychological questions.

But the question of causation is a different one.

I think the simplest way to express it is to talk about this "atrocity triangle".

There is a triangle... in one corner there are the victims, to whom things are done,

and to whom bad things happen, and they're the objects of genocide or political massacre,

or they become slaves, or whatever.

They're the victim corner.

Then there's the perpetrator corner, which is dominated by the causal question: "Why

do people do terrible things?"

Where all sorts of interesting questions have been asked.

"Do they have to believe in what they do?"

Look at the literature on the Holocaust, Goldhagen says, "Yes, they did believe them.

They were real ideological anti-Semites".

Bauman says, you know, "No, you're talking about a victory for modernity.

It's something to do with bureaucracy gone mad.

It's nothing to do with belief systems like anti-Semitism".

There you have psychological questions, or people say this, "Are they authoritarians?"

"Are they cruel?"

"Is it something about their upbringing?"

So the victim and the perpetrator corner.

But I always was interested in the third corner, which is the onlooker corner.

I think that's the difference.

Not whether it's sociological or psychological.

The experience in South Africa led me at the personal level to the sense of being in the

oppressor class.

Then, at the theoretical level to explain the causes of such oppression.

Gradually, though, I came to sense the problem, was the problem in the third corner of the

bystander, the onlooker, the person who knows about, or hears about atrocities, or might

physically see it happen.

I think bullying in school is the archetypal situation – there is the bully and there

is the person who is being bullied – but there's always 20 kids who are watching.

Now, is their silent watching lending encouragement to the bully?

Sometimes yes, sometimes they actively form a shield so that the teachers can't see

the bullying going on.

Or are they just pretty terrified themselves, and do they identify with the victim, but

they're too scared to say that?

And so on, you know.

Now take that emblematic picture of the kid being bullied, and 20 watching as an image

of the audience of our organisation's report on torture.

Of course, we were looking to achieve some change.

We wanted the government to immediately end these practices.

We wanted Amnesty to investigate them.

We wanted international judgements.

Yes, the aim was a standard Human Rights aim, you want people to observe the Human Rights

prohibitions.

But my interest from the start was not on formal human rights agenda alone.

I was always going back to my South African interest, which now was, "Well, how do the

average Israelis deal with this information?" "