ATROCITY FIENDS ARE MADE, NOT BORN
Water, Marjorie Van De
Atrocity Fiends Are Made, Not Born By MARJORIE VAN DE WATER (Psychology Expert For Science Service) SICKENING stories of the inhuman cruelties in Nazi concentration camps reveal what can happen...
...Any person has within him the possibilities for hatred and crime and bestial cruelty...
...Hope For The Future The situation in Germany has undoubtedly been made worse by all the repressions, restrictions of liberty, regimentation, and harsh military discipline to which all the people have been subjected...
...It has been developed in them deliberately by their leaders and is a matter of calculated training from early childhood, not of innate qualities...
...Hope for the future lies in the fact that in Germany as elsewhere in the world, each new baby that is born is a completely new individual...
...But in most persons these forces are constantly balanced by others, equally strong, which make men want to build, not destroy...
...They fight best and display the greatest heroism and endurance and military skill when they are motivated by the spirit of loyalty and affection for the nation, their officers, and their friends...
...It is known definitely that in human minds such frustration leads always either to aggression or to a dangerous apathy...
...save life, not kill...
...Education and upbringing will make him civilized or barbaric, just as education and upbringing affected the behavior of the men and women of Germany today...
...Usually the hatred and cruelty find outlet on some helpless victim...
...Some persons, seeing this hatred being developed in Germany, have criticized our own Army officers for not developing a similar spirit of hatred and blood lust...
...When it is impossible, because of defeats, to vent this hatred on the enemy soldiers, it is taken out on helpless victims or minorities—political prisoners, neighbors, almost anyone who cannot defend himself...
...But experience has shown that American soldier's do not fight best motivated by hatred...
...have friends, not enemies...
...Atrocity Fiends Are Made, Not Born By MARJORIE VAN DE WATER (Psychology Expert For Science Service) SICKENING stories of the inhuman cruelties in Nazi concentration camps reveal what can happen to the people of a nation when deliberate effort is made to release and develop all the cruel and hateful forces that can exist in man...
...He inherits certain qualities from his parents, but he cannot inherit their bitter and embittering experiences...
...Aggressive forces are directed through education against common enemies such as disease, famine, unemployment, poverty, and ignorance...
...No Scientific Evidence American soldiers fight to defend liberty and their loved ones—not to kill and mutilate and destroy...
...So, propaganda agencies make a deliberate attempt to whip both soldiers and civilians into frenzies of hatred toward the enemy...
...When a man, or a nation, through mental disease or what is believed to be the exigencies of war, sets out to give free rein to all the worst that is in him and suppress all his better instincts, it is very difficult ever to restore the balance again...
...This Warning has been voiced repeatedly by psychiatrists not only in this country but in Europe...
...It is a belief, particularly in some European countries, that soldiers can fight a war successfully only when both they and the civilians of the nation learn to hate bitterly and cruelly...
...The human mind is also constituted so that if the aggression cannot be expressed as it properly should be on the oppressors, it easily turns on almost any other object...
...Psychologists know of no scientific evidence that the Germans are born with any more talent for hatred and cruelty than the people of any other nation...
Vol. 9 • May 1945 • No. 20
