Ordinary People Do Terrible Things

Evil acts are easily normalized

There are two people I think about from time to time. Thanks to the machinations of history, we only know one of their names: Nanaya-ila’i. That wasn’t the name she had been given, and probably wasn’t the name she preferred, but one that was foisted upon her later in life. We have no idea what the second woman, Nanaya-ila’i’s daughter, was called, either by her mother or by the slavers who ripped the two from their place of birth in the territory of Elam and took them to captivity in Assyria. The two women lived and died more than 2,600 years ago in the fading days of the Assyrian Empire, collateral damage in a campaign that saw the utter destruction of Elam, located in today’s southwestern Iran. Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were torn from their homes and marched hundreds of miles to a life of slavery in the city of Aššur, the spiritual heart and namesake of the Assyrian Empire. We only know of their existence, and Nanaya-ila’i’s name, because the two appear in a cuneiform document recording their sale to a merchant some time between 646 and 620 BC. This man, Mannu-kī-Aššūr, paid the price of one mina of silver, about 500 grams for the adult woman and her daughter.¹

What remained of the city of Aššur in 2008 (image from Encyclopedia Britannica)

This is the only time Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter appear in the historical record. We have no idea what happened to them, but it’s likely that they remained in the city of Aššur until its sack at the hands of the invading Medes, part of a coalition of enemies that eventually toppled the mighty Assyrian Empire. If that was the case, then Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter experienced not one but two brutal campaigns of mass violence in their lives. The first had seen them captured and enslaved in a foreign land, with no hope of ever seeing their home in Elam again; the second involved the brutal sack of the city in which they had lived for decades, with all the horror - massacres, mass sexual violence, and destruction - that went along with it. If they survived, then the two women were almost certain to have been enslaved again, perhaps to be sold east, to Media, or south, to Babylonia.

Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were just two of the thousands upon thousands of victims of the Assyrian Empire, most of whose names have been lost over the centuries. The Assyrian Empire was just one of the many aggressive polities that has produced victims by the thousands over the past several millennia: The Romans did no better in Gaul or Dacia. Alexander the Great razed Thebes on his way to far more expansive conquests. The crusaders who took Jerusalem in 1099 waded ankle-deep in blood, Timur Lenk left behind towers of skulls marking his conquests. Pizarro slaughtered the Inca by the score. The Nazis left behind millions of corpses. As long as grasping rulers and would-be warlords have sought to expand their power, common people have suffered the consequences, just like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter.

But those ambitious politicians and conquerors didn’t do the dirty work themselves. They had underlings, generals and officers and common soldiers and bureaucrats, to enforce their will. Those underlings participated in acts that, by any reasonable standard of moral behavior, range from the merely distasteful to completely abhorrent. It would be comforting to think that those who murdered children, burned houses with the residents inside, committed acts of sexual violence, and enslaved the survivors were uniquely evil. It would be easier to believe that these participants had somehow forfeited their humanity somewhere along their path to organized violence. We would prefer to fool ourselves into thinking they formed a special class of malefactors separate from the farmers and shopkeepers and laborers who made up their societies as a whole. These ideas would be wrong. The agents of empire and conquest were not a marked group of sadists; they fit quite comfortably within the mainstream of the societies that produced them and benefited from their actions.

There are exceptions, of course, in varying degrees. Soldiers serving at the sharp end of campaigns of conquest might be drawn from specific ethnic or social groups outside the mainstream, such as Ottoman Janissaries or the semi-barbarian professionals of the later Roman Empire. They might have become habituated to violence through long periods of service, thinking little of heinous acts that would shock and horrify civilians. But by and large, those soldiers - even if they were disproportionately likely to perform military service - were drawn from the normal strata of their societies. The Romans who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC were citizen-soldiers, even if that often meant many years of experience in the later years of the Middle Republic. The mercenaries who sacked Rome in 1527 and committed a variety of atrocities, ranging from the rape of nuns and murder of civilians to the desecration of holy relics, had gone unpaid for years; for many of them, war was their chosen profession, but far more saw it as an occasional side-business for a season or two between monotonous stints in workshops or fields.

The group of ten men who profited from the sale of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter in the city of Aššur were entirely ordinary. That group included a baker, a weaver, a cook, a shepherd, an ironsmith, and a goldsmith, some of whom worked for a local temple. The most likely explanation for how they came into the possession of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter is that these ten men formed a kisru, or “knot,” the standard unit in which Assyrians performed their required services to the king. These ten ordinary men were thus part-time soldiers, called up for the campaign to Elam, and Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter were their payment for their service on that campaign. When they got back to Aššur, the ten-man kisru couldn’t easily divide up two captives, so they sold her and split the profits: about 50 grams of silver per man, which they then took back to their homes, families, and occupations as iron- and goldsmiths, bakers, and cooks. The two Elamite women were enslaved, and the ten Assyrian men benefited directly from their participation in that campaign.

Did the weaver and cook talk about it, we might wonder? Did they tell their wives and children about what they had seen during the vicious sack of the Elamite capital of Susa, the fire and the ransacked royal tombs and desecrated temples that the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal bragged about in his account of these events, the wanton killing and sexual assault, the enslaved who died on the march back to Aššur? Were they proud of what they’d done, did they feel shame, or did they even think about those events? Did they seem like the actions of other people in other lives, unconnected to the workaday existence of an ironmonger and a baker going about their lives in the spiritual home of the Assyrian Empire?

We simply don’t know the answers to those questions, and we never will. The source material that would allow us to formulate an answer doesn’t exist. The members of that Assyrian kisru who profited from the sale of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter left behind no narratives of their inner lives and thoughts that might allow us to construct a ground-up view of Assyrian imperialism: no journals, no inscriptions, nothing of that sort. They appeared in the historical record for that one fleeting moment, just as Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter did, but as the beneficiaries rather than the victims of an organized campaign of conquest and terror. The 50 grams of silver each received would have gone toward food, shelter, a set of fine pottery, investment in a trading enterprise, better tools for the ironworker or goldsmith, or perhaps even the purchase of another enslaved person. They materially benefited from the suffering of the Elamites in general and Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter in particular. Why should the members of that kisru, or the thousands of other Assyrians who participated in the campaign, have felt bad about it? Why should their wives and children and dependents? That was how the world worked. Within decades, of course, the same fate would be visited upon them by the Medes.

The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, who led the expedition to Elam, certainly didn’t feel bad about it; he celebrated his accomplishments, the deeds his soldiers carried out on his behalf. Here’s how he describes his actions: “I had the sanctuaries of the land Elam utterly destroyed and I counted its gods and its goddesses as ghosts… I destroyed and devastated the tombs of their earlier and later kings… I took their bones to Assyria. I prevented their ghosts from sleeping and deprived them of funerary-offerings and libations… On a march of one month and twenty-five days, I devastated the districts of the land Elam and scattered salt and cress over them.”

Ashurbanipal in his garden, with the head of the Elamite king on the left side.

The image above depicts Ashurbanipal relaxing in his garden while being attended to by a coterie of servants. The decapitated head of the Elamite king hangs from a tree on the left side of the image. Ashurbanipal didn’t cut that head off himself; other people, men no different than the goldsmith and weaver and cook, did the deed at his command. Perhaps they felt they had no choice. Perhaps they felt disgusted and had nightmares about it for the rest of their days. Perhaps they celebrated their participation, and told the story to rapt audiences in taverns and wine-shops: It wasn’t every day one got to decapitate a king, after all.

Assyrian kings were particularly vociferous about the gory details of their conquests, but they differed from other conquerors of that age and others only in their commitment to recording flayings, decapitations, and salting the earth. Their Neo-Babylonian successors, who famously destroyed Jerusalem in 587 BC and thus began the Babylonian Exile, were if anything worse; they just bragged about it less. The list of conquerors goes on and on: Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Umayyads, Mongols, all the way up to the empires of the recent past. While we may know the names of the rulers who so desperately wanted to be remembered, we shouldn’t forget about the people on the business end of those conquests, those who held the swords and the torches. We shouldn’t let them off the hook, just as we shouldn’t forget their victims, people like Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, whose names so rarely enter the historical record.

It’s only in much more recent times that we have access to the detailed workings of a campaign of mass violence, including the thoughts and actions of those who participated directly. The best documented and most thoroughly explored is, of course, the Holocaust. In my opinion, the most illuminating book on the topic is the historian Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution. Browning’s research focuses on a unit of reservists, Police Battalion 101, who were drawn from the utterly average population of the city of Hamburg.

Hamburg was considered to be, if not anti-Nazi, then at least not particularly Nazi-fied. They weren’t dedicated Nazis, and only about 25 percent even belonged to the Nazi Party. They weren’t heavily indoctrinated shock troops. They weren’t recruited from a particularly violent and antisocial segment of German society. These were utterly ordinary men, dock-workers and truck drivers and waiters, hence the title of the book. Most were middle-aged family men, fathers and husbands, drawn from the working and lower middle classes. Few of the formation sent to Poland in 1942 had served in the earlier stages of the war, and only the very oldest reservists had fought in World War I.

But what these men did during their time in Poland was extraordinary in its scale and brutality. Over the course of less than a year, in the second half of 1942 and the first half of 1943, the several hundred members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 shot and killed 38,000 Jews. Many of those killings happened as mass executions with hundreds or thousands of victims; others took place as patrols swept the countryside for individuals or small groups. Using rifles, submachine guns, and pistols at point-blank range, they murdered men, women, and children, tossing them into hastily dug pits or leaving the bodies in the open. They walked away covered in the blood and viscera of their victims and went back to their barracks. Then, a few days or weeks later, they did it again.

Ordinary men with a few of their victims.

Somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the battalion refused to participate in these killings, despite a complete lack of formal consequences for those who wouldn’t shoot. This means that 80 to 90 percent of these entirely ordinary men became mass murderers without explicit coercion over the course of just a few months. Some relished their role in the killings, and volunteered for any opportunity to do more, but they were a minority compared to the willing but not especially enthusiastic participants. Most simply followed their orders, even when those orders meant murdering defenseless people of all ages. Browning’s thesis, in a nutshell, is this: “Ultimately, the Holocaust took place because at the most basic level individual human beings killed other human beings in large numbers over an extended period of time. The grass-roots perpetrators became “professional killers.”²

Historians have spent a great deal of time arguing about Ordinary Men and whether this holds true for the entire Holocaust. One forceful and oft-repeated counterargument states that the German populace as a whole was so steeped in a particular kind of virulent anti-Semitism that these men were ready and waiting to become mass murderers of Jews.³ As soon as they had their orders, that deep-rooted hatred kicked in, and the killings happened. Without denying the rampant anti-Semitism of the age, it doesn’t satisfactorily explain the leap to mass murder. Browning has engaged with that line of argument in great detail, as have the generation of historians to come afterward. I find his perspective - one focused on social pressure - much more convincing than the alternative, that Germans of the 1940s were uniquely qualified to become perpetrators of genocide.

Why? Because of Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, and the ten-man kisru that profited from their sale in the city of Aššur more than 2600 years ago. These perfectly ordinary perpetrators can be found all over history, from Aššur to post-war Hamburg, where the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 returned to their perfectly ordinary lives. They seamlessly re-integrated back into society, at least until they were thoroughly investigated for war crimes 20 years later. None became pariahs, just as the Assyrian baker and goldsmith did not become social outcasts. The Romans who destroyed Carthage in 146 BC went back to their farms after their years on campaign. Some of the people who committed mass murder in the Killing Fields in Cambodia are still smoking cigarettes outside Phnom Penh bars. The landsknechts and other mercenaries who sacked Rome in 1527 returned to their workshops and fields. Ordinary people did horrific things, and then went right back to being ordinary people, whatever nightmares they might have seen when they closed their eyes at night.

The destruction of Elam was not the Holocaust, just as the Rwandan Genocide wasn’t the Holocaust or the Cambodian Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t the Rwandan Genocide. The destruction of Elam wasn’t even the Assyrian destruction of Israel a century or so beforehand. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, the anti-Huguenot pogrom that killed between 5,000 and 20,000 people in France in 1572, differed meaningfully from the many anti-Jewish pogroms in the later Russian Empire. The Holocaust wasn’t the same as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide, the mass murder of indigenous people in what is now Namibia by the German Empire between 1904 and 1907, despite the fact that both were carried out by German authorities just a generation apart.

Each of those incidents and campaigns of mass violence stands on its own. Their logic was different. They proceeded in different ways, with death tolls ranging from the dozens to the millions. Some were straightforward land grabs in which killing was incidental. Others were ideologically motivated campaigns of murder for which the groundwork had been laid for decades or centuries. Still others were the result of sudden explosions of ethnic or religious hatred against a background of oppression or conflict. But what ties them together, aside from the mass violence, is the fact that utterly ordinary people participated in all of them. It doesn’t take all that much for a baker from Aššur or a truck-driver from Hamburg to turn into a willing enslaver and killer, even a mass murderer who pulled a lethal trigger hundreds of times, under the right circumstances. If those in positions of authority tell them that it’s acceptable or even admirable, if they’re given the tools and the opportunity to do so, then even the most average people can commit horrifying acts.

We would all like to believe that when faced with the choice, as the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 were before their first mass killing, we would at the very least refuse to participate. In the more flattering version, we would throw down our weapons, give a rousing speech about how wrong it all is, convince our weaker-willed comrades to do the same, and prevent this great tragedy from happening. We know that mass murder is wrong, that it’s wrong to drag somebody hundreds of miles away from home into slavery, to burn down their homes and do all the other horrible things that accompany war; how could anybody just go along with it, let alone embrace it?

The deeply uncomfortable answer is that the vast majority of us are just as ordinary as the members of Reserve Police Battalion 101. We’re not as different from the ten-man kisru that went to Elam and returned home with a pair of enslaved women to sell as we would like to believe. Americans of the 20th century, victors against those same Nazis - as close to canonical Good Guys as recent history might produce - still committed horrific war crimes.⁴ The 21st century, with all its aspirations toward and lofty rhetoric about peace and fairness and the rules-based international order, is still populated by people. Being able to recite a line from one of Martin Luther King’s speeches, or quote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, isn’t a vaccine against wanton cruelty. Social pressure, cultural norms, groupthink, whatever we might want to call it: we’re all susceptible, far more so than the comforting narratives we tell ourselves about free will, human rights, and the respect for our fellow people.

War, and even more mundane forms of ongoing conflict, can far too easily make monsters of us all. Once the horrors begin, they suck in even those who consider themselves good, solid, moral people. Under the right circumstances, we might all do terrible things.

1. On Nanaya-ila’i and her daughter, see Betina Feist, “An Elamite Deportee,” in Homeland and Exile, Brill, 2010. 59-69; and the relevant section of Karen Radner, Assyria: A Very Short Introduction. which has a wonderful discussion of the case.

2. Browning, Christopher R.. Ordinary Men (p. xvii). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

3. E.g. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.

4. Studs Terkel’s oral history of World War II, The Good War, is full of anecdotes from American participants about terrible things they did, and wished they hadn’t in the context of a conflict they felt was fully justified.