Shakespeare's Macbeth experiences enormous guilt after several murders, as do the villains in many other stories.
Yet instigators of wars and other atrocities have often felt no guilt. Why? Often it is because those who create the greater suffering perceives their acts as self defense. If persons, like Macbeth, commit crimes to climb to a higher level of power, then they are likely to feel guilt.
On the other hand, if people commit atrocities to lay down the law and maintain what they already have and perceive it as self defense, their conscience is deactivated and they generally experience no remorse.
History shows that the leaders who have the most all embracing, expansive and enlarged view of self defense are likely to act preemptively and even aggressively. The perpetrators of many of the sorriest chapters of our history (whether it is the mistreatment of Indians or the internment of the Japanese during World War II) were done in the name of self defense.
It is very rare when the perpetrators of massacres ever acknowledge that their massacres were not justified. But in December 2002 former president of Serbia, Biljana Plavsic, explained to the World Court in the Hague Netherlands how she had helped lead her nation to commit massacres against other ethnic groups of Yugoslavia. In World War II, Serbs had been victims of those other ethnic groups and she had a "blinding fear" this would reoccur and thus supported the decision of war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, to act preemptively. "In this obsession to never again become victims, we allowed ourselves to become victimizers." After her confession, she was vilified in Serbia, where many felt her massacres had been prudent self defense.
Dick Cheney articulated a most extreme doctrine of self defense. It is well described in Pulitzer Prize winning author Ron Suskind's book "The One Percent Doctrine." Cheney felt that if there was a 1 percent chance that our enemies were conspiring against us, then we had to treat it as a certainty. This was the basis of the Bush's decision to preemptively attack Iraq. Cheney viewed the illegal invasion as self defense.
But Herod, who initiated the slaughter of innocents (Matthew 2:16), also probably viewed himself as acting in self defense. As Isaac Asimov observes that at the time any Jew with a realistic view of the balance of power between Judea and Rome would have viewed nationalist agitation with absolute horror. "Herod might therefore be viewed as clearly feeling it to be his duty to nip all Messianic hopes in the bud -- for the good of all."
Josef Stalin, who was shaped by and suffered from paranoia -- and caused millions of others to suffer -- certainly viewed his acts action as self defense. To see his fears in context, recall that the U.S., Britain and other capitalist nations had invaded Soviet Russia in 1918.
The U.S. suffered hundreds of casualties before it called it quits and withdrew in 1920. The capitalist invasions contributed to an attitude of take no chances.
The files of the Soviet NKVD archives indicate that Stalin, who came to rule after Vladimir Lenin's death in 1924 until his own death in 1953, had some variant of the 1 percent doctrine. From 1921 to 1953, there were a total of 799,455 executions. While some of these were for nonpolitical crimes, such as murder, rape and assault, and many others were those who collaborated with invaders, that is nevertheless a horrendous number which suggests he was guided by the logic of our beef recalls: destroy what is questionable.
Virtually all people see the 1 percent doctrine as evil when applied by Herod or Stalin.
Most of the world and millions of Americans recognize that it is a doctrine which cannot be universally accepted and so can have no place in a society which aspires to be just. It is unfortunate that our society was recently guided by that doctrine.
The 1 percent doctrine distorts budgetary priorities, unnecessarily endangers untold numbers of lives, undermines our values and sullies our image.
Jones lives in West Haven.
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