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STATE CRIME - Coggle Diagram
STATE CRIME
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4 CATEGORIES OF STATE CRIMES
1) political crimes
- such as rigging elections or appointing officials corruptly
2) crimes of the police and security forces
- such as torture, genocide, illegal detention and using unjustified violence against demonstrators
- AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL - minimum of 111 countries practised torture and ill-treatment in 20009
3) economic crimes
- such as failing to pay state employees the minimum wage, or breaking health and safety regulations in state-run enterprises
4) social and cultural crimes
- such as mistreatment of minority ethnic groups, e.g. suppressing minority languages
CASE STUDY:
- 2003 UK (Tony Blair) and USA (George Bush) invaded Iraq to remove the dictator Saddam Hussein from power
- any believed that this decision broke international laws as president Bush and Blair had not secured the agreement of the international community via the UN Security Council to invade Iraq
EXPLAINING STATE CRIME
- genocides may be ordered and organised by leaders of states, they can't happen without the cooperation of ordinary soldiers, police and civilians
- e.g. in both Rwanda and Nazi Germany, genocide needed the involvement of a large proportion of the population
the authoritarian personality
- Adorno et al - identify an 'authoritarian personality' that includes a willingness to obey the orders of superiors without question
- argue that at the time of WW2, many germans has authoritarian personality types due to the punitive, disciplinarian socialisation patterns that were common at the time
- also thought that people who carry out turtle and genocide must be psychopaths - however research suggests that there is little psychological difference between them and 'normal' people
- e.g. Arendt's study of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann showed him to be relatively normal and not particularly anti-semitic
Crimes of obedience
- crime usually defined as deviance from social norms, however state crimes are crimes of conformity since they require obedience to a higher authority - the state or its representative
- e.g. in a corrupt police unit, the officer who accepts bribes is conforming to the unit's norms, while at the same time breaking the law - conforming to one law means deviating the other
- research suggests that many people are willing to obey authority even when this involves harming others
- sociologists argue that such actions are part of a role into which individuals are socialised, they focus on the social conditions in which atrocities become acceptable/required
- Green and Ward - in order to overcome norms against the use of cruelty, individuals who become torturers often need to be re-socialised, trained and exposed to propaganda about 'the enemy'
- states also frequently create 'enclaves of barbarism' where torture is practised (military bases)
- allows the torturer to regard it as a 9-5 job from which they can return to normal everyday life
- from a study of the my Lai massacre in Vietnam, where a platoon of American soldiers killed 400 civilians
- kelman and Hamilton identiify 3 general features that produce crimes of obedience
1) authorisation - when acts are ordered or approved by those in authority, normal moral principles are replaced by the duty to obey
2) routinisation - once the crime has been committed there is a strong pressure to turn the act into a routine that individuals can perform in a detached manner
3) dehumanisation - when the enemy is portrayed as sub-human, normal principles of morality do not apply
CASE STUDY - OSKAR GROENING
- did he know what he was doing was actually wrong?
- former Nazi SS guard who has gone on trial in Germany over the mass killings in the Auschwitz concentration camp
- admitted he shares a 'moral guilt' and asked for forgiveness
- was 91 when trialled
- said it was up to the court to decide if he should be convicted as an accessory to 300,000 murders
- became known as the 'accountant of Auschwitz' as he documented the possessions of the newly arrived prisoners
- denies being involved with any mass murder
Modernity
- some commentators argue that the Nazi holocaust represented a breakdown of modern civilisation and a reversion to pre-modern barbarism
- however, Zygmunt Bauman - takes the opposite view - it was certain key features of modern society that made the holocaust possible:
- a division of labour - each person was responsible for just one small task, so no one felt personally responsible for the atrocity
- Bureacratisation - normales the killing by making it a repetitive, rule-governed and routine 'job'
- also means that the victims could be dehumanised as mere 'units'
- instrumental rationallity - where rational, efficient methods are used to achieve a goal, regardless of what the goal is
- science and technology - from the railways transporting victims to the death camps, to the industrially produced gas to kill them
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