A trauma studies scholar who interviewed members of the Chukiren, a group of war criminals, describes the difficulties of his work:
I recently wrote a piece for CNN about a Syrian rebel who carved out a man’s heart and began to eat it. The editor had asked me to explain what could make a man do such a thing. I tried to explain, and many people were outraged by what I wrote. In one way or another, they were all saying: You think when you try to understand why men do evil things, you are going to learn something that might help prevent atrocities in the future. But really you are just excusing the perpetrators, justifying unjustifiable actions. The only thing you need to understand about evil is how to punish it.
Many of the Chukiren have died since I last spoke with them. The others are failing rapidly. I’m not sure I ever really came to understand them. But that is not because what they did is beyond understanding, not because evil is some kind of mystery. In some ways, it is all quite simple. If I had been a 19-year-old when my country entered into a genocidal war, I would have done the same thing everybody else did. That’s true for most of us. Making monsters is a straightforward process, and nation-states are expert at it.
Why the war criminals did what they did—in the end, that is not what I find hard to understand. What I find hard to understand is what must it be like to be the person who did those things. When we imagine getting perpetrators into our hands, the first thing we think about is punishment, what we as a society are going to do to them. But I think the real and final punishment is having to be the person you are.
The Dish 