Obedience has caused more hideous crimes than rebellion has

Evidence

Self-exonerating obedience to horrific orders is similarly evident in military atrocities, such as the My Lai massacre (Kelman, 1973). The incidence of genocidal violence testifies to the writer C. P. Snow’s insightful observation that “more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion.” In an effort to deter institutionally sanctioned atrocities, the Nuremberg Principles declared that obedience to inhumane orders, even orders from the highest authorities, does not relieve subordinates of responsibility for their actions. However, victors rarely try their upper-echelon authorities as criminals. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 405 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Thus, here is the oppressor oppressed in turn; and the men who do violence to him in their turn become masters, tyrants, and executioners: in revolting, the oppressed are metamorphosed into a blind force, a brutal fatality; the evil which divides the world is carried out in their own hearts. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 98 (#complicates, via linked claim)

From among them, maroon units were formed and for two months, long after the suppression of the Black Regiment, they continued to resist the military, and the now emboldened colonial militia. Given the framework of the trial records we know too little of these slaves’ activities beyond the fact that many of them ended up like David Atkinson, “the Shell Blower,” whose trial disposition read: “Hanged by the Neck, til he is dead, dead, dead.” Just how many can never be known. But the official parish returns were horrible enough: 626 tried, 312 executed, 300 flogged, imprisoned for life or transported. In this tragic record, however, the slave societies of the West Indies had also written their own end. In their brutal repression, their flirtations with treason against the Empire, and their ruthless campaigns against the missionaries, they had overplayed their hand, lending their own resources to the cause of the slaves. By 1838, slavery in the British Empire had been officially abolished by a Parliament now “reformed” to enhance the power of industrial capital. “The slaves,” Mary Reckord reports, “had demonstrated to some at least of those in authority that it could prove more dangerous and expensive to maintain the old system than to abolish it.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 817 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Forced obedience to absolute power is worse than the state of nature — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 170; Obedience to authority has enabled more atrocities than outright rebellion has — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 405; Duty-driven obedience, not personality, predicts cruelty under authority — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 434 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Obedience to authority has enabled more atrocities than outright rebellion has #corroborates (1.00) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 405
• Violent revolt infects the oppressed with the oppressor’s own evil #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 98
• Slave rebellion made maintaining slavery costlier than abolition. #complicates (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 817