Seeing victims as fellow humans can override group-sanctioned killing orders

Evidence

The transformative power of humanization is graphically illustrated by the actions of one man during a military massacre in 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War (Zganjar, 1998). An American platoon led by Lieutenant William Calley had killed about 500 Vietnamese women, children, and elderly men in the village of My Lai. … He spotted an injured girl, marked her location with a smoke signal, and radioed for help. To his horror, he saw a soldier flip her over and spray her with a burst of machine-gun fire. When he saw bodies of the villagers heaped in an irrigation ditch and soldiers firing into them, he realized that he was watching a massacre. … Thompson was moved to moral action by the sight of a terrified woman with a baby in her arms and a frightened child clinging to her leg. He described his sense of common humanity: “These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them.” He told a platoon officer to help him remove the remaining villagers. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 652

Categorization

• XREF: Hugh Thompson’s leap over the in-group/out-group line directly parallels the ‘vault claims’ on how ordinary people rationalize — and occasionally refuse to rationalize — harming a demonized out-group. — connects to: Extermination stage killing requires that killers see victims as less than fully human — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 8; Comparing victims to animals makes their murder easier — Gregory H. Stanton, Ten Stages of Genocide, 14
• ADDENDUM: Buttresses the sacrifice piece’s and the trees piece’s shared interest in individual moral breaks against institutionalized harm; the My Lai refusal is a case study of resistance overriding sanctioned violence.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 652