Evil Men

He has since turned from violence and joined up with Amnesty International. More telling was this quote from one of the war criminals Dawes interviewed: This book is amazing and impacted how I think about ethics in the world. If I had to describe what this book covers I would say war crimes, ethics, human rights, and the state of scholarship and society relating to these topics. I've been on a non-fiction stint lately regarding generally dark topics and war crimes.

Dawes made me reflect on the i This book is amazing and impacted how I think about ethics in the world. Not to say these works are not valuable, quite the contrary. Rather, I think the common response even to good and informative books is passive when an active response is what the world really needs. I just want to do more now, and it's rare that one reads a book like that. I think Dawes is very candid and honest in the book about his thoughts and emotions as he meets these war criminals while also adding his academic perspective. Overall I would recommend this book to anyone looking to broaden their perspective on people and ethics.

Feb 19, Kali Altsoba rated it did not like it. The author of this would-be study of the causes and meaning of war crimes is a literary critic who conducted interviews with perpetrators of horrific atrocities, primarily Japanese Army soldiers who committed bestial crimes against Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War The moral imperatives that drive research into war crimes and perpetrator motivations are pressing. This is not the book to read if you are interested in any of that. A merely literary and overtly personal prese The author of this would-be study of the causes and meaning of war crimes is a literary critic who conducted interviews with perpetrators of horrific atrocities, primarily Japanese Army soldiers who committed bestial crimes against Chinese during the Second Sino-Japanese War A merely literary and overtly personal presentation takes center stage on nearly every page, pushing aside the perpetrators, the victims, and the meaning of what happened in this hugely pretentious failed book.

Everything is set behind personal, literary and cultural filters, presented as dilemmas of a paradox of evil that means nothing ever really means anything, unless it also means everything. Or something like that. Evil is demonic and other; it is also banal and common to us all We are free and self-determining; we are also the products of circumstance To find our meaning we must face our meaninglessness.

It is not an ad hominem attack to point out this theme of literature professor as world-changing moral hero. Yet the book is not really a study of atrocity in history or of human rights. It is a defense of poetry and professors of literature as having swollen ethical consequences. The interviews themselves hardly make an appearance. They are used as garnish to professorial self-indulgence. I am not making this up. What matters is what these stories do.

Remarkably, this passage was not excised by editors at Harvard University Press: Idealists shatter, I argue —realists trudge on. But Barb is making me rethink this. Few interested in military history or the atrocities attending the Second Sino-Japanese War will find much to hold their interest in these pages.

Or be impressed by sudden, sweeping conclusions on the general nature of war that appear ex nihilo, such as: This is all about therapy for writers, not history or atrocity or actual human suffering on a Unit vivisection slab. Dawes is quite explicit about that: They seek less to touch the real than to recover from it The critical study of human rights It allows one to experience self-preoccupation as an aspect of a purportedly universalizing institutional structure. Nov 08, Ren rated it it was amazing Shelves: It made me cringe, cry, reflect, and question my conception of the world.

How do normal people commit atrocity and how do they live with themselves after? So many thoughts, it will take a couple of years for me to understand all this book had to offer. Jul 04, Jamie Mason rated it it was amazing. It easily evil menand immediately takes a place in my top five favorite books.

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I do remember him, but I imagine that most of the class of remembers him. He was like that. Brilliant, kind, and athletic, he rather had all of his ducks in a row back then, which is remarkable for any kid that age. But there was more gravity to Jim than there was to other socially and academically successful teenagers.

He was prominent in an unusual way, even if that way is still difficult to articulate all these years later. It left an impression that has lasted decades and definitely had something to do with being able to relate comfortably to a gaggle of peers while thinking quite a bit beyond us. Apparently that has carried over into a life of valuable research and singular eloquence. These very old men recounted, through a translator, the horrors they had meted out in uniform during the Sino-Japanese wars. It broadens from there into a display of theory, ethics, scientific study, history, philosophy, and human rights advocacy, all tethered in a coherence that I would have to be incoherent to adequately express my admiration of.

This is by no means a one sit read. It demands and rewards deliberation. There is no making sense of the things we do to each other, especially under the banner of military duty, but the value in this book is discovering that maybe there is a way to make sense of it not making sense. This is not an entertaining book. The moral paradoxes of relating these traumas are thoroughly addressed. Doing justice to the victims with mere words while evoking the necessary vividness to adequately represent the crimes is no easy task.

Then avoiding catapulting the whole works into gratuitous carnival takes the utmost heartfelt precision, which he exhibits without faltering. James Dawes is exacting of himself as a researcher, as a writer, and as a moral human being. Following his lead through the nautilus of self-examination is effortless and, somehow, not terrifying. If the model of morality is in any way analogous to the model of physics, then this book inspires the hope that perhaps it all works in the same way quantum mechanics plays under the screen of our observable, Newtonian world.

Maybe in the act of just examining our malleability and by measuring our own frailty, perhaps we change it. Go get this challenging, wonderful book. Mar 17, Tom Crosby rated it really liked it. This was a fascinating read and contains more than enough insight to NOT rely on other materials. Mar 28, Graham rated it it was amazing. James Dawes tackles the complicated subject of atrocity and, more specifically, is interested in analyzing and understanding the people who commit acts of violence.

This is a constant curiosity for thinkers in all societies, but the writing and form of "Evil Men" is so unique and accessible that the book provides a lens into what is, for most readers, an unfamiliar world, but in a way that is both easy and thrilling to read. What makes this book not like any other on the subject is the intense pe James Dawes tackles the complicated subject of atrocity and, more specifically, is interested in analyzing and understanding the people who commit acts of violence.

What makes this book not like any other on the subject is the intense personal nature of it. A great deal of the book recounts personal testimonies from war criminals, primarily former Japanese soldiers. These testimonies are powerful and intimate, stories that are at times surprisingly relatable. Personal stories where we can hear the voices of the "evil men" are rare, providing an insight otherwise unavailable to us.

Intermingled with these stories is the narrative of the Dawes, the author, interviewing and speaking with the men. The self-awareness of the research and analysis is apparent, and I for one greatly appreciated the transparency of the author, and found his story fascinating and personal, drawing connections to himself and his own life just like the reader. You can tell how deeply Dawes cares about this subject and handling it with care.

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But the book isn't just a collection of experiences. Dawes expertly weaves in the works of other thinkers and academics on the subject, providing an analysis of violence and humanity. But this book never feels "academic," and is as much of a page-turner as any book I've read. There is a great deal we can learn about ourselves in the process of understanding others, especially those who may seem so unlike us on the surface, but feel just like we do, everything from love to jealousy, friendship to hatred. Dawes navigates this territory masterfully, resulting in a book anyone can pick up and start reading, and that everyone will want to finish.

Dec 16, Michelle rated it it was amazing. Evil Men is a unique work that seeks to plumb the depths of human capability, raising disturbing and difficult questions about what it means to be human, and offering no easy answers. In its narrative style, with no formal chapters or divisions, it bounces deftly between segments of first-hand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Asia-Pacific War, researched theory in psychology and sociology, philosophical musings, and personal admissions, with a pace more akin at times to stream-of Evil Men is a unique work that seeks to plumb the depths of human capability, raising disturbing and difficult questions about what it means to be human, and offering no easy answers.

In its narrative style, with no formal chapters or divisions, it bounces deftly between segments of first-hand interviews with convicted war criminals from the Asia-Pacific War, researched theory in psychology and sociology, philosophical musings, and personal admissions, with a pace more akin at times to stream-of-consciousness than structured academic argumentation.

Dawson wants his readers to understand that the people behind these atrocities are not monsters. While it may be comforting to demonize, to think that they are fundamentally different from us, he encourages us to acknowledge that they are every bit as human as we all are: He wants us to understand why such people make the choices they make but - importantly - to know that to understand is by no means to excuse. Dawson uses his experience of interviewing war criminals to provide a set of considerations and meditations on much larger and more fundamental questions of human existence.

In order to understand what it means to be good, we cannot avert our eyes from atrocity, nor the people who commit them. Only honestly about the paradoxes of humanity - a firm and stark acknowledgement of all the things of which we are capable, our depts and our heights - will provide us the moral, ethical, psychological and philosophical tools necessary to resist the pressure conform, to render others less-than-human, to obey even those who would have us destroy one another.

On May 7, , Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as But Pedro Lopez deserves a spot. Lopez was picked up by a pedophile while still young, and was repeatedly raped before he was taken away by an American family and enrolled in a school for orphans.

After being sodomized by a teacher, he ran away and found himself in prison at There, Lopez was gang-raped and allegedly killed three of the rapists while still incarcerated. After his jail sentence was complete, his killing spree began. He claimed that, by , he had killed more than young girls, and later he confessed to more than murders. It is not known if he is alive or dead. Eichmann was the organizational talent that orchestrated the mass deportation of Jews from their countries into waiting ghettos and extermination camps. He learned Hebrew and studied all things Jewish in order to manipulate Jews, through his power of coercion, to leave their occupied territories and possessions in favor of a better life in the ghettos.

He fled Germany at the end of the war via a ratline to south America, and was captured by the Mossad in Argentina. He was extradited to Israel and executed by hanging in , after a highly publicized trial.

Mengele initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer. His crimes were evil and many. When it was reported that one hospital block was infested with lice, Mengele gassed every single one of the women assigned to it.

Mengele used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation. He was particularly interested in identical twins. He survived the war and, after a period living incognito in Germany, he fled to South America, where he evaded capture for the rest of his life, despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.

Born in Vienna, December 11, , Amon Goeth joined a Nazi youth group at seventeen, moved to a nationalist paramilitary group at nineteen, and, in , when he was twenty-two, joined the — then outlawed — Austrian Nazi Party. He was designated No. His superior officers admired his devotion, gave him glowing personal evaluations and transferred him to the S. A son was born in , and died of unexplained causes less than a year later. At Plaszow, Amon Goeth passed his mornings by using his high-powered, scoped rifle to shoot at children playing in the camp.

After the war, he was hanged by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland, for murdering thousands of people. Another Jew, Poldek Pfefferberg, recalled Goeth this way: The Method and Madness of Monsters at Amazon. Nicolae Ceausescu was dictator of Romania from to Ceausescu decreed that all women must bear five children. More than , children were crowded into these institutions. Many died of malnutrition and disease. Others ran away, becoming homeless beggars. Through transfusions and shared vaccinations needles, thousands of orphans contracted AIDS.

He was finally executed in , by revolutionaries, along with his wife. Speaking of the Ottomans, Talat Pasha was the key architect of the Armenian genocide, one of the largest genocides in modern history. Over 1 million people were massacred in the span of 2 years. A member of the Young Turks, Talat rose up and became one of the three Pashas who ruled the Ottoman government in , until the end of the disastrous First World War.

Many Muslim Turks came to see the rise in nationalism of the Christian Armenians as a threat to the existence of the Ottoman state. Programs had already been installed against Armenians in previous years, with possibly hundreds of thousands dying. Russian and Armenian forces set up an Armenian mini-state in , and thus Talat Pasha sought to punish them. Security forces rounded up Armenian intellectuals and leaders in Istanbul in , and eventually executed them.

After passing a Deportation Law, Pasha ordered deportations and executions to be carried out against the whole Armenian population.

2. Joseph Stalin (1878-1953)

During the deportations, conditions were deplorable and men were routinely separated from the rest and executed. Many prisoners were tortured and were victims of gruesome medical experiments. More died of hunger and thirst. In some instances victims would be crucified in imitation of Jesus, as the perpetrators would say: Out of a population of 2. After the Ottoman collapse, Talat Pasha fled to Berlin and was subsequently murdered there, in His assassin was an Armenian genocide survivor. Either just before or just after his birth, his father disappeared from his life. Some accounts say that his father was killed; others say he abandoned his family.

At age 18, Saddam graduated from primary school and applied to military school.

Though Saddam was never in the military, he frequently wore military-style outfits later in life. Saddam then moved to Baghdad and started high school, but he found school boring and enjoyed politics more. Iraq, which had been a British colony from the end of World War I until , was bubbling with internal power struggles. In , at age 20, Saddam joined the Baath Party.

He started out as a low-ranking member of the Party, responsible for leading his schoolmates in rioting. However, in , he was chosen to be a member of an assassination squad. On October 7, , Saddam and others attempted, but failed, to assassinate the prime minister.

Wanted by the Iraqi government, Saddam was forced to flee. He lived in exile in Syria for three months and then moved to Egypt, where he lived for three years.