cover image Evil Men

Evil Men

James Dawes. Harvard Univ., $25.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-674-07265-7

In this complex examination of people’s potential for cruelty, as well as the difficult ethics of discussing them, Macalaster College English professor Dawes focuses on interviews with Japanese war criminals who committed torture and rape in occupied China during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). He intersperses the stories of these now-elderly men with explorations into related issues, such as methods of turning hesitant men into vicious killers (“take a group of poorly trained young people, put them in a strange and frightening environment, and give them unclear roles with light or no regulation”). He looks at recent psychological experiments that demonstrate how easily people can be influenced by groups or authority figures into going against their better judgment. In the infamous Stanford prison experiment of 1971, for instance, a mock prison was created in a basement at the university and a group of participants was randomly selected to act as guards while the rest acted as prisoners. The researcher had to end the test after only a few days because the “guards” were abusing and tormenting the “prisoners”; the researcher even found himself acting like a warden, concerned with “the possibility of a rumored assault upon his prison.” In addition, Dawes explores the murky boundaries between documenting such atrocities and exploiting them, of trying not to turn “pain into pornography.” Powerful and unusually told, the book raises questions that resist easy answers. (May)