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Niall, it seems that you're saying that atrocities like these are possible in part because we're capable of abstracting the people we kill. The correlary would seem to be that if we actually had to face the people we killed, we'd be less inclined to do it.

Which doesn't seem, to me, to really get at the core of the matter. The Liberians generally were not killing distant populations by remote. The reports generally indicate very brutal, direct confrontations resulting in very gruesome bloodshed. Without getting too gory about it, suffice it say that the war crimes were perpetrated by people who ended up with more than blood literally on their hands.

If we accept that Americans (and I presume that you'd include all modernized Western nations in your explanation) are complacent about the deaths and atrocities attributable to their governments and militaries because they've managed to distance and abstract the enemy, then we still haven't accounted for how it's possible to commit the very intimate, personal atrocities we're hearing about in reports from the Liberian civil war.

Antebellum lynchings may go more to the heart of the matter, but I think that most modern Americans would view that as something pretty much unthinkable in the contemporary context. The closest thing we have in recent memory would probably have to be the hate killing of a gay teenage about a decade ago, but even that we're prone to treat as an anamoly, whereas Liberian violence was so commonplace that it can hardly be thought of as anamolous, at least in Liberian society.

Garicker's point seems more flexible to me, but I can't say that I'm quite convinced. I suppose it's an argument that we'd have to test by actually reading up on Liberia, but it doesn't seem de facto obvious to me that the victims in Liberia were being objectified.

Another line of thought occurs to me. I'm currently reading Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory", and the conjunction of the two topics makes me wonder if the modern West's careful avoidance of atrocity -- avoidance not only in the sense that we avoid perpetrating it, but also in the sense that we avoid seeing it, as in Yugoslavia and Liberia, or seeing the ways in which we contribute to it -- isn't somehow related to the World Wars. After all, a major segment of our literary, artistic and entertainment culture is dedicated to war stories. I wonder if that hasn't turned into a kind of ritual whereby we continually remind ourselves that such behavior is unacceptable. If that's the case, it would mean that we hadn't so much progressed beyond those atrocities as that we had geared our culture towards suppressing an impulse that remains dormant. Just an idea, but I'm going to give it some thought.

Niall001: It is possible for communities that live in same cities and districts to think of each others simply as threats and objects.

It seems to me that it takes a certain amount of effort to maintain that view, though. The military, for instance, has had to invest a great deal of effort and training in the interests of objectifying enemy combatants, and as previous wars ('Nam, anyone?) have shown us, even with that sort of deliberate training prolonged exposure to human suffering can pay a heavy psychological toll in rapid order.

That's probably part of why some outbreaks of violence tend to be sporadic rather than prolonged -- the persons involved can only maintain that objectification for so long before they break down and relent.

The Stamford prison experiments have shown us that people will walk in from a street and effectively torture an individual if they are told to do so by an authority figure.

But again, how long could those experiments have lasted? The subjects involved have complained of emotional fallout from their experience.

It is harder for group-think to occur in American society (at least on internal matters) because people cannot isolate themselves from other voices in the same way that happens in other less developed, conflict torn areas.

I'm not sure I agree. Just as much as it's possible to expose yourself to a polyphony of opinion, American media also makes it possible to build an ideologically homogenous community out of geographically disparate individuals. To that degree, I'd say that certain segments of the American population as made a science of groupthink.

It takes effort to maintain the view only when there is evidence to contradict it. If you can separate groups so as there is no meaningful contact between them, then it is relatively easy to maintain false stereotypes.

It just doesn't seem likely to me -- and again, this is something I need to study more -- that such was the case in Liberia. We're not talking about military groups fighting on foreign soil. In many cases, I suspect, these were actrocities being carried out on people living in close proximity to one another. Evidence to contradict the myth that another group is less-than-human must have been hard to avoid.