The Manufacture of Killing

Hardly anyone kills another human being of their own accord. They have to be brought to it, in stages that are well known. And the spiral that follows can be broken.

I. The inhibition

During the Second World War the American military historian S. L. A. Marshall interviewed infantrymen after their battles and reached a conclusion that alarmed the army: only a small proportion of soldiers had fired at the enemy at all. His figures are disputed today, and his methods were already disputed then. But the army drew its conclusions. Instead of round targets, recruits have since been shooting at man-shaped figures that pop up suddenly and fall when hit, thousands of times over, until the shot is no longer a decision but a reflex. The psychologist and officer Dave Grossman described this change in 1995 in his book “On Killing”.

How strong the reluctance is exactly may remain open. That armies go to such great lengths to overcome it is the best evidence that it exists. For most people killing is not natural. It has to be manufactured.

The manufacture proceeds in stages. They are well researched, and they appear alike in wars, civil wars, genocides and gang wars.

II. Us and them

At the beginning there is no weapon, but a boundary. In 1971 the social psychologist Henri Tajfel divided schoolboys in Bristol into two groups, supposedly by their preference for paintings by Paul Klee or Wassily Kandinsky, in truth at random. The boys hardly knew each other; they had nothing in common but an arbitrary label. When they were allowed to distribute money, they favoured their own group, and many preferred to accept less for themselves as long as the gap to the other group grew larger.

That is how little it takes. Every identity that gives a person something to hold on to, nation, religion, class, party, neighbourhood, football terrace, also creates an outside. In itself this is harmless and often valuable. It becomes dangerous when the outside turns into a threat, and when someone profits from keeping it that way.

III. Dehumanisation

You do not kill your neighbour. So the neighbour has to become something else. In Rwanda the radio station RTLM called the Tutsi “inyenzi”, cockroaches, for months on end. In the spring of 1994 several hundred thousand people were killed in about a hundred days, around 800,000 by most estimates, often by neighbours, with machetes. Whoever kills vermin does not kill a human being.

Language here is not an accompaniment, it is a tool. People become rats, parasites, animals, a flood, a cancer. These words appear in every genocide of the twentieth century, long before the first shot is fired. Whoever hears them today, whether about refugees, minorities or political opponents, is hearing the first stage.

IV. Justification

Hardly anyone kills without feeling in the right. The justification has to turn killing into a duty: self-defence, retaliation, protection of one’s own children, a sacred mission. The greater the cause, the smaller the individual dead person becomes. On 25 March 2026 the American Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, prayed at a service in the Pentagon for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”. The sentence contains the whole stage: there are people who do not deserve mercy, and we know who they are.

How a conscience forms from this that no longer hesitates, we described in “Petrov’s Failure and Eichmann’s Reliability”. Eichmann was empty and obeyed. The new danger is the convinced believer who needs no order.

V. The group and the order

On 13 July 1942 Reserve Police Battalion 101 stood in the Polish village of Józefów. It was made up not of SS men but of middle-aged family men from Hamburg, dock workers, craftsmen, clerks. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, informed them that on this day they were to shoot some 1,500 Jewish women, children and old people, and offered that anyone who did not feel up to the task could step forward. Of roughly 500 men, about a dozen stepped forward. The historian Christopher Browning analysed their later testimony in “Ordinary Men”. Most of them did not shoot out of hatred, but because they did not want to look like weaklings or leave their comrades in the lurch.

This is perhaps the most frightening finding: killing often requires less than an order. The group is enough. Stanley Milgram had shown in the laboratory that two thirds of his subjects, on instruction, gave a stranger apparently life-threatening electric shocks. Józefów shows that the instruction can even be voluntary.

VI. Distance

The further away the victim, the easier it becomes. Grossman describes a staircase: almost no one kills with the bayonet, more with the rifle, almost everyone from an aircraft or with artillery, because the face is not seen. Zygmunt Bauman showed the same for the bureaucracy of mass murder, as we described in “Bird Droppings or Catastrophe?”: everyone does only a small part, and no one sees the whole.

Technology extends this staircase into infinity. The drone pilot sits in Nevada, the target is in Yemen. The target list is now compiled by software, and the human only confirms it. This is the subject of “The Number before the Strike”: what happens to responsibility when killing is given a key figure?

VII. The spiral

Once the first boundary has been crossed, a mechanism begins that no longer needs a leader. Every dead person has relatives, every relative a right to retaliation, every retaliation new dead. In the Balkans the memories of 1941 to 1945 were enough to justify new murders in 1991, and Srebrenica in 1995 still justifies new hatred today. In the neighbourhoods of Medellín, feuds between gangs were passed down over generations, as we described in “Violence and Harmony”. Each side tells the story so that the other started it, and both are right, because there is no beginning any more.

This creates the impression that escalation is inevitable. It is not. But it is the likely outcome as long as nobody does anything about it, and there is always someone who profits from it. How conflicts are managed for profit instead of resolved is the subject of “The Interest in the Fire”.

VIII. The counterforces

In the trenches of the Western Front, from 1914 onwards, something emerged that no general staff had planned. The same units faced each other for weeks, and in many sectors a tacit agreement formed: shots were fired at fixed times at fixed spots, over the heads, and the other side’s ration carriers were left in peace. The sociologist Tony Ashworth reconstructed this “live and let live” system from letters and diaries. At Christmas 1914, British and German soldiers met at several places in no man’s land, exchanged cigarettes and buried their dead together.

It was ended not from below but from above. The high commands ordered trench raids and assault parties precisely in order to destroy the tacit agreements. Escalation had to be ordered, because the men at the front no longer wanted it.

There are further counterexamples. In 1983 Stanislav Petrov did not report a counterstrike because he doubted the signal. In 1962 Kennedy and Khrushchev found a way out because both knew they were standing at the abyss. In Northern Ireland the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ended a conflict that had been considered insoluble for thirty years. And in 2025 Mark Kelly reminded American soldiers that they do not have to obey unlawful orders, which is the subject of “The Little Apple Tree”.

From these cases the conditions under which the spiral breaks can be read: when the opponents meet as human beings, when both know what they have to lose, when one individual hesitates at the decisive moment, and when the rules that limit killing still apply and someone reminds others of them.

IX. The thesis

Killing is not natural for human beings. It is manufactured, with identity, language, justification, group and distance, and each of these stages is recognisable before the first shot is fired. Whoever manufactures these stages works with the same components as the founder in our “Building Instructions for a Cult”: with a longing for belonging, a doctrine that knows no doubt, and a language that puts an end to questions.

Escalation is not inevitable, it is convenient. It demands a decision from no one. Resistance demands one. It begins with the word that turns a human being into vermin, and with the individual who steps forward when everyone else stays in line.

Further reading: Petrov’s Failure and Eichmann’s Reliability · Where Is Petrov? · Bird Droppings or Catastrophe? · The Number before the Strike · The Hour of the People · Violence and Harmony · The Interest in the Fire · Building Instructions for a Cult