Seite - 40 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 04/01

40 | Hessel J. Zondag www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/1, 35–46 In The Act of Killing we see that Anwar Congo’s suffering takes the form of awareness of having been morally evil. He asks himself whether he has sinned or has robbed people of their dignity. He tries to imagine himself experiencing the suffering he caused for others. He even goes one step further: he empa- thises with his victims. Many of those who have carried out such actions are well able to imagine the suffering they have inflicted on others. The man who continues to enjoy the memory of the rapes he committed 40 years earlier says that the abuse was like hell for the girls. He knows what they felt, but it does not interest him. For Congo the situation is different. Unlike so many perpetra- tors, he empathises with his former victims, This empathy can lead to remorse, a sense of guilt and subsequently a confession of guilt. This guilt can generate a type of suffering that therapy cannot alleviate. To help people who are experiencing this kind of suffering, they must be allowed to confess and do penance, for example by admitting their guilt directly to their victims and their victims’ surviving relatives. To the victim such a confession can serve as a recognition of the pain they endure. Nonetheless confessing guilt and penance is rare. Only a fraction of perpetra- tors ever admit to have done wrong.6 Estimates for the percentage of perpetra- tors who suffer as a result of inflicting violence vary, with some estimates rising to 20 per cent.7 But of this estimated 20 per cent who suffer from nightmares, from hearing the anxious cries of their victims, from physical symptoms, all symptoms of trauma, only a very small proportion ever show repentance. The suffering of the perpetrators appears to accommodate very well with a lack of awareness of having sided with immorality. Very seldom do perpetrators expe- rience their own suffering in moral terms, let alone confess their guilt. DAS RADIKAL BÖSE AND CONFORMITY Director Stefan Ruzowitzky makes explicit use of social psychology in his documen- tary Das radikal Böse, for he even bases his movie on the results of this branch of psychology. He shows classic social-psychological experiments to cast light on the genocide committed in the Second World War by the Einsatzgruppen, special troops active on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1943. The experiments are found in all handbooks of social psychology, evidence that their results belong to the core of this discipline. Moreover, these experiments have been carried out repeatedly.8 In this case the reproach that psychology often jumps to far-reaching conclusions on the basis of limited empirical research cannot be sustained. 6 Baumeister 1997; De Swaan 2014. 7 Lifton 1986. 8 Hock 2006.