Orders are Orders

 

For this week’s blog post, I wanted to talk about the Zoo Attack scene from the Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I’m not going to talk about the reading from a literary standpoint, I wanted to talk about it from a psychological standpoint. When I first started reading the short story I felt really uneasy, which at first I thought made sense because it’s a story about the killing of animals which isn’t exactly a pleasant thing. However, I felt like something specific about it was making me feel uncomfortable. Halfway through the reading, I realized it was because it reminded me of a specific passage I read in my Holocaust class last semester. We spent some time studying a passage about the Reserve Battalion 101 of the Nazi party, it talked about different reasonings in trying to understand how were these men able to execute the task they were given. This battalion was tasked to ‘liquate’ 1800 Jews in Josefow, quickly and effectively. I saw parallels in how the soldiers went about carrying out orders they didn’t necessarily want to take part in. The passage we read discussed the emotional turmoil of the men when killing these women and children. It explored the possible reasons for carrying these attitude-behavior behavior discrepancies. This happens when you internally feel one way about a matter, yet your behavior doesn’t line up. In this case, the soldiers didn’t want to kill, but their behaviors (carrying out the killing) as part of their duties did not match. When this happens, people go into distress because of their inability to cope with the situation at hand.   The first time I read about this battalion it caused me some emotional turmoil. There were parallels in this story that made me associate this fictional scene to it. In The Zoo Attack, the main soldier talks about how it’s the first time he was ever in charge of his own group of men. He talked about how he didn’t necessarily want to kill the animals, but he was given orders and he needed to fulfill his duty. I could see him going through an internal battle because something in him knows he doesn’t want to do it, he knows it’s not okay. They are running on little time, with little resources (lack of poison) so they decide they must shoot all the animals. Yet he also starts trying to make justifications for the killings. The animals are weak and starving anyways, he’s mercy killing them. The descriptions of the soldiers taking aim and struggle with the realization that some of the animals they had to finish off with a second round. I picked up on distress that comes from the attitude-behavior discrepancies shown. In the battalion reading, it talked about how some of the men tried to justify themselves when ‘liquating’ children because they knew they were sick and starving anyways, mercy killing. I also remember reading descriptions of how the man in charge of the Battalion, lieutenant Trapp, would become intoxicated with bursts saying he didn’t want to proceed but he was given orders that needed to be carried out, he was also fixated on his duties since this was his first task in which he was in charge of his own men. In the Zoo Attack, after mentioning his discontent, the soldier says, “so as long as the army continued to exist its orders had to be carried out.” The passage on the battalion had similar passages about scenes when they would have to take aim a second time, the messiness of not having resources and just rushing bullets left and right. I’m not saying the Zoo Attack was inspired by this, I just wanted to discuss how it made me feel. Very completely different situations, different countries, different ideologies. Yet this idea of soldiers being devoted to one’s duties, one’s men, one’s country, regardless of the internal struggle is interesting to explore. A lot of psychological questions have been raised when examining the reasoning behind the aggression taken by different countries in war times. Again different situations, but I couldn’t help but feel a parallel between the human distress that came from the responsibility of a soldier ‘carrying out orders.’

Christy Lira Araujo