The Dilemma of Obedience; Lebnon: a Case Study of Identity Politics

Marvah Shakib

27/02/2012

Stantely Milgram has done the experiment on the dilemma of obedience to figure out the reason of mass killing by Nazi Germany. In his experiment two people were engaged, “teacher” and “learner,” and the teacher were supposed to punish the learner by electronic shock for every mistake that he does. Interestingly he figured out that none of the participants in experiment refused to punish, and some of them punished with a very high degree of electronic shocks. None of them thought of taking a decision to not to punish, and two third of them fall in to category of obedient by obeying the excremental person. Thus, he indicates that this violence were justified by Nazi Germany, because the people who poured gas or killed innocent people by other methods did not feel guilty because they were obeying, and people in high ranks did not feel guilty because they did not do it themselves rather they played with papers in their offices (Milgram, 605, 606).

Moreover, the Lebanon case study indicates the reason that ordinary people commit to ethnic violence is power of identity and perceptions of self in relation to others to constrain political actions. The narratives and analysis of five perpetrators of violence during the Lebanese civil war illustrates that besides their ideological position, affiliations, allegiances, or individual past, they felt constrained by their self identity, and group identity. Additionally, individuals became capable of committing violent against their neighbors, and people who they lived with in peace for decades, because of the importance of protecting their perceived psychological boundaries (Kreidie and Monroe, 31). Hence, he indicates that individuals would commit any form of ethnic violence by justification of protecting themselves and or their group, and group identification, stereotypes, social representation, were significant for the five individuals in this case study.

As J.Glenn Gray in his text indicates that the  delight of comradeship is that the soldiers have grown throughout their course of training and living will help them to defend, attack and moreover to self-sacrifice one’s life for the other comrade. This idea flows well with the experiment by Milgram and Lebnon case, in which both of them point out that people’s experience of identity power and their perception in relation to others leads them to be capable of committing crime, and are over all obedient.

Finally, being obedient and commitment, loyalty to self identity and group identity are two reasons that can be recognized that as a result of them violence occurs in large scales and has been used in political decision. My query is that, as Western powers do not have the rests identity, and power of individual identity  in such case does not play as important role as it does in the Lebanon case, and I appoint the commanders who point Drons and airplanes to bomb innocents, so they do not obey anyone but themselves as well. Then how the violence done as a result of the international or better to say the head of impariarcal forces’ decisions from west on the rest can be justified (considering in individual scales)?