I have spent time with mass killers, warlords and death squad leaders as a reporter in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Some are psychopaths who relish acts of sadism, torture and murder. But others, maybe most, see killing as a job, a profession, good for their careers and status. They enjoy playing God. They revel in the hypermasculine world of force where theft and rape are perks. They proudly refine the techniques of murder to snuff out one life after another, largely numb to the terror and cruelty they inflict. And, when they are not killing, they can sometimes be disarmingly charming and gracious. Some are decent fathers and sentimental with their wives and mistresses. Some dote on their pets.<\/p>\n
It is not the demonized, easily digestible caricature of a mass murderer that most disturbs us. It is the human being.<\/p>\n
Joshua Oppenheimer\u2019s documentary \u201cThe Act of Killing,\u201d<\/a> which took eight years to make, is an important exploration of the complex psychology of mass murderers. The film has the profundity of Gitta Sereny\u2019s book \u201cInto That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience,\u201d for which she carried out extensive interviews with Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, one of the Nazi extermination camps. Oppenheimer, too, presents candid confessions, interviewing some of the most ruthless murderers in Indonesia. One of these is responsible for perhaps 1,000 killings, a man named Anwar Congo, who was a death squad leader in Medan, the capital of the Indonesian province North Sumatra.<\/p>\n The documentary also shows the killers performing bizarre re-enactments of murders.<\/p>\n Indonesia\u2019s military, with U.S. support, launched in 1965 a yearlong campaign<\/a> to ostensibly exterminate communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers in that country. By its end, the bloodbath\u2014much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs\u2014had decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists, ethnic Chinese and many who just happened to be in the wrong spot at the wrong time. By some estimates, more than a million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left on roadsides.<\/p>\n This campaign of mass murder is still mythologized in Indonesia as an epic battle against the forces of evil and barbarity, much as U.S. popular culture for many decades mythologized our genocide of Native Americans and held up our own killers, gunmen, outlaws and murderous cavalry units of the Old West as heroes. The onetime killers in the Indonesian war against communism are cheered at rallies today as having saved the country. They are interviewed on television about the \u201cheroic\u201d battles they fought five decades ago. The 3-million-strong Pancasila Youth\u2014Indonesia\u2019s equivalent of the Brown Shirts or the Hitler Youth\u2014in 1965 joined in the genocidal mayhem, and now its members, like the death squad leaders, are lionized as pillars of the nation. It is as if the Nazis had won World War II. It is as if Stangl, instead of dying in the Duesseldorf remand prison as a convicted war criminal, came to be a venerated elder statesman as has Henry Kissinger.<\/p>\n There is a scene in the Oppenheimer film where Congo\u2014who parades across the screen like a prima donna, his outsized vanity and love of fine clothing on display\u2014is interviewed on \u201cSpecial Dialogue,\u201d a program of a state-owned television station with national coverage. I have substituted the word \u201cJew\u201d for \u201ccommunist\u201d to put the moral bankruptcy of the Indonesian regime into a cultural context better understood by Americans.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had to kill them,\u201d Congo, wearing a black cowboy hat adorned with a gold sheriff\u2019s star, tells the female host.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd was your method of killing inspired by gangster films?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes!\u201d Congo says. \u201cIt\u2019s like. … \u201c<\/p>\n \u201cAmazing!\u201d she says. \u201cHe was inspired by films!\u201d<\/p>\n The audience, mostly made up of members of the Pancasila Youth in their distinctive orange and black shirts, applauds. At the start of the show, Ibrahim Sinik, a leader of the paramilitary group, lauded the Pancasila Youth as having been \u201cat the core of the extermination.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEach genre had its own method,\u201d Congo says. \u201cLike in Mafia movies, they strangle the guy in the car, and dump the body. So we did that too.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhich means Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating Jews<\/i>,\u201d the woman says enthusiastically, \u201ca system more humane, less sadistic, and without excessive force.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYoung people must remember their history,\u201d Ali Usman, a Pancasila Youth leader, interjects. \u201cThe future musn\u2019t forget the past! What\u2019s more, God must be against Jews<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes,\u201d the talk show host says. \u201cGod hates Jews<\/i>!\u201d<\/p>\n There is more applause.<\/p>\n Oppenheimer, in the film\u2019s strangest but most psychologically astute device, persuades the killers to re-enact some of the mass murders they carried out. They don costumes\u2014they fancy themselves to be the stars of their own life movies\u2014and what comes out in the costumed scenes of torture and killing is the vast disconnect between the image they have of themselves, much of it inspired by Hollywood gangster films, and the tawdry, savage and appalling crimes they committed. These scenes include one of the old killers named Herman Koto\u2014Koto and the other murderers refer approvingly to themselves as gangsters\u2014done up to look like the drag queen Divine. And in these moments Oppenheimer captures the playfulness, the black humor and the comradeship that create bonds among killers. The killers stage a scene at the end of the film in which actors playing their murdered victims hang a medal around the neck of Congo\u2014who is dressed in a long, black robe and standing in front of a waterfall\u2014and thank him for saving the country and \u201ckilling me and sending me to heaven.\u201d This bizarre fantasy\u2019s background music, specified by Congo, is the theme from the movie \u201cBorn Free.\u201d<\/p>\n These same human bonds, along with the same schizophrenic self-delusion, can be glimpsed in photographs of off-duty Nazis in the book \u201cNein, Onkel: Snapshots From Another Front 1938-1945,\u201d or in the photographs<\/a> of off-duty SS camp guards at Auschwitz. One of the pictures in the Auschwitz album shows the SS leadership, including the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, and Dr. Joseph Mengele, who carried out inhuman medical experiments on children, in a raucous \u201csing-along\u201d on a wooden bridge with an accordion player at Solahutte, an SS resort about 20 miles south of Auschwitz on the Sola River. Mothers and children not far away were being gassed to death, some of the 1 million people murdered at Auschwitz. And it is this disquieting moral fragmentation, this ability to commit mass murder and yet to see oneself as a normal, caring human being, that Oppenheimer astutely captures. The bifurcation between work and life\u2014a bifurcation that many in the U.S. military, today\u2019s fossil fuel or health insurance industry or Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs also must make\u2014allows human beings who exploit, destroy and kill other human beings to blot out much of their daily existence.<\/p>\n \u201cI killed every Chinese I saw,\u201d Congo remembers as he tours the Chinese area of Medan in a car. \u201cI stabbed them all! I don\u2019t remember how many, but it was dozens of Chinese. If I met them, I stabbed them. All the way to Asia Street, where I met my girlfriend\u2019s dad. Remember, I had two motives: crush the Chinese and crush my girlfriend\u2019s father, so I stabbed him, too! Because he was Chinese too! He fell into a ditch. I hit him with a brick. He sank.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cKilling is the worst crime you can do,\u201d says one of Congo\u2019s former associates. \u201cSo the key is to find a way not to feel guilty. It\u2019s all about finding the right excuse. For example, if I\u2019m asked to kill somebody, if the compensation is right, then of course I\u2019ll do it, and from one perspective it\u2019s not wrong. That\u2019s the perspective we must make ourselves believe. After all, morality is relative.\u201d<\/p>\n Congo patiently explains to Oppenheimer his technique of garroting his victims with a piece of wood, a pole and wire, a technique he adopted to avoid the mess of excessive bleeding.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s probably many ghosts here, because many people were killed here,\u201d he tells Oppenheimer as they stand on a rooftop at one of his former murder spots. \u201cThey died unnatural deaths\u2014unnatural deaths. They arrived here perfectly healthy. When they got here they were beaten up. \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Congo crouches and puts his hands over his white, curly hair to imitate the last moment of his victims.<\/p>\n \u201d \u2026 And died,\u201d he goes on. \u201cDragged around. Dumped. In the early days we beat them to death. But when we did that blood spurted everywhere. It smelled awful. To avoid having blood everywhere, I used this system.\u201d<\/p>\n He holds a piece of wood, about two feet long, and long wire.<\/p>\n \u201cCan I demonstrate it?\u201d he asks.<\/p>\n He secures the wire by wrapping one of it around a mounted pole. A friend, whose hands are behind his back, sits on the floor near the pole. Congo loops the wire around his friend\u2019s throat. Standing several feet away, Congo pulls lightly on the wood, attached to the other end of the wire, to show how the victim was killed.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve tried to forget all this by listening to good music,\u201d Congo says when he finishes his demonstration. \u201cDancing. I can be happy. A little alcohol. A little marijuana. A little\u2014what do you call it?\u2014Ecstasy. Once I\u2019d get drunk, I\u2019d \u2018fly\u2019 and feel happy. Cha cha.\u201d<\/p>\n He begins to dance on the rooftop in his white pants and white shoes.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s a happy man,\u201d his friend says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe shoved wood in their anus until they died,\u201d Adi Zulkadry, a death squad leader, says later in the film as he is shown shopping in a mall in the capital Jakarta with his wife and daughter. \u201cWe crushed their necks with wood. We hung them. We strangled them with wire. We cut off their heads. We ran them over with cars. We were allowed to do it. And the proof is, we murdered people and were never punished. The people we killed, there\u2019s nothing to be done about it. They have to accept it. Maybe I\u2019m just trying to make myself feel better, but it works. I\u2019ve never felt guilty, never been depressed, never had nightmares.\u201d<\/p>\n In one scene a film crew member, his raw emotion broken by nervous laughter, says his family was on the receiving end of the terror.<\/p>\n \u201d … If you want a true story, I have one,\u201d the crew member volunteers. \u201cTell us,\u201d Congo responds, \u201cbecause everything in this film should be true.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, there was a grocery store owner,\u201d the man begins hesitantly. \u201cHe was the only Chinese person in the region. To be honest, he was my stepfather. But even though he was my stepfather, I lived with him since I was a baby. At 3 a.m., someone knocked on our door. They called my dad. Mom said, \u2018It\u2019s dangerous! Don\u2019t go out.\u2019 But he went out. We heard him shout, \u2018Help!\u2019 And then, silence. They took him away. We couldn\u2019t sleep until morning.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow old were you?\u201d he is asked.<\/p>\n \u201cEleven or 12,\u201d he answers. \u201cI remember it well. And it\u2019s impossible to forget something like this. We found his corpse under an oil drum. The drum was cut in half and the body was under it, like this,\u201d he says as he doubles over a piece of paper to illustrate. \u201cHis head and feet were covered by sacks. But one foot poked out like this.\u201d The crew member raises one foot off the ground. \u201cSo the same morning, nobody dared help us,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe buried him like a goat next to the main road,\u201d he says with a forced smile as if the burial story should be amusing. \u201cJust me and my grandfather, dragging the body, digging the grave. No one helped us. I was so young. Then, all the communist families were exiled. We were dumped in a shantytown at the edge of the jungle. That\u2019s why, to be honest, I\u2019ve never been to school. I had to teach myself to read and write.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy should I hide this from you?\u201d he says to the former death squad leaders, who listen with wry smiles. \u201cThis way, we can know each other better. Right? I promise I\u2019m not trying to undermine what we\u2019ve done. This isn\u2019t a criticism. It\u2019s only input for the film. I promise, I\u2019m not criticizing you.\u201d<\/p>\n Congo and the other killers dismiss his story as inappropriate for the film because, as Herman Koto tells the crew member, \u201ceverything\u2019s already been planned.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe can\u2019t include every story or the film will never end,\u201d another death squad veteran says.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd your story is too complicated,\u201d Congo adds. \u201cIt would take days to shoot.\u201d<\/p>\n The killers in the film no longer wield the power that comes with indiscriminate terror, although they periodically wander through local markets to extort money from shopkeepers, a practice Oppenheimer captures on film.<\/p>\n When they carry out murder re-enactments, however, it triggers memories of a time when they were more than petty criminals, when they had license to do anything they wanted to anyone they chose in the name of the war against communism.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they\u2019re pretty, I\u2019d rape them all, especially back then when we were the law,\u201d one of the killers remembers. \u201cFuck \u2019em! Fuck the shit out of everyone I meet.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cEspecially if you get one who\u2019s only 14 years old,\u201d he adds after he and some other death squad veterans pantomime molesting a girl and holding a knife to her throat. \u201cDelicious! I\u2019d say, it\u2019s gonna be hell for you but heaven on earth for me.\u201d<\/p>\n There are moments, usually years after their crimes, when even the most savage killers have brief flashes of self-recognition, although they usually do not reflect upon or examine these revelations. They are often, however, haunted by specific moments of murder. Oppenheimer closes his film with a re-enactment scene where Congo begins by placidly describing the murders he committed at that spot and ends by retching and vomiting.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember I said, \u2018Get out of the car,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Congo says of one killing. \u201cHe asked, \u2018Where are you taking me?\u2019 Soon, he refused to keep walking, so I kicked him as hard as I could in the stomach. I saw Roshiman bringing me a machete. Spontaneously, I walked over to him and cut his head off. My friends didn\u2019t want to look. They ran back to the car. And I heard this sound. His body had fallen down. And the eyes in his head were still. …\u201d<\/p>\n He trails off.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the way home,\u201d he finishes, \u201cI kept wondering, why didn\u2019t I close his eyes? And that is the source of all my nightmares. I\u2019m always gazed at by those eyes that didn\u2019t close.\u201d<\/p>\n _________________________<\/p>\n Chris Hedges spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges was part of the team of reporters at The New York Times awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for the paper\u2019s coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002. The Los Angeles Press Club honored Hedges\u2019 original columns in Truthdig by naming the author the Online Journalist of the Year in 2009 and again in 2011. The LAPC also granted him the Best Online Column award in 2010 for his Truthdig essay \u201cOne Day We\u2019ll All Be Terrorists<\/a>.\u201d Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.<\/i><\/p>\n