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It is impossible for most people to imagine exactly went through the minds of Japanese soldiers and officers as they committed the atrocities. But many historians, eyewitnesses, survivors, and the perpetrators themselves have theorized about what drove the naked brutality of the Japanese imperial army. Some Japanese scholars believe that the horrors of the Rape of Nanking and other outrages of the Sino-Japanese War were caused by a phenomenon called “the transfer of oppression.” According to Tanaka Yuki, author of Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes In World War II, the modern Japanese army had great potential for brutality from the moment of its creation for two reasons: the arbitrary and cruel treatment that the military inflicted on its own officers and soldiers, and the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, in which status was dictated by proximity to the emperor. Before the invasion of Nanking, the Japanese military had subjected its own soldiers to endless humiliation. Japanese soldiers were forced to wash the underwear of officers or stand meekly while superiors slapped them until they streamed with blood. Using Orwellian language, the routine striking of Japanese soldiers, or bentatsu, was termed an “act of love” by the officers, and the violent discipline of the Japanese navy through tekken seisai, or “the iron fist,” was often called ai-no-muchi, or “whip of love”. It has often been suggested that those with the least power are often the most sadistic if given the power of life and death over people even lower on the pecking order, and the rage engendered by this rigid pecking order was suddenly given an outlet when Japanese soldiers went abroad. In foreign lands or colonized territories, the Japanese soldiers – representatives of the emperor – enjoyed tremendous power among the subjects. In China even the lowliest Japanese private was considered superior to the most powerful and distinguished native, and it is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred, and fear of authority could have erupted in uncontrollable violence at Nanking. The Japanese soldier had endured in silence whatever his superiors had chosen to deal out to him, and now the Chinese had to take whatever he chose to deal out to them.

A second factor in the atrocities, scholars believe, is the virulent contempt that many in the Japanese military reserved for Chinese people – a contempt cultivated by decades of propaganda, education, and social indoctrination. Though the Japanese and the Chinese share similar if not identical racial features (which in a distorted way may have threatened the Japanese vision of themselves as unique), there were those in the imperial army who saw the Chinese as subhuman beings whose murder would carry no greater moral weight than squashing a bug or butchering a hog. In fact, both before and during the war members of the Japanese military at all levels frequently compared the Chinese to pigs. For example, a Japanese general told a correspondent: “To be frank, your view of Chinese is totally different from mine. You regard the Chinese as human beings while I regard the Chinese as pigs.” A Japanese officer in Nanking who bound Chinese captives together in groups of ten, pushed each group into a pit, and burned them excused his actions by explaining that his feelings when committing these murders were identical to those had when he slaughtered pigs. In 1938 the Japanese soldier Azuma Shiro confided in his diary at Nanking that “a pig is more valuable now than the life of a [Chinese] human being. That’s because a pig is edible.”

A third factor was religion. Imbuing violence with holy meaning, the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative every bit as powerful as that which propelled Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. “Every single bullet must be charged with the Imperial Way, and the end of every bayonet must have the National Virtue burnt into it,” one Japanese general declared in a speech in 1933. Few Japanese doubted the righteousness of their mission in China. Nagatomi Hakudo, a former Japanese soldier who participated in the Rape of Nanking, said he had been reared to believe that the emperor was the natural ruler of the world, that the Japanese were racially superior to the rest of the world, and that it was the destiny of Japan to control Asia. When a local Christian priest asked him, “Who is greater, God or the emperor of Japan?” He had no doubt that “the emperor” was the correct answer. With an entity higher than God on its side, it was not difficult for the Japanese military to take the next step – adopting the belief that the war, even the violence that came with it, would ultimately benefit not only Japan but its victims as well. Some perceived atrocity as a necessary tool to achieve a Japanese victory that would serve all and help create a better China under Japan’s “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” This attitude echoes that of the Japanese teachers and officers who beat their students and soldiers senseless while insisting, between blows, that it was all done for their own good.

Another lesson to be gleaned from Nanking is the role of power in genocide. Those who have studied the patterns of large-scale killings throughout history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal – the only sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible. In the 1990s R.J. Rummel, perhaps the world’s greatest authority on democide (a term he coined to include both genocide and government mass murder), completed a systematic and quantitative study of atrocities in both the twentieth century and ancient times, an impressive body of research that he summed up with a play on the famous Lord Acton line: “Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.” The less restraint on power within a government, Rummel found, the more likely that government will act on the whims or psychologically generated darker impulses of its leaders to wage war on foreign governments. Japan was no exception, and atrocities such as the Rape of Nanking can be seen as a predictable if not inevitable outgrowth of ceding to an authoritarian regime, dominated by a military and imperial elite, the unchallenged power to commit an entire people to realizing the sick goals of the few with the unbridled power to set them.

Watching some hip-hop dancers on TV, a friend asks me: “Why is it so fun and satisfying to see a group of people do exactly the same thing?” I think about this – how we apprehend the life of the special body, choreographed movement, dance, planes flying in formation. It is satisfying, but also like watching something defy gravity, or more specifically, defy the wilderness of our bodies in time. All that work and then, finally, something levitates. When the minute stresses of practice fade, the specialness emerges. There is a quotation from On Directing Film by David Mamet that I underlined in 1993 and have never forgotten: “Stanislavsky wrote that the difficult will become easy and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.” Glenn Gould, explaining his love of the recording studio, described it as “an environment where the magnetic compulsion of time is suspended – well, warped at the very least. It’s a vacuum, in a sense, a place where one can properly feel that the most horrendously constricting force of nature – the inexorable linearity of time – has been, to a remarkable extend, circumvented.”

I think about something the psychologist Adam Phillips wrote: “Our excesses are the best clues we have to our own poverty; and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.” I think of my own collections (old white trousers, hardcover books, striped towels, bathing suits, fake oranges) and wonder what my unknown deprivations are. I wonder, What, if I stop accumulating, will I confront?

I believed the concerned look on his face revealed confusion about what he was going to do in light of this evidence, and I considered the judge’s newfound confusion and concern to be real progress.

For over a century, institutional care for Americans suffering from serious mental illness shifted between prisons and hospitals set up to manage people with mental illness. In the late nineteenth century, alarmed by the inhumane treatment of incarcerated people suffering from mental illness, Dorothea Dix and Reverend Louis Dwight led a successful campaign to get the mentally ill out of prison. The numbers of incarcerated people with serious mental illness declined dramatically, while public and private mental health facilities emerged to provide care to the mentally distressed. State mental hospitals were soon everywhere.By the middle of the twentieth century, abuses within mental institutions generated a lot of attentions, and involuntary confinement of people became a significant problem. Families, teachers, an courts were sending thousands to institutions for eccentricities that were less attributable to acute mental illness than resistance to social, cultural or sexual norms. People who were gay, resisted gender norms, or engaged in interracial dating often found themselves involuntarily committed. The introduction of antipsychotic medications like Thorazine held great promise for many people suffering from some severe mental health disorders, but the rug was overused in many mental institutions, resulting in terrible side effects and abuses. Aggressive and violent treatment protocols at some facilities generated horror stories that fueled a new campaign, this time to get people out of institutional mental health settings. In the 1960s and 1970s, laws were enacted to make involuntary commitment much more difficult. Deinstitutionalization became the objective in many states. Mental health advocates and lawyers succeeded in winning a series of Supreme Court cases that forced states to transfer institutional residents to community programs. Legal rulings empowered people with developmental disabilities to refuse treatment and created rights for the mentally disabled that made forced institutionalization much less common. By the 1990s, several states had a deinstitutionalization rate of over 95 percent, meaning that for every hundred patients who had been residents in state hospitals before deinstitutionalization programs, fewer than five were residents when the study was conducted in the 1990s. In 1955, there was one psychiatric bed for every three hundred Americas; fifty years later, it was one bed for every three thousand. While these reforms were desperately needed, deinstitutionalization intersected with the spread of mass imprisonment policies–expanding criminal statutes and harsh sentencing–to disastrous effect. The ‘free world’ became perilous for deinstitutionalized poor people suffering from mental disabilities. The inability of many disabled, low-income people to receive treatment or necessary medication dramatically increased their likelihood of a police encounter that would result in jail or prison time. Jail and prison became the state’s strategy for dealing with a healthy crisis created by drug use and dependency. A flood of mentally ill people headed to prison for minor offenses and drug crimes or simply for behaviors their communities were unwilling to tolerate. Today, over 50 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States have a diagnosed mental illness, a rate nearly five times greater than that of the general adult population. Nearly one in five prison and jail inmates has a serious mental illness. In fact, there are more than three times the number of seriously mentally ill individuals in jail or prison than in hospitals; in some states that number is ten times. And prison is a terrible place for someone with mental illness or a neurological disorder that prison guards are not trained to understand.

Alabama is among the growing list of states that make the murder of a person under the age of fourteen a capital offense punishable by the death penalty. The child-victim category resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of young mothers and juveniles who were sent to death row. All five women on Alabama’s death row were condemned for the unexplained deaths of their young children or the deaths of abusive spouses or boyfriends–all of them. In fact, nationwide, most women on death row are awaiting execution for a family crime involving an allegation of child abuse or domestic violence involving a male partner.

Despite America’s preeminent status among developed nations, we have always struggled with high rate of infant mortality–much higher than in most developed countries. The inability of many poor women to get adequate health care, including prenatal and postpartum care, has been a serious problem in this country for decades. Even with recent improvements, infant mortality rates continue to be an embarrassment for a nation that spends more on health care than any other country in the world. The criminalization of infant mortality and the persecution of poor women whose children die have taken on new dimensions in twenty-first-century America, as prisons across the country began to bear witness.

The collateral consequences of incarcerating women are significant. Approximately 75 to 80 percent of incarcerated women are mothers with minor children. Nearly 65 percent had minor children living with them at the time of their arrest–children who have become more vulnerable and at-risk as a result of their mother’s incarceration and will remain so for the rest of their lives, even after their mothers come home. In 1966, Congress passed welfare reform legislation that gratuitously included a provision that authorized states to ban people with drug convictions from public benefits and welfare. The population most affected by this misguided law is formerly incarcerated women with children, most of whom were imprisoned for drug crimes. These women and their children can no longer live in public housing, receive food stamps, or access basic services. In the last twenty years, we’ve created a new class of ‘untouchables’ in American society, made up of our most vulnerable mothers and their children.

Despite its enormous political costs, Bundy believed the Bay of Pigs ultimately strengthened Kennedy. ‘This is a detached and self-contained human being who, as far as I perceive him, had enormous inner confidence,’ Bundy told the political scientist Richard Neustadt in 1964, speaking of the president. Bundy noted 'the number of times he had accomplished things that people said could not be accomplished. So that 'no’ was a word he was used to hearing and used to disproving….The great blow of the Bay of Pigs was that it broke the picture of infallibility and it’s great service to him was that it did exactly that.’

On Monday morning, April 17, 1961, the 1,300 members of the Cuban exile brigade landed on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs on Cuba's southwestern coast. Fighting with its back to the ocean and already infiltrated by Castro's agents, the exile brigade was outnumbered and outmaneuvered. Within a day it was surrounded by 20,000 Cuban troops. There were no stirrings of a spontaneous popular revolt that would sweep across Cuba. And in a stunningly inept lapse in planning, the exile force soon realized that eighty miles of swamp blocked its escape route into the mountains. A crushing defeat was imminent. As the grim reports poured in the a White House, Rostow drove to CIA headquarters to meet with Bissell, his former professor, who was haggard, unshaven, and panicked. As the journalist and historian David Talbot notes, President Kennedy had insisted throughout the planning for the invasion that he would not intervene militarily to salvage the operation, at one point sending a military aide to the exiles’ Central American training camp to reiterate that the U.S. Marines would not come to their rescue. As Rostow met with Bissell and his aides, however, he soon realized that the CIA planners did not believe Kennedy would continue to withhold American military support of the success if the operation was imperiled. Such an outcome, Rostow later wrote, ‘was inconceivable to them.’

As Bundy retrospectively reflected on the Vietnam decisions of 1964, he invariably returned to the litany of nondecisions produced in that year – the decision not to withdraw, not to escalate, not to neutralize, not to debate the domino theory, and, fatefully, not to examine the military limitations and implications of a massive deployment of the U.S. ground combat forces to South Vietnam. The cause of the disparate nondecisions of 1964 that emerges from Bundy’s varied reflections and fragments is Lyndon Johnson’s preoccupation with the domestic politics of an election year. In Bundy’s appraisal it was politics – specifically Johnsonian politics – that created multiple disincentives to challenge the status quo and analyze rigorously the limited options and difficult choices in Vietnam. Politics became the enemy of strategy in 1964. Because winning the presidential election was Johnson’s overarching goal, he could not permit the situation in Vietnam to deteriorate to a deeper level of crisis. The impending election further constrained Johnson from either escalating the American commitment or embarking on a strategic withdrawal.

The domino theory was first promulgated by President Eisenhower in April 1954. ‘You have a row of dominos set up,’ he explained at a news conference held in the midst of the Dien Bien Phu crisis. You knock over the first one… . What will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.’ By 1964 the domino theory had the force of doctrine, becoming a de facto feature of the political debate over Vietnam, the teetering domino that could ostensibly unleash communism across Southeast Asia. Bundy retrospectively faulted himself for not challenging the logic of the domino theory when he had the opportunity to do so as national security advisor. I did not believe in dominoes,’ he wrote, 'but did not try to argue the full case against the notion or its lesser included case: we must not lose another!’ In an additional fragment, he surmised that 'for LBJ the domino theory was really a matter of domestic politics.’ Bundy told me, 'No serious contender for political office can propose letting go of Vietnam. Not because dominoes will fall, but because Vietnam must not fall.’ And he concluded, 'It’s an American political problem, not a geopolitical or cosmic matter.’ Yet because the domino theory had Eisenhower, 'a very strong and much feared ex-president as the head of its church,’ the influence remained considerable. 'The metaphor… . carries a very considerably different weight when it comes rolling down from Gettysburg,’ where Eisenhower had retired, 'tumbling over senators as it comes. That’s the domino theory thats actually working.’

One time I filmed people who’d been in concentration camps. They try to avoid meeting one another. I understand that. There’s something unnatural about getting together and remembering the war. People who’ve been through that kind of humiliation together, or who’ve seen what people can be like, at the bottom, run from one another. There’s something I felt in Chernobyl, something I understood that I don’t really want to talk about. About the fact, for example, that all our humanistic ideas are relative. In an extreme situation, people don’t behave the way you read about in books. Sooner the other way around. People aren’t heroes.

Where did that rumor come from? I think from the incongruity of the scale of the event with the number of victims. For example, the Battle of Kursk – thousands dead, that was something you could understand. But here, in the first few days it was something like seven firemen. Later, a few more. But after that, the definitions were too abstract for us to understand: ‘in several generations,’ ’ forever,’ 'nothing.’ So there were rumors: three-headed birds, chickens pecking foxes to death, bald hedgehogs. Well, and so on.