The Constitution of the Confederate States of America, finalized on March 11, 1861 and now housed in the University of Georgia Library.  Photo credit:  Public domain. 

Other Resources on Institutional Evil

Wikipedia, Assyrian Genocide (wikipedia) by Ottoman Empire in 1915 against Assyrians, mostly Christians

Wikipedia, Pontic Genocide (wikipedia) by Ottoman Empire in 1915 against Pontic Greeks, mostly Christians

Wikipedia, Armenian Genocide (wikipedia) by Ottoman Empire in 1915 against Armenians, mostly Christians

Wikipedia, Unit 731 (Wikipedia article) the biological and chemical research arm of the Imperial Japanese army which conducted human experiments

Facing History and Ourselves (website)

Our World in Data (website)

DTJ (founded 2004) documenting crimes against children worldwide

The Synesis Journal: A Journal of Science, Technology, Ethics, and Policy

John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions

Nicholson Baker, Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War Before we blame God for the Holocaust, we need to read this article.

Jerry Elmer, Ordinary Evil: Vietnam's History Reveals the Banality of Systemic Violence

Philip Gourevitch, After the Genocide When a people murders up to a million fellow-countrymen, what does it mean to survive? (New Yorker Magazine, Dec 18, 1995)

Paul Brown, Scientist "Killed Amazon Indians to Test Race Theory" (Guardian, Sep 23, 2000) and Emily Eaken, How Napolean Chagnon Became Our Most Controversial Anthropologist (NY Times Magazine, Feb 13, 2013)

Jonathan V. Last, The Case for the Empire (Weekly Standard, May 16, 2002)

Eleanor Stein, Construction of an Enemy (Monthly Review, Jul 1, 2003) about the Nazi technique of pitting race vs. race, religion vs. religion, using nativism and foreign policy  

BBC News, Market Crisis 'Will Happen Again' (BBC News, Sep 8, 2009) - an interview of Alan Greenspan, who blames human nature

Jane Mayer, The Predator War What are the risks of the C.I.A.’s covert drone program? (New Yorker Magazine, Oct 26, 2009)

Ravi Somaiya, What Not to Say When Your Company Is Ruining the World (Time, Jun 1, 2010) British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward misspeaks

Campbell Robertson, Police Are Charged in Post-Katrina Shootings (NY Times, Jul 13, 2010)

Andrew Tavani, Inside The Mind of Madoff: NYT's Diana Henriques Discusses New Book 'Wizard Of Lies' (Huffington Post, Apr 26, 2011)

Jake Halpern, Iceland's Big Thaw (NY Times, May 13, 2011)

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Steven Pinker on the Alleged Decline of Violence (International Socialist Review) and full book (2012)

Lia Mandelbaum, Hitler's Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust (Jewish Journal, Jun 18, 2013)

Roger Berkowitz, Misreading 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' (NY Times, Jul 7, 2013)

Kali Ma, Humanity in Flux: Would a Species that Recognizes its Own Worth Be Actively Destroying Itself? (The Hampton Institute, Dec 12, 2013)  

Michael B Kelley, This World Map Shows Where Press Freedom Is Strongest And Weakest (Business Insider, Feb 12, 2014) 

Who Pays Film, Who Pays the Price? The Human Cost of Electronics (youtube video, Mar 4, 2014)

John Gray, Captain America's Moral Philosophy (The New Republic, Apr 2, 2014)

David Daley, "America as the No. 1 Warmonger: President Jimmy Carter Talks to Salon About Race, Cable News, "Slut-Shaming" and More (Salon, Apr 10, 2014)

Olga Khazan, Why Do So Many Women Wear So Much Makeup? (The Atlantic, Apr 28, 2014) even though men don't find make-up and thinness as attractive as they think; why men think women are attracted by muscle even though they aren't; the industries' deception

Graeme Wood, Hell is an Understatement: A Report from the Bloody, Crumbling Central African Republic (The New Republic, Apr 30, 2014)

Daniel R. Schwarz, Do the Humanities Help Us Understand the World in Which We Live? (Huffington Post, May 2, 2014)

NPR, Workers Dying in Qatar Ahead of 2022 World Cup (NPR, May 23, 2014)

Maggie Zhang, 11 Psychological Tricks Restaurants Use to Make You Spend More Money (Business Insider, Jul 14, 2014)

Mary Nichols, Maker Of Common Blood Thinner Pradaxa Withheld Critical Safety Data (Design & Trend, Jul 26, 2014)

Shannon Whitehead, 5 Truths the Fast Fashion Industry Doesn't Want You to Know (Huffington Post, Aug 19, 2014)

Radley Balko, How Municipalities in St. Louis County, MO Profit from Poverty (Washington Post, Sep 3, 2014)

Paul Roberts, Instant Gratification: As the economy gets ever better at satisfying our immediate, self-serving needs, who is minding the future? (American Scholar, Sep 8, 2014)

WBEZ, The Secret Recordings of Carmen Segarra (This American Life, Sep 26, 2014)

Which Dictator Killed the Most People? (The Mind Unleashed, Oct 4, 2014)

Sophie Kleeman, One Powerful Illustration Shows Exactly What's Wrong With How the West Talks About Ebola (Mic, Oct 7, 2014)

C.J. Chivers, The Secret Casualties of Iraq's Abandoned Chemical Weapons (NY Times, Oct 14, 2014)

Adrian Chen, The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed (Wired, Oct 23, 2014)

Eric Lichtblau, In Cold War, U.S. Spy Agencies Used 1,000 Nazis (NY Times, Oct 26, 2014)

Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler's Men (Amazon book, Oct 28, 2014) and review by Fresh Air, How Thousands Of Nazis Were 'Rewarded' With Life In The U.S. (NPR, Nov 5, 2014); see also Kevin C. Ruffner, CIA's Support to the Nazi War Criminal Investigations (CIA, Apr 14, 2007)

Michael Allen, Massacre in the Family: My Great-Great-Grandfather and an American Indian Tragedy (WSJ, Nov 24, 2014)

Jane Mayer, Torture and the Truth: How Unthinkable Cruelty Became Official Policy, But Will It Spur Lasting Reform? (New Yorker Magazine, Dec 22, 2014)

Charles Davis, America, Nation of Torturers: Stop Saying “This Isn’t Who We Are” — Here’s the Real Truth (Slate, Dec 16, 2014)

Jack Cloherty and Pierre Thomas, Teens as Young as 13 Rescued From Super Bowl Sex Trafficking (ABC News, Jan 4, 2015)

Annie Jacobsen, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Amazon book, Jan 20, 2015) and review by Jay Watkins, Intelligence in Public Literature (CIA, Oct 6, 2014) review posted before the book was officially released?

Deborah Becker and Shannon Dooling, Documentary Series Looks at Sex Trafficking in Boston (NPR, Jan 30, 2015)

Gary Haugen, The Hidden Reason for Poverty - Violence (TED talk, Mar 2015)

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, Raped on Campus? Don’t Trust Your College to Do the Right Thing (Chronicle of Higher Education, Mar 2, 2015)

Chris Bohjalian, Why Does Turkey Continue to Deny Armenian Genocide? (Boston Globe, Mar 9, 2015)

John Gray, Steven Pinker is Wrong About Violence and War (Guardian, Mar 13, 2015)

Kevin Kruse, A Christian Nation? Since When? (NY Times, Mar 14, 2015) how U.S. corporations linked libertarian capitalism (anti-New-Deal) and Christianity from the 1930's

Oliver Laughland, Guatemalans Deliberately Infected With STD's Sue Johns Hopkins University for $1bn (Guardian, Apr 2, 2015)

Yuka Hayashi, Japan's Textbook Changes Get Failing Grade From Neighbors (Wall Street Journal, Apr 7, 2015)

Frank Bruni, Best, Brightest - and Saddest? (NY Times, Apr 11, 2015)

WGBH, My Lai (PBS/WGBH video)

Brittany Wong, The 10 Most Dangerous Phrases in a Relationship (Huffington Post, May 13, 2015) and see "The Moment I Knew" below

Rod Dreher, Heart of Darkness: War and the Things We Don't Talk About (The American Conservative, May, 19, 2015)

Lance Armstrong, If You Didn't Gear Up, Hard to Stick Around (Dan Patrick Show, Jun 2, 2015) 

Maria Konnikova, The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment (New Yorker, Jun 12, 2015)

James W. Lowren, Why Do People Believe the Myths About the Confederacy? Because Our Monuments and Textbooks Are Wrong (Washington Post, Jul 1, 2015) an example of when history was written by the losing South

Adam B. Ellick and Nicholas Kristof, The Worst Atrocity You've Never Heard Of (NY Times, Jul 13, 2015) about the Nuba Mountains in Sudan

Talal al-Khatib, Tobacco Companies Still Battling Smoking-Cancer Link (Seeker, Jul 17, 2015)

Gabriel Sherman, How Roger Ailes Picked Trump, and Fox Viewers, Over Megyn Kelly (New York Magazine, Aug 11, 2015)

Bill McKibben, Exxon's Climate Lie: 'No Corporation Has Ever Done Anything This Big or Bad' (Guardian, Oct 14, 2015)

Paul Bloom, People Don't Actually Want Equality (The Atlantic, Oct 22, 2015)

Lucius McMannis, Hacktivist Group Anonymous Promises To De-Hood 1,000 KKK Members (Addicting Info, Oct 27, 2015)

Liz Kowalczyk and Patricia Wen, Why Didn't Anyone Stop Doctor Hardy? (Boston Globe, Dec 6, 2015)

Hailey Wallace, The Man Who Killed Tamir Rice (Black Enterprise, Dec 30, 2015) citing emotional instability and systemic failure

Georgina Kenyon, The Man Who Studies the Spread of Ignorance (BBC, Jan 6, 2016) about corporate efforts at spreading disinformation

Sukjong Hong, The "Comfort Women Deal" Between South Korea and Japan: Six Alternative Views (Korea Expose, Feb 2, 2016)

Glynn Custred, Turning Anthropology from Science into Political Activism (John William Pope Center, Feb 17, 2016)

Sarah Kaplan, The Darker Link Between Ancient Human Sacrifice and Our Modern World (Washington Post, Apr 5, 2016)

Tristan Harris, How Technology Hijacks People’s Minds—from a Magician and Google’s Design Ethicist (Medium, May 18, 2016)

Daniel Marans, Trump Supports Cutting Social Security From A ‘Moral Standpoint:’ Report (Huffington Post, May 28, 2016) lack of transparency

Liyan Qi, U.S. Schools Expelled 8,000 Chinese Students (Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2016)

Steven Paulikas, How Should We Respond to ‘Evil’? (NY Times, Jun 27, 2016)

John Oliver, Doping (Last Week Tonight, Jun 26, 2016)

Lynsey Chutel, Germany Finally Apologizes for Its Other Genocide - More Than a Century Later (Quartz, Jul 16, 2016) and BBC Namibia, Namibia Genocide and the Second Reich (BBC video, 2004) 1 hr documentary

William Astore, Why It's So Hard for Members of the Military to Speak Out (Tom Dispatch, Aug 11, 2016)

NY Times Editorial Board, When Police Unions Impede Justice (NY Times, Sep 3, 2016)

Om Malik, Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum (The New Yorker, Nov 28, 2016)

Jonathan Chait, David Brooks and the Intellectual Collapse of the Center (New York Magazine, Nov 29, 2016)

David A. Graham, The 'Comet Pizza' Gunman Provides a Glimpse of a Frightening Future (The Atlantic, Dec 5, 2016)

Josh O'Connor, The Asian Holocaust Killed Twice As Many People As The Nazis Did (Dose, Jan 16, 2017)

Pierre Keys, Alternative Facts in Bonhoeffer's Germany (Christian Century, Feb 15, 2017)

Andrew Higgins, Trump Embraces ‘Enemy of the People,’ a Phrase With a Fraught History (NY Times, Feb 26, 2017)

Tim Harford, The Problem with Facts (Financial Times, Mar 9, 2017) how Big Tobacco promoted "agnosticism", how the Trump presidency follows that strategy

Sophia A. McClennen, The Right Wing War on Facts: The New Partisan Divide That's Destroying Our Nation (Salon, Jun 24, 2017)

Jerry Useem, Power Causes Brain Damage (The Atlantic, Jul/Aug 2017) how powerful people lose mental capacities because they insulate themselves from disagreement

Richard Lloyd Parry, The School Beneath the Wave: The Unimaginable Tragedy of Japan's Tsunami (The Guardian, Aug 24, 2017) a failure of bureaucratic leadership; attempt to evade responsibility

Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Madeleine Varner, and Lauren Kirchner, Despite Disavowals, Leading Tech Companies Help Extremist Sites Monetize Hate (ProPublica, Aug 19, 2017) Although most tech companies have policies against working with hate websites, PayPal, Stripe, Newsmax and others help keep more than half of the most-visited extremist sites in business

Lynn Parramore, Meet the Economist Behind the One Percent’s Stealth Takeover of America (Institute for New Economic Thinking, May 30, 2018) "Nobel laureate James Buchanan is the intellectual linchpin of the Koch-funded attack on democratic institutions, argues Duke historian Nancy MacLean"

Specific to World War II

Wikipedia, Individuals and Groups Assisting Jews During the Holocaust (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia, Archbishop Damaskinos of Athens (Wikipedia article) whose actions and advocacy saved thousands of Jews during WW2

Wikipedia, Council of Jews and Christians, a voluntary organization in Britain working against anti-Semitism

Sir Nicholas Winton, Man Who Rescued Nearly 700 Holocaust Victims Finds Himself in an Audience Comprised Entirely by Those He Saved (BBC, 1988)

Nicholson Baker, Why I'm a Pacifist: The Dangerous Myth of the Good War (Harper's Magazine, May 2011) Before we blame God for the Holocaust, we need to read this article.

Brian Rosner, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy - A Righteous Gentile vs. the Third Reich (Centre for Public Christianity, May 12, 2011)

Michael Ignatieff, One Country Saved Its Jews. Were They Just Better People? The Surprising Truth about Denmark in the Holocaust (New Republic, Dec 14, 2013)

Tim Townsend, Mission at Nuremburg: An Army Chaplain and the Trial of the Nazis (Religion and Politics, Apr 23, 2014)

Madison Park, How the Philippines Saved 1,200 Jews During the Holocaust (CNN, Feb 3, 2015)

Irene Archos, Mother Maria of Paris Says "Oxi!" to the Nazi Mass Murder Machine (Pravoslavie, Mar 11, 2015)

David Gelernter, Why Should a Jew Care Whether Christianity Lives or Dies? (First Things, Mar 24, 2015)

Andrew Higgins, WWII Hero Credits Luck and Chance in Foiling Hitler’s Nuclear Ambitions (NY Times, Nov 20, 2015)

Robert D. McFadden, Nicholas Winton, Rescuer of 669 Children From Holocaust, Dies at 106 (NY Times, Jul 1, 2015)

Catholic News Agency, Heroic Virtue of Ukrainian Bishop Who Sheltered Hundreds of Jews Recognized (CNA, Jul 17, 2015)

Amanpour, Amazing Story of How Bulgaria's Jews Were Saved in WWII (CNN News, Jul 24, 2015) about King Boris III of Bulgaria (Wikipedia)

John Sandinopoulos, The NO of Greek Clergy in 1940 (Mystagogy blog, Oct 28, 2015)

Ishaan Tharoor, What Americans Thought of Jewish Refugees on the Eve of World War II (Washington Post, Nov 17, 2015)

Daniel A. Gross, The U.S. Government Turned Away Thousands of Jewish Refugees, Fearing That They Were Nazi Spies (Smithsonian Magazine, Nov 18, 2015)

Carol Kuruvilla, Japanese Schindler Who Saved 6,000 Lives During World War II Finally Gets a Movie (Huffington Post, Jan 19, 2016)

David Swanson, Top 12 Reasons the Good War Was Bad: Hiroshima in Context (Washingtons blog, May 24, 2016)

Newsner, Woman Hides Thousands of Children in Coffins - Then She's Arrested and Her Dark Secret Emerges (Newsner, Dec 17, 2016)

Kevin M. Levin, The Pernicious Myth of the ‘Loyal Slave’ Lives on in Confederate Memorials (Smithsonian, Aug 17, 2017)

The Florida Bookshelf, 5 Books on the True History Behind Confederate Monuments (University of Florida Press, Oct 2017) very helpful books on unmasking white nationalist propaganda about the South, the Civil War, and American history

Adam Serwer, The Nationalist's Delusion (The Atlantic, Nov 20, 2017) a helpful, historically broad analysis of how racism manifests in politics

Yoram Hazony, The Dark Side of the Enlightenment (Wall Street Journal, Apr 6, 2018) Today’s advocates oversell the benefits of unfettered reason. They dismiss the contributions of tradition, religion and nationalism to human progress.

Kristin Romey, Exclusive: Ancient Mass Child Sacrifice May Be World's Largest (National Geographic, Apr 26, 2018) Incan child sacrifice dating back ~550 years ago

David Gelles, Sundar Pichai of Google: ‘Technology Doesn’t Solve Humanity’s Problems’ (NY Times Magazine, Nov 8, 2018)

Sarah Condon, As Advent Approaches: Evil is Well-Organized (Mockingbird, Nov 27, 2018) compares the death of journalist Jamal Kashoggi to the death of the concubine in Judges 19; this type of evil requires organization

Ben Lefebvre and Nick Juliano, How Zinke Lost His Way (Politico, Dec 21, 2018) a somewhat sympathetic take examining lack of conflict-of-interest laws in his native Montana

Eric Levitz, How American Exceptionalism Is a Dangerous Myth (NY Magazine, Jan 2, 2019) involving American foreign policy

For more engagement on the issues of race and empire

Part of the series: