Sorry I took the Lions getting 3 and a half.
Okay I’m kind of puzzled about the half, but that’s been me lately, puzzled? Sometimes it’s hell being a blonde.
It’s an Aussie thing. In sporting events the bookmakers always include half a point so there can’t be a tie. So if our Colisseum battle ended up:
Christians 6 Lions 3 with the start it would become:
Christians 6 Lions 61/2 (Go you lions).
And blonde is good, just ask around.
I recall reading about an experiment done in the sixties where a teacher took an ordinary class and divided them into two groups and, creating a cult of superiority, set one group in power over the other. The situation developed toward atrocity so quickly that the experiment had to be stopped early.
(No cite handy, but it was described in the old CoEvolution Quarterly magazine.)
We all have the capability to tread on the faces of others. Remember how school was when you were 12 or 13: it was all about Belonging to the Group, and anyone outside the Group was fair game for abuse. It takes quite a bit of development to get past this phase, and some people never do.
If you can provide your henchpersons with a sufficiently-good and powerful Group to belong to, they’ll do anything for you. And they only need be Ordinary People.
As for charisma in the leader, I’m sure it helps, but group dynamics does the bulk of the work.
Now you mention it, there was recently some kind of reality TV show here in the UK where a mock prison was set up and I seem to remember it becoming quite brutal quite quickly.
I hadda ask, didn’t I. 
Well this is a deja vu moment. I’m giving away my age, but school in California in the 60’s was part encounter group, part experiment and oh learning too. We were divided up blue eyes and brown eyes. Brown eyes were superior and it got surprisely real. It was uncomfortable and memorable. I was not in the superior group or I probably would have had better memories of it. I don’t remember much in the way of details, just that it was bad.
Sunspace is quite correct; I studied this particular experiment recently as part of my certification process. No actual harm was done, but parents and administrators creeped out QUICK at how fast the little buggers took to merrily oppressing each other… based on the color of their eyes (brown eyed children got to oppress the blue eyed kids, and later, vice versa).
A news show even sponsored a “twenty years later” reunion. We watched that, too.
Most organizations that want henchmen don’t advertise for moral bankrupts willing to take money in exchange for torture services, murder, muscle, and general thuggery, y’know. When it comes to mass atrocity, one does not advertise in advance. Admittedly, the KKK tends not to attract people who’re open-minded and such, but you’ll also notice that the KKK has been a standing joke for decades to everyone except themselves, black folks, and the FBI.
Most ‘henchmen’ simply find themselves having to deal with bigger and bigger stuff… or quietly sifted out of the organization. From what I’ve read, most Nazi storm troopers didn’t actually sign up to murder Jews… but when the time came, they either did it or got the hell out.
And at the time, there were some pretty heavy penalties for getting the hell out. No, not excusing their actions; but I think it makes for an explanation of how the hell ordinary people could do this sort of thing.
Wasn’t there a book on the topic? The WAVE or something? Google doesn’t pick up much on the topic, unfortunately.
The divided-group study mentioned above is known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s been written about extensively and adapted for film a couple of times, most recently in an excellent but gruellingly difficult German version called Das Experiment. Google “stanford prison experiment” for tons of information.
Re the OP, there was an episode of Angel this season that contained a moment appropriate to the discussion. The bad guy was up to no good; Angel and his team busted in to knock heads. The bad guy’s henchmen surrounded our heroes, and the bad guy said something to the effect of, “I’m willing to let my men die. Can you say the same?” You had to wonder what the nameless goons thought at that moment; did any of them have second thoughts at the realization that the boss was going to toss away their lives without a twitch of guilt?
Personally, I think it’s mostly a literary device to aid storytelling. We feel bad when a human being dies, so in wartime we dehumanize our enemy to make it easier to kill them. Thus in our adventure tales, we don’t bother getting to know the “bad guys” as people, so we don’t feel sad when Arnold Schwarzenegger mows down a yard full of thugs in Commando or whatever. Consider this past summer’s Bad Boys II where the heroes can cheerfully create ungodly mayhem on the freeways, no doubt causing dozens of injuries and deaths, but when one hero’s sister gets kidnapped, he says, “This shit just got personal.” As if none of the other stuff mattered.
So on one level it provides fodder for cute jokes about “disposable” minions, like in Clerks when they talk about the guys on the Death Star who were just union plumbers or whatever and didn’t deserve to get blown up with the really bad guys. But on another level, it offers a window into human psychology, insofar as we are able to construct an artificial dichotomy between “real” people and subhumans who don’t count when they die. We can lump all of our enemies into a big “other” bucket and pretend they all behave and think alike, as an enemy mass, which manifests in our storytelling as the interchangeable henchmen who apparently don’t have lives and minds of their own, thereby permitting the hero to kill them with impunity.
This is what Fight Club is about. A charismatic leader starts off making sense to people (“Where are your parents? Do you need all this stuff?”) and slowly leads them into madness and chaos for his own purposes, step by gradual step. The common misinterpretation of the film is that the charismatic leader is initially presented as just that, leading to the erroneous belief that he should therefore be the hero throughout, which causes the simple-minded critic to conclude that the film endorses terrorism and nihilistic destruction. A close reading, of course, makes it clear that the film endorses no such thing. But if you’re interested, take another look at the movie and pay attention to how the henchmen are created, nurtured, and controlled.
Which, of course, is the same thing that happens in a genocidal situation. The perpetrators are able to look at the victims as a subhuman mass whose lives and deaths don’t matter.
Maybe the mistake is in the assumption that something has to happen to people to make them support an evil regime. Maybe, and a lot of evidence seems to support this, from the Stanford Prison experiment, to the studies of Police Batallion 101, to the Milgram experiment, ordinary people, without much special coaxing, can come to accept the actions of an evil regime as alright.
In my country (the US) 50 years ago, a bunch of states had laws saying that black people had to use seperate, inferior public accomodations, and these laws were extremely popular. Yet, in all other regards, the majority of the people who supported segregation were decent, ordinary people.
Maybe this is just part of what we are.
What right wing organizations? Are you talking about neo-nazi’s or the RNC?
My $.02 on the subject of the OP is that all human beings have the potential of being extremely cruel and brutal. Anybody could be a “henchman” type character if the right circumstances permit.
It’s easy for us to have an academic discussion about the subject and not understand. We sit in cubicles (not working) in first world countries that are at peace (for the most part). It’s much different from someone living under say Stalin or Hussain. They look around and see who the winning team is. When asked to join the henchman type secret police/torture/etc organizations they see a steady job with good pay and relative safety from the government. They are then willing to do just about anything to protect the position they are in.
MHO, of course.
I am probaly just going to waste space but I wanted to insert real facts into this thread…
Most can agree that Hitler was well, evil for the most part. Hitler had what I would call a henchman with him from almost the begining (since 1938). His name… with bad spelling and all? Gurgel (I can not spell it… sorry…). He believed so much in Hitler that when Hitler was on his last defensive in Berlin, in the underground bunker, that Gurgel brought his entire family down with him. The names of his kids all started with H in honor of Hitler. When Hitler decided to kill himself, Gurgel and his wife killed all of their children, and then themselves.
(I think Gurgel was actually in charge of the concentration camps…)
Do you mean Goebbels? He had joined the Nazi party in 1922 and the Hitler faction of the party in '26, and I don’t think he ever actually joined Hitler in the bunker, so he might not be who you mean, but he, his wife, and their 6 children did commit suicide after Hitler’s death.
Although there were other reports done, you may be thinking of “A Class Divided” from the PBS documentary series Frontline. You can view it on-line, though dial-up speeds just don’t seem to cut it with streaming video…
Read Shoot the Women First interviews with female terrorist. The title of the book was advice by a German anti-terrorist squad leader who believed women to be the most devoted and therefore the most dangerous.
I recall another expiriment, in which a test subject was placed in a small room with a box with a dial. They were told that as the dial was advanced, progressively larger electrical shocks would be administered to a subject in the next room (this was not really true). As they turned the dial, an assistant in the next room would scream, moan, beg the subject to stop, plead for mercy, etc. If the test subject expressed any concern, he would be told politely to please continue, this was normal, and that the testers would take full responsibility for anything that happened. Most test subjects would fully advance the dial, to the point where the screaming stopped and the person presumably was dead. Not only that, they said afterwards they didn’t think they had done anything wrong!
When a person dosn’t feel responsible for their own actions, they can do horrible things without guilt. Scary stuff.