To die fighting

[DrZoidberg]

What do you do when you know your captor, or likely captor, intends to kill you? Not maybe, but for sure you know intends to kill you?

This scenario is ongoing in Syria, Iraq, and Libya right now. Though this question has undoubtedly occurred many times before. Take this Holocaust video from Latvia:

[YOUTUBE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ParxL_mmi-Y[/YOUTUBE]

The victims can hold no ambiguity about their impending fate - yet they comply, almost obsequiously. They pass guards with guns; guns they could attempt to grab to kill or harm before being killed. But they don't.

More recently is this: WARNING - GRAPHIC / NSFW

Show

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=44e_1406655216

Again, there is no question they are to be massacred. However, in this instance, the captives greatly outnumber their would-be murderers. Why not use the greater numbers to overwhelm on the chance that some might survive?

I appreciate my relative privilege in not actually having been in this situation. Still, I wonder what prevents people from crossing that internal barrier to fight back. If you're going to die, you're going to die. At least die fighting.

I've read plenty of reports of Syrian mock executions. Mock-executions is one of the most common torture methods in the world. They're also threatened to be killed all the time. The result is that they don't know when the execution is for real or just as a method to intimidate. I know the Nazis in WW2 did a lot of shooting every second or third guy in a line, and let the others live. Hope is a powerful incentive.

 

[fromderinside]

What would you do?

Spread my wings and fry.

 

[abaddon]

... the captives greatly outnumber their would-be murderers...

The numbers are not working for them. People in a crowd tend to wonder “Why doesn’t someone do something?” When you get a bunch of people wondering that, they do no outward action. Being in numbers anonymizes people, in a sense it "atomizes" them, so it takes organizers to get a coordinated group behavior from them and the murderers were the organizers.

I don’t think that’s “the” explanation but probably it’s part of it. “Maybe a miracle will happen and they won’t shoot me” and “nothing I can do” will be the more conscious line of thought (in each 'atomized' lonely mind). Fantasy retribution helps, thinking on how the murderers will pay for it eventually even after your death. Some hero stories are along those lines, where a person selected to die will say to his murderer “Your day is coming too” before getting shot.

... I wonder what prevents people from crossing that internal barrier to fight back. If you're going to die, you're going to die. At least die fighting.

Few, if any, will jump out of line on the assumption that everyone else too, not without a pre-agreed plan. Organized uprisings happened in response to feeling “there’s nothing left to do but die fighting” but that usually comes after the numbers are depleted enough to organize them. That was said to be the thinking of the persons in the Warsaw uprising. They wanted to die fighting and also to give others hope by showing that the Germans are not all-powerful, that they "bleed too". But their uprising happened after the ghetto had been emptied of most of its numbers.