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unauthorized circumstances, such acts are deemed criminal. Police brutality and military atrocity, for example, are two categories of criminal violence. The violence that police and military apply illegally—against noncombatants, for example, or against citizens who have not committed a crime or are not resisting arrest—is similar to the violence they use officially. Ironically, such illegal but otherwise comparable acts by violent officials are often characterized as “irrational” or “crazy.”
    Many theories have been proposed to explain violent behavior, including loss of control, involuntary impulse, unconscious motivation, lack of conscience, character disorders, genetic inheritance or neurological damage. Some of these theories are anecdotal, based on an observer’s interpretation of a violent actor’s intentions. Others derive from statistical correlational studies, which by definition do not reveal causal relationships but merely identify qualities that may be associated in some way with violent behavior. That people become violent because they have low self-esteem, for example, is a widely accepted theory that minimal interaction with violent people, including violent professionals, quickly disconfirms: violent people usually have overweeningly high self-esteem verging on egomania, because they are confident of their ability to handle conflict and because other people, fearing them, show them great deference. Not all sociopaths are violent; not all violent people have neurological damage; unconscious motivation is by definition unprovable; and any theory of violence development that fails to account for official violent behavior as well as criminal is incomplete.
    In his history Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the young Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen ascribes Nazi mass murder to what he calls “eliminationist anti-Semitism,” which he defines as “the belief that Jewish influence, by nature destructive, must be eliminated irrevocably from society.” Besides being tautological — because it includes the effect (elimination) in the cause (“eliminationist anti-Semitism”)— Goldhagen’s theory fails to explain the Third Reich’s fervor for murdering not only Jews but also Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals and the disabled. It assumes that violence is essentially an overflow phenomenon, so that when too much of some volatile substance has accumulated in an individual or a society (in this case anti-Semitism), it will overflow in the form of violent behavior; as Goldhagen writes naively and again tautologically, “People must be motivated to kill others, or else they would not do so.” In fact, motivation is not sufficient by itself to produce serious violence; people must also have undergone prior violent experiences: they must have learned to be violent and must have come to identify themselves as violent. Otherwise their intense hatreds will emerge as ugly but nonviolent behaviors, such as expressions of contempt, denunciations, discrimination, ostracism—exactly the sort of behaviors that the rest of twentieth-century Europe, and Germany before Hitler, demonstrated toward the Jews. As several critics have noted, Goldhagen’s theory that eliminationist anti-Semitism explains the Holocaust also isolates the most destructive genocide of the twentieth century as a unique event (in Goldhagen’s formulation, “a radical break with everything known in human history”), disconnected from the other genocides of the age, when in fact other genocides — of the Armenians, for example, or of the Tutsi in Rwanda—resemble the Holocaust in etiology if not in scale even though anti-Semitism played no part in their occurrence. There is much of value in Goldhagen’s book, but the evidence, including the evidence he cites, does not support a theory that ideology causes violent behavior, though it may well be used to justify it.
    One theory that accounts for violent officials as well as violent