Robert Jay Lifton – Algol at its best

Robert Jay Lifton, the psychiatrist who shed light on the darkest chapters in modern history including Chinese brainwashing, Hiroshima, the Holocaust and the Vietnam War, has died aged 99.  His later investigations into war crimes and the experiences of Vietnam veterans in the early 1970s led him to formulate his theory of the “atrocity-producing situation” in which he believed ordinary people could commit acts of such extraordinary cruelty as the My Lai massacre.  His book