Uncharted Island

In “The Man Behind the Curtain,” we saw Ben unflinchingly murder his father with a nasty nerve gas, part of a greater plot that exterminated his fellow members of Dharma in the same horrifying manner. The systematic destruction of an entire people - genocide. Haunting echoes of the gas chambers used by the Nazis.

In “Through the Looking Glass,” Ben became even more Hitler-like. He ordered Tom and the Others sent to the beach to kill any of the castaways who got in the way of kidnapping the pregnant women. When he finally got radio contact with Tom after he met up with Jack and the crew, he ordered him to shoot Sayid, Jin, and Bernard. Although it’s a bit confusing, since Ryan told Tom it was on order they had to follow, and Tom muses they should’ve shot the men instead of the sand. Were we not privy to a previous order to shoot in the sand instead, that he was going to bluff Jack? In any case, Ryan was very clear about following Ben’s orders.

Bonnie tried to explain to Mikhail that she and Greta were following Ben’s orders. But Mikhail turns it back on her, confessing that he’s only following Ben’s orders by killing both women. He is a “loyalist” to Ben, he follows Ben’s orders to preserve Ben’s secret. And he follows through by pulling the pin on the grenade to finish off Charlie, since he wasn’t able to shoot him, possibly sacrificing himself in the process.

A lot of people who were not inherently bad people did a lot of terrible things by following orders. A famous psychological study by Stanley Milgram attempted to explain how ordinary Nazi soldiers could’ve senselessly killed so many innocent people based on Hitler’s orders. And what Milgram found was a horrifying glance at human nature; ordinary Americans, instructed by an experimenter in a lab coat, administered what they believed to be a lethal dose of electric shock to a man they believed to have a heart condition - just because they were told to. (I knew my Master’s degree in Psychology would come in handy some day.) People will follow dubious orders from an authority figure. And authority figures with as much charisma as Hitler or the character of Ben can get people to follow far more sinister orders.

The creators of LOST have gone to some lengths to make sure we acknowledge the similarities between Ben and Hitler. I believe that. For one thing, Hitler was not a member of his ideal Aryan race, blond haired and blue eyed. Ben was not a member of the group of Hostiles he came to lead; he was a member of the group he helped to murder.

It’s all very disturbing.

I do wonder if Ben will meet the same fate in the end, if he’ll end up taking his own life. I guess that’s one more argument for Ben being in the coffin in the flash forward in the season three finale; the man in the coffin killed himself.