Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PREFACE
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE - Eliminationism, Not Genocide
Human Beings and Mass Slaughter
Eliminationism
The Modern State, Transformative Power
The Problems Defined
CHAPTER TWO - Worse Than War Our Age of Suffering
Our Age’s Slaughters
Varieties of Eliminationist Assaults
The Scope of Eliminationist Assaults
PART I - EXPLAINING ELIMINATIONIST ASSAULTS
CHAPTER THREE - Why They Begin
Four Questions and Three Perspectives
A New Perspective
The Centrality of Political Leaders
CHAPTER FOUR - How They Are Implemented
The Perpetrators
Eliminationist Institutions
Means and Methods
The Sympathies of Others and the Problem of Resistance
Transformative Politics, Transformative Results
CHAPTER FIVE - Why the Perpetrators Act
Why Do the Killers Kill?
The Perpetrators’ Other Actions
The Perpetrators’ Beliefs and How They Come to Hold Them
From Beliefs to Action
CHAPTER SIX - Why They End
The Genocide Convention
The International Political Environment’s Crucial Context
How Eliminationist Assaults End
PART II - MODERN ELIMINATIONIST POLITICS
CHAPTER SEVEN - Sources and Patterns
Modernity and Eliminationist Politics
Four Kinds of Eliminationist Assaults
Noneliminationist Outcomes
The Crucial Character of Perpetrators’ Beliefs
CHAPTER EIGHT - Thinking and Acting
Discourse and the Dissemination of Eliminationist Beliefs
Dehumanization and Demonization
Dealing with Demons
From Discourse to Action
CHAPTER NINE - Actual Minds, Actual Worlds
Eliminationist Worlds
Communal Worlds
Camp Worlds
Personal Worlds
Actual Worlds
PART III - CHANGING THE FUTURE
CHAPTER TEN - Prologue to the Future
The New Threats
CHAPTER ELEVEN - What We Can Do
The Need for a Powerful Anti-Eliminationist Discourse
The International Community’s Promise and Pathologies
Stopping Eliminationist Politics
NOTES
CREDITS
THOUGHTS AND THANKS
INDEX
Copyright Page
For Gideon and Veronica
PREFACE
The Choice
HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence.
They live in countries governed by political regimes that have been and are inherently prone to committing mass murder. In some countries, such as Sudan, the killing is ongoing. In others, such as Rwanda, the killing has been recent. In still others, such as Kenya, the threat of mass murder has appeared real if not imminent. In yet others, although no warning signals suggest immediate danger, mass slaughter could begin precipitously.
Our time, dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, has been afflicted by one mass murder after another, so frequently and, in aggregate, of such massive destructiveness, that the problem of genocidal killing is worse than war. Until now, the world’s peoples and governments have done little to prevent or stop mass murdering. Today, the world is not markedly better prepared to end this greatest scourge of humanity. The evidence of this failure is overwhelming. It is to be found in Tibet, North Korea, the former Yugoslavia, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Rwanda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Darfur.
Individuals, institutions, and governments, in every region of the world—we all have a choice:We can persist in our malign neglect that consists of three parts: failing to face the problem squarely and to understand the real nature of genocide; failing to recognize we can far more effectively protect hundreds of millions of people and radically reduce mass murder’s incidence; and failing to choose to act on this knowledge.
Or we can focus on this scourge; understand its causes, its nature and complexity, and its scope and systemic quality; and, building upon that understanding, craft institutions and policies that will save countless lives and also lift the lethal threat under which so many people live.
How can we not choose the second?
INTRODUCTION
CLARIFYING THE ISSUES
CHAPTER ONE
Eliminationism, Not Genocide
HARRY TRUMAN, THE THIRTY-THIRD president of the United States, was a mass murderer. He twice ordered nuclear bombs dropped on Japanese cities. The first, an atomic bomb, exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and the second, a nuclear bomb, detonated over Nagasaki on August 9. Truman knew that each would kill tens of thousands of Japanese civilians who had no direct bearing on any military operation, and who posed no immediate threat to Americans. In effect, Truman chose to snuff out the lives of approximately 300,000 men, women, and children. Upon learning of the first bomb’s annihilation of Hiroshima, Truman was jubilant, announcing that “this is the greatest thing in history.”1 He then followed up in Nagasaki with a second greatest thing. It is hard to understand how any right-thinking person could fail to call slaughtering unthreatening Japanese mass murder.
People, particularly Americans, have offered many justifications and excuses for Truman’s mass slaughter. That it was necessary to end the war. That it was necessary to save tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of American lives. But as Truman at the time knew, and as his advisers, including his military advisers, told him prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, none of these was true.2 Then supreme Allied commander of the forces in Europe and soon to be American president, Dwight Eisenhower explained: “During his recitation of the relevant facts [about the plan for using the atomic bomb], I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him [Secretary of War Henry Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’”3
Truman, in his press release informing the American people about the annihilation of Hiroshima, offered the primitive logic of retribution: “The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold.”4 These justifications notwithstanding, the best that can be said for Truman, for those Americans (in August 1945, 85 percent) and others who supported his mass slaughters, and for those who have been duped by the drumbeat of self-exculpation into believing that the slaughter was just (in 1995, 72 percent of Americans ages fifty to sixty-four, and 80 percent of those sixty-five and older), is that he and they, not otherwise wicked people, perpetrated or supported this twin horror owing to erroneous information or reasoning, to moral blindness, or to hardened hearts after years of war.5 Even this best face does not change what Truman did.
What if Adolf Hitler had dropped a nuclear bomb on a British or American city? What if during the Cuban Missile Crisis Nikita Khrushchev had incinerated Miami? Would we not call such acts mass murder, even though in Hitler’s case it would have also been done with the veneer of a rationale that it was a military operat
ion and not the mass slaughter of noncombatants? In the case of Hitler, we would inscribe his act prominently in his long ledger of evil. Why should Truman’s wholesale extermination of so many men, women, and children be different?
What if the Japanese had not surrendered a few days after Nagasaki’s bombing, and Truman had proceeded to annihilate another Japanese city? And then another. And another. And another. At what point would people stop making excuses? At what point would all people speak plainly about his mass murdering? Why would the successive nuclear annihilation of the people of, say, five or ten Japanese cities be deemed mass murder—which undoubtedly it would be—but the slaughter of the Japanese of only two cities not be?
Or what if the Americans had conquered a few Japanese cities, stopped their advance, and proceeded to shoot 140,000 Japanese civil-ians, men, women, and children (the number who died immediately or from injuries in the next few months from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima), explaining to Japan’s leaders and its public that only surrender would prevent more mass slaughters? Would Truman’s apologists have similarly justified this more conventional mass murdering as militarily and morally necessary? What if three days later Truman ordered American soldiers to shoot another seventy thousand Japanese men, women, and children from a second city? Would we not call such slaughters mass murder? Except for the technological difference between 210,000 bullets and two nuclear bombs (the nuclear bombs destroyed also the cities themselves, and subsequently caused at least another sixty thousand deaths owing to radiation poisoning and other injuries), it is hard to see how, in deciding whether each constitutes mass murder, these two scenarios differ in any conceptually or factually meaningful way. Truman’s Chief of Staff William Leahy, a Navy admiral, abhorred using nuclear weapons against the Japanese, and not only because “the Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.” Leahy explains: “My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children”6—because that is not war but mass murder.
Hiroshima after the mass murder
I start with the Truman’s mass annihilation of Japanese to indicate how deficient our understanding of large-scale mass murder is. The willful slaughter of more than a quarter million people, in full view of the world, should be universally recognized for what it was, causing the label “mass murderer” to be affixed to Truman’s name. Japanese, to a degree people in other countries, and especially critics of the United States do see Truman’s use of nuclear weapons this way. But in the United States and the corridors of power, it is denied or ignored. That Truman’s nuclear incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s people is not invariably and prominently listed among our time’s mass murders points us to one of the acute problems—aside from truthfulness—confounding our understanding: the problem of definition. How should we define mass murder so that we do not misconstrue it?
Why have Truman’s actions not been universally seen and condemned for what they were? For Americans the problem of facing up to the crimes of one’s own country and countrymen is real. Most peoples have prettified self-images that cover up blemishes, airbrush scars and open sores on the self-drawn portraits of their nations, their pasts, and themselves. For Americans, Turks, Japanese, Poles, Russians, Chinese, French, British, Guatemalans, Croats, Serbs, Hutu, and countless others, the ugliness that they easily see in others, they fail to acknowledge in themselves, their own countries, or their countrymen. How can we establish appropriate general criteria that give people a more accurate view of themselves?
Americans and others fail to see and speak truthfully about these American crimes against the Japanese for other reasons. The difficulty of adequately defining mass murder or genocide is compounded by the common failure to keep it distinct from two other essential tasks: explanation and moral evaluation.
For many people, especially Americans, it just feels wrong, and offensive, to speak of Truman in the same breath as Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. Why? The latter four killers were certifiable monsters. They destroyed millions because they deemed certain people human trash or obstacles to their power or millennial or imperial goals. Truman, however, was no such monster. While these monsters’ mass murdering was an organic expression of their long-standing racist or ideological views and political aspirations, Truman’s was accidental, owing to a confluence of circumstances that he would have preferred never came about. While these monsters planned, even lusted, to kill millions and created institutions explicitly for such purposes, Truman would have gladly had history take another course. While each of these monsters killed as an integral part of his use of power, did so over much of the time that he held power, and would have continued doing so had he stayed in power, Truman killed in a very specific setting, in the context of a brutal and extremely destructive war that Japan had launched against the United States starting with a surprise attack on the American Pacific fleet in Pearl Harbor. After destroying much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Truman stopped. When one looks at each of the other four, it is hard not to conclude that, if the term is to be applied to human beings, each was a monster. When one looks at Truman, one sees an otherwise conventional man who committed monstrous deeds.
Still, none of these distinctions speaks to the definition of mass murder. None suggests that the nature of Truman’s acts and those of the other four are different. Each distinction, rather, addresses either differences between why the four monsters and Truman acted, or how we ought to evaluate the four and Truman morally. None makes Truman’s willful killing of Japanese children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki any less a mass-murderous act than Hitler’s, Stalin’s, Mao’s, or Pol Pot’s willful killing of Jewish, Ukrainian, Chinese, or Cambodian children.
This failure to distinguish between defining an act, explaining it, and morally judging it likely leads many to recoil at putting Truman in the dock with the greatest monsters of our age. Nevertheless, that Truman should have found himself before a court to answer for his actions seems clear. How such a court’s judgment and sentence would read—compared to those of the other four—can be debated. Truman was not a Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. In this sense, people’s intuitions are correct. But that should not stop us from seeing his deeds for what they are.
The difficulty of keeping distinct the three tasks of definition, explanation, and moral evaluation muddles considerations of mass murder. The passions of assigning guilt, blame, or moral responsibility hijack the other two usually cooler enterprises. This happens constantly in discussions of the Holocaust, the name for the Germans’ annihilation of European Jews. If Truman and Hitler are not to be judged the same, then their acts, so goes the faulty and backward chain of thinking, could not be the same. Similarly, if their deeds cannot be explained in the same way, then they could not be of the same kind. Hitler killed Jews because he was in the grip of an ideology, a fantasy, that held the Jews to be the source of evil in the world. Truman, not beholden to any such fantasy, annihilated the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for other, though not entirely clear, reasons: perhaps his belief that it was a just way to hasten the war’s end (even if, as Truman knew, the slaughter was not necessary to end the war soon), or perhaps to demonstrate American power to the Soviets for the emerging cold war struggle. But these different explanations do not make one slaughter a mass murder and the other not.
We can, as a matter of fact, call Truman’s annihilation of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki mass murder and the man a mass murderer, putting Truman and his deeds into the same broad categories of Hitler and the Holocaust, Stalin and the gulag, Pol Pot, Mao, Saddam Hussein, and Slobodan Milošević and their victims, without giving the same explanation for Truman’s actions as we do for theirs, and without judging them morally as being equivalent.
As Truman’s example suggests, we must put an end to a host of fallacies and self-deceptions that have cloude
d the facts and muddled our judgments. We must consult the corrective lenses of others. We must look at mass killings using impartial criteria. We must keep distinct the tasks of definition, which requires specifying what it is we are examining; of explanation, which requires accounts for why events occur and people act; and of moral evaluation, which requires us to judge the character of events and the culpability of the actors. We must approach the phenomenon with the willingness to think it through systematically and from the beginning.
Human Beings and Mass Slaughter
Our investigation of mass murder begins with basic questions: Is it easy or hard to get people to kill others, including children? Some say that, with opportunity, all or most people will readily slaughter others. Others say that human beings will assent to kill others merely because they receive orders to do so. Still others hold that people who find themselves subjected to social psychological pressure to kill will generally do so, or that propaganda can quickly, almost immediately, turn any people into mass executioners of any men, women, and even children. Each of these views has scholarly and “common-sense” or popular versions. Are they right?
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