Are all or most adults potential mass murderers, mass exterminators of children, just waiting to be asked to kill? Or must something profound happen to people for them to perpetrate mass slaughter? Are all or most states, are all or most societies, proto-genocidal, meaning they could easily be moved to commit genocide? Or are only some ready to be easily incited to slaughter? Why has our age of such technological, economic, and undeniable moral progress seen so much mass slaughter?
The foundation for answering these seemingly simple questions is an exploration of critical aspects, in turn, of the nature of human beings, modern societies and their cultures, states, and mass slaughter.
Any serious investigation of mass murder must reject two widespread notions. The first consists of several related notions: that people’s actions are determined by external forces; that they have little or no say over how they act; that free will is an illusion. Yet if forces or pressures determined people’s actions, it would not be so hard to understand mass murder, or so much about our social and political lives in general that we understand only partially or hardly at all. Some people always deviate from what the external forces supposedly acting upon them are said to push them to do; often so many do that forces, such as state orders, deemed so powerful in one setting, seem hardly relevant in another, as during rebellions and revolutions.
The second faulty notion is the first’s curious analogue. It holds that internal drives impel people to commit mass murder. When civilization’s restraints are lifted, the universally existing antagonism of people unlike oneself, the love of violence, the will to vent aggression, to dominate, to vanquish, and the pleasures of sadism easily awaken the darkened heart, the Caligula that is everyman. A kindred view holds that when opportunity presents itself, when the incentives are right, the universal drive for gain will move people, like so many automatons, to kill others. Either way, this notion about innate internal drives is also false. Far from everyone kills or tortures others whenever the opportunity presents itself or when it appears profitable, or kills or tortures any group of people, regardless of their national, political, ethnic, religious, or linguistic identities.
These various notions about human nature are often not articulated but instead embedded in the discussion of mass murder as unstated assumptions. However explicitly or baldly their proponents state these notions, they rarely investigate, examine, test, or justify them, and fail to assess them against competing views. This is true of scholarly and popular writing and (in my considerable experience) of discussions among acquaintances and friends.
The real task is not to postulate that all people have the general capacity to kill and therefore will kill anyone at any time or, still more wrongheaded, to assume that because of external circumstances or internal drives those who have killed have done so automatically, and then to declare the investigation closed. The real task is to adopt a more multifaceted and realistic view of humanity and to explain the variation in people’s responses to the forces outside them and those (whatever they are) inside them, to understand how people mediate such influences when they move themselves to act. Why do some people kill (though not just anyone) and other people who find themselves in the same situation do not? Why do some people torture and others similarly positioned do not? On a larger scale, why do some groups of people perpetrate mass murder, including slaughtering children, and others who find themselves in very much the same circumstances, say of deprivation or of being at war, do not?
To answer these and the many other questions about mass murder, we must begin with several fundamental truths about human beings: People make choices about how to act, even if they do not choose the contexts in which they make them. People make these choices according to their understanding of the social world and their views of what is right and wrong, good and evil, and of their own understanding of how the world is to be shaped and governed, even if different contexts make some choices more or less plausible, or easier or more difficult to choose. And people ultimately are the authors of their own actions because humans are fundamentally beings with a moral dimension (which does not mean we endorse their moral views), and they are so because the human condition is one of agency, namely the capacity and burden of being able to choose to say yes, which means also being able to say no.
We must keep these facts about human beings in mind for another reason. Ignoring them depersonalizes and dehumanizes the perpetrators. It turns them into puny abstractions, fleshy automatons with internal robotics programmed by whatever theories are supplying the motor. This also means that when presenting accounts of the perpetrators’ deeds, we should not omit them linguistically, as people often do who want it to appear as if some larger forces, and not human beings with human motives, are effectively doing the killing or who, for political reasons, wish to obscure the identities of the perpetrators. We should not employ the passive voice, which omits the presence of the actors—on this or that day, this or that many Armenians, Chinese, Jews, Bosnian Muslims, or Tutsi were killed—and instead use the active voice. And we should make sure to name the perpetrators, and not be afraid to call them Turks when they were Turks, Japanese when they were Japanese, Germans when they were Germans, Soviets when they were Soviets, Americans when they were Americans, Serbs when they were Serbs, Hutu when they were Hutu, Political Islamists when they were Political Islamists.
This linguistic rectitude is not just analytical but moral as well. Without human beings, without naming them properly, there cannot be moral and legal accountability. Perpetrators who want to escape culpability, foreign leaders who want excuses for inaction or to provide cover for the perpetrators, and scholars and writers who wish to hide the identity of or absolve perpetrators typically use the passive voice. For decades, Germans and many writing about the Holocaust obscured the German perpetrators’ identity by using the passive voice or by falsely referring to the perpetrators as “Nazis” (the vast majority of the German perpetrators were not Nazi Party members or any more allegiant to Nazism than Germans in general) and by attacking those calling the perpetrators—as both the German perpetrators and the Jewish victims did at the time—plain and simply “Germans.” A similar consideration to the Germans’ and their apologists’ attempts to absolve the German perpetrators, especially the many ordinary Germans among them, can be seen in the Japanese government’s changes to its school textbooks in 2007 that effaced the role of Japanese soldiers during World War II in coercing or inducing 100,000 Okinawans to commit mass suicide before the American invasion of Okinawa. For the previous quarter century the textbooks rightly specifically named the Japanese’s Imperial Army soldiers as the perpetrators. The new textbook version omits the perpetrators completely, asserting that Okinawans simply committed mass suicide or felt the need to do so. This change produced a howl of protest in Okinawa, including local governmental resolutions for a rescission of the textbook falsifications, and a public protest one day in Ginowan of more than 110,000 people, almost 10 percent of Okinawa’s people .7
During mass murders, the murderers themselves, their supporters, and those who wish to stand idly by practice linguistic camouflage. In the 1980s Guatemalan murderers of leftists and Maya used the passive voice in their voluminous and meticulous document-keeping. Police do not kidnap a person. Instead a person “is kidnapped.” The strange locution “was disappeared” became the standard for many Latin American mass murders. A Guatemalan supervisor wrote on one police agent’s report, which used the first person singular, “Never personify—the third person must always be used.”8 Mike Habib, a high-ranking U.S. State Department official, in keeping with Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s principal objective regarding the Serbs’ mass slaughter of Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims), which was to prevent the United States from effectively acting to stop the killing, instructed Marshall Harris, the State Department’s country officer for Bosnia, to conceal the Serbs’ identities and therefore their responsibility for the transgressions. Habib told Harris not to write
that the Serbs were shelling a certain town but rather that “there was shelling” or “there were reports of shelling.” Harris explains that Habib “didn’t want us to be seen pointing the finger when we weren’t going to do anything.”9
Taking seriously people’s agency, understanding of the social world, and moral values is essential, and so too is understanding how they come to hold their views. This entails rejecting another common notion, which was for decades common to scholars of Nazism and the Holocaust, and remains the view of those seeking to exculpate Germans and others of their responsibility for their mass murdering and related deeds: that the cultures in which people have grown up and live are irrelevant for understanding their participation in mass murder. This mistaken view contains two interrelated notions: that (1) every person who has lived in any age or society is equally easily a potential mass murderer of (2) the people of any and all other groups (except possibly his or her own). Yet a person reared in a society with the uncontested common sense, such as in medieval Europe, that Jesus is the son of God is overwhelmingly likely to believe that and to feel hostility and be willing to act violently toward people considered evil—Jews, Muslims, heretics—for rejecting Jesus’ divinity than toward those sharing his bedrock religious belief. A white growing up in the pre-Civil War American South was overwhelmingly likely to believe that blacks are inherently inferior and to feel more hostility and be willing to use violence toward blacks than he was against whites. A person growing up in a society or in a subculture deeming a certain group of people—whether they are Armenians, Jews, Bosnian Muslims, or Tutsi—to be evil or dangerous will be more likely to say yes to using violence to rid society of them when it is considered necessary than someone will growing up in a society or subculture deeming the same group to be good or socially munificent.
An account of mass slaughter must therefore look to how the circumstances are engendered that first make mass annihilation even thinkable and then an actual option. It must also examine why people eventually embrace or reject such action. This requires a wide range of factors to be systematically assessed, without prejudging the matter with simplifying, seemingly powerful, yet ultimately untenable assumptions about human nature. This means that we must consider what it is about societies and their cultures that contribute to the circumstances that produce exterminationist conditions, or put differently, that make mass extermination plausible as a group or national project, a project that is led by the state, supported by a good percentage of the nation or its dominant group or groups, and which employs large institutional and material resources. In many societies, groups come to be seen as deleterious to the well-being of the majority or, sometimes, a powerful minority. How this happens and the character of the pernicious qualities projected onto such groups vary enormously. In some instances people deem the group’s perniciousness so great that they want to eliminate it. In some of the cases such beliefs become socially powerful and coalesce into an explicit public and political conversation about elimination. At other times such beliefs hover below the surface, never finding powerful, sustained articulation. In these instances, the eliminationist beliefs do not become the basis of a coherent political ideology, while retaining their potential to do so.
Eliminationism
The existence of eliminationist beliefs and desires, conversations and ideologies, and acts and policies has been a central feature of all eras of human history and all sorts of societies. Nevertheless, the many facets of eliminationist beliefs and deeds have not been conceptualized as belonging to a common phenomenon: eliminationism. Even if eliminationism’s many forms are better known by their particular and spectacularly horrible consequences and names, such as genocide, the desire to eliminate peoples or groups should be understood to be the overarching category and the core act, and should therefore be the focus of our study.
Political and social conflicts among groups exist in all human societies, and often between societies or countries. When unwilling to come to some modus vivendi, groups, people, and polities (usually the dominant groups within them) deal with populations they have conflict with or see as a danger that must be neutralized by seeking to eliminate them or to destroy their capacity to inflict putative harm. To do this, they employ any of the five principal forms of elimination: transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, or extermination.
Transformation is the destruction of a group’s essential and defining political, social, or cultural identities, in order to neuter its members’ alleged noxious qualities. (Eliminationist transformation—which is often accompanied by violence or its threat—differs from the ordinary processes of education or acculturation because it is directed at suppressing others rather than giving them new skills or expanding their possibilities.) Groups’ real or alleged features or practices—religious, ethnic, or cultural, among others—that putatively set them off from the dominant culture or group have been transformative projects’ main target. Historically, conquerors and empires have commonly sought to assimilate conquered peoples and areas by destroying their distinctive identities and loyalties. It has also been frequently done in our age. The Turks have at various times suppressed spoken and written Kurdish. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Japanese, having colonized Korea, tried to destroy an independent Korean identity, including by forbidding the use of Korean. The Germans during the Nazi period, the Soviets, the communist Chinese, and many others have also sought to forcibly transform victim peoples. Many eliminationist projects animated by religion have compelled people of other religions to convert, sometimes on the pain of death. Historically, Christianity and Islam had this project at their core. Christianity focused its most fervent eliminationist project of two thousand years, the one against the Jews, on transformation through conversion, often threatening or using violence against those who would resist. Our time has seen many such forced conversions. Today, powerful strains of Political Islam maintain this transformative orientation as a high priority.
Repression entails keeping the hated, deprecated, or feared people within territorial reach and reducing, with violent domination, their ability to inflict real or imagined harm upon others. Such repression has been a regular feature of human societies. Its most extreme form is enslavement, which does have sources besides the desire to reduce a threat. Though few do today, most human societies have had slavery. Other violent forms are at least as common. Apartheid—a legal system of domination, political disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, and physical separation of a subordinate group—existed until recently in South Africa and, under the name of segregation, not so much longer ago in the American South. Political and legal segregation and ghettoization are by definition forms of eliminationist repression. Repression, including the ongoing threat of violence and its occasional or frequent use, exists against many groups—peasants, workers, ethnic groups, religious groups, political groups, and more—in many countries today.
Expulsion, often called deportation, is a third eliminationist option. It removes unwanted people more thoroughly, by driving them beyond a country’s borders, or from one region of a country to another, or compelling them en masse into camps. From antiquity to today, expulsions, often by imperial conquerors, have been common. In the ancient world, victors routinely killed many among their vanquished enemies and expelled others, often into slavery. The Assyrians routinely deported conquered peoples. The Romans expelled and enslaved enemies who had rebelled or who excessively resisted them, including the Carthaginians at the end of the Third Punic War. Spaniards expelled their Muslim minority in 1502 and then again from 1609 to 1614. The English deported 100,000 Irish to North America and the West Indies from 1641 to 1652. The English, French, and others banished Romas (called Gypsies) in the sixteenth century. Americans drove Native Americans from their lands—perhaps most infamously the 1838 Cherokee Trail of Tears, an eight hundred-mile winter trek that killed perhaps four thousand Cherokee—and forced them onto remote reservations durin
g the nineteenth century. During World War II, the Soviets undertook internal expulsions, forcing eight different ethnic groups, including the Crimean Tatars, from their homes in the Soviet Union’s western part, scattering them hundreds or thousands of miles into the interior. Germans during World War II expelled Poles and others from various regions, and then, after the war, Czechs, Hungarians, and Poles took their turn driving out ethnic Germans. During the period of Israel’s establishment in 1948, the Jews partly created the Palestinian diaspora by expelling Palestinians from their homeland. This coincided with many Arab countries expelling Jews beginning in 1948. In 1972, Ugandans expelled their ethnic Indians. In 1974-1975, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots expelled each other from their respective parts of Cyprus. From 1988 to 1991, Saddam depopulated entire areas of Iraq of Kurds, destroying their villages and their agricultural base and depositing many into camps, and then in 1991-1992 expelled the Shia Marsh people from their region of southern Iraq, in each instance as part of a broader exterminatory and eliminationist campaign. During Yugoslavia’s breakup, ethnic expulsion was a constituent part of the conflicts, including the Serbs’ massive expulsion of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, also known as Kosovars, in 1999. Today, we witness the ongoing mass murder and expulsions of Darfurians by Sudan’s Political Islamic government. The unfortunate term ethnic cleansing (the perpetrators’ euphemism for deeds opposite of the beneficent act of cleansing) became during Yugoslavia’s breakup a standard of the international lexicon to characterize expulsions, particularly when accompanied by mass slaughters or smaller terror killings.a
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