The most frequent victims of expulsions have been Jews. During ancient times, Babylonians drove them from ancient Israel, and during medieval times the peoples of one city, region, and country of Europe after another expelled them. Every part of Europe expelled Jews at some time. England expelled its Jews in 1290, France in 1306. Most German regions expelled their Jews during the fourteenth century. Many Arab countries did the same starting in 1948. As late as 1968, Europe saw another expulsion of Jews, this time from communist Poland, which forced out approximately twenty thousand in a supposed anti-Zionist campaign. The best-known such expulsion remains the Inquisition-inspired one from Spain in 1492. The Spaniards and the transnational Catholic Church’s eliminationist campaign against the Jews is particularly noteworthy because its perpetrators employed four of the eliminationist means: transformation (forced conversion), repression, expulsion, and selective killing.
Prevention of reproduction is a fourth eliminationist act. It is the least frequently used, and when employed, it is usually in conjunction with others. For varying reasons, those wishing to eliminate a group in whole or in part can seek to diminish its numbers by interrupting normal biological reproduction. They prevent its members from becoming pregnant or giving birth. They sterilize them. They systematically rape women so men will not want to marry or father children with them, or in order to themselves impregnate them so they bear children not “purely” of their group, thereby weakening the group biologically and socially. Preventing reproduction is an eliminationist act with the longer time horizon of future generations, while the perpetrators simultaneously employ different eliminationist means for those currently living, or sometimes none at all. The Nazis forcibly sterilized many Germans suffering from real or imagined congenital afflictions, without otherwise eliminating them, and considered sterilizing Jews as an alternative to killing them. The Serbs systematically raped Bosniaks and Kosovars, while murdering many others and expelling many more.
Extermination is the fifth eliminationist act. Radical as it is, killing often logically follows beliefs deeming others to be a great, even mortal threat. It promises not an interim, not a piecemeal, not only a probable, but a “final solution” to the putative problem. The most notorious “final solution,” giving this infamous euphemism worldwide currency, was the Germans’ mass murder of the Jews. Hitler and those following him first employed a variety of lesser eliminationist measures against the Jews, until circumstances arose that permitted them to finally implement a program for their total extermination. Already in 1920, Hitler in the speech “Why Are We Antisemites” publicly declared the general eliminationist intent “the removal of the Jews from our Volk” and specified his preferred exterminationist solution, which he hoped the German people would “one day” implement. Hitler explained: “We are animated with an inexorable resolve to seize the Evil [the Jews] by the roots and to exterminate it root and branch. To attain our aim we should stop at nothing.” This is an utterly clear and carefully formulated statement of an eliminationist, in this case exterminationist, ideal: According to Hitler, (1) the Jews are so evil and dangerous that (2) they must be exterminated—root and branch—that is, totally, and (3) the need to do so is so acute that Germans should let nothing stay their hand. To make it unmistakable that this was no frivolous statement either about the extent of the putative danger or the utter emergency of eliminating it, Hitler continued his declaration “we should stop at nothing” by concluding, “even if we must join forces with the Devil.”10 The devil is less to be feared than the Jews.
Extermination has also been a staple of all eras and parts of the world, though historical accounts are often so sketchy we cannot be sure that certain slaughters occurred or of the number of victims. In ancient times peoples often slew those they conquered, in some places such as ancient Greece so commonly that the discussion of the mass annihilation was an unremarkable topic. In the celebratory Iliad, Homer has Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces arrayed against Troy, speaking to his brother Menelaus about the Trojans, and through him to his assembled troops and all Greeks for all time: “They’ve ground the truce under their heals . . . they’ll pay for their misdeed in lives, in wives and children! For this I know well in my heart and soul: the day must come when holy Ilion [Troy] is given to fire and word, and Priam [the Trojan king] perishes, good lance though he was, with all his people.”11 In the Jewish Bible, God instructs the ancient Jews to slaughter the peoples living in the “promised” land of ancient Israel. In the medieval world, mass murders were common, which the perpetrators often consecrated by invoking God. In the name of their Lord, Christian Crusaders slaughtered Jews, Muslims, and others in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This age’s greatest butchers were probably Genghis Khan and the Mongols, who killed peoples over vast terrain in Asia and Eastern Europe in the thirteenth century. In early modern and modern times imperial European peoples slaughtered many less technologically advanced peoples of other continents. In our time virtually all manner of peoples have perpetrated mass murder against virtually all kinds of victims.
Identifying these five eliminationist means of transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination suggests something fundamental that has escaped notice: from the perpetrators’ viewpoint these eliminationist means are (rough) functional equivalents. They are different technical solutions to the perceived problem of dealing with unwanted or putatively threatening groups, to fulfilling the most fundamental desire of somehow getting rid of such groups, which Germans emblematically expressed in one of the most frequent rallying cries before and during the Nazi period: “Juden raus” (Jews out). As radically different as the various measures are for the victims, for the perpetrators the solutions logically follow their eliminationist beliefs, are substitutes for one another, and can be employed interchangeably.
Conceptualizing these forms of violence as variations of the same phenomenon of eliminationism itself suggests that when perpetrators embark on an eliminationist program they might use several of them simultaneously—just as the Spaniards during the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century used four of the eliminationist means at once against the Jews. Alisa Muratčauš, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, explains that the Serbs “aimed to eliminate all Bosnian people.” Yet they used a variety of means: “Some people will be expelled to another country, a Western country. Some people would be killed. Some people will be [kept] alive for maybe their [the Serbs] personal needs. Who knows? Maybe like slavery.”12 Indeed, when people adopt one eliminationist measure, they frequently also employ other ones in a subsidiary or complementary manner. The Turkish leaders codified in 1915 the use of a plurality of such instruments in a preparatory document for the eliminationist assault on the Armenians. They called for extermination (“all males under 50,” among others), expulsion (“carry away the families of all those who succeed in escaping”), and transformation (“girls and children to be Islamized”).13 When perpetrators use mass expulsion as the principal eliminationist policy, they typically complement it with selective killing, sometimes on a large scale. The peoples of different European countries, regions, and cities not only expelled Jews from their midst during medieval times. They also episodically slaughtered them, ghettoized them, and compelled them to convert as part of a centuries-long Church-inspired orientation to eliminate Jews from their midst.14 And if, as with the Soviets, the expulsions do not deposit the victims outside the country, then repression, usually severe, follows to ensure the victims do not return home or rebel.
This unrecognized, yet startlingly intimate relationship among the various eliminationist means of transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and annihilation is crucial to acknowledge and explore. Several questions present themselves.
Regarding mass slaughter: Is it so distinct from other eliminationist forms that it is a singular phenomenon unrelated to the others? Or is it on an eliminationist c
ontinuum of increasing violence, related to the other forms but qualitatively different? Or is it a rough functional equivalent of the others, meaning the different eliminationist options emanate from the same source so the perpetrators see them as effectively achieving the same ends, and their choice of which to use depends on tactics, practicality, expediency, and (perhaps) the perpetrators’ moral restraints?
Regarding eliminationist policies’ genesis: Where do eliminationist beliefs come from? Is there something distinctive about the ones of our age? How do eliminationist beliefs, or even an eliminationist ideology, get translated into eliminationist action? Put differently, what has to happen for beliefs to move people to act?
Regarding eliminationist policy’s character: Whatever those mechanisms may be, why do eliminationist beliefs sometimes lie dormant and sometimes get translated into action? When such beliefs produce action, why do they sometimes lead to one eliminationist policy, transformation, sometimes a second, repression, sometimes a third, expulsion, sometimes a fourth, prevention of reproduction, and sometimes a fifth, mass slaughter, and at other times some combination of them? And if it is relatively easy for the politics of one eliminationist kind to slide and morph along the continuum into another, should we treat a regime’s violent repression of peoples or groups as inherently prone to exterminationism, or proto-exterminationist?
Eliminationist beliefs have been commonly held by ordinary people throughout history. Yet such beliefs have not always led to action because alone they do not generate mass slaughter or elimination. Extermination and elimination programs are not inevitable. Eliminationist beliefs, though all but a necessary cause, are not in themselves a sufficient cause of mass murder or elimination. This was true, as I have shown elsewhere, even for the Holocaust. Eliminationist antisemitism among Germans was enormously widespread, deeply rooted, and potent in its demonology but lay dormant until Hitler and the state he led initiated, organized, and oversaw the Jews’ mass murder.15 To understand why exterminationist and eliminationist assaults occur in some places and times and not in others where eliminationist beliefs are also widespread, it is critical not just for the Holocaust but in all other instances to always look to the political arena, to political leaders, to, in our time, by and large, the state.
The Modern State, Transformative Power
The world of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is vastly different from before.16 Societies and states’ ability to transform their physical environment and themselves is many orders of magnitude greater than before. The nineteenth century’s capitalist, industrial, and technological revolution was not a single time-bounded revolution, as it is often portrayed, but a continually accelerating, thoroughgoing societal transformation. In the West it created vast wealth, leveled and reshuffled society, and altered politics, social relations, the nature of culture, and even human beings, with, for example, their greater education, mastery over their lives, and life spans. This revolution, eventually giving birth to globalization, continued through the twentieth century and into our own, spreading unevenly around the world. Most relevant for the discussion of mass murder and elimination is the emergence of the contemporary state.
The contemporary state has enormously greater power than ancient or medieval, or even nineteenth-century, states. Power in its broadest form is simply the capacity to transform, to change things, whether the things belong to the natural world or to human order. State power has grown mainly because wealth, communication and mobility, and knowledge and organizational know-how have increased enormously. With greater wealth the state can raise more money, mainly through taxes, and therefore employ more people with more resources to carry out its tasks. The contemporary state—which includes not just the government but also its many agencies and the military—is vastly larger than earlier states. With greater communication—radio, television, telephone, highways, air travel, and now the computer, wireless technology, the Internet, satellites, and GPS—it is easier to move, and to coordinate this greater number of state officials and employees, including the military. With greater knowledge about society and people and greater know-how about organizing people, the state has developed a greater capacity to manage its officials and employees and to monitor their tasks. The state’s capacity to survey society—meaning to know what people are doing, to penetrate it, meaning to affect people’s daily lives, and therefore to control it—has grown colossally. Compared to the era of the American and French revolutions, when politically the modern world began to take its form, the mid-twentieth century’s state, not to mention the contemporary state’s transformative capacity, its power, is a figurative million times greater.
The changes to society and state that have produced the modern world have also produced a fundamental alteration in how people, particularly political leaders, understand the social world and in how they imagine themselves, their societies, and the future. The essential difference is a new awareness that change, not stasis, characterizes the human world. The enormous growth in social power has made people, particularly those wielding political power, aware that altering the world is a matter of human control and can therefore be undertaken according to human design. The design, or redesign, can be extensive and the alteration thoroughgoing. In the modern world, man conceives of himself as the fashioner of himself, his society, and his environment, an architect and engineer of the human soul and of the cacophony or chorus of souls. This has been true among Marxists and capitalists alike, practitioners of cybernetics and readers of science fiction, past and contemporary eugenics and genetic engineering enthusiasts, and others. And the manner in which people, particularly those wielding state power, have imagined that that engineering should take place and what it should fashion has been qualitatively different from earlier eras.
The notion that society and people are not givens or only capable of being changed incrementally but instead can be transformed, even radically, has been at the heart of our age’s politics. And, as never before, the capacity to act upon this notion efficaciously has also existed. This transformative vision and capacities have spawned varied and often comprehensive transformative projects. Because modernity has also mobilized all people into politics (in premodern times most people were never engaged in the politics of their countries or kingdoms), thereby making all people political concerns of the state, those governing societies must deal with people’s desires to shape their own destinies and to influence their political systems. They can incorporate people into politics and accept social and cultural pluralism. Democrats do this. Or they must repress and reduce pluralism that threatens them, which has a self-reinforcing propensity to make them want to reduce pluralism further. Nondemocrats, more appropriately called tyrants, do this.
Spurred on by their transformative capacities and their need to restrict pluralism and freedom, this era’s transformative dreamers typically believe that they must subject all members of their societies, and sometimes all human beings, to their extensive or comprehensive visionary projects. Power does allow people to kill. Great power does allow people to kill on a massive scale. But what great power does first is make it plausible for political leaders, and even for common people, to imagine massive exterminationist and eliminationist projects and to imagine them in a new way, as something doable. In no previous era have political leaders dreamed of disposing of hundreds of thousands, millions, or tens of millions of people, which the political leaders of our time—and not just Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—have routinely done, whether by killing them or by some other eliminationist means. They have the capacity: So they dream. Then plan. Then act. Because they dream their eliminationist dreams, their transformative capacities have become dangerous beyond anything the world had previously known.
Mass elimination is often part of some broader transformative or eschatological political project, including many of the principal projects that nation-states have undertaken during the past century, such as nation- or state-building itself, imperialism, economic
development (whether capitalist or communist), democratic development, or the transformation of state and society according to a visionary blueprint. These projects have been wedded to ideologies that designated enemies of a size and threat sufficient to make eliminating them often a seemingly pressing consideration.
Nation-building has been an impetus for our age’s mass slaughters, from the Turks’ annihilation of Armenians during World War I through the Serbs’ various slaughters of the 1990s. Imperialists’ eliminationist onslaughts were predominantly a feature of earlier centuries, such as the Spanish depredations in the Americas and the Americans’ killing and expulsion of Native Americans. Yet they have also taken countless lives in our time from its beginning to end, starting with the Belgians’ mass murder in the Congo, a carryover from the nineteenth century, and the Germans’ annihilation of the Herero and Nama in South-West Africa starting in 1904, to the Japanese’s wholesale killings during World War II in China, to the Indonesians’ mass slaughter in East Timor and the Chinese’s grinding eliminationist and murderous one in Tibet. In each instance, the perpetrators violently reduced the respective country’s people to subdue and colonize the territories they annexed. The desire for economic development or political transformation spurred many South and Central American governments during the past century to wage eliminationist campaigns against indigenous peoples, often called Indians. Democratic development has been less explicitly murderous or even eliminationist. The eliminationist onslaughts of the communist world’s and of Nazism’s apocalyptic regimes have victimized and killed the most people.
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