War can incubate existing eliminationist hatreds and provide a context for people to act upon them. But, with rare exceptions, war does not itself create the eliminationist animus that becomes the impetus for exterminating people. By whatever mechanism war itself is supposed to produce the mass annihilation of civilians—whether it is simply being at war, a real threat of being annihilated, the agony of defeat, or the euphoria of victory—each one fails to account for mass murder’s basic facts.
If warfare somehow created the eliminationist mindset characterizing mass murderers, then mass murder would be still far more common. Every war, or at least most wars, would produce an annihilationist campaign paralleling the military campaign. Indeed, in all or most wars two such campaigns, one from each combatant, would occur. Yet in the overwhelming majority of wars it did not, and no evidence shows that the combatants even contemplated annihilationist campaigns. If, instead, suffering is supposed to produce the desire to annihilate the source of one’s pain, then the Germans, twice, after each World War, and the Japanese after World War II, would have been destroyed by their conquerors. Overwhelmingly, mass murder’s perpetrators have not been defeated people who suffered enormously during war.
The people slaughtering large civilian populations under war’s cover have usually been the military aggressors, who furthermore have either exterminated peoples other than those against whom they fought or began their mass murdering before suffering major military defeats. This was true of the Turks’ annihilation of the Armenians during World War I, of the Germans and Japanese during World War II, and of many others, including the Pakistanis in Bangladesh in 1971, where they killed between 1 million and 3 million people, and the Indonesians in defenseless East Timor, which started with the Indonesians’ unprovoked imperial invasion in 1975 and continued with a murderous occupation that lasted until 1999 and that, all told, killed perhaps 200,000 people.
Perpetrators have slaughtered noncombatants not in reaction to wartime hardship, but as an integral part of their strategic political goals. As a high-ranking German Embassy official reported one of the Turks’ eliminationist assault’s masterminds, Interior Minister Mehmet Talât, explaining to him, Turkey “wanted to take advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal enemies (the indigenous Christians), without being disturbed by foreign diplomatic intervention.” 10 Talât and War Minister Ismail Enver explained in a telegram to Turkey’s ally Germany that “the work that is to be done must be done now; after the war it will be too late.”11 In the 1930s, Hitler was looking forward to war as an opportunity to carry out his eliminationist projects, including the Jews’ extermination. Regarding his mass-murderous project, euphemistically called “euthanasia,” to kill mentally ill people and other Germans deemed biologically unworthy of life, he told the Reich doctors’ leader in 1935 that “in the event of a war he would take up the question of euthanasia and enforce it” because “he was of the opinion that such a problem could be more easily solved in war-time, since opposition which could be expected from the churches would not play so significant a role in the context of war as at other times.” Hitler understood that war would provide the cover “to solve the problem of the asylums in a radical way.”12
Mass murder and elimination are also not the stepchildren of the euphoria of military victory. If vanquishing an opponent creates a sense of omnipotence and a desire (not previously existing) to annihilate entire populations, then all or certainly many more victors would annihilate their enemies. In 1940 the Germans would have exterminated their bitter enemies, the French, against whom they had fought three major wars in seventy years, and would have planned to kill the British. The Israelis would have annihilated several neighboring peoples after their victories.
Our era’s differing landscapes of war and of mass murder belie the common belief that war itself causes annihilationist programs. War has provided the occasion for would-be mass murderers to finally act and has therefore been an arena for mass murder. But that is different from war itself producing it.
Many mass slaughters have had little or nothing to do with war. Stalin’s mass murdering long predated, and was most intensive before, World War II. Though Stalin deported eight national groups to the Soviet Union’s interior during the war, the Soviets’ general domestic eliminationist drive markedly abated. Mao’s killing took its greatest toll long after the communists had an iron grip on China. This is also true of the Chinese’s killing of more than half a million and perhaps as many as 1.2 million Tibetans since their imperial occupation of Tibet in 1950. The Indonesian military’s slaughter of perhaps half a million Indonesian communists in 1965 occurred during peacetime. The Tutsi slaughter of at least 100,000 Hutu in Burundi in 1972, and smaller numbers three other times, had nothing to do with war (a fifth, the most recent, in 1993, occurred in response to a Hutu uprising in which Hutu slaughtered perhaps twenty-five thousand Tutsi). Many mass killings in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s—by Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the military junta in Argentina, José Efraín Ríos Montt in Guatemala, and elsewhere—occurred during peacetime, even if their tyrannical regimes confronted resistance (including some armed resistance).
Slaughtering foreign civilians during war has been a common feature of our age, but mass murder’s principal locus has shifted from international to domestic terrain. The impetus to annihilate populations has been less the correlate of conquest or colonization, as it had been in earlier centuries, and more the desire to alter power relations within or to remake one’s own society. Seldom has war created in the perpetrators novel desires they had not previously had, to slaughter large numbers of unarmed men, women, and children, or to expel them from their homes and countries. But it has often been the converse. Leaders’ and their followers’ common desires to eliminate or annihilate other peoples, such as the Germans’ desire to create a new empire in Eastern Europe, the Japanese’s wish to create an empire in Asia, and the Serbs’ wish to secure theirs in Bosnia and Kosovo, have frequently produced the idea to initiate military conflicts, which they then use as an occasion to enact previously laid murderous plans. The evidence suggests the relationship between war and eliminationist assaults on targeted groups of people is the reverse of what is commonly held. People harboring mass-murderous and eliminationist aspirations often initiate or broaden military conflicts for those purposes, or see others’ violent elimination as integral to the conquest or colonization of foreign territory.
Varieties of Eliminationist Assaults
Even if our age’s eliminationist projects have shared certain characteristics, they, especially the domestic eliminationist projects, have also had varying features, which are important to understand.
The communists’ colossal mass murders in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, and Cambodia notwithstanding, either rightist or nationalist or ethnicist regimes (which the Khmer Rouge partly also was) have committed most domestic mass murders. During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, many rightist dictatorships in Latin America, under the name of anticommunism or counterinsurgency, undertook campaigns to exterminate political opponents or indigenous peoples. From 1976 to 1982 the Argentinean military dictatorship conducted a secret campaign against leftists and other opponents—real or invented—murdering or, in the time’s euphemistic language, “disappearing” thirty thousand people, often by dropping them from airplanes into the ocean. Mass-murderous regimes in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere were moved by the doctrine of “national security,” meaning the nation’s integrity, economic order, and security required the annihilation of those deemed a threat—which often included conventional political opponents. This systematic killing of targeted political opponents was analogous to some of Stalin’s and Mao’s killings, but in Argentina and elsewhere the slaughter was much more selective, and not tied to a visionary transformative project. During this period, across Latin America widespread murder was part of the ordinary repertoire of forfending challenges to political powe
r and economic benefits of the dominant groups and political regimes. The El Salvadoran rightist regime slaughtered perhaps seventy thousand people during a counterinsurgency campaign during the 1970s, though few of the victims were actual guerrillas. The Guatemalan rulers turned a campaign against a relatively unthreatening, leftist insurgency into a systematic slaughter of perhaps 200,000 Maya, mainly from 1978 to 1985, and expelling from their villages between a half million and a million more.
Such “counterinsurgency” mass murder is related to others that, at least formally, are reactions to domestic political challenges, guerrilla war, or concerted rebellions. In 1982 in Syria members of the Muslim Brotherhood (a Political Islamic movement seeking to create theocracies throughout the Islamic world), which was challenging the tyrannical rule of Hafez al-Assad and his Alawite Party, killed government officials in Hama and declared the city’s 350,000 people liberated. Assad chose not to root out the few hundred lightly armed rebels. Instead, using planes and artillery, he bombarded the city for days, then sent in tanks.
Assad’s forces stopped only after leveling a good part of the city and slaughtering between twenty thousand and forty thousand men, women, and children. Assad opted for a final solution to this particular city’s “problem” and also to show Syrians the peril of challenging his rule. Assad’s destruction in Hama made any cost-benefit analysis of rebellion a bleak one. As many others have, Assad used mass murder to produce terror and as a deterrent.
Not all of the recent decades’ domestic eliminationist projects have been as restrictive as these Latin American and Syrian slaughters of “only” tens of thousands. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 had a comprehensiveness, scope, and killing rate that recalls the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews. In Central Africa, Hutu and Tutsi have vied for power in adjacent Rwanda and Burundi, as well as in neighboring diasporas. Since the process of decolonization from Belgium began in 1959 and independence was achieved in 1962, each group has perpetrated several mass slaughters against the other. In 1994, after a plane carrying the presidents of both countries was blown up, in Rwanda the Hutu attacked the Tutsi with unsurpassed intensity and fury, seeking to eliminate them all. In three months, they killed about 800,000 men, women, and children. The remaining several hundred thousand Tutsi fled the country or hid in the countryside. The Hutu’s individual, face-to-face butchery of Tutsi, usually by machete, stopped only when a rebel Tutsi army defeated the Hutu mass murderers and seized control of the country. A regional war among different ethnic and political groups, with forces from neighboring countries and a vast array of armed groups, ensued in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a country of Western Europe’s size (including Spain and the United Kingdom). Seemingly all sides perpetrated massacres and pursued policies that have led to rampant deaths from starvation and disease. Although the war formally ended in 2004, slaughters and death from starvation have continued on a massive scale. The death toll, estimated at more than 5 million, has engendered its regionally understandable moniker, the Third World War. Kim Il Song’s eliminationist policies in North Korea, now with son Kim Jong Il at the helm, also continue, as does the Political Islamic Sudanese lethal eliminationist assault on the people of Darfur.
The twentieth century’s final European eliminationist onslaught started in March 1999, as the Serbs attempted to purge Kosovo of all ethnic Albanians (or Kosovars). This full-scale eliminationist assault is a classic case of the interchangeability of killing and expulsion as solutions to putative problems. Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian ruler of what remained of Yugoslavia after the country began breaking up in 1990, considered Kosovo an integral part of Serbia, making the Kosovars, composing 90 percent of the population, a threat. The Serbs had a few years earlier made eliminationist politics, a mixture of mass murder and expulsion, their policy in Bosnia. They responded to the Kosovars’ desire for more political autonomy, with a more thorough, if less lethal, eliminationist campaign. In the face of international sanctions, pressure, and eventually bombing, the Serbs forcibly expelled 1.5 million people, almost all the Kosovars, from the country. The Serbs also selectively slaughtered approximately 10,000 mainly military-age men, which diminished the Kosovars’ capacity to resist Serbian onslaught. Serbs burned and destroyed at least 1,200 Kosovar residential areas, including 500 villages, and tens of thousands of homes, in the ultimately failed attempt to obliterate the Kosovar presence (NATO forced the Serbs to let the Kosovars return).13
From the Germans’ imperial slaughter of the Herero to the Serbs’ mass expulsion and murder of Kosovars, to the recent and ongoing slaughters in Central Africa and Sudan’s Darfur region, and China’s continuing eliminationist grip on Tibet and Kim’s on North Korea, our age’s mass slaughters and eliminations have different characters, facets, and features. This considerable heterogeneity makes the Holocaust’s status, singly and together with the Germans’ other eliminationist assaults, as our time’s emblematic (which is different from its defining) mass murder, more understandable and striking—precisely because of its all-encompassing nature.
The Germans’ annihilation of European Jewry is the best-known, most extensively documented and studied, and most discussed mass murder of all time. It is the only mass slaughter with an internationally known proper name. It even has two: Holocaust and Shoah. Yet the Holocaust’s preeminent status owes less to a sober, comparative assessment of its features than to misguided and false understandings scholars and nonscholars have propagated.
How did Germany, a highly “civilized,” educated, and modern country produce this gargantuan slaughter? To comprehend what to many has seemed incomprehensible, people have latched on to a fictional framework: The Holocaust represents modernity’s lurking dangers. Among the many widely circulating myths and falsehoods about the Holocaust, three specific ones help compose this once all but unquestioned (but now roundly discredited) view.14 First, the perpetrators were and are Every-men, meaning that all people are at any moment equally potential killers of anyone. Second, Germany was no different (regarding its people’s attitudes toward Jews and other “races”) from other Western countries of the time (or our time). Third, modern technology and organization—conveyor-belt killing, gas chambers, trains, bureaucracy—made the Holocaust possible.
These three myths create a superficially compelling but false universalism: The country, at the pinnacle of modernity, mobilized perpetrators of no distinctive feature, except being modern and therefore like us, to slaughter Jews. These perpetrators killed others in enormous numbers only because the modern world gave them the necessary technology and organizational capacity. This strange combination of rendering the Holocaust commonplace and close—anyone could do it—and also abstract and distant—the technology and bureaucracy of killing replace the human beings as the central actors—has created a continuous fascination and ongoing struggle both to make sense of the Holocaust and to control emotions generated by the notion that this greatest horror can be identified with us all.
The Holocaust has modern features, but they do not distinguish it among mass murders. What is truly modern about the Holocaust, other genocides share. Why have the “civilized” Soviets’ killings and camps, begun under Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, not produced a similar fascination and dread? The Bolshevik leaders were more educated, literate, and modern in outlook than the Nazi leaders. Do they “fascinate” people less because they did not create gassing factories—even though their killing, organizationally and logistically, was as technologically modern? Perhaps. But far more important is that people in the West attributed the Soviets’ deeds to evil beliefs—the creed of communism—that rendered the actors and their civilization different from us and ours.
Yet recent scholarship has demonstrated the fictive character of this previously widespread understanding of the Holocaust. Evil beliefs, namely antisemitism, moved Germans, Austrians, and other Europeans who helped them, to kill Jews—and led many others to support the eliminationist onslaught. And antisemitism and prejudi
ce are not particularly modern (even if the Germans’ particular racist brand of antisemitism is a modern variant), having moved the “civilized” and “uncivilized” alike, from the ancient world through today. Modern technology, especially the gas chambers, was unnecessary to perpetrate the Holocaust. The Germans killed masses of Jews with more conventional methods, which they easily could have employed for the rest of their victims.b
The Germans’ mass murdering can be seen as the emblematic instance of our age’s mass slaughters, not because of this mythologized view but because of its real character. Even though the Germans did not kill the most people, they were our age’s most omnivorous killers, exterminating the greatest variety of victims and, upon conquering the main areas of intended destruction, they killed the most people on average per year of all mass-murdering regimes. Equally significant, the Germans’ mass murdering encompassed virtually all facets of mass elimination and its annihilationist variant.
The Germans killed abroad as imperial conquerors, decimating the peoples living in large swaths of Eastern Europe, so that Germans could Germanify the conquered territories. And they perpetrated domestic slaughters. They killed as self-conceived apocalyptic warriors. And they killed as calculating Machiavellian overlords. They destroyed populations with the passion of fanatical belief. And they killed for cool reasons of realpolitik. For them, mass murder was often an end in itself. And they responded to rebellion with mass murder as a deterrent to future challenges. They killed with the most time-tested and primitive methods. And they innovated and built death factories. They slaughtered their victims in the cruelest manner. And they killed them clinically, with gas or lethal injection. They killed their victims face-to-face. And they killed them from a distance. They murdered in the most planned and organized way. And they killed in an impromptu way, with every German in Eastern Europe allowed to be judge and executioner of dehumanized people. They killed some categories of people comprehensively. And they killed others selectively. They killed people because of their putative individual biological characteristics (the mentally ill and physically handicapped), social and national identities (which they conceived of in racial terms), and political allegiances.
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