PART I
EXPLAINING ELIMINATIONIST ASSAULTS
CHAPTER THREE
Why They Begin
WHY WOULD PEOPLE DECIDE one day to slaughter other human beings by the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? That someone might want to kill a person he knows, an avowed enemy, or a person who has done or explicitly threatens to do him or his loved ones injury, most people can comprehend. But that someone would wish to kill thousands or millions of people, including children, whom he has never met or seen seems unfathomable.
How could anyone want to do this? The seeming incomprehensibility of people consciously wanting so much death and suffering has led many to construct accounts that, in effect, deny that such desires exist or that they motivate mass murder. Such accounts focus not on the perpetrators but on transnational systems, such as capitalism or globalization, or social structures, such as authoritative political systems or bureaucracies, or on transhistorical forces, such as ethnic conflict or human nature. They make mass murder seem impersonal and inevitable, something beyond human control. Such accounts seem to make mass murder more comprehensible, by glossing over the essential question: How could anyone want to do this?
One such account is that mass murder is a consequence of nation-building, which is a complex political process that includes states consolidating and extending control over territory, and forging in a heterogeneous society a dominant national identity. It often leads to the elimination of groups that do not fit the new nation—through a combination of transformation, expulsion, and extermination. The Turks’ annihilation of Armenians, the mass murders in various countries of postcolonial Africa, and others, even the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews, have been attributed to nation-building. Yet, in reality, the relationship between nation-building, which often takes place over decades or longer, and mass slaughter is, at best, indirect and complicated, as we can see perhaps best from the history of the United States.
Nation-building began during the American Revolution. Its central constructive moment was the adoption of the American Constitution in 1783. Tens of thousands of Tories, those opposing the new nation of a self-governing democracy, fled or were expelled. The former colonies, in a postrevolutionary compromise, produced a weak federal government with two incompatible political, social, economic, and moral systems: the free North and the slave South. These systems coexisted so uneasily that the South eventually contested the American state’s legitimacy. The Civil War of 1861-1865, in which more Americans died than in any other war, was American nation-building’s second great moment. In destroying the Southern system, it secured for the American state unchallenged authority.
The third part of American nation-building was also violent. As the nation expanded westward and inward, through and onto Native American lands, the American state and Americans sought Native Americans’ general elimination from most of the country. Americans, overwhelmingly of European descent, reduced the Native American population with various policies that are sometimes hard to categorize because their effects were often indirect, if calculable. The absolute numbers of Native Americans whom Americans directly murdered is comparatively low, probably in the tens of thousands. Many more died from disease, which Americans, knowing their immunological vulnerability, sometimes purposely spread. Under government leadership or acquiescence, white Americans destroyed Native Americans’ livelihood, by taking their lands and killing the bison. Americans further eliminated Native Americans by herding them onto so-called reservations, institutionalizing a spatial and social apartheid, not of exploitation but of neglect. The number of Native Americans on American soil declined from an estimated 10 million prior to the Europeans’ “discovery” of the Americas (a number that would have since expanded substantially) to 2.4 million today. Not all or maybe not even most of those deaths resulted from explicit eliminationist policies and acts, but many did.
These three principal aspects of American nation-building produced three different challenges to the American state and society. The presence of Tories would have undermined the fledgling republic. From the perspective of the victorious revolutionaries, Tories had to become loyal Americans or leave. The American state destroyed the Southern slave civilization in response to a fundamental challenge to power and the country’s integrity. The Americans’ systematic destruction of Native American life and lives, and their spatial elimination from American society, was an imperial conquest carried out by the state with the broad support of Americans.
The violence of American nation-building exemplifies three major tasks that states and groups face during nation-building that produce insecurity, conflict, and bloodshed: removing a foreign power and its loyalists (here the colonial British and the Tories); the political, social, or cultural homogenization of society (here destroying Southern slave civilization and the repression of its adherents); and the elimination of unwanted or putatively threatening groups (here annihilating, killing, and segregating Native Americans). American nation-building’s most recent phase occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, with the American South’s desegregation—really the destruction of the Southern whites’ post-Civil War “lesser” eliminationist option of an apartheid system. This was accomplished without eliminationist violence.
Nation-building is not a smooth process. It can proceed in alternating bursts of activity and quiescence. According to the ideals of those stewarding the national project, it typically remains incomplete, at least producing dissatisfactions and insecurities among those building the nation and those being squeezed into its image. Groups that lose out in this process are killed, leave the country (ordinarily they are expelled), or are socially transformed by having central aspects of their identity, culture, or practices denied, repressed, or destroyed. In responding to the paradigmatic challenges to them, Americans and their governments used the full range of these eliminationist means. They expelled (the Tories), transformed and homogenized, however partially (Southerners), and killed, expelled, and repressed (Native Americans) peoples who did not seem to or want to fit. There was also white Americans’ eliminationist domination, killing, and repression of blacks, first by enslavement and then with apartheid.
American nation-building and its mass eliminations bring to light critical themes for explaining the initiation of exterminationist and other eliminationist assaults. States and societies often face challenges, must deal with recalcitrant groups, and often face extreme ethnic conflict or resistance to plans of expansion. How do they respond to such challenges? When the elimination of recalcitrant groups is sought, is it principally the state or groups within society that initiate it?
Why did the American state and Americans respond to the three challenges of nation-building with such different means and results? In each instance the response’s severity did not correspond to the challenge. The Southern states began the Civil War, resulting in 360,000 dead and an additional 275,000 wounded among the Union. However, even though the Union’s armies laid waste to swaths of the South during the war, they did not systematically slaughter or expel Southern civilians. Native Americans never inflicted nearly as many casualties or destruction upon Americans as the Southerners did against the North, yet Americans conducted thoroughgoing eliminationist campaigns against them, clearing entire regions of them, sometimes by slaughtering them, such as the almost total annihilation of the ten thousand Yuki of Northern California in the late 1850s. The Confederate army’s defeated military commander, Robert E. Lee, was permitted to retire with honor. Imagine his fate, and the fate of his lieutenants and others, had he been a Native American general who killed so many American soldiers and inflicted so much misery on the American people. With the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the American government enshrined the de facto expulsion of Native American tribes east of the Mississippi River in American law and political practice.
Tories—British, white, and Christian—were treated with relative dignity, allowed to choose to take an oath to the new nati
on or leave for the old. Southerners—American, white, and Christian—were coerced into accepting the national order and, after a short occupation, were permitted to retake control of their own Southern society and to create brutal apartheid against blacks. Native Americans—not “real” Americans, dark-skinned, and non-Christian—were deemed barbaric and threatening, so white Americans rendered them harmless by killing them or depositing them in camps, euphemistically called reservations, or assimilating those deemed assimilable, including by forcibly removing Native American children from their families and educating them in Western ways as a means of “killing the Indian and saving the man.”1
Why did Americans employ different eliminationist responses to different challenges? I imagine that when Americans reflect on each episode in isolation, the answer to the question—if people even see this as a question—seems obvious. But once the three episodes are seen in the light of the others—and of other countries’ eliminationist projects—the answers seem anything but self-evident. Nation-building, in and of itself, could not be the principal explanation for why mass murders, or even eliminations, are undertaken. After all, many Tories who had sided against the revolutionaries were allowed to join the new nation, and they chose to do so. Likewise, white Southerners or even the rebellious elites—unlike their political system of slavery—were not eliminated, and the repression they suffered was lifted soon after the Civil War. Nation-building always faces challenges to its goals and always produces political responses to them. But the responses are of different eliminationist means, or no eliminationist means at all when nation-builders pursue, often successfully, political compromise. To understand the relationship between nation-building (or other structural or transhistorical forces) and eliminationist and exterminationist assaults, a perspective is needed that is more complex and multifaceted than one that asserts that nation-building, or anything else, causes mass murder.
Four Questions and Three Perspectives
Explaining the initiation of campaigns of mass elimination and annihilation begins with four questions. The first, most obvious one is the staple of the general literature on mass murder: Why does the machinery of destruction get set in motion? The other three are generally not directly addressed, so their answers are assumed. Question two: Why do some groups get targeted for elimination and others, even others in the same country, do not? Question three: When a group is slated for elimination, why is the annihilationist variant chosen? Question four: Why does the annihilationist assault begin when it does, and not earlier, or later?
Relevant to these four questions, and to explaining mass murder, is the issue of determinism. Are episodes of mass annihilation inevitable? Once certain conditions are created, such as a nation-building project, acute ethnic conflict, or intensive prejudice and persecution against a group, is the path to mass extermination unavoidable? This question has been posed most famously for the Holocaust, with some people treating it as having been inevitable. Perspectives on mass annihilation generally take deterministic positions or have a strong deterministic bent.
Many general perspectives exist about why mass murders begin, which, of the four questions discussed above, is the question this chapter focuses on. Yet whatever these perspectives’ substantial differences, each locates mass murder’s source principally in one of three places: the character of the state, the composition of society including its culture, or the psychology of the individual. Each of these perspectives captures important elements of the entire complex, yet each, taken on its own, is inadequate.
State-centered perspectives correctly observe that annihilationist campaigns are quintessentially political acts that are almost always started by states (or entities vying to be states). Therefore, mass murder’s causes are to be found in the nature of states. Most commonly, state instability is held responsible: weak and threatened states react by annihilating those perceived as an actual or potential threat. This sort of thinking is a political analog to the analytical dodge and crutch of the endlessly invented and reified “human nature”—it’s just in the nature of states. Nation-building, the decline of empires, war, and, today, globalization are frequently said to cause such state instability and consequences. Proponents of this state-centered perspective routinely cite postcolonial states in Africa, as well as tottering countries such as Turkey during World War I, which was both an empire in decline and a state engaged in nation-building, and Germany during the Nazi period. A different state-centered view holds the opposite, that it is great power that leads states to slaughter people. States that completely dominate their societies, states that are not restrained by internal checks and by a vibrant civil society are able to kill people standing in their way or deemed superfluous, so they do. The colossal mass murders of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, communist China, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge are adduced as evidence that although power kills, great power kills even more.
A second perspective about the initiation of mass annihilation focuses on a country’s social and ethnic composition. Where ethnic conflict is acute over power or economic benefits, or where competing mutually exclusive ethnic, religious, or linguistic visions rend a society, groups seek to exterminate their enemies. Society-centered perspectives are typically put forward for poor countries, often former colonies, composed of antagonistic ethnic groups that colonial powers threw together. Because the political and economic spoils are so meager, deadly struggle ensues. Kill or be killed—or so it seems to the protagonists. Society-centered perspectives sometimes focus less on the country’s social composition and more on its dominant culture. When a culture of dehumanization removes a group from the family of humanity, and therefore from the moral order, mass murder results. In this view, acute ethnic or religious conflict may produce such dehumanization, which then induces its bearers to kill.
Individual-centered perspectives for the initiation of mass annihilation locate mass murder in the psychological mechanisms of the individual that impel people to slaughter others. One aforementioned view, typically not articulated, underlies many analyses. When the opportunity to annihilate others presents itself, the will to power, the beast within us, leads people to kill the people they see as enemies or obstacles. The view that unfettered state power allows and therefore impels states to kill relies implicitly on this notion. Variants of the individual-centered perspective propose a range of psychological mechanisms that cause people to feel mortally threatened, that remove inhibitions against killing, or that lead people to vent aggression lethally, which alone or in combination produces mass annihilation.
Abundant approaches and notions seek to account for why mass murders begin. They work at different levels of analysis—political, societal, and individual—and select cases for discussion that seem to substantiate the given view, with each one finding credence for two additional reasons. First, analyzing mass annihilation is difficult (this is also true of the all but ignored mass elimination). Much goes into producing mass murder, so the events and factors to be accounted for are complex. Yet our knowledge of most mass murders is spotty or unreliable, so the empirical foundation is insufficient for deriving robust conclusions. Accounting for such a complex phenomenon with poor data makes simplification, and focusing on only one level of analysis, tempting. This leads to the proliferation of views capturing one or another of mass murder’s aspects while failing to account for the phenomenon writ large. Second, because mass murder is complex, as are the concepts used to analyze it, defining or redefining a state or a society in a manner that accords with a favored approach is easy. For example, Germany during the Nazi period is said to have been the wellspring of mass murder because of state weakness (the loss of World War I, followed by the disaster of the Weimar Republic, followed by the garrison-like situation of Nazism) and because of Nazism’s enormous state power. The Jews’ mass murder was initiated supposedly because of the euphoria of military victory and because of the despair of impending defeat. The Germans decided to kill Jews because of
the Jews’ unusual economic and cultural success in Germany, and because of long-standing prejudice, antisemitism, that was independent of the Jews’ economic and cultural lives. Often the concepts used are so woolly they can be stretched to accommodate almost any reality, becoming analytically meaningless. Nation-building is a prime example. When one group seeks to eliminate another, it is easy to declare it an expression of nation-building, particularly because perpetrators typically invoke their nation (or people) to justify their deeds, heighten group conflict, and mobilize support among their compatriots. A proponent of the nation-building view can almost always see a mass murder in this light. It is not surprising that the Jews’ mass murder by Germans, the “delayed nation,” as their country has often been called, has also been accounted for in this way.
These general propositions about state, society, and the individual can still be assessed in light of the four questions, and in light of the evidence that, though imperfect, suggests which conclusions are valid. In doing so, we should keep in mind that each proposition, whatever its virtues, either overdetermines (suggests that mass murder is inevitable) or underdetermines (fails to account for the specific aspects of mass murder’s beginning) what it purports to explain.
State-centered views correctly identify the state as mass annihilation’s prime mover. But claims about why states move to kill people—nation-building’s challenges, war’s stress, totalitarian domination’s unchecked power—fail to account for why many similarly positioned states do not initiate mass murder. State-centered views also cannot tell us why states kill certain groups and not others. Nazi Germany systematically killed mentally ill and developmentally disabled people, Sinti, and Roma, but the Soviet Union did not. Nor can such views explain why states choose to kill some groups, yet eliminate others using different means. Nor the timing of the killing. They cannot account for the possibility, which historically has in fact frequently occurred, that the causality is reversed: that eliminationist desires produce the nation-building project, lead to war, or create the wish for total power. These views’ greatest failing, perhaps, is to explain the origin of the motive to annihilate or eliminate people. The structural condition, whether it be perceived weakness or great power, does not self-evidently generate motives of any kind to act, and certainly not according to some ironclad cause-and-effect rule. Most obvious, they do not generate the motive to destroy or otherwise eliminate specific groups, and to kill their children, groups that manifestly have little or nothing to do with state conditions—such as people deemed mentally ill, Sinti, Roma, or Jews. State-centered perspectives present the generation of the motive to kill as being precisely what it is not: self-evident, or somehow immanent in the condition of power. They treat mass murder as being determined and they fail to account for the variability and uncertainty of its initiation and of the eliminationist programs themselves.
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