But the still more telling reason to dismiss the postulate that material gain has been the motive for perpetrators to annihilate tens of millions is that in the overwhelming majority of our time’s mass killings the perpetrators have not tangibly benefited materially from their deeds. In many mass murders and eliminations the perpetrators operated in military or police institutions, governed by their restrictive rules. No evidence suggests that the majority, not to mention the overwhelming majority of mass murderers, gained non-negligible material benefits, including promotion, for killing, let alone that such putative benefits motivated the perpetrators to kill people they had no other reason to kill. Both German and Soviet perpetrators who enriched themselves could be and sometimes were punished. Anecdotes about personal enrichment, which is all that is typically put forward to make a general case that plunder motivates perpetrators to commit mass murder, does not constitute general evidence.
Finally, a postulate discussed earlier that is partly articulated and partly free-floating holds that when law and sanctions’ constraints are lifted and people are allowed to kill, they will. Brutality resides in human nature. Killing is enjoyable. Civilization’s patina is thin. The heart of darkness lurks within us, waiting to express its most murderous self. This postulate is advanced either as a general account about human beings or as a specific account of certain peoples. As a general claim, it is wrong. Many people historically could have killed others with impunity and have chosen not to. Most people, by word and deed, indicate they abhor the killing of innocent people. This “human nature” explanation, like other ones, is the refuge of those who want to wish the problem away by asserting, against or without evidence, that killing is in our genes, so people are programmed. Sometimes this argument is not advanced for people in general but only for specific peoples, particularly those from countries or civilizations that are not advanced technologically or considered “civilized,” specifically for people in African and Asian countries—whom many Europeans and Americans are ready to believe are barbarians or bloodthirsty primitives who, absent civilization’s restraints, go wild to act as they do. While this position is rarely stated openly, at least in the public sphere’s polite company, it is easy enough to detect it underlying or informing how people discuss many mass slaughters. Claudine Kayitesi, a Tutsi survivor, has no patience for such talk: “To hear Whites talking, the genocide is supposedly a madness, but this is not true. It is a job meticulously prepared and efficiently carried out.”17 Kayitesi understands that genocide is a political, and purposefully calculated, act.
The postulates about how people said to disapprove, or not approve, of an annihilationist project can be brought to carry it out are falsified by the facts. None has ever been demonstrated to be true. Most have had little more substantiation than the power of assertion and a few anecdotes. None has been critically investigated, let alone worked through sufficiently by its proponents, let alone been worked through comparatively against a range of possible explanations. Those supporting such views have also not done what, analytically, is necessary: to demonstrate that the starting point for their reasoning is actually true, that starting point being that the perpetrators did not approve or disapproved of their own deeds. Instead, this alleged lack of approval is assumed, then presented as an uncontested fact, and then built upon by asserting that the alleged lack of approval or the disapproval was overcome by one of the postulated mechanisms just discussed. Such interpreters focus their and the readers’ attention on those mechanisms, without giving a hint that the assumption on which the whole analysis is based is contestable, indeed without the necessary empirical foundation to believe it is true. Most of the postulates also suffer from stunning psychological implausibility.
Merely casting an eye over another aspect of life under some of our time’s most mass-murderous regimes further reveals the analytical bankruptcy and the psychological implausibility of such assumptions and the assertions built upon them. The Soviet Union, communist China, North Korea, and other communist countries could not get people to work productively. They could not, even though the regimes had vast coercive and terror capacities, and even though virtually everyone worked for the “authoritative” state, either formally as a bureaucrat or in a state-owned enterprise. Authoritative orders or directives from these states failed to get workers to work hard, to work with zeal and energy, to take initiative to solve problems. Without the internal desire to work, a desire created under capitalism by the incentive of wages and other forms of advancement, under communism no amount of coercion, terror, state authority, peer pressure, bureaucratic structures, or ethos could get people to work hard and work well. Indeed, peer pressure operated just as I suggest it would if units of men told to slaughter men, women, and children believed it violated their deepest values. In the Soviet Union and other communist countries, peer pressure operated to strengthen workers’ resolve not to give their all to the regime and its work (and work did not even violate the people’s deepest values!). The joke in the Soviet Union was: They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. Yet these same mechanisms—coercion, obedience to authority, peer pressure, and bureaucratic norms—are supposed to suddenly and magically succeed in getting people to act against their wishes to do something far more radical: to mass slaughter men, women, and children. And in this one realm of the magic’s effectiveness, it is still more powerful than merely producing compliance: It super-magically gets people to work extraordinarily well and, what’s more, with enormous initiative, energy, and zeal in, what is for killers, an exemplary way.
These postulates, as accounts for the perpetrators’ killing other people—or for the perpetrators’ other eliminationist policies and actions, which those who advance the postulates rarely, and then barely, address—are riddled with disqualifying conceptual, theoretical, comparative, and empirical problems, and repeatedly fail any real-world test when applied to other circumstances or held up against what we know about people’s actual conduct in all kinds of social and political settings. Yet because coercion, the force of authority, peer pressure, and so on can get some people to do some things they would otherwise refuse to do, these postulates, at least at first glance, seem superficially plausible. That they manage even this, however, depends on a second sleight of hand: excluding from view and from analytical consideration the perpetrators’ many other actions, which are regularly and integrally part of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults, that could not be the acts of people who do not approve of their deeds.
The Perpetrators’ Other Actions
Perpetrators of mass slaughter and elimination do not conduct themselves as clinicians. They do many other things to their victims besides killing or expelling them, and do many other things to bring themselves and their victims to the moment of annihilation or expulsion. In surveying mass slaughters, the great zeal and energy with which perpetrators pursue and kill their victims is most striking. Germans in SouthWest Africa; Turks; Germans across Europe; Lithuanians, Romanians, and Ukrainians helping the Germans exterminate Jews; the British in Kenya; Indonesians slaughtering communists; the Khmer Rouge; Tutsi in Burundi; Pakistanis in Bangladesh; Guatemalans killing Maya; Serbs; Political Islamists in Sudan; and many more have been the picture of dedication and abandon in seeking out and slaughtering their victims. This was also true of the Hutu in Rwanda:Because of the situation, some [Tutsi] went out running and Interahamwe ran after them until they killed them. Some hid in bushes, sorghum fields, in ditches, in caves. Those ones were hunted down and they even used dogs to flush them out and then killed them. In addition, those who were caught were asked names of other people who hid with them while beating them because they had lists of those who were not yet killed. It was a very hard time. . . . Sometimes they cut down bushes, sorghum and banana trees hunting down Tutsi who were apparently hiding there.18
Alphonse Hitiyaremye, a Hutu killer, recalls that when reinforcements came, they could take “advantage of having these attackers along to bring
off more profitable hunting expeditions.”19 Prefiguring the Hutu’s “hunting expeditions” were the Germans’ search-and-destroy missions, for which the perpetrators regularly volunteered and had a special, approving name: “Jew hunts.” Henry Orenstein, a survivor, describes the Germans’ zeal to ensure they killed every last Jew after having already slaughtered the bulk of one town’s Jews. It was then thatthe hunt for those who had gone into hiding [began]. It was a hunt the likes of which mankind had never seen. Whole families would hide out in skrytkas [hideouts] as we had in Włodzimierz, and they would be hunted down inexorably, relentlessly. Street by street, house by house, inch by inch, from attic to cellar. The Germans became expert at finding these hiding places. When they searched a house, they went tapping the walls, listening for the hollow sound that indicated a double wall. They punched holes in ceilings or floors. . . .
These were no longer limited “actions”; this was total annihilation. Teams of SS men roamed the streets, searching ditches, outhouses, bushes, barns, stables, pigsties. And they caught and killed Jews by the thousands; then by the hundreds; then by tens, and finally one by one.20
No explanation that holds the perpetrators to have disapproved of their deeds can explain the source of the zeal and enormous energy, the “enthusiasm,” that routinely characterizes mass slaughter and elimination’s perpetrators.
This initiative is properly conceived of not as a bureaucrat’s mindless or simply job-doing act, but as the action of human beings, human agents who, informed by their values and beliefs, choose to act as they do. In one mass murder and elimination after another, perpetrators take initiatives to ensure that they manage to apprehend and then kill, incarcerate, or deport as many of their victims as possible. They improvise when searching for victims; they undertake killings that they are not, strictly speaking, ordered to. They overcome emerging logistical difficulties on their own. They problem-solve. It is precisely because the perpetrators often operate in fluid institutions, which accord them substantial freedom—and not in highly regimented and rule-governed institutions (such as classic bureaucracies) where specific procedures spell out their actions—that, in annihilationist and eliminationist assaults, the perpetrators’ conduct overwhelmingly accords with the image of self-initiating and self-motivating human beings, human agents, informed by their beliefs and values, and not that of robotic bureaucrats.
In bringing the victims to the point of annihilation, the perpetrators act with energy, zeal, and initiative—not foot dragging, lethargy, and obstructionism. Yet these acts and displays are only a figurative half of what, aside from the killing itself, the perpetrators do that demands analysis and explanation. The other half consists of the other ways the perpetrators treat their victims. They routinely talk to them, taunt them, conveying to them their belief in their deeds’ rightness and justice, and their joy in performing them. Rarely in mass murder and elimination’s annals (some Serbs in Bosnia and Hutu in Rwanda did) do we learn of perpetrators contemporaneously telling victims, or bystanders or friends, that they regret their actions. Esperance Nyirarugira, Concessa Kayiraba, and Veronique Mukasinafi, who with others form a small, informal community of rape and genocide survivors, whose family members their neighbors and other Hutu from their community butchered, came into contact with many perpetrators and other Hutu during the exterminationist assault. Asked whether any Hutu expressed sympathy for them or came to their aid, Mukasinafi replied for them all: “No.”21
After the fact, when the perpetrators face punishment, or even after their sentencing, confronted by a condemning world, they protest their innocence or say whatever might exculpate them. In this sense they resemble all criminals. Men convicted in the United States of possessing or distributing child pornography reveal how much perpetrators of heinous crimes hide, and how little their denials can be believed. At sentencing, 26 percent of the 155 offenders studied were known to have committed “hands-on” offenses against children, in other words sexually abusing them. Yet, when the same offenders in an eighteen-month prison treatment program filled out anonymous sexual histories, 85 percent admitted they had molested children. At least 59 percent of them had—when it mattered—lied, concealing their crimes, to present themselves to the legal authorities and the disapproving world as innocent of the heinous acts they actually committed. In the anonymous sexual histories, each one provided a “victims list,” which revealed that regarding the number of victims these perpetrators had concealed from the legal authorities, the extent of the self-protective lying was even more stunning. At sentencing, the authorities knew of seventy-five children these 155 men had, in sum, victimized. In the anonymous sexual histories, the same exact men named 1,777 children they had molested. This group of perpetrators had hidden and, after conviction, continued to hide from the legal authorities (at least) 96 percent of all their crimes and crime victims!22
Perpetrators of mass murder and elimination, after the fact, are no different. Srebrenica massacre survivor Sabaheta Fejzíc, whose sixteen-year-old son Serbian mass murderers dragged away and killed (while kicking and beating her and calling her a derogatory epithet for Muslims), explains: “Thirteen years later many of the perpetrators are still walking freely around Srebrenica and the Pedrinje region, while most of them are safe in Serbia. . . . Not one of them ever admitted they had committed any crime. They denied but we all saw them. I personally saw my neighbors, my former friends, and they can only tell lies. But the truth is there, the real truth.”23 Emmanuel Gatali, a Tutsi survivor, lost many family members and friends killed by their neighbors: “Before we knew it, Interahamwe and all villagers, the whole community rushed down to us, they used whatever weapon they had: machetes, arrows, big sticks, all sorts of traditional weapons, they whacked people, grounded them, slashed parts of their bodies.” Gatali, himself having seen people he knew kill with unmistakable passion and zeal, scoffs at ordinary Hutu’s self-exonerations that they were forced to kill and were not willing killers. “Even those Hutu that are confessing [to killing] are not sorry, they just want to be free,” Gatali explains, referring to Hutu who before the Gacaca courts confess as a condition of receiving much shorter sentences and being sent to a minimum-security work camp instead of harsh prison. Gatali is emphatic: “It was their will to kill and it’s in their nature.”24 Similarly, Hutu of Mukasinafi’s community cut her husband and children to pieces. She and the other rape and genocide survivors from her village knew many perpetrators well and heard many things directly from them. She explains, “The country was in their hands. They just wanted to exterminate their enemy. Because a Tutsi was an enemy to them . . . They did it willingly and happily. They did it with a lot of passion saying that they are doing it for [President] Habyarimana because he was killed by Tutsi. . . . They loved doing it. They were actually happy doing it. But they all say in Gacaca [courts] that they were ordered by the government.”25 Attempting to explain the perpetrators’ actions, indeed just writing a history of any mass elimination, by relying on their self-exonerating testimony would be akin to writing a history of criminality in America by relying on criminals’ self-exonerating statements to police, prosecutors, and the courts, or in public opinion’s court, the media.26 Unless criminals are arrested, almost none volunteers that he committed the crimes he willfully committed. Most criminals who are arrested assert that they have been wrongly accused. If they cannot plausibly deny their material culpability, they attribute responsibility for the crimes to others. They ordinarily profess, with seeming conviction and great passion, to abhor the crimes that, their protestations notwithstanding, they freely committed. When facing the authorities, as well as the general society, criminals lie about their actions and motivations. Even after conviction, criminals habitually proclaim, indeed insist upon, their innocence. Admitting the truth of their crimes will elicit still more intensive social condemnation. And, as with these sexual predators, how many criminals publicize to the police, before the court, while in prison, or after release, to anyone and
everyone, the crimes they have committed of which people are not aware? Why, then, should we think that the people complicit in human history’s largest murders and worst horrors should be more honest, more self-incriminating, more eager to volunteer the full and self-condemning truths about what they have done?27
The perpetrators of mass murder, expulsions, incarcerations, and other brutalities, of all forms of eliminationist politics, lie to the world. They say whatever might exculpate themselves, from falsely claiming they were not at the killing or elimination scene, to, if it can be proven they had been there, that they killed or brutalized no one, to, if it can be proven they did, that they were coerced. They also regularly tell tales of having saved people. The reality according to Alphonse, a Hutu killer, was that “we killed everything we tracked down in the papyrus. We had no reason to choose, to expect or fear anyone in particular. We were cutters of acquaintances, cutters of neighbors, just plain cutters.” Yet the stories told since the Hutu’s defeat differ. Their self-exoneration tactics are well worked out. According to Alphonse, “Today some name acquaintances they supposedly spared, because they know these are no longer living to contradict them. They tell the tales to attract the favor of suffering families, they invent rescues to ease their return [to their villages]. We joke about those fake stratagems.” Léopord Twagirayezu, another Hutu killer, explains the other main strategy: “He keeps saying [that] he remembers nothing or only piddling things—that he wasn’t there and suchlike nonsense.” According to Léopord,d “there are many such liars.” Why do they do it? “He bows down to lies in the hope of evading retribution and reproach.”28
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