Usually, those Communists whom people had managed to round up were turned over to an executioner, so that he could dispatch their souls to another world. Not everyone is capable of killing (though there are some exceptions). According to what a number of executioners themselves claimed (for Kartawidjaja’s Son No. 2 had many friends among them), killing isn’t easy. After dispatching the first victim, one’s body usually feels feverish and one can’t sleep. But once one has sent off a lot of souls to another world, one gets used to killing. “It’s just like butchering a goat,” they’d claim. And the fact is that Kartawidjaja’s Son No. 2 often stole out of the house, either to help guard the [local] PNI [Indonesian National Party] headquarters located in the home of Pak Salim (the driver of the school bus in the area around Ngadirejo) or to watch the d[i]spatch of human souls. This too made sleeping difficult. Remembering the moans of the victims as they begged for mercy, the sound of the blood bursting from the victims’ bodies, or the spouting of fresh blood when a victim was beheaded. All of this pretty much made one’s hair stand on end. To say nothing of the screams of a Gerwani leader as her vagina was pierced with a sharpened bamboo pole. Many of the corpses lay sprawled like chickens after decapitation.
How could the perpetrators bear doing this? More, since they obviously approved of their deeds, as their symbolic degradation of the Gerwani leader indisputably shows, why did they relish it? Kartawidjaja’s Son No. 2, because he draws on his friends’ contemporaneous confidences to him, knows. He explains in his very next sentence that the executioners’ finding the blood and the gore unsettling had nothing to do with principled disapproval of the deed. Far from it: “But even though such events were pretty horrifying, the participants felt thankful to have been given the chance to join in destroying infidels.”71
The Perpetrators’ Beliefs and How They Come to Hold Them
The questions, “Do the killers believe the victims deserve what they are getting?” and “Do the killers think their deeds are right and necessary?” are not the most significant ones. The answer is all but invariably yes. The crucial question is why and how eliminationist perpetrators come to view their victims, and their slaughtering of their victims, in this way. This question has more complex and variable answers. Only by tackling it directly can we gain certain necessary insights into mass murder and elimination’s genesis and course. This requires exploring the perpetrators’ motives and the political, social, cultural, and situational contexts in which their motives come into being.
How perpetrators conceive of the targeted people is the critical factor in their willingness to participate in mass murder and elimination in the first place, in their willingness to visit nonlethal atrocities upon the victims, and in the character and scope of their assault. Kartawidjaja’s Son No. 2’s acquaintances, and the Indonesian mass murderers generally, saw the communists as enormously threatening infidels, whose souls had to be dispatched to another world. So when a throng of perpetrators from Nahdatul Ulama (NU), the main Muslim political party, converged upon a Communist Party office, Kartawidjaja’s Son No. 2 reports that “as usual, before carrying out their task, the NU masses roared ‘Allahu Akbar [Allah is great!]’” They then brutally beat a man they found in front of the office and burned the building down.72 This is a textbook illustration of the intimate relationship between belief, motive, and action.
Structures—such as living under a particular regime, or being a guard in a camp—could not possibly explain the perpetrators’ actions, because structural explanations deny that such a relationship exists, let alone that it has the central place it in reality occupies. Structural explanations hold that what is in a person’s head is essentially unimportant for generating his actions. Instead, the political or social structures of institutions or circumstances themselves produce people’s conduct, and do so invariably. Aside from the multiple conceptual and empirical reasons to reject the conventional explanations that have been shown here to be hopelessly faulty, coercion, authority, social psychological pressure, and bureaucratic membership are different kinds of structures. So they, like structural forces in general, also cannot explain the variations in what they must explain. And they cannot, because a constant force or influence cannot be the cause of inconstant or variable actions or outcomes. So the structure itself, which is invariable, cannot explain eliminationist assaults’ many variations, some of which were strikingly in evidence in Germany and Rwanda.
The Germans had differential success in finding willing helpers and general social support in the different countries they occupied, and within each country there was variation in people’s support for the Germans’ eliminationist assault on the Jews in the first place. These variations did not derive from variations in the German occupation’s severity but had everything to do with local antisemitism’s extent and character. Danes, by and large, did not help the Germans. Lithuanians, Poles, Slovaks, and Ukrainians much more frequently did. Indeed in Lithuania, Ukraine, and elsewhere, upon the Germans’ defeat of the Soviets, local peoples having received the green light from the Germans, voluntarily and with enormous brutality slaughtered the Jews among them. Italians helped the Germans only infrequently. French did so more but with enormous variability. The Germans could not turn just anyone into a willing mass murderer. Many helped willingly and many other people, in different countries, resisted.73 And just as they knew their own people, the German leaders knew that the antisemitic peoples of many other countries would help them, while some would not, correctly anticipating at the Wannsee Conference genocidal planning meeting that they would have difficulty getting Danes and others in Scandinavia to go along with the deportation and mass murder of the Jews: “Under State Secretary [Martin] Luther comments that if this problem is dealt with thoroughly then difficulties will arise in some countries, for example in the nordic countries, and it would therefore be advisable to exclude these countries for the time being.”74 Even the clergy of different Christian churches in different countries took strikingly different stances toward the Jews’ persecution and mass murder. The stances generally accorded with their own particular churches’ religious and cultural attitudes toward Jews, which were embedded in their countries’ particular national cultures. Among Protestant churches, the German Protestant churches supported the eliminationist assault the most. The Catholic Church overall and individual national Catholic Churches were openly behind the general eliminationist program (much more than their conational Protestant churches were), and sometimes vigorously supported its different aspects, in some countries even publicly encouraging or supporting the extermination itself.75
Rwanda provides the rare eliminationist instance of a government’s unleashing and empowering one entire people, the Hutu, to slaughter a second entire people, the Tutsi, who everywhere were the first group’s coworkers, classmates, and neighbors. Any Hutu could join the slaughtering right in his own town, village, or neighborhood. Many Hutu were encouraged to; some were compelled. While Tutsi survivors’ extensive testimony, corroborated by Hutu perpetrators, recounts a staggering number of ordinary Hutu with evident willingness and zeal killing Tutsi, there is also credible testimony that in certain villages and communes some Hutu resisted killing their Tutsi neighbors. Some but not all of them then faced the unbearable choice of kill or be killed. But the overwhelming majority of the Hutu who killed did not. They fell upon the Tutsi, strangers or neighbors, with approval and many even with alacrity. Hutu Christian clergy aided and joined in.
Many other variations in the perpetrators’ actions cannot be explained by the political or institutional structures. In camps, all victims are powerless and all perpetrators are unconstrained and all-powerful. Yet the perpetrators systematically treat different victim categories differently. In some eliminationist onslaughts, as in the Holocaust and Rwanda, the fates of victim men, women, and children were largely undifferentiated. In others, as in the Turkish, Indonesian, and Serbian onslaughts, the perpetrators treated them markedly dissimilarly.
In light of these and other variations (discussed in depth below), three sets of themes need to be investigated: (1) How, when, and over what period are the perpetrators’ beliefs generated? (2) Are all mass murderous or eliminationist beliefs roughly equivalent and, if not, then how do they vary, and how do these variations matter? (3) How do other factors, such as fellow killers’ enthusiasm, intersect with and perhaps reinforce the perpetrators’ beliefs about the target groups, to influence the perpetrators to act as they do?
Much writing about mass murder erroneously assumes it is a unitary phenomenon and that an explanation of how the desire to slaughter people is generated in one instance must be true in all instances. Mass murders have certain common features, but they also have others, including motives and the processes that produce the motives, that vary. Not surprisingly, how people come to think that other people ought to die occurs in different ways.
Our analysis begins with a well-grounded view already present in this discussion: Peoples of most countries and cultures live with an ethic that holds human beings to have a basic human value, which means that killing a person is a morally significant act of some kind or, as a shorthand, a moral act (usually deemed immoral), in the way that cutting the grass or inadvertently stepping on an ant is not. The view that killing a person is a moral act leads to the question: How do people develop the contrary belief that certain specific groups do not possess that human value, so that killing them is not immoral? How is the moral position developed that the members of those groups must die?
There are four basic ways this willingness to kill comes about. The first has a different starting point from the others. There have been societies and cultures—probably the majority of them prior to the Enlightenment and then the dissemination of its ideas—that have not recognized human beings’ universality and moral equality. Instead human value was seen to be possessed only by a minority, often only a given society’s or culture’s members. The ancient Greeks, those romanticized civilizers, while sometimes democrats among themselves (really only among certain classes of men), held slaves, who according to no one less than Aristotle lacked reason. Greeks believed non-Greeks, deemed barbarians, lacked full human qualities. In such cases throughout history a dominant group’s instrumental treatment of people, to be used or eliminated according to the dominant group’s needs and capabilities, has been the norm. The dehumanized status and treatment of many peoples historically is particularly well known for one common condition, slavery. Most human societies historically have enslaved others, who were also subject to being killed, except when a slaveholding society’s laws forbade it to protect the polity’s interests and norms. European colonizers treated people of color the world over as beings of a different kind, often as barely human, to be dispensed with, including as slaves, or production factors, or corpses, according to convenience and practicality.
We must consider that also during our time certain societies and cultures have not accorded basic human value to all or most human beings long prior to its members’ committing mass murder, and that killing people has therefore not depended upon stripping this value from them. It may be that in some societies and cultures (or subcultures) there has been a generalized disregard for human life, save perhaps people’s own reference group, so killing people has not been the existentially monumental and morally significant act that, during our age, it otherwise has been. Because societies and cultures can nurture people with such an ethnocentric ethic, we must acknowledge the possibility that in our era certain perpetrators have easily come to see slaughtering their victims as desirable because it has been seen as necessary, and they could come to view mass killing, what we would call mass murder, this way because they never saw their victims as having fundamental human value and therefore certain basic rights in the first place. Nothing moral had to be removed, no great transformation had to occur, for them to be incapable of feeling genuine sympathy with the target groups. Such killers’ language of justification is amoral utilitarianism.
In the first centuries of their colonialism, Europeans treated the technologically inferior African, Asian, and Native American peoples they conquered generally with amoral utilitarianism, to be employed or disposed of according to the Europeans’ needs. Also the “natives,” by their resistance to the so-called civilizing process or merely to the self-styled superior Europeans’ goals, gave proof of their putative inherent inferiority and unfitness. How long this attitude continued to prevail varied from country to country and people to people, though it certainly moved the European perpetrators in their eliminationist assaults on African peoples during our time. In Asia, the Chinese’s colossal mass murders before and after the communist takeover, which occurred under several political contexts and regimes, raise the question of whether this amoral utilitarianism has at least partly existed there, at least until midway through the twentieth century. The extremely culturally ethnocentric imperial Japan preyed on Asian peoples in this manner, hearkening back to European colonialists, though drawing on indigenous Japanese cultural sources for these attitudes and practices.76 It may also be that such attitudes existed amidst the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s violent anarchy during the past several years. Yet in the story of our time, these instances, as important as they are, are the exceptions.
Our age’s mass murders and eliminations have overwhelmingly been perpetrated by people nurtured in societies and cultures that assigned fundamental human value to people in general. In such societies, this protective attribute had to be stripped away for the perpetrators to see other people as deserving death or elimination. This has occurred in three basic ways.
1. People who had no particular prejudice or animus for another group can have hatred forged in the heat of real (usually military) conflicts that lead them to believe that the enemy people must be defeated at any cost (permanently) and deserve the worst.
2. People can become beholden to political ideologies that call for destroying or eliminating others. If such ideological regimes are in power long enough to socialize new generations, they can educate a reservoir of like-minded followers who will willingly act upon the regime’s and their own eliminationist beliefs.
3. People can have preexisting powerful prejudices against specific groups, which then get activated for lethal and other eliminationist aims by leaders bent on eliminationist politics.
More than one of these pathways can be operating, sometimes on different perpetrators, sometimes regarding different victim groups. Nevertheless, whatever the complexity, one of them is usually dominant and its lineaments are easily discernable.
Real conflicts, when unusually brutal or posing an existential threat, have occasionally forged mass-murderous responses. These are essentially reactions to suffering at the hands of an actual antagonist. Even if the reactions are immoral and unjust, they have an air of retributive justice and sometimes the veneer of military or existential necessity, which is how the perpetrators justify and rationalize them.
The most obvious context that engendered eliminationist assaults, including mass murder, were Germany’s and Japan’s imperial, predatory, and annihilationist invasions and occupations of various countries and peoples. The Germans’ and Japanese’s barbarities during their respective attacks and occupations produced in their victims an intense hatred far exceeding what had existed before and (in many cases there was no particular prejudice at all) that in some instances got translated into eliminationist and mass-murderous revenge assaults upon the Germans and Japanese.
To most Americans, little-known Japan, halfway across the globe, had been virtually absent from their mental world. Even if many, certainly on the West Coast, were prejudiced against East Asians in general, including the Japanese, they felt no enmity for Japanese. Yet, owing to several features of the war, Americans developed a dehumanized image and hatred of Japanese that led them to conclude that just about any action was permissible against this heinous enemy. Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbo
r was a far more threatening assault upon the United States, and a greater shock to Americans, than Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. Overnight, it plunged the United States into a world war that consumed and disrupted the country for years, took almost 300,000 American lives, wounded an additional 700,000, and risked millions more. This produced the axiomatic view that the Japanese violated civilized society’s most basic rules, a view that transformed them into a nation of outlaws. This view was inflamed by how the Japanese fought in battle and treated conquered peoples and prisoners of war. Already before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese’s mass murder of perhaps 200,000 Chinese in the notorious Rape of Nanking (Nanjing) had become well known to Americans, a moniker for what could be expected from the Japanese during war. The Japanese’s subsequent killings and abuse of conquered peoples amplified this image. Their fanaticism in fighting to the death, including their kamikaze and other suicide attacks, construed them as an enemy that would rather die in order to kill Americans than succumb. Their treatment of allied POWs, especially the infamous Bataan death march, during which they killed twenty thousand (mainly) Filipino and American prisoners, reinforced the image of the Japanese as uncivilized, treacherous, and uncompromisingly dangerous.
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