Born of the manner in which the Japanese fought and treated civilian populations, a racially grounded demonizing of the Japanese developed among Americans, placing the Japanese beyond the pale of humanity, which suggested that no measure should remain unused when trying to defeat them. Americans routinely referred to Japanese as monkeys, baboons, dogs, rats, vipers, cockroaches, or vermin. Leading American civilian and military leaders developed and articulated eliminationist, even explicitly genocidal views about what should be done to the Japanese. President Franklin Roosevelt’s son and confidante, Elliott, told Vice President Henry Wallace in May 1945, shortly after Germany’s capitulation, that the United States should bomb Japan “until we have destroyed about half the Japanese civilian population.” Such views were echoed in popular opinion. In December 1944, in response to the public opinion survey question “What do you think we should do with Japan as a country after the war?” 13 percent of Americans chose “kill all Japanese.”77 So it is no surprise that Americans perpetrated and supported mass slaughters—Tokyo’s firebombing and then nuclear incinerations—in the name of saving American lives, and of giving the Japanese what they richly deserved.
So Harry Truman became a mass murderer. And 85 percent of Americans at the time approved of Truman’s actions—23 percent admitted that they wished that “many more of them [atomic bombs] had been used before Japan had a chance to surrender.” Today a large majority of Americans still approve of the nuclear bombing, as they widely believe the fiction of its military necessity. This fiction continues to be propagated by American apologists and guardians of national honor, even though it was known not to be true at the time. Truman and his advisers were well aware that, facing an already militarily defeated Japan in a virtual stranglehold, they could have likely imminently ended the war without invading Japan or using nuclear weapons.78 Sharing Eisenhower’s belief that “Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face,’” Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff, maintained that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”79
They started it is an emotionally and rhetorically powerful rationale and retort, used by children on the playground and men—Truman “repaid [them] many fold”—deciding who should live or die. It is especially powerful when they really did start it, and continue to shoot at you, insisting that they not stop short of victory that will bring incalculable destruction and death to your country and countrymen. Whatever the military purposes also were, they started it was and continues to be the rationale for the American and British bombings of Japanese and German cities in those instances when the actual principal purpose was to kill civilians and destroy their infrastructure of existence, thereby weakening civilian support for the war effort. The Americans firebombed Tokyo, killing more than eighty thousand. The British and Americans bombed Dresden, purposely destroying most of the city and killing between eighteen thousand and twenty-five thousand Germans. That the Germans had previously, with bombing, virtually destroyed Guernica in 1937 and Rotterdam’s inner city in May 1940, and in the 1940-1941 blitz on London killed twenty thousand people and destroyed or damaged a good part of the city—crucial facts, particularly the slaughter of Londoners, conveniently forgotten or skirted in today’s political attempts to reconstruct Germans as victims—and would have done much worse, only further reinforced the Allies’ resolve to let the Germans reap what they sowed. The Japanese in May 1939 similarly started such bombing in the Asian theater, with incendiary bombing of Chongqing, the Nationalist Chinese capital, killing perhaps more than five thousand.
Firebombed Tokyo
The retributive anti-German reaction after World War II by Poles, Czechs, and others to the Germans’ conquest and, in many areas, their murderous and brutal overlordship can be seen as an on-the-ground partial parallel to the murderous Allied wartime air campaign (that did have a military strategic component). The animus the Japanese and Germans engendered among their surviving victims led to counterslaughters and counterexpulsions justified by military or national political necessity or expedience. In Europe, they also produced a broad-based counterassault upon Germans and ethnic Germans, owing to, as a British review of the Czech press concluded about Czechoslovakia, “a universal and burning hatred of the Germans . . . and a demand that they should go, and go quickly,” both to achieve national homogenization and as revenge or justice. Poland’s provisional governor of Silesia explained, “We will deal with the German population inhabiting these lands, which have been Polish since before the beginning of time, just as the Germans taught us.” The Germans—not just SS men but ordinary Germans—had conducted themselves monstrously in these countries, where the image of them was as monsters. This image was not Americans’ fanciful caricatures about the distant, analogously brutal Japanese, but one etched by direct experience, and enhanced and extended by human beings’ penchant to generalize. The Polish military command articulated the region’s understandable and commonsense, if factually and morally indefensible, view that the “entire German people” were responsible for the “criminal” war.80
The eliminationist campaigns against ethnic Germans, while drawing on long-standing anti-German prejudices, at least among some Poles, Czechs, and others, were vehement reactions to these peoples’ own suffering and derived from a self-protective logic (Germans should never again have cause to invade in order to “protect” ethnic Germans) even among people who would have earlier deplored such measures. Poles, mainly from the Polish annexed parts of eastern Germany, and Czechs conducted a thoroughgoing and sometimes murderous expulsion of Germans on the order of ten million people, set up temporary camps for hundreds of thousands, and killed tens of thousands. The burning animus against ethnic Germans led to the rare instance of a democratic regime, in Czechoslovakia, practicing large-scale and lethal domestic eliminationist politics, with the support—as in Poland—of people of all political parties and aspirations. The first, most brutal and lethal phase of what became known as “wild expulsions” took place in the aftermath of liberation from the Germans, as the Poles and Czechs together with their leaders descended upon local Germans in a fury. Poles and Czechs expelled the vast majority of the ethnic Germans later in an organized and orderly fashion and with the consent of the victorious Allies, who, seeing the Poles’ and Czechs’ determination, approved it at the postwar Potsdam Conference.
In addition to the other justifications, the perpetrators’ actions were wrapped up in the simple belief that this was payback: “We proceed with the Germans,” according to the Second Polish Army command, “as they did with us.”81 A sign at one Czech camp’s entrance declared “An Eye for an Eye—A Tooth for a Tooth.”82 This moral and prudential justificatory logic and language was so strikingly prevalent, and still is, that to this day the countries involved have produced little self-doubt and criticism. Although such thinking, emotions, and acts might be psychologically understandable, it should be unambiguously understood that the eliminationist acts are criminal.
The instances of brutal war engendering motives for actual retributive or reactive eliminationist onslaughts have been surprisingly few. As we saw earlier, in the overwhelming majority of instances, war in itself does not generate an eliminationist orientation and mass murder. Even in the Central and Eastern Europeans’ massive eliminationist campaign against ethnic Germans, it was not the war fighting itself, but the Germans’ subsequent murderous and predatory occupation, including their brutal and racist attempts to expunge other nations’ and peoples’ existence, that generated the beliefs and attendant rage motivating the counterexpulsions and killings.
A second, more frequent and more deadly path has led people to see others as deserving death or elimination. The sway of ideologies has bloodied our time. People governed by communist regimes on the left and by dictatorships on the right have come to see large groups
of enemies standing in their way or threatening their existence, and concluded that exterminating and eliminating them is necessary and just.
All ideologies answer three questions: What is the problem, who is the enemy, what is the solution? Ideologies, as opposed to prejudices, specify enemies based on a political worldview about society’s proper organization. The understanding of the problems and the solutions (utopian, dystopian, or otherwise) suggests or logically intimates that certain categories of people, often including individuals opposing the ideologues and their ambitions, need to be eliminated somehow—suppressed, reeducated, expelled from their homes, confined in camps, or killed. In such instances, an eliminationist assault’s initial impetus is not prejudice against particular ethnic or religious groups, but the execution of a political blueprint. The perpetrators choose targets not because of a long-standing antipathy or a cultural aversion or animus toward them, and (certainly initially) not because of the people’s ascriptive identity. They choose targets because of a political conception of the world that defines certain people into enemies.
The ideologizing of a society, or a good portion of it, has two stages. The political movement’s cadres taking power, usually through revolution or coup, become literally empowered, becoming the regime’s shock troops willing, even eager, to carry out its defensive or transformative projects. They also set about educating the young in their creed, and try their best (typically with uneven results) to reeducate the adult population. After several years they succeed in rearing their first cohorts of young adults who share their worldview, with its designated problems, enemies, and solutions. In the countries where eliminationist regimes maintain their power, an ever-growing reservoir of people subscribe to the beliefs that will make them willing to eliminate enemies, including by lethal means.
Such eliminationist ideologies’ content varies greatly. The political Right’s murderous ideologies tend to speak in the nation’s name, sometimes in a racist manner, have a militarized conception of politics and society, and construe the regime’s enemies or opponents, or just those expressing ordinary political dissent and calling for economic and social change or justice, as equivalent to being the people’s enemies. Whatever their many and substantial differences, this has been true of Nazism, Croatia’s Ustasha, the rightist regimes in Latin America, including in Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Often a national-security mentality prevails, construing those expressing political dissent as assaulting the state’s or the nation’s security or stability.
The political Left’s murderous ideologies, communisms of various hues, seek to reorganize society according to a totalizing political and social vision, glorify that vision and the class or segment of society that is declared to be its bearer, and declare as enemies all individuals and groups that consider themselves or that are “objectively” defined to be opposed to that vision. This vision admits little possibility of coexistence with doubters and dissenters, let alone actual enemies. Communist regimes and their followers have a strong proclivity for eliminating the communist vision’s opponents. Because Marxism promises and requires a homogenous, dissent-free paradise, and because it posits sizable groups as being, by definition, “socially dangerous elements,” powerful roadblocks to that world’s creation, communists see the need to remove them as acute, so the restraints on how it may be done crumble.
Mass-murdering communist regimes have most notably, after initially drawing on poor and resentful proletarians and peasants, reared generations of true believers, by inculcating the young, who then readily lend themselves to eliminationist programs. Especially using their control of schools, the Soviets, communist Chinese, and communist North Koreans instilled in many of their subjects the fanatical belief in their political systems’ rightness, in the existence of systematic enmity among many people inside and outside the country, and the systematic need to do just about anything to eliminate those enemies. The Soviets erected the gulag, produced mass famine death, and deported putatively disloyal peoples. In some Soviet satellite countries, communist regimes killed (especially in Yugoslavia) and imprisoned in labor camps (as in Romania) real and imagined enemies. The communist Chinese slaughtered more people than the Soviets, including mass numbers in their Laogai labor camp gulag. North Korea’s true believers have turned the entire country into a quasi-gulag, with a landscape peppered by the camps of the regime’s formal gulag, the Kwanliso, or Special Control Institutions. Each communist system’s most loyal supporters were continuously replenished by new communist-raised generations. (This would have almost certainly been true of a longer-lasting Khmer Rouge.) Their zealous devotion to “purifying” their societies of class, ethnic, or religious enemies drove them, to a degree reminiscent of the Christian Crusaders’ analogous fanaticism, to slaughter Jews and Muslims in Christianity’s name and cause. Yet these latter-day communist crusaders, using a modern state, could better organize and systematize their murderousness, making it much deadlier.
In the name of creating a fantasized society of plenty, harmony, and total equality, despotic communist parties instituted dictatorships of extreme, homogenizing control over society, economy, culture, and thought, which deadened society, created a dysfunctional economy, desiccated culture, and stultified thought. The communists’ gross inhumanity and manifestly false claims about the world prevented them from turning all their subjects into supporters. Nevertheless, communist regimes did find and socialized many acolytes, and created a huge reservoir of willing perpetrators upon which they drew when staffing their eliminationist institutions, though many communist regimes never perpetrated horrors on the scale of the most notorious ones. The phenomenon of parents fearing their children might wittingly or unwittingly send them to the gulag by betraying the parents’ dissent from the regime expressed these regimes’ powerful socializing capacity.
Marxism’s universal principles recognize no differences of national or ethnic origin, but real-world communism typically attaches its Marxism to a national or ethnic chauvinism. In some instances, such as in China and in Cambodia, communist leaders grafted communism onto peasants’ resentment and hatred of landlords or urban dwellers, deemed class or national enemies. One Chinese peasant explained forthrightly in an interview why he killed and cut open the chest of a former landlord’s son, a boy: “The person I killed is an enemy. . . . Ha, ha! I make revolution, and my heart is red! Didn’t Chairman Mao say: It’s either we kill them or they kill us? You die and I live. This is class struggle!”83 This has all been clearest, though by no means singular, with the xenophobic Khmer Rouge, which celebrated the Khmer (Cambodia’s majority ethnic group) as the one authentic people capable of building true communism. The Khmer Rouge inculcated poorly educated peasant teenagers and boys with a bristling hatred for all things and all people supposedly standing in the way of Angkar, the romanticized pure Khmer civilization that they sought to re-create. These fully ideologized teenagers and young men came to believe that those not serving Angkar had to be destroyed. A full analysis of any given communist leadership and its followers’ murderousness would require that other factors, including long existing prejudices, be considered, yet there can be no doubt that communists’ exterminationist and eliminationist campaigns have been overwhelmingly ideologically motivated and driven.
The mass murderers of 9/11, all members of Al Qaeda, were classic ideological zealots, and yet they are unusual in our time because their fanaticism’s foundation, or at least its disinhibiting mechanism, was religion. These shock troops of a transnational and, at the time, a quasi-state political entity based in Afghanistan, were animated by a political ideology of extreme intolerance calling for the destruction of the civilization, Western civilization, which they believed had held back Islam and which stood for the liberation of people from many kinds of oppression. The West is especially noxious to the perpetrators because it opposes religious domination and gender domination, which the perpetrators wanted to maintain and intensify where they exist in Islam
ic form, and to further spread them beyond, ultimately all over the world. Their religiously grounded dreams and justifications of murdering millions, including four million Americans, according to Al Qaeda,84 exceed anything that other major political movements and governments have ever dared broadcast to the world, let alone with such explicit and clear mass-murderous formulations. Moreover, Al Qaeda is part of a larger transnational, though loosely organized (and sometimes internecine), mass-murderous political movement (discussed in depth in Chapter 10), best called Political Islam, that preaches and acts upon a lethal eliminationist political creed grounded in Political Islamists’ understanding of Allah’s commands and promises. Vast differences notwithstanding, Political Islam resembles Nazism in its murderousness. In addition to Al Qaeda, this movement exists in many countries and terror groups, holding power in Iran, Sudan, the Palestinian Authority especially in Hamas, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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