The third and probably most common path to producing our time’s eliminationist mindsets is forged in powerful prejudices.
The Germans in South-West Africa were old-fashioned racists, believing Africans were subhumans who could, in a utilitarian manner, be cleared from the land that had been their homes long before the Germans arrived. One missionary explains: “The average German looks down upon the natives as being about on the same level as the higher primates (‘baboon’ being their favorite term for the natives) and treats them like animals. The settler holds that the native has a right to exist only in so far as he is useful to the white man. It follows that the whites value horses and even their oxen more than they value the natives.”85 When these putative subhumans became too resistant, the Germans systematically slaughtered them. General Lothar von Trotha explained to German Chief of Staff General Alfred von Schlieffen his thinking, which, in light of the Herero’s rebellion, prevailed: “The ideas of the governor and the other old African hands and my ideas are diametrically opposed. For a long time they have wanted to negotiate and have insisted that the Herero are a necessary raw material for the future of the land. I totally oppose this view. I believe that the nation as such must be annihilated.”86 An ideology of German expansionism, later part of the foundation of the destructive mid-twentieth-century empire in Eastern Europe, was at work here. But it was a mere adjunct to German settlers’ deep racism that denied Africans the most basic moral respect and human rights. The Germans deemed Africans a “raw material”—even those Germans holding the comparatively benign view of them—that, in the Herero’s case, eventually became too costly and dangerous to work with. So they were junked.
The Turks’ various murderous assaults upon the Armenians over the course of more than two decades were animated by a long-existing, intensive prejudice and hatred, which the Armenians’ desires for greater self-governance and autonomy further fed. The largest annihilative onslaught, of 1915-1916, occurred during World War I, but, as the Turkish leaders’ own words and documents tell us, they saw the war as an opportunity to implement their long-standing wish to solve their geopolitical Armenian problem. The Turkish leaders were, whatever their prejudices, moved by cold eliminationist calculations of power and opportunity. Their followers were animated by bigotry’s more primal beliefs and emotions, leading them to believe in the necessity of eliminating the non-Turkic and non-Islamic Armenians, a putatively foreign, corrosive people, with alien, infidel, and polluting religion and practices. A Turkish killer, Captain Shükrü, admitted to Krikoris Balakian, an Armenian priest, that in annihilating the Armenians they were conducting a “holy war.” Afterward, in accord with the Muslim notion of jihad, Shükrü said he “would say a prayer and his soul would be absolved.”87 American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau knew about the calls to jihad, which was part of Turkey’s declaration of war, followed by the Sheik-ul-Islam’s call to Turks “to arise and massacre their Christian oppressors.” (This was directed specifically at Russia, England, and France as part of a general call to arms.) Commenting on such exhortations to commit jihad (particularly an incendiary pamphlet the Germans wrote and distributed throughout Turkey and other Muslim countries), Morgenthau explains: “It aroused in the Mohammedan soul all that intense animosity toward the Christian which is the fundamental fact in his strange emotional nature, and thus started passions aflame that afterward spent themselves in the massacres of the Armenians and other subject peoples.”88
The Turks’ assaults exemplify a phenomenon found in many other eliminationist programs, a disjunction between leaders’ and followers’ motives. The Turkish leaders, aware of this disjunction, cynically exploited it, as indicated in their “Ten Commandments,” which codified their easily executable plan to “excite Moslem opinion,” because “the Armenians have already won the hatred of the Moslems.” Leaders, to serve their more coolly calculated policies (which also are often ultimately grounded in prejudice), happily mobilize the visceral prejudices and hatred among their followers—in the case of the Turkish leadership when discussing the “Moslems,” whom they so clearly see as being different from themselves, to “provoke organized massacres.”89 Charlotte Kechejian, an Armenian survivor, answers the question of why the Turks slaughtered Armenians, by repeatedly stating, “They hate the Christians. They hate Christians and they were Muslims.”90 Turks’ widespread animus against Armenians was long-standing, though it remained relatively quiescent until cynical leaders repeatedly ignited it to produce murderous conflagration. This is one of many classic instances (others are explored below) of prejudice’s lurking power and of leaders’ strategically mobilizing existing eliminationist sentiment at a chosen time for lethal outcomes.
The territories of Yugoslavia have been the locus of deeply rooted prejudices and hatred and, during our time, of various mass-murderous and eliminationist eruptions. Several small and contested political regions have housed imperfectly the different ethnic groups, including Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, and Slovenians, which were further divided by powerful religious affiliations to Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam. These groups have periodically mobilized around nationalist politics for independence, for the subjugation of one or another of the others, with and against powerful eschatological or militaristic ideologies of communism and fascism, and often in the name of exclusivist religious salvation. The region has been prone to eliminationist hatred, fantasies, and initiatives that have always been grounded in generations-old prejudices and mutual hatred between Croats and Serbs, between Orthodox and Catholics, between Christians and Muslims, and more. When during our era this region has had its two major bouts of mass murder and elimination, political leaderships easily mobilized many people to eliminate their enemies and rivals. During the 1940s the Germans’ conquest and creation of a new German-allied Croatia under the leadership of the murderous Ustasha movement produced the conditions that allowed the fascist Catholic Croats finally to act upon their preexisting desires to rid themselves of the Orthodox Serbs. After the war, Yugoslavia’s Josip Tito’s communist state, preaching interethnic harmony, suppressed these ethnic hatreds. Yet, despite the communist regime’s genuine efforts to eradicate them, they continued to simmer beneath the surface. During the 1990s, with communist Yugoslavia’s breakup the now-dominant Serbs acted upon their long-existing and, owing to the Serbs’ genuine suffering in the 1940s, greatly inflamed hatred of Croats to undertake an eliminationist onslaught against them as part of their attempt to secure a greater Serbia in the face of the Croats’ drive for an independent state. The Croats returned the favor in kind. And both, especially the Serbs, sought to eliminate their hated Islamic co-territorialists, in Bosnia. Finally, and most colossally (though less explicitly murderously), the Serbs did the same in Kosovo. Although the mutual and serial “ethnic cleansings” in the 1990s served to forge new ethnic and religious enmities among these groups, the foundations of these various ethnic perpetrators’ willingness to expel and kill their victims were laid long ago, with the prejudices and hatred of decades and centuries, and with the mass-murderous violence during World War II, mainly by Croats against Serbs but also by Serb partisans against Croats and others. Milorad Ekmečić, a Bosnian Serb founder of an ultra-Serbian nationalist party, asserts that Croats killed seventy-eight members of his family in one village in 1941. “Over the years,” he recounts, “when I came to visit [the village] for weddings and funerals the stories they told were about the massacres during the war. They were possessed by the memories of 1941-45. Probably it was the same with the Muslims and the Croats.”91 But under communism’s extreme repression, neither Serbs nor Croats could act upon their mutual hatred. As one Bosnian Croat explains, “We lived in peace and harmony because every hundred meters we had a policeman to make sure we loved each other very much.”92 He might have added that once communism’s policemen were gone, political leaders pushed, the simmering hatred and murderous desires became activated, and all hell broke loose.
In
South Asia, Muslim-Hindu and Pakistani-Bengali prejudices and hatred have structured much of the region’s politics and have been inflamed into periodic conflagrations. During the partition of India and Pakistan, the prejudices and intense emotions on all sides led ordinary Muslims and Hindus, mainly in paramilitaries, though often in mobs the paramilitaries directed, to slaughter one another. Local leaders, under the direction or with the go-ahead of their respective main political leaders or military and police forces, organized most of them to commit systematic, though not comprehensive, murderous assaults all over the region, including by attacking trains transporting people from one side of the partition line to the other. The partition itself was predicated on the notion that the principally religious-based mutual prejudices and enmities made coexistence extremely difficult. Where geographic separation—including massive population transfer—was feasible, it had to be done, especially given the intensifying conflicts. As Mohandas Gandhi declared in 1946, “We are not yet in the midst of a civil war. But we are nearing it.” This, among complex reasons of nationalist ideology and aspirations, as well as considerations of personal interest, meant, as Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s political father, explained years later, that “the plan for partition offered a way out and we took it.”93
Sorting out these antagonistic populations, however necessary it may have been to reduce the likelihood of civil war, proved disastrous for millions and further intensified the prejudices. It also produced one of the most artificial countries ever, Pakistan, composed of two territories, West Pakistan and East Pakistan, divided by more than six hundred miles of India. The discrimination of the dominant non-Bengali West Pakistanis against the Bengali East Pakistanis itself eventually led to the 1971 civil war, during which the West Pakistanis murdered between one million and three million Bengalis in East Pakistan, and then an Indian invasion of East Pakistan that resulted in the new country Bangladesh.
The scores of slaughters of indigenous peoples during our time, in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—the Germans’ annihilation of the Herero and the Nama included—by many societies’ dominant groups, led or green-lighted by their governing political regimes, have had as their foundation prejudices that include a thorough deprecation of the targeted people’s moral worth. For generations, prejudices have demeaned indigenous peoples as “subhumans,” “baboons,” “savages,” “vermin,” or “nuisances.” Those holding these prejudices have been prone to reacting to conflict with their eventual victims over territory or resources with a dismissive, exterminatory impulse and follow-through. In country after country where indigenous peoples have been the objects of exterminationist and other eliminationist assaults, the common justification of their putative backwardness, noxious qualities, or diminished human and moral worth have disinhibited, indeed spurred, the perpetrators to solve their “problem” in violent and murderous ways. As one Mayan human rights activist and anthropologist says, “indigenous people are killed simply for who they are.”94
During their colonial rule over central Africa, the Belgians nurtured if not set in motion the Tutsi and Hutu’s mutual demonizing and dehumanizing. The Belgians had earlier pursued the most brutal politics of domination, exploitation, and mass murder in neighboring Congo, slaughtering three million, five million, ten million people (no one really knows), starting in the nineteenth century and ending in 1908. In Burundi and Rwanda, the Belgians practiced a politics of extensive ethnic stratification, a divide-and-rule tactic that produced ethnic antipathy onto which was grafted a racist prejudice that in postcolonial times, if not before, reached almost Nazi-like proportions. As each country’s politics became organized around these heightened, ethnically grounded suspicions and antagonisms, extreme conflict and eliminationist politics between Hutu and Tutsi in both Burundi and Rwanda produced a temporal web of reciprocal—which does not mean exactly equivalent—prejudice and hatred, which was fed by real and imagined experience, resulting in mass murder. The mutual prejudice and hatred have been so intensive that when the political leaders of either group decided to solve their “problems” lethally, they easily unleashed their ethnic constituents, often organized in killing institutions. Also, neighbors readily fell upon neighbors in Burundi, where Tutsi have been the principal perpetrators, and in Rwanda, where Hutu have been the mass murderers.
In Sudan’s various immense eliminationist assaults, with the one in Darfur ongoing, the perpetrators have been animated by deep-seated prejudice that has two sources, racism and a highly aggressive political Islamic religious hostility, that were mutually reinforcing in the attack on the black animist southern Sudanese. According to the Sudanese regime, a religious and fundamentalist Islamic politics under continuing minority Arab domination must govern all Sudan. The non-Islamic peoples of the south and blacks in all parts of the country naturally resisted this. Hence the regime’s thoroughgoing and enduring annihilationist and eliminationist politics. There is a good reason for seeing the Arab political Islamist regime in Khartoum as much of Sudan’s imperial occupier, convinced of its own god-given right to convert, rule, and displace non-Muslims and blacks, whom the perpetrators repeatedly refer to as slaves. Combining the mindset of imperial conquerors intent on subjugating a vast, far-flung population with the fire of Political Islamic conviction of acting in Allah’s name against infidels and Allah’s enemies, the Political Islamic leaders and followers have practiced eliminationist politics over a longer period (now in the third decade) and with more catastrophic consequences (more than two million killed and millions more expelled) than only a few of our age’s most murderous regimes.
The Germans’ eliminationist campaigns during the Nazi period, because they were so various in scope and targets, compose the most complicated case (which is treated in depth in Part III). The Germans’ murderousness overall is an instance of mixed motives and mechanisms. Our era’s most unambiguous case of activating long-standing, intensive prejudice for the mass murder of a discrete group is the Germans’ annihilation of the Jews, the source of which one ordinary German mass murderer who killed Jews in Poland’s Lublin region explains, speaking for the German mass murderers and most Germans as well: “The Jew was not acknowledged by us to be a human being.”95 The Germans’ apocalyptic onslaught in the Soviet Union and elsewhere against Bolshevism and its willing adherents and unwilling subjects was an instance of ideologically driven killing undertaken as an end in itself and to create a German empire. The Germans’ killing and population transfers of Slavic peoples such as Poles emerged out of a mixture of prejudice, ideological fantasy, and the brutal utilitarian calculus of a disinhibited occupying power and its troops. The Nazis were also set upon imbuing Germans with a racist worldview—broadly resonating with widespread existing prejudices in Germany—that denied a common humanity’s existence. By 1940 the Nazis had succeeded in educating a generation of young adults who, on top of their society’s profound prejudices and hatred, generally disregarded human life that was not of the privileged “Aryan” or Germanic variety. Proof of this was a German high school class’ project in the 1980s to investigate their school’s curriculum and pedagogy during the Nazi period. After studying curricula, textbooks, and lesson plans, and interviewing former teachers and students, they published their findings in a book titled Schools in the Third Reich: Education for Death.96 This worldview made these Nazi-era young Germans their country’s most relentless and promiscuous mass murderers.
Just as Germans in general and not only German men, and just as Turks in general and not only Turkish men, and in the former Yugoslavia, Serbs and not only Serbian men, and in Rwanda, Hutu and not only Hutu men came to see exterminating and eliminating the targeted peoples as necessary, so too have women and not only men acted upon these socially shared beliefs to willingly lend themselves, including as perpetrators, to exterminationist and eliminationist assaults. When we look to the populations in whose name eliminationist politics are perpetrated, women are no less supportive than men, and are no less desirous of the b
roader political and social transformations undergirding such politics than the men are. In those mass murders and eliminations where substantial evidence exists—among colonialists everywhere, including the British in Kenya, Germans during the Nazi period, Serbs, and Hutu, the eliminationist conceptions of the victims and the stances taken toward the exterminationist and eliminationist assaults were shared by men and women alike. This is not surprising. Prejudices, hatred, and eliminationist beliefs are nongendered. The mechanisms, whichever they are, generating them for a society’s or group’s men and boys, generate them also for its women and girls. Everything we know about human cognition, and more specifically about belief systems and prejudices, indicates that when eliminationist views broadly exist in a society, they become the property of men and women equally, and so they are equally potential participants in mass murder, even if their actual rates of participation, because of social and political norms, differ markedly.
From Beliefs to Action
Ideologies, ideas and values, beliefs about other people and the world, prejudices and hatreds, these are the things, mechanisms—call them what you will—that have moved the perpetrators of these and many other mass murders and eliminations. The people slaughtering, eliminating, and inflicting immense suffering on other people, upon millions of children, have been motivated by their beliefs about the victims and about the treatment or punishments they justly deserve. Mass murder begins not in abstract structures or inchoate psychological pressures, but in the minds and hearts of men and women.
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