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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  From this discussion several conclusions follow.

  The Holocaust was singular in certain dimensions (as are other eliminationist assaults), but not in the general congruence of leaders’ and perpetrators’ beliefs, or in its perpetrators’ moral approval. Both are common, constituent features of mass murder and elimination. Hence, the relationship between leaders and followers needs to be rethought no less than other faulty received notions (about bureaucracies, authority, etc.) that have been put forward without regard and in firm contradiction to what we know about politics and social life. For mass murders, the relationship between leaders and perpetrators is usually analyzed as one of psychological dependence, authority, or compulsion. The leaders are usually presented as all-powerful agents and the followers as people with no or little capacity to adopt their own positions, and then to have those positions matter by affecting their own conduct, influencing leaders’ estimations of what is possible or desirable, or having an effect in any way over what happens. But this is, of course, not at all how politics works or how we, in every sphere of politics except eliminationist politics—which is commonly reduced to the mind-numbing word genocide—think of the relationship between leaders and followers, whether the politics are democratic or nondemocratic. In no other area of politics do we assume or assert as a matter of faith that followers do not reflect upon the rightness of their leaders’ politics and policies, reflexively accept or follow their leaders’ wishes, or are passive vessels to be infused with and moved by whatever leaders want. Dissent from, suspicion of, and resistance to political leaders’ wishes, programs, and policies is the norm throughout the world under all kinds of regimes—including during war—in general and particularly when people disagree with those policies, especially when those policies violate people’s deepest moral values—as a policy to slaughter other human beings, to slaughter children would, if indeed people thought it wrong. What is missing from the theorized and nontheoretical discussion of eliminationist politics is commonplace in the understanding and theorizing of other kinds of politics: the fundamental recognition of people’s agency, and of the complex relationship that that agency necessarily creates between them and their leaders, and between them, the circumstances of their actions, and what they actually do.

  Working through these relationships, both theoretically and in concrete cases, necessitates among others two things: first, a reintegration of the cognitive and moral dimensions of the followers’ stances toward their leaders in general and, at least as critically, toward particular policies, initiatives, and goals that their leaders adopt or seek to pursue. Followers’ views about people designated as targets, and their understanding of acceptable and appropriate moral action, are critical for how they will respond psychologically, how they will perceive the legitimacy of authority, including so-called charismatic authority, and whether compulsion would be necessary, might be tried, or would succeed. Second, we need to recognize that the eliminationist situation is inherently fluid, with leaders calling on preexisting beliefs, helping sometimes to intensify and further shape them or to overcome lingering moral inhibitions, able to do so often only under the prior constraints those existing beliefs and values create. Our analysis of this complex and fluid relationship, and the conduct that emerges from it, must necessarily also be fluid. It is true that predispositions among followers to eliminate potential target groups must often be cultivated and must all but invariably be called upon by leaders, if the followers are not to remain relatively quiescent. It is also the case that, absent some catastrophic assault upon a people, leaders cannot, certainly not in a few weeks or even a few years, create a large, willing, let alone eager followership for vast exterminationist and eliminationist policies—for children’s mass annihilation—if those followers do not already accept the fundamentals of the leaders’ worldview about the victims and about the aspects of society and politics relevant for determining what ought to be done with the victims. Leaders can get followers to go willingly only where the followers are already in some sense prepared to go. This was true for Mehmet Talât and Turks, for Hitler and Germans during the Nazi period, for Slobodan Milošević and Serbs, and for the Hutu leaders and Hutu. It has been true across our time’s exterminationist and eliminationist assaults.

  We must jettison the rigid, typically dichotomous thinking that in three related respects characterize discussion of mass murder (and eliminations more broadly, though eliminations are left out of such discussions). First, and touched on earlier, mass murder’s interpreters attribute agency and efficacy to leaders or to followers, but not to both, and certainly fail to treat both as capable agents acting in a fluid relationship of mutual influence as movement occurs toward eliminationist measures. This dichotomous thinking has been almost uniform among writers about the Holocaust as well as in the faulty paradigmatic thinking about perpetrators its interpreters have generated.

  Second, the sometimes explicit though mainly implicit model that dominates discussions about mass murder maintains, dichotomously, that perpetrators must have always wanted to kill the victims or, if not, then prior beliefs about the victims must be irrelevant, and the perpetrators must have undergone a coercive transformation, not necessarily in belief, but in conduct—either through brainwashing, blind obedience, or some kind of psychological or threatening pressure. The strange reasoning underlying this position is that if the perpetrators, or more broadly a people, had had exterminationist-compatible beliefs about others, then they would have annihilated them long before they finally did. Or in the rhetorical question that is so often used to make this point, “Then why didn’t it happen earlier?” Because the perpetrators did not kill earlier, then the exterminationist beliefs—so the thinking continues—could not have been there, and therefore, when the perpetrators do actually kill, they cannot be willing killers in any meaningful sense of willing. The flip side of this mode of thinking—common to society-centered explanations of eliminationist assaults’ initiation—is that if murderous beliefs were always present, the leadership is but the conveyor belt of popular sentiment and intentions.

  If instead we understand first that prior beliefs predisposing people to adopt an eliminationist solution can exist while lying dormant, or that such beliefs might not have yet coalesced around a particular solution, or that their bearers might need a moral example and push, and second that leaders activate, shape (intellectually, with policy, and organizationally), and sanction dormant beliefs and moral views, then we can understand the complex of beliefs, policy, and actions at the heart of the process that leads from initiation to implementation.

  The third misleading rigid manner of thinking (which is implicated in the second) holds that beliefs and action have a one-to-one relationship. Beliefs about despised people and the actions desired by their bearers are treated by commentators as so intertwined that they are collapsed into each other, as if they are the same thing. This means that if someone supported or implemented one eliminationist solution, say forced emigration, then—so goes the faulty conclusion—he must have opposed more radical eliminationist solutions, such as annihilation. But, as we know, eliminationist beliefs are compatible with various policy solutions, including various eliminationist ones. Beliefs’ multiple potential for action is obvious in our own social experience and in politics. When thinking about people’s or politicians’ stances, say, toward crime, no one adopts the stilted unrealistic paradigm that characterizes mass murder’s discussions. People can be willing to accept a wide range of laws and punishments as good or as merely adequate (if the alternative is to do nothing). It is astonishing that the same flexible relationship between people’s beliefs and the range of policies they would willingly support is explicitly or implicitly denied for the political issues of how people might treat despised and feared groups. Why and how different eliminationist solutions and mixes are decided upon in one instance and not another and then, in any given instance, different ones during the evolution of policy must be explore
d.

  Recognizing the critical quality of ordinary people’s beliefs and values is the first important step. Recognizing the complexity of the relationship between beliefs and desired action is another. Refashioning our understanding of the relationships of beliefs and values, and desired actions, to other factors, which are also complex and changing, is necessary and predicated upon adopting a more fluid view of each component and its relationships to the others.

  As most people know from their own experience, we sometimes begin to look at a thing in certain ways only when relevant courses of action become possible. Newfound options can induce us to focus on an old matter with new intensity, from new angles, and with new reasoning. Suddenly, our previous thinking about the matter appears inadequate, a new solution is necessary, a newly offered one desirable. None of this is inevitable. At other times, when new courses of action present themselves, sometimes nothing changes. And sometimes new options, socially or politically, have the opposite effect. As people realize the conduct that logically follows on their views is unpalatable, they might conclude that the views themselves are mistaken and need revision. This occurred for many deeply antisemitic Christian churches after the Holocaust, as their leaders and members came to see the perniciousness, indeed, in their terminology, the evil of antisemitic beliefs that had wrought such human destruction. However, if new ways of acting are compatible with our established views, we so often see the desirability of adopting them. This has been at the heart of eliminationist and exterminationist politics.

  The relationships among people’s beliefs, the solutions they are willing to consider to perceived problems, and the actions they deem appropriate are complicated and fluid. The issue is not, as so many postulate, that eliminationist beliefs are suddenly created out of nowhere by structures, orders, or pressures. Rather—as Fulgence so pithily captured it when he explained that “the atmosphere had changed”—newly emerging, favorable circumstances provide contexts for existing eliminationist beliefs to be massaged, channeled, and activated in varying forms and directions, resulting in their bearers’ willingness to act, even to kill.

  While this can happen in several ways that have been discussed here, we need to appreciate the frequent component of epiphany. The sudden realization that unimagined or unexpected actual possibilities exist, that novel solutions could improve one’s life or the lives of one’s loved ones or community, can galvanize people in unexpected ways and even, precisely because of the sense of newness and good fortune, produce the euphoric zeal so often seen among the perpetrators. Such instances are human history’s commonplaces. One occurred in 1989 when Romanian dictator President Nicolae Ceausescu’s mass rally went awry with millions of Romanians watching on television:The young people started to boo. They jeered the President, who still appeared unaware that trouble was mounting, rattled along denouncing anti-communist forces. The booing grew louder and was briefly heard by the television audience before technicians took over and voiced-over a sound track of canned applause.

  It was a moment that made Rumanians realize that their all-powerful leader was, in fact, vulnerable. It unleashed an afternoon of demonstrations in the capital and a second night of bloodshed.105

  These youths did not trick or transform their countrymen, but unleashed the repressed passions, and mobilized the latent beliefs, among Romanians that would eventually bring down a so-called charismatic leader. And so, the people acted. Similarly, it is not political leaders’ alleged charisma that magically dupes thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of people to support eliminationist ideals and programs that would otherwise violate their deepest beliefs and values. Aside from the simple fact that even the most supposedly charismatic leaders, including the allegedly most charismatic of all, Hitler, regularly meet resistance when they move against such cherished beliefs and values, no such so-called charismatic leaders exist in many mass murders and eliminations. Sometimes the leader’s identity or character is barely known. So-called charismatic leadership was absent in German South-West Africa, in Turkey, in British Kenya, in Indonesia, in many Latin American countries, in Burundi, in Rwanda, and in so many other eliminations.

  When leaders, whether putatively charismatic or not, offer people a heretofore unimagined or seemingly implausible opportunity to act violently and lethally that accords with—in fact, fulfills—their deepest existing values and beliefs, people suddenly realize they can solve a previously unsolvable though grave problem. The Hutu mass murderer Pancrace explains along these lines how we should understand the critical mobilizing place of “the president’s death and a fear of falling under the rule of the inkotanyi [cockroaches]” in the Hutu’s complex of prior dormant beliefs and subsequent impassioned action:The Hutu always suspects that some plans are cooking deep in the Tutsi character, nourished in secret since the passing of the ancien régime. He sees a threat lurking in even the feeblest or kindest Tutsi. But it is suspicion, not hatred. The hatred came over us suddenly after our president’s plane crashed. The intimidators shouted, “Just look at these cockroaches—we told you so!” And we yelled, “Right, let’s go hunting!” We weren’t that angry; more than anything else, we were relieved (my emphasis).106

  We should accept the fluidity (which does not mean total malleability) of this complex of beliefs, solutions, opportunity, calls to action, and conduct because it accounts best for the facts. It helps us make sense of the indeterminacy of beliefs and values, while according them their essential place in the eliminationist equation. It allows us to explore the complicated relationship between eliminationist beliefs and eliminationist action (in Part II), which is at once the core of the eliminationist stance and deed, and very hard to know.

  When, as the perpetrators almost always have, people believe that other groups, other people, are of a character that makes eliminating them, including with lethal violence, right and necessary, then once unleashed, these people become the most self-motivated, zealous, and effective implementers of political policy the world has known. Hence, the paradox that confounds so many: Without political leadership, the overwhelming majority of the perpetrators would not lift a finger in harm, but once set in motion, typically but with a few encouraging and enabling words, they, both the eliminationist regimes’ shock troops and their societies’ ordinary members—be they ordinary Turks, ordinary Germans, ordinary Indonesians, ordinary Tutsi, ordinary Serbs, or ordinary Hutu—give themselves, body and soul, to death. They do so easily, effortlessly, and to them, logically. “I think the possibility of genocide fell out as it did because it was lying in wait—for time’s signal, like the plane crash, to nudge it at the last moment,” explains the Hutu perpetrator Ignace Rukiramacumu. “There was never any need to talk about it among ourselves. The thoughtfulness of the authorities ripened it naturally, and then it was proposed to us. As it was their only proposal and it promised to be final, we seized the opportunity. We knew full well what had to be done, and we set to doing it without flinching because it seemed like the perfect solution.”107

  CHAPTER SIX

  Why They End

  ALL ELIMINATIONIST ONSLAUGHTS END sooner or later, but not for the same reason. Why they end is an important question. Why they do not end earlier is perhaps an even more important question. Answering these questions requires us to broaden our view, to examine not only the perpetrators and their states and societies, but also their relations with other peoples and states

  The effects of mass murder and elimination are well known. The perpetrators are roundly condemned and repudiated abroad, except by self-interested apologists. Less well known, discussed, and analyzed are the broader contexts in which mass murders transpire, which include the reactions of neighboring countries and the world. This is not because the topic is insignificant. The international environment critically influences political leaders’ decision-making about people’s fundamental rights within their own countries and abroad, and how, as a practical matter, they must govern and treat differ
ent people and groups. Witness the prominent and often dominant emphasis on human rights in international relations. During the past two decades, various countries, regional entities such as the European Union, and transnational and international institutions have encouraged countries to move toward democratic politics and free markets, positively influencing many countries’ societies and politics.