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From 1948 until the late 1970s the international environment saw one positive change. One critical kind of eliminationist politics had become illegal, as the genocide convention formally outlawed mass murders classifiable as genocides. That aside, the rhetorical and practical permissiveness toward mass murder and elimination remained roughly as it had for centuries. A new development, seen in earlier eras in the transnational actor (and at times sovereign country) of the Catholic Church, was outside actors’ active or tacit encouragement of mass murder. This included Western intellectuals’ legitimation of the Soviets’ and other communists’ eliminationist politics, about which they could no longer deny (as they might have in the 1930s) they knew. Playwright Berthold Brecht, philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and other equal and lesser luminaries supportive of this notorious eliminationist regime became known as “fellow travelers.” Still, whatever caché these individuals lent, the two principal culprits in tolerating or welcoming eliminationist politics were the Soviet Union and the United States, within their respective spheres of influence. Each superpower helped engineer certain eliminationist assaults. The Soviets did this (before the Sino-Soviet split) in China and in its European client states’ initial years. The United States did it in many rightist Latin American regimes, Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala included, and elsewhere, most disastrously in Indonesia. Time magazine, in a 1965 article called “Vengeance with a Smile” that reflected and further reinforced this view that prevailed in the United States, dubbed the Indonesians’ exterminationist and eliminationist assault on the Communist Party’s members “the West’s best news for years in Asia.”5
The third period stretched from roughly the late 1970s until the early 1990s. The international legal stance toward eliminationism did not improve. Only mass murders that qualified as genocides were illegal. The rhetorical condemnation of mass murder did, however, increase. This was partly owing to American President Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights, and partly to the effects of détente and the Soviet Union’s manifest decline, which meant that in the West more people were willing to openly question the American government’s neglect, not to mention encouragement, of client or supportive states’ mass murders. Nevertheless, permissiveness prevailed, and no government, alliance, or group of countries, whether under UN auspices or not, seriously considered intervening in Burundi, Guatemala, Cambodia, Syria, Iraq, and other countries that slaughtered their own people. And despite more rhetorical condemnation, the superpowers continued to encourage or permit client states to murder real or putative threats to their power. The United States did this in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Chinese in Cambodia, and earlier the Soviets in China. One of the most bizarre and undeniably craven international stances of our time was, under Presidents Carter and Ronald Reagan, the United States’ continued recognition of the eliminationist Khmer Rouge regime and its possession of Cambodia’s UN seat, even after the regime’s 1979 defeat. These presidents had no affection for these mass-murdering communists, but they were the enemies of the United States’ even more detested enemy, the Vietnamese, who had installed the successor Cambodian regime.
The contemporary period began in the early 1990s, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union and most of the communist world. The legal status of eliminationist onslaughts remained as before with only those few massive annihilationist assaults that legally qualify as genocide being proscribed. The internationalized media, ever more able to quickly report events around the world, helped develop a greater self-and public awareness of mass murder and eliminationist politics. The former Yugoslavia’s protracted horrors on Western Europe’s back porch hastened this by thrusting eliminationism under the Western spotlight and fixing the euphemistic “ethnic cleansing” in the global lexicon. General permissiveness continues for extensive killing in the developing world; witness Saddam’s Iraq, Sudan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, particularly when the eliminationist campaign is more grinding and gradual—a few thousand here, a few thousand there. Nevertheless, today there is greater public and political pressure for interventions, and there have been some, such as the counterproductive UN insertion of “peacekeepers” in Bosnia that enabled the Serbs’ mass murdering in Srebrenica and elsewhere, NATO’s subsequent, more effective interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and the international community’s forceful diplomatic intervention in Kenya to halt the postelection eliminationist assault on Kikuyu in 2008 that took 1,500 lives and expelled hundreds of thousands, and that could have escalated into a much larger bloodbath. The critical change is the drying up of outside encouragement for regimes to practice eliminationist politics. With the cold war’s dissolution, the global geostrategic rationale for the superpowers to encourage clients to commit mass murder ended. What remains are local and often stunningly petty reasons, such as the French political leadership’s desire to promote Francophone peoples and therefore its active support for the Hutu’s butchery in Rwanda.
Exceptions to these general characterizations of the four international environments regarding mass murder and elimination notwithstanding, we have seen over the course of our time some progress, in fits and starts, regarding mass murder, though barely any at all, regarding other eliminationist assaults. Yet the progress is meager, if we use the reasonable standard that (1) all eliminationist assaults (or even just mass murder) are illegal; (2) the United Nations, member states, the international media, and attentive publics immediately and universally condemn them; (3) mechanisms exist for powerful international intervention, including a legal basis for individual states to intervene to halt mass murder and eliminations within other countries; and (4) forceful intervention occurs as soon as eliminationist politics begin.
Instead, we live in the continuing, deadly hypocrisies that have characterized our era, a world governed by cynical leaders giving lip service to morality. We have let thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people die, without raising a hand, or even seriously consider doing so. American President Bill Clinton apologized in March 1998, long after the fact, for having let Hutu murder so many Tutsi, saying that he and others had not realized the extent of the mass murder. (Was Clinton saying that had the Hutu been killing—what?—a mere 10,000 or 100,000 Tutsi, then his inaction would have been justified?) Clinton’s apology was cynical posturing for political consumption, and for enhancing his reputation. While Clinton was letting Hutu butcher hundreds of thousands, he and his administration knew the facts for which he would later apologize. So why had Clinton enabled the mass murder? He was not willing to expend domestic political capital, especially after the loss of American lives in the short-lived intervention in Mogadishu, Somalia, the previous year, to save the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans—men, women, and children. In Rwanda, Clinton made a calculated decision, not a “mistake,” which he actually articulated during the Hutu’s slaughter, while covering his tracks by falsely portraying the all-out genocide as an “ethnic conflict” and, what’s more, but one among so many other ethnic conflicts. In the commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy on May 25, 1994, Clinton declared, “We cannot solve every such outburst of civil strife. . . . Whether we get involved in any of the world’s ethnic conflicts in the end must depend on the cumulative weight of the American interests at stake.”6 Morality did not enter the decision-making, even as 1 percent. Clinton and his administration were so little concerned about the Hutu’s mass butchery of Tutsi that, as he admitted in September 2006, “We never even had a staff meeting on it.”7 Not until 1998, almost four years after the genocide, did Clinton see the necessity of trying to position himself as a moral man (gaining plaudits for his willingness to apologize!) without ever owning up to his actual transgression.
Perpetrators perpetrate with a sense of impunity from intervention or punishment. Such impunity is not much reduced from what has existed throughout our age and before. The creation of several ad hoc criminal tribunals, including ones for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and recently the International Criminal Court
, constitute in themselves little change overall, or even in eliminationist politics’ overall legal status. It took the UN Security Council until March 31, 2005—two years, more than 750 days, after Sudan’s exterminationist and eliminationist onslaught in Darfur began—to take the minimal step of referring the “situation” to the International Criminal Court (though not as an instance of genocide but as “a threat to international peace and security” and owing to “violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law”). The International Criminal Court so far has been agonizingly slow in issuing warrants for only a small number of perpetrators, finally indicting the genocide’s mastermind, Omar al-Bashir, in March 2009, though not for genocide. Yet the Sudanese government and its militias have killed perhaps 400,000 people and driven from their homes more than 2.5 million more. (And the United Nations’ and the court’s deplorably tardy and minimal reaction is for a political Islamic regime that previously committed an even more colossal exterminationist and eliminationist assault against southern Sudanese, for which the United Nations did nothing.) Such small steps, and such considerable inaction, hardly inspire confidence in those who look to the international community to act effectively to stop mass murder and elimination. Nevertheless, the International Criminal Court’s establishment offers some promise of progress.
Understanding the international environment and its evolution, and how it has provided a somewhat changing though fundamentally continuous context for mass-murdering leaders, helps us understand why outside actors have not systematically stopped mass murders and eliminations, once begun. Understanding the nature of outside actors, with their different capacities, is also important for comprehending what has happened, and for thinking about how to craft more effective antieliminationist politics.
Outsiders’ capacity to intervene against mass murders and eliminations has increased substantially during our time. Modernity’s enormous growth in state power generally, including technological, organizational, and monitoring capacities, has also applied to the power of states to work against eliminationist politics. Earlier, mass slaughters, such as the Germans’ in South-West Africa or the Belgians’ in Congo, could go on for months or years before their existence or magnitude was, if ever, known to the outside world. Discerning the extent and effects of eliminationist assaults in faraway lands was often beyond the ordinary capacities of outside actors with few resources and little access in the region. Publics had little if any knowledge of areas of the world beyond their immediate geostrategic environments, and even in those it was often poor. If information gathering was one critical problem, then acting on it, even if the will to do so existed, was often extremely difficult and required substantial lead time. States’ capacities to stop mass murders in distant regions were highly attenuated. Nonmilitary means for pressuring other states were few and weak. Projecting power, especially far away, was extremely difficult. Starting a military campaign to stop annihilations would have taken a long time at great relative cost to states that had few financial resources. That is not to say interventions would not have been effective, especially in Congo, where the Belgians committed their vast mass murder over two decades.
States today, whether neighboring states or those able to project power beyond their immediate environs, have enormously greater capacities to learn of mass slaughters and eliminations and to intervene promptly and, in many cases, decisively. (The United States and its allies routed the political Islamic Taliban state and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in a few weeks, even if a powerful insurgency has since developed.) Since World War II, the emergence of many international institutions and regional associations also establishes, at least in theory, an infrastructure that facilitates far greater international coordination to stop all kinds of eliminations. Today there are many more potential actors. When European imperialist powers, which themselves often used eliminationist violence to suppress colonized peoples, controlled large portions of the world, mass-murdering regimes had fewer neighboring states on their borders. As the past century wore on, with progressive decolonization, mass murderers had to potentially contend with both neighboring states and more distant powers which in principle could intervene.
We have seen a growth in the availability of verifiable information about what is occurring, in states’ capacities to intervene, and in potential interveners against eliminationist campaigns. We have also witnessed the establishment of international institutions, the United Nations, the European Union, NATO, and other regional organizations and international trade organizations, which in principle can act effectively against mass murder and elimination. International institutions have increased the world’s capacity for intervention, because of their power and their ability to facilitate states’ acting together. Yet we have seen almost no increase in intervention and only small though positive changes in the international environment for eliminationist politics. Why? Because without a substantial change in the laws, norms, and pressures upon political leaders to change their calculus, business as usual has prevailed. Powerful considerations, often also put forward as justifications, for states not to act to halt exterminationist and eliminationist onslaughts have prevailed.
At the height of the Hutu’s mass butchery, U.S. UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright washed her and everyone’s hands of the genocide (which the United States was denying was a genocide), saying that though the United Nations might eventually do something to help, “ultimately, the future of Rwanda is in Rwandan hands.” She infamously declared that “without a sound plan of operations” intervention would be “folly.”8 Aside from the transparent cynicism of her attempt to short-circuit a serious discussion of effective outside intervention by declaring it outside reason’s bounds—even though the genocide had been under way for more than a month and hundreds of thousands had been allowed to be butchered—Albright’s statement was deemed plausibly correct and adequate by elites and publics alike, as the mute reaction to it confirms. What assumptions made her assertion of “folly” plausible?
Beyond holding up the fig leaf of the need for operational planning, Albright was vague about the reasons for the folly. She thus allowed people to activate the range of reasons that has for decades undergirded the widespread consensus opposing American (and not just American) foreign intervention against mass murder (and elimination, which in any case barely registers). I list them in no particular order and without maintaining they are equally widespread, central, or openly articulated.
• It is not in the United States’ “national interest” to enter conflicts not tangibly and substantially affecting the United States or its close allies.
• It is their conflict; let them settle it.
• The local situation is too complicated.
• There are killing and atrocities on both sides, as there often are in war.
• American boys should not die to save another country’s people.
• They are just a bunch of barbarians killing each other.
• We cannot solve the problem anyway.
• Why should we pay for their actions?
• It is not our right to intervene.
• Let the international community or nearby countries do it.
• We have too many important priorities at home.
These excuses for allowing hundreds of thousands to be slaughtered abroad would never be tolerated by Americans, Britons, Germans, Spanish, Italians, or Japanese if applied to the similar slaughter of, say, only one hundred people in any of their own countries (or even of a close Western ally). For peoples in faraway or seemingly enormously different countries, these powerfully effective excuses are grounded in three factors that produce policy detachment: an overriding doctrine of national interest, racism, and a failure to morally engage the issues.