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To start with the last, I have yet to see anyone address two related questions: How many African or Asian lives is one American life worth? Why is the American life deemed so much more valuable? Put differently, why do we value the life of an American (or in Germany a German, in the United Kingdom a Briton, in Italy an Italian, in Japan a Japanese) so much more highly than African or Asian lives in the thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands? How can this be justified morally, or even politically? Putting the question this way dissolves many of the thoughtlessly uttered justifications for allowing, which is in effect enabling, the killing of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions, and the habitual assent those justifications find.
The racism of people in the West is palpable, if usually unarticulated, when it comes to mass murders and eliminations among peoples of color. Racism underlies the they are just barbarians mentality and the these people are governed by uncontrollable primordial hatreds explanation, which offer the speaker and his listeners implicit justification for inaction. This dismissive reasoning ignores first that these putative barbarians’ political and military leaders are, with few exceptions, university graduates, sophisticated, and well-spoken, and often thoroughly westernized; second, in all exterminationist and other eliminationist assaults, political leaders for ideological and political reasons coolly practice their destructive politics; and third, perpetrators everywhere are moved by various overlapping or kindred notions, prejudices, and hatreds that lead them to think the killing is right. This was true of “civilized” Germans (and their many collaborators in many other “civilized” European countries) during the Nazi period no less than “uncivilized” Hutu in Rwanda, Serbs in Bosnia or Kosovo, or Muslim “tribesmen” in Sudan today.
Finally, the doctrine of national interest, much criticized in the scholarly international relations literature, has gained such currency in the United States and other countries, such as France (even conceptions of national interest vary substantively from country to country), as to squelch serious questioning of its conventional wisdom. That Secretary of State Warren Christopher would unashamedly declare in July 1993 that the United States was following its “national interest” in Bosnia, as a definitive justification for why it should stand idly by and let the Serbs continue mass murdering and eliminating Muslims, conveys the power of the national-interest doctrine.9 The most basic question, why so-called national interest should be the governing concept for acting internationally, is hardly asked. In the United States in particular, even those wanting to intervene against annihilationist assaults appear to think themselves obliged to assert that such intervention is in the American national interest. They support this assertion by arguing that American values are part of the country’s interests, and the United States’ moral standing in the world and therefore American interests will be detrimentally affected if the United States does not intervene, or by offering some other unconvincing attempt to employ the lowest-moral-denominator language to an end for which it is palpably unsuited.
Political leaders and other elites would object to aspects of this analysis, such as racism. Yet, they would accept the power of the national interest as a source of their inaction but not see it as revealing failures or as an indictment, but as a justifiable, even laudatory principle for their do-nothing stances. There is, however, another class of reasons for political leaders’ inaction, which few today would justify openly.
Some political leaders (and their followers) choose to overlook eliminationist assaults as they transpire because they care more about countervailing geopolitical or economic considerations. States and their leaders often give tacit support, remain silent, or make quiet pro forma objections when allies or other important countries commit mass murders or eliminations. Aside from a few tepid and oblique objections, this has characterized virtually every state’s stance toward the Russians’ mass murdering and vast destruction in Chechnya. Among world leaders the Chinese’s decades-long eliminationist campaign in Tibet to Sinofy the region barely meets a whispered criticism, unless open conflict erupts, as it did in spring 2008 during the lead-up to that summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing. The more powerful the country perpetrating mass murder and elimination, the more states and political leaders would pay materially or diplomatically for speaking out. So unless a powerful motive impels them to object, or to take symbolic or more effective action, they usually keep quiet.
Some political leaders, elites, and peoples ignore mass slaughters and eliminationist campaigns because they identify or sympathize with the perpetrators. The most obvious ones are those of Arab and other Islamic countries who have consistently refused to condemn mass murders of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands committed by Arab states—Assad in Syria, Saddam in Iraq, al-Bashir first in southern Sudan and then in Darfur—while vociferously condemning Israelis for every Palestinian they kill. Their total or near total silence is mirrored by their counterparts in Europe and around the world supporting Palestinian nationalism or so hostile to the United States and Israel that they are loath to criticize the enemies of those they hate.
Although not mass murder or elimination, the Americans’ crimes in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq should be mentioned in this context. Many American commentators’ unwillingness to speak plainly and forcefully (though, of course, many others have done so) about the extent of Americans’ systematic torturing of imprisoned Iraqis and the responsibility for them that went up the chain of command is not in essence different (even if the deeds are markedly different) from Arab political and media elites’ refusal to speak plainly and forcefully about Arab and Islamic states’ mass murdering and eliminations. The unwillingness to criticize here, as elsewhere, reflected the general political allegiance many American commentators had for the United States’ toppling of Saddam or for the Bush administration generally. They failed to differentiate between the justness of the war itself and its strategic goals—in which they believe—and the justness of aspects of how Americans fought the war—which many of them certainly privately abhor and should condemn.
We see then that another factor is necessary for eliminationist and exterminationist politics to be practiced, which though obvious is overlooked perhaps because it is not seen as a constituent factor actively promoting and therefore helping to produce eliminationist assaults. That factor is: a permissive outside world unwilling to use its great power to prevent most any regime or perpetrators from consummating their destructive ambitions. The genocide convention and the United Nations do more to provide cover for mass murderers than to stop them, and in only a few instances has there been effective intervention to prevent the further annihilation and expulsion of more victims. The price paid by those practicing eliminationist politics owing to actions taken by the international community has, in historical terms, been miniscule. The current international political system, in which eliminationist politics is embedded, is, whatever its self-presentations, amenable to mass murder, expulsions, and eliminationist politics. As I discuss in Chapter 11, this can be altered.
How Eliminationist Assaults End
The discussion of the international environment regarding eliminationist politics, and the essential immorality of those acting within it, provides the necessary context for investigating why individual mass murders and eliminations have ended, and why they did so when they did, and not earlier. Understanding political leaders’ failure to intervene to stop the world’s greatest horrors explains why eliminationist assaults have ended: not because of world outrage, not because of mobilization against mass murder, but because of internal developments among the perpetrators or external happenstance.
The Germans’ annihilation of the Herero proceeded apace without external pressure or serious internal condemnation, ending only when the Germans had killed enough, about 80 percent, to solve their “Herero problem.” It was then that German Chancellor von Bülow pressured the kaiser, for presumptive reputational reasons, to stop the wa
nton mass murder. The Germans had more or less finished the job and in any case, after the mass murder’s formal cessation, continued to assault the Herero with other brutal, though mainly nonlethal, eliminationist means. The Belgians stopped their gargantuan annihilation of Congo’s people in 1908 on their own accord. The Turks’ annihilation of the Armenians similarly did not falter until they had depopulated Anatolia of Armenians and accomplished their eliminationist goal. With the Russian czar’s overthrow, the Turks seized the opportunity to restart their annihilationist assault in 1918 to slaughter Armenians who had fled Turkey to Transcaucasia, known as Russian Armenia, as well as Armenians already living there. The Indonesians stopped slaughtering communists because they decided the job was finished. The Pakistanis ceased killing Bengalis only upon being militarily defeated by the Indians, who fought the Pakistanis for their own geostrategic reasons. Assad stopped slaughtering Hama’s people when the destruction was sufficiently horrific to deter other Syrians from challenging his dictatorship. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge had to be defeated by the Vietnamese, who fought the war not as anti-eliminationists (they, after all, had their own gulag), but because the Khmer Rouge attacked Vietnam. And the many mass murderers of indigenous peoples around the world, all but ignored by the international community, have killed and expelled these internationally invisible peoples and then stopped, according to their own rhythms and self-conceived needs.
Annihilationist and eliminationist regimes targeting several groups often end the various assaults in their own ways. The Soviets’ eliminationist policies went through different phases, which individually came to an end when Joseph Stalin deemed the job completed or when it seemed prudent to desist, such as during the war with Germany. After the war, Stalin resumed purges, although on a smaller scale, which ceased only with the regime’s change upon his death in 1953. The Communist Party continued to rule the Soviet Union. Yet its new leaders decided to break with Stalin’s eliminationist politics, so only days after he died, they began to end the regime’s terror and close down the gulag. Similarly, Saddam stopped the murderous assault upon the Kurds, the Marsh people, and the rebellious Shia when he was satisfied the job was well enough done. Yet his general murderousness ended only when the Americans and British deposed him for geostrategic reasons having nothing to do with his domestic slaughters and eliminations.
An accounting of the cessation of the Germans’ mass murdering of the Jews, and then of other targeted groups and peoples, differs by country and group. For the Jews, the Germans’ and their collaborators’ mass murdering in a country or region, such as in Lithuania, ended—except for the hunting down of those in hiding—when they succeeded in annihilating the country’s Jews or deporting them for extermination elsewhere. For other targeted groups, such as the Polish elite, whose members the Germans partly targeted in 1939 and 1940, the Germans stopped their concerted campaign upon achieving their temporary goal. But their general mass murdering ended in a country or region, and then completely, only with military rollback and then defeat by the Allies, who themselves were fighting not because of the Germans’ eliminationist assaults per se, but because they needed to destroy the regime waging an apocalyptic war of continental conquest. Had the Germans not been defeated, they might never have stopped, because their blueprint for the world, mandating the master race’s subjugation and exploitation of all “lesser” races, would have required an unprecedented scale of destruction and ongoing use of all eliminationist means—repression, expulsion, transformation, prevention of reproduction, and extermination—to keep the “lesser” races dragooned and sufficiently diminished as to be controllable. The Germans’ allies in mass murder, in Vichy France and Yugoslavia, in Slovakia, stopped their eliminationist programs as the job was reaching completion or the Germans’ fortunes waned and occupation ended. The end of the Japanese mass murdering resembled the Germans’, with the crescendo having been Americans’ militarily unnecessary twin counterslaughters in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Our age’s other gargantuan mass-murder regime, in communist China, also had ebbs and flows in its eliminationist policies and targets, which Mao, ideologically driven, turned on and off according to the intersection of his political goals and his read of changing conditions. He stopped the colossally murderous Great Leap Forward, for example, almost overnight in 1961. As with the Soviets, the general exterminationist policies ended through internal regime change, finally stopped for good, at least on an epic scale, by Mao’s death in 1976. Yet the Chinese continue their imperialist eliminationist program in Tibet.
No matter where on the globe, or when in our time, one looks, the basic findings do not change. With few exceptions, eliminationist and exterminationist programs have ended because (1) the perpetrators reached their goals, (2) there was internal change owing to a leader’s death, the perpetrating regime took a new direction, or it was overthrown, or (3) the states lost wars that were waged against them not to stop mass murders and eliminations but for other reasons. Outside intervention with the explicit intent to stop mass murder or eliminations—such as NATO’s late interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo and the United Nations’ insertion of peacekeepers in East Timor in 1999—has almost never happened. Even serious and effective sanctions expressly targeted to stop mass-murdering regimes from slaughtering more people have almost never been imposed. And those regimes that stopped their mass killing for their own reasons, not because of military defeat, often continue to assault the same groups and peoples, using other eliminationist means, including camps. As much as political leaders have learned they can slaughter with impunity, they know even better that lesser eliminationist measures, including expulsion, incarceration in camps, and the destruction of towns and homes, are in themselves that much less likely to produce a concerted international effort to thwart them.
Could these and other mass murders and eliminations have been stopped earlier? In so many instances the answer is obviously yes, or the international community or powerful countries could have at least made serious attempts offering a reasonable probability of success.
In Burundi, the Tutsi’s wanton butchery of Hutu, targeting the Hutu elite and middle class, lasted from May to July 1972. The personalized killing, face to face with machetes, was an inverted precursor to the Rwandan mass murder two and a half decades later. The world’s political leaders knew of the Burundian killing, on a scale that at least resembled genocide, while it was under way. Only the Belgians, the region’s former colonials, made even token noises to stop the killing. The secretary general of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), then African countries’ major international political organization, visited Burundi’s capital during the height of the slaughter and formally declared: “The OAU, being essentially an organization based on solidarity, my presence here signifies the total solidarity of the Secretariat with the President of Burundi, with the government and the fraternal people of Burundi.” UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim was only slightly less craven in his public enabling of the mass murder. He conveyed his “fervent hopes that peace, harmony and stability can be brought about successfully and speedily, that Burundi will thereby achieve the goals of social progress, better standards of living and other ideals and principles set forth in the UN Charter.” This was the United Nations’ official response to a frenzy of killing that led the U.S. embassy’s chief of mission to cable the State Department: “No respite, no letup. What apparently is a genocide continues. Arrests going on around the clock.”10 Yet American President Richard Nixon did nothing. The U.S. Congress never discussed the matter. No economic pressure, which would have been virtually cost-free to the United States, was put on this desperately poor country. Intervention to save Africans’ lives in an all but militarily defenseless country did not take place. The possibility seems never to have occurred to anyone. The four other instances of Tutsi perpetrating substantial slaughters of Hutu in Burundi elicited effectively no response from the international community.
Similarly, in Chile, A
rgentina, El Salvador, and elsewhere in Latin America where U.S. influence with their rightist governments was vast, the Americans had enormous power and could have halted the mass murders and eliminations at little cost. In some instances, it may have taken but a few words. But as we know, in some instances the United States actively or tacitly encouraged the slaughters. As Clinton has now conceded about the Guatemalan regime’s murder of 200,000 people in its eliminationist campaign, mainly aimed at Maya: “It is important that I state clearly that [American] support for military forces or intelligence units which engaged in violent and widespread repression of the kind described in the report was wrong.” Indeed, it was not just “support” for such forces and it was not just “violent and widespread repression,” as bad as that would be. It was much worse. The United States set the contours of the national security policy that informed the Guatemalan (and other) regimes, and helped train the Guatemalan security forces in the counterinsurgency tactics they would use against Maya communities. The violent repression included widespread mass slaughter and expulsion. The Guatemalans’ exterminationist and eliminationist assault against the Maya came to an end when the Guatemalan leadership that deposed Ríos Montt decided the eliminationist task had been sufficiently completed as to render their self-conceived Mayan problem solved.
In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, President George H. W. Bush’s American administration first encouraged southern Iraq’s Marsh people to rebel against Saddam and then forsook them. Although the Americans had just pulverized the now defenseless Saddam’s military capacity, he and his armed forces proceeded to wage a lethal eliminationist campaign against the Marsh people, systematically exterminating them and laying waste to their villages and region, killing perhaps forty thousand, and driving hundreds of thousands from their homes forever. During the 1992 assault, British Member of Parliament Emma Nicholson reported:Saddam has stepped up his onslaught in the marshes themselves. . . . I traveled through marshes smoking from ground-launched bombardments . . . reed-built villages have been razed, their small rice plots burned. . . . I reached the heart of the marshes, one mile from Saddam’s front line. There I found people starving, desperate people, drinking filthy water and eating contaminated fish. They had fled villages under assault by Saddam’s forces. . . . Many refugees like these have made the dash across the border into Iran. But to make the crossing, they must brave mined waters and a line of Saddam’s soldiers.11