B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Nicholson knew about it. The British government knew about it. The Americans knew about it. Everyone knew about it, including the coalition of more than thirty countries whose troops had just defeated the Iraqi army and ended Saddam’s imperial conquest of Kuwait. Yet they did nothing because geopolitical considerations—wanting to maintain Iraq as a countervailing force against Iran, not wanting to alienate the Americans’ Arab coalition allies by invading an Arab country—took precedence. If ever an instance existed for the absolute necessity of American intervention to stop mass murder and elimination, this was it: The Americans had encouraged the rebellion that catalyzed Saddam’s murderous eliminationist campaign; the mass murderer had just provoked a war with the United States, which soundly defeated him; and overpowering American military force was at hand. Nevertheless, Bush let the slaughter proceed unimpeded.

  The eliminationist assaults in the former Yugoslavia by Serbs, first against Bosnians and Croats, then Kosovars, and by Croats against Serbs are more instances of how little political leaders are willing to do to stop mass murder, even at their doorstep. European nations, their political and media elites alike, often present themselves as paragons of moral conscience in contrast to the avaricious American colossus. Yet European governments individually and collectively stood by and watched systematic mass murder return, after less than a half century’s absence, to their continent. Some European voices urged intervention, but these were relatively weak and ineffectual. The major and minor countries’ political leaders and political classes did all they could to look the other way, explain away the problem as not being genocidal or as being intractable, fail to act forcefully, and drag their feet. In some instances, such as the Germans’ premature recognition of Slovenian independence in violation of European Union policy, they actually helped precipitate the various stages of the crisis. All in all, the Europeans did nothing discernable to brake the killings and expulsions. Neither did the United States under Bush and during the Clinton administration’s first three years, even though the first Bush administration knew about the Serbs’ mass-murderous and eliminationist designs on Bosnia before the assault began, and immediately understood the assault for what it was once it did begin. Had Bush or Clinton decided to meet Slobodan Milošević with a credible threat of the actual force Clinton eventually did effectively apply—just serious bombing—the Serbs would not have slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims, brutally expelled hundreds of thousands, or raped enormous numbers of women, and a more just cultural and political settlement would have emerged from Yugoslavia’s breakup. Only when Clinton, much too late, used American airpower in Kosovo in what was formally, as it had also been in Bosnia, a NATO intervention was Milošević’s eliminationist rampage in the West Europeans’ backyard finally halted.

  The story in Rwanda is even more sordid. The French, serving as the Francophone Hutu’s guardians, and UN leaders possessed explicit advance knowledge that the Hutu leadership intended to embark upon a colossal mass murder of the Tutsi. The French had even armed and trained the eventual murderers. Did French President François Mitterrand or the head of the UN peacekeeping force, Kofi Annan (later rewarded with a promotion to UN secretary-general!), warn the Tutsi or the world? No. Did they tell the Hutu political leadership that the international community would intervene to stop them and would treat them as criminals if they proceeded with the mass murder? No. Did they seek to mobilize troops to intervene, or even just to make a credible threat that might give the regime pause? No. What did they do? First, when General Romeo Dallaire, the military commander of the UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, informed Annan of the Hutu’s plan to exterminate Tutsi leaders and Belgian peacekeepers to get the United Nations to withdraw its peacekeepers, Annan forbade Dallaire from intervening to protect the Tutsi, an order Annan never rescinded. Annan and Mitterrand kept quiet about the plans, providing cover for the mass murderers. Once the killing began, the United Nations withdrew its troops, abandoning the Tutsi and giving the Hutu the green light to slaughter them. The French did eventually send soldiers, which they have had no compunction to do in Africa to serve their interests, though here it was not to stop but effectively facilitate the butchery by protecting the Hutu regime. The rest of the world mobilized very late in the killing process to send some troops, in order to create a few safe havens but not to stop the mass murdering more generally—although halting the poorly armed and -trained perpetrators would have been easy. The killing continued until a Tutsi army, invading Rwanda from Uganda, defeated the Hutu militarily.

  The French political leaders were at the helm of a democratic country that, like other democracies, is generally supportive of human rights. Why then did they collaborate in a mass murder that was of an intensity (number killed per month) that exceeded the Germans’ slaughter of European Jews? Because the Hutu are Francophones and the Tutsi from Uganda who threatened the Hutu’s tyrannical rule are not. The French, engaged in a virtually magical realist struggle to maintain their waning cultural importance around the world, decided that their self-image trumped the lives of 800,000 men, women, and children. Why did Annan permit the mass annihilation to proceed unimpeded? Anyone might assume that someone authorizing such intervention and going against the international community’s status quo hands-off policies would make a mortal enemy of France, a UN Security Council permanent member with veto power over who becomes secretary-general.

  In Rwanda, the world failed to work to stop the colossal slaughter taking place in full view, which it easily could have done at any of several stages, including before its inception. Some of its leading members also made the bloodbath possible, or at least far more likely and more deadly.

  The far more formidable Taliban ruling Afghanistan, home to the genocidal bin Laden and Al Qaeda, was toppled easily by a mainly American campaign aided by an international expeditionary force. It took the American and allied forces only two weeks after inserting troops (following bombing) to rout the regime. (Subsequent strategic and tactical blunders have allowed a powerful insurgency to grow.) Unusual for a Western power, the United States was highly motivated to act against this mass-murdering regime for the obvious reason that it was the haven and staging ground for Al Qaeda, which had destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on 9/11, damaged the Pentagon, killed three thousand people, and stunned and mobilized the American people. Would the motivation have been there had the Taliban or bin Laden slaughtered three thousand Afghanis? Or ten thousand? Or even 100,000? Of course not. Each of the many other instances of large domestic killing repeatedly answers this question for the United States and the powerful countries in the negative. Dislodging the Hutu genocidal regime in geographically small Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest countries, would have been easy and not very costly. But 800,000 Tutsi’s lives are evidently less valuable than 3,000 American lives.

  These instances show how little the world, the United Nations, the major powers, the political decision-makers have done even when it would have been relatively easy to stop mass murder. The world’s political heavyweights do not act to save innocent lives, because the nation-state is egoistic and its leaders are self-interested, and because the lives of people who are deemed to be unlike those living in the powerful countries are devalued. As Dallaire in 2004 said about the Hutu’s slaughter of the Tutsi, “I still believe that if an organization decided to wipe out the 320 mountain gorillas there would be still more of a reaction by the international community to curtail or to stop that than there would be still today in attempting to protect thousands of human beings being slaughtered in the same country.”12

  Once the mechanisms that have stopped mass murder and eliminations are known, the question as to why eliminations do not end earlier than they do mainly answers itself. In almost all of our time’s mass slaughters and eliminations, the leaders of the powerful international institutions and states, the effective agents capable of stopping a dedicated eliminationist regime, have not acted at all. So, obviously, they
were never going to intervene early, to stop, let alone prevent, the catastrophes, while tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved.

  Intervention can take place. The horrible record of countries and their leaders need not be reproduced forever. To bring about effective change, we need to consider how we can transform the international environment regarding eliminationist politics, including the incentive structure that potential mass murderers and eliminationists confront, and how to promote right and necessary action among the world’s powerful political actors.

  PART II

  MODERN ELIMINATIONIST POLITICS

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sources and Patterns

  MASS MURDER IS A political act. It is not a frenzied outburst of crazed individuals. It is not the lashing out of a psychically or materially wounded collectivity. It is not a suprahuman or historically determined occurrence caused by prior acts of people long dead or continents away. It is not the mere expression of modernity’s conditions or bureaucracies, or the explosive result of social psychological pressures. It is not driven by the darker, barbaric self supposedly within us all. And it is not the mere expression of one single man’s or a small group of men’s will, any more than other major political initiatives and policies are.

  Because mass murders and eliminations are political acts, to understand and account for them, we must reinsert them into our understanding of politics and fundamentally change or expand our conception of politics to include them. I do not mean merely that we need to say that such assaults are “political,” which is at once not recognized by many and treated as a truism requiring little elaboration or exploration by others. Instead, we must explore eliminationist programs’ political complexities and integrate our understanding of them into a robust understanding of modern politics—domestic, international, and the intersection of the two. Thus, it is both true and not enough to say that an exterminationist or eliminationist assault is the result of a leader or leaders’ decision for political ends. We need to further recognize and explore the other factors influencing leaders and the considerations they take into account in making their political decisions to mass murder or eliminate others—explorations that should produce analyses as full and true to the project’s enormity as those we give to political leaders’ decisions about other major policies, everything from national economic initiatives and social programs to going to war: How do the eliminationist assault’s political goals advance the leaders’ still larger political aspirations and initiatives? Will slaughtering or eliminating the targeted groups be popular with their supporters? Do they have the requisite resources, personnel, and organizations? Is the time ripe for the initiative? What are the potential costs, and the probabilities they will occur? How do the cost-benefit probabilities of initiating an eliminationist program compare to those of doing nothing, or of taking an entirely different approach to the perceived problems?

  Leaders contemplating mass murder and elimination are not all rational actors, using sophisticated algorithms to calculate a complex matrix of variables’ costs and benefits before arriving at their decisions to expel or kill targeted groups, or to repress or tolerate them. Politics does not operate so neatly, and neither does the politics of mass elimination. Moreover, however rationally more conventionally conceived politics seems to be practiced—particularly when the well-understood norms of power, wealth, or moral responsibility are dominant—eliminationist politics are often governed at root by eschatological or millennial orientations, fantastical beliefs, or intense emotions that render talk of rationality, or even instrumental calculation, misplaced. As we do with political leaders making other momentous decisions, including about war, we must neither treat eliminationist leaders as purely rational actors nor neglect the rational calculations such leaders regularly make.

  War is a political act. Whatever their significant differences, so too are mass murder and elimination. War is part of political leaders’ repertoire. So are eliminationist and exterminationist politics. It would seem foolish to explain the outbreak of a specific war or wars in general by reducing them to ancient prejudices, supposedly transhistorical qualities such as the supposed barbarian within us all, the social psychology of small-group life, or some invariable outcome of social structures, such as capitalism or globalization. We understand that the decision to start a war is a choice by political leaders—a calculated choice taking into account many factors, including their often erroneous, prejudice-laden worldviews. We understand it is a choice that could be made differently and, in practice, has been made differently again and again, with leaders opting for nonmilitary solutions to problems, effectively saying no to war. All this is true for mass murder and elimination.

  All attempts to explain, as ironclad cause and effect, why wars break out have failed. The contingency of the political, the irreducibility of leaders’ decision-making, the intelligence, passions, and wisdom of particular leaders doom the quest for scientific-like causal explanations. They also suggest how misplaced and misguided the quest is. The high-stakes confrontation of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1961 demonstrates the foolishness of the notion that decisions to initiate a war or an eliminationist assault are foreordained by social structures or other “forces.” (The tapes of the meetings in which American President John Kennedy and his advisers flail about while groping for a course of action should disabuse anyone of such an illusion.1 ) Most notably, Kennedy was under enormous pressure from American military leaders to strike Cuba, killing a projected ten thousand to twenty thousand people and risking a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Kennedy said no.

  Beyond the contingency of political developments and processes, and of individual leaders’ personal imprints on events, leaders are embedded in such different political worlds in different historical periods and contexts that factors that might tend to lead them to opt for war in one period or place do not in another. Moreover, individual wars’ timing and character also cannot be explained in a generalized way. Neither can the outcomes, except perhaps in the most prosaic, though hardly trivial, sense of who wins.

  Take war’s most catastrophic instance. World War II’s major elements and features are not explainable without foregrounding the person, personality, intelligence, and pathologies of Adolf Hitler.e In 1928, it was not inevitable that Germany would bring Hitler to power or in a decade seek to conquer Europe and eventually the world. Had someone assassinated Hitler, or had any of many contingent historical developments turned out differently, then there would have been no war, certainly no apocalyptic war (and mass elimination) that produced tens of millions of deaths. Even in 1933, when Hitler, as the leader of parliament’s strongest political party, became Germany’s chancellor, war, let alone its timing, scope, course, and destructiveness, was anything but inevitable. The same can be said for 1938, when Germany was still weak, though by then, short of a military coup deposing Hitler, some military conflict was likely. Had the Allies not caved in to Hitler’s demands at Munich or had Stalin not made the disastrous calculations that led him in August 1939 to sign a nonaggression treaty with Hitler and thereby give Hitler the green light for a general war, European and world history would have unfolded substantially differently. His armies then still relatively weak, Hitler might not have started a two-front war, the avoidance of which he had always understood to be the sine qua non of expansionist military success. Even if he had wanted to start such a war against the most powerful countries to the west and east, would he have judged his military leadership willing to follow? Would they have been? Or would they have balked at a seemingly disastrous course? If Hitler had nevertheless initiated a two-front war, would he have been able in the spring of 1940 to conquer France and knock Britain off the continent? If, alternately, Hitler, in the face of an antagonistic Stalin, had waited, with the Allies rearming, his relative military strength might only have deteriorated. How events would have unfolded is anyone’s guess. The political and military developments of the la
te 1930s and 1940s were hugely contingent. Perhaps Germany would have been contained, and Hitler deposed. Perhaps Germany would have been defeated in a more geographically limited war, sparing millions of lives.

  The only relatively certain major military development about World War II in Europe is that the United States’ entry meant Germany was likely to lose (unless Germany developed nuclear weapons first). And without Germany’s initiation of a general war, it is also likely Japan, standing alone against the American colossus, a powerful Britain, and an unengaged, antagonistic Soviet Union, would not have attacked the United States and initiated a general Pacific war.