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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Without Hitler, the visionary apocalyptic warrior, the world would have been substantially different and in so many critical ways unpredictably so. Two all but certain things are that there would have been no Holocaust, and no world war at any time remotely close to when it occurred, if ever. Other things are less certain. A powerful Germany, which likely would not have been democratic, would have continued to occupy the heart of Europe. An imperial Japan might have continued to uneasily coexist with East Asia, Britain, and the United States. The Soviet empire in Eastern Europe would never have been established. The rapid postwar decolonization, owing in part to the war’s mortal blows to the British and French empires, likely would have unfolded considerably later and more slowly. But how all this and much more would have played out is impossible to say.

  Hitler was a rational calculator, an astute, adept politician, and an obsessive governed by a hallucinatory image of humanity and the world and of his megalomaniacal role in it, and a person operating under domestic and international political circumstances that constrained and enabled him. Yet nothing about Hitler’s rise to power and decisions that led Germany and Germans, and then much of the world, hurtling to disaster, can be understood without accounting for Hitler’s cunning mind and calculations. Nothing about it can be understood without privileging his irrational elements, his personal pathologies, and his political beliefs, prejudices, and hatreds. And nothing about it can be understood without embedding it all in an understanding of politics—Germany’s politics, in which ordinary Germans resonating with Hitler’s own beliefs and prejudices played a substantial role, and international politics, including the domestic politics moving the major international actors.

  Just as leaders’ decisions for or against war take into account a range of factors, including the prospect of winning and of being able to fight—whether they will receive compliance and support from those who must fight and from the broader population—so does the decision to practice eliminationist politics. In fact, leaders opting for mass elimination, especially extermination, depend significantly more on followers’ having supportive beliefs and values, for two related reasons: the cognitive, emotional, and moral threshold for killing unarmed men, women, and children ordinarily greatly exceeds killing enemy soldiers. And for waging war there is a well-established, politically legitimate, existing institution, the military, that as a socially accepted practice prepares its members for fighting and for overcoming inhibitions (if any) in killing enemy soldiers. For eliminationist onslaughts, similar institutions and preparation are typically initially absent, so the intended perpetrators, and the general populace, have less formal preparation for overcoming the ordinarily greater inhibitions against slaughtering unarmed noncombatants, in other words massacring civilian adults and children. Because the decision to pursue eliminationist politics, especially mass extermination, depends on the ready willingness of those in whose name the politics would be pursued, the decision in itself is obviously not sufficient to explain the perpetrators’ participation. The “great man” view of genocide—best known for being applied to the so-called charismatic leader Hitler and as an exculpatory argument to spare the perpetrators’ character and responsibility from being probed—is obviously only partially correct. Political leaders are critical for determining whether eliminationist onslaughts take place at all, but they cannot do it or, as seems often to be believed, will it alone. To understand the translation of their will into social and political action on the part of thousands we need to move from analyzing the leader’s and his circle’s individual beliefs, values, and psychology to considering broadly dispersed political and social beliefs and values.

  The same complex and multifaceted analyses that exist of major political policies, including war, must characterize investigations and understandings of eliminationist politics. The literatures on either world war are examples. Take World War I. A vast body of scholarship (and popular writing) dissects and tries to make sense of why the war happened, examining all aspects that may have contributed to its outbreak, including political, social, economic, imperial, and individual psychological dimensions. Vast literatures examine the war itself in its every detail, the soldiers’ lives, understanding, and motives, and the mobilizing of domestic support, the war’s domestic consequences, and its aftermath. Standard political questions of leadership and followership, of the mobilization of resources, of institutional design and performance, of motivating the soldiers and the broader population for participation and sacrifices are not assumed away. They are asked, by and large, without their answers being presumed or asserted with some agenda of inculpation or exculpation. The same could be said for World War II, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and a host of others. Compared to this, our treatment and understanding of eliminationist politics is analytically thin and one-dimensional. The same telling comparison could be made by looking at the complexity and multidimensionality of how other, more hum-drum aspects of American politics are investigated, whether it is the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the “Reagan Revolution,” or the politics of health care during the administration of President Bill Clinton.

  We must stop detaching mass elimination and its mass-murder variant from our understanding of politics. We must stop thinking it is sufficient for historians to describe the events themselves and then posit some (reductionist) “explanation.” Or for social psychologists to reduce it to social psychology. Or for diversionists to attribute structural causality and responsibility to abstract institutions or to systems far removed—either in time, such as long-gone colonizers, or in space, such as global capitalism—from the agents of violence and death and the countries of their destructive deeds. Eliminationist politics, like the politics of war, is a politics of purposive acts to achieve political outcomes, often of ultimate ends and often of desired power redistribution. Only when we recognize this can we begin to understand the varied phenomena that compose eliminationist politics and respond better to them politically.

  This suggests that there is no single explanation for mass murder or more generally mass elimination. Eliminationist politics has many diverse aspects. Some resist general or systematic explanation. Others do not. Some lend themselves to probabilistic statements. Some fall into patterns that can be analytically usefully categorized. Our task is to make sense of eliminationist politics’ various aspects, or at least as much sense as each allows.

  We have seen that eliminationist politics are an extension of politics by other means. But are they really an extension? The history of our time suggests that eliminationism is actually integral to politics, as its diverse forms and policy options have often been used and are readily available. Interstate war has become exceptional. Yet violent domestic conflict (including civil wars), domination, and repression are commonly practiced around the world, and eliminationist politics, including mass murder, is conceptually and as a matter of practice on a continuum with other violent domestic forms of control and suppression. The number of those Eliminationist Politics in the Ten Most Populous Countries and the European Union

  Country Population in Millions (2009) Selected Eliminationist Assaults

  1 China 1,339 Communist Chinese slaughter of tens of millions

  2 India 1,166 Partition mass murders and expulsions

  3 European Union 492 Germans’ mass murdering across continent

  4 United States 307 Incinerating Japanese cities, and home to numerous survivor communities

  5 Indonesia 240 Slaughter of communists and of East Timorese

  6 Brazil 199 Killing and elimination of indigenous peoples

  7 Pakistan 176 Partition, and mass murder in Bangladesh

  8 Bangladesh 156 Partition, and mass murder by Pakistanis

  9 Nigeria 149 Slaughters during civil war

  10 Russia 140 Victims of German, Soviet mass murders

  11 Japan 127 Mass murders in Asia, and victims of nuclear weapons

  Estimated population figures from July 2009, CIA World Fact
book, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2119rank.html. In choosing to treat the European Union as the third most populous political entity at 492 million people, let us not forget that Germany’s mass-murderous predations were a primary, if not the primary, impetus for establishing a European federation that would eventually evolve and expand into the European Union.

  dying because of eliminationist politics is vast. The number of instances of such politics being practiced is too numerous to easily count. The number of moments that eliminationist politics have not been practiced during our era is zero, and the instances where its most violent and lethal forms of mass expulsion, incarceration, enslavement, and killing have not been practiced also number zero. The number of countries and groups having either practiced eliminationist politics or had such violence practiced upon them is enormous. Without a thorough reckoning of eliminationist politics’ character and effects, our time’s history dating from the twentieth century’s beginning, many of its major geopolitical developments, and states’ and societies’ constellation today cannot be understood properly. Eliminationist politics have shaped Europe’s and Asia’s maps, and the histories, social compositions, and politics of the world’s most populous countries and so many smaller ones.

  Each of the ten most populous countries and the European Union (which with regard to mass murder during World War II has shared experience and relatively common consciousness) has perpetrated or been the victim of large-scale, nationally traumatic murderous eliminationist politics.f In recent history mass murder has deeply scarred countries home to 4.4 billion people, two-thirds of the world’s population.

  Imagine mass murderers had targeted you, that somehow you had managed to escape, or they had “merely” driven you from your home or imprisoned you in a camp and brutalized you, or you had lived for years fearing they might kill you. Or imagine eliminationist executioners had targeted and “merely” brutalized or actually killed your family, ethnic group, community, or coreligionists. Or imagine that you lived in a community where such executioners had so targeted, brutalized, or killed people of other ethnicities or religions. How would any of these circumstances of your life, how would these horrors that engulfed you and/or those around you, scar or mar you? If imagining rampaging mass murderers seems far-fetched, imagine hooligans had broken into the house next door and brutally beaten and murdered your neighbor, and his son had seen it happen. Think of how it would indelibly transform the boy’s life. Think of how it would affect yours, knowing what had befallen your neighbor and how that boy, whom you see daily, had to bear the daily burden of being fatherless and having witnessed such brutality perpetrated on his father, and thereby on him. These are the eliminationist politics and acts that have worsened and coarsened the existence of billions of people alive today. Such politics have been mainly the province of nondemocratic regimes. Even so, democratic regimes succeeding them must pick up the pieces, process (including by suppressing knowledge of) what has happened, and live with exterminationist and eliminationist assaults’ society-deforming and personally devastating consequences.

  If we understand eliminationist politics as a constituent feature of politics and of leaders’ available political repertoire, and realize that eliminationist beliefs and hatreds have existed broadly among many countries’ leaders and peoples, then the attacks’ high incidence and victims’ staggering number are not so startling.

  Modernity and Eliminationist Politics

  Just as our time’s politics have differed from those of previous ages, so too have the eliminationist politics. Although a complex interactive relationship exists between a specific country’s politics and society, we can identify several political factors that crucially contribute to the initiation and character of our time’s mass murders and eliminations:1. Features of modernity itself and of the modern state

  2. Structural relationships that exist domestically within countries

  3. International contexts (or environments)

  4. Beliefs about certain groups and understandings of politics and society that lead leaders and followers to think eliminating those groups desirable

  5. Proximate factors that produce the opportunity and the will to take the political step of turning eliminationist desires into actuality

  In discussing these political factors we can explore eliminationist politics’ broader outcomes, some of which are by now familiar: What has been the character of our era’s mass-murder and eliminationist politics, and why has it differed from that of other periods? Why have our time’s attacks occurred? What do eliminationist programs have in common? How do they vary? Why do perpetrators treat different victim groups differently during a given eliminationist program? Examining eliminationist politics through these wide-angle and narrowly focusing lenses reveals similarities and identifiable patterns in mass murder and elimination’s causes and mechanisms, and various differences in the results, some patterned, others not.

  Modernity, a defining aspect of which is the modern nation-state, has features promoting and informing our time’s eliminationist and exterminationist politics. Among the modern state’s distinctive qualities is its enormous and unprecedented power to transform the physical and social world—dwarfing anything states could do even in the nineteenth century. This is owing to the modern world’s gargantuan growth technologically and industrially, and also to its equally prodigious, though much less recognized, growth in organizational sophistication and means of control, and knowledge about society and how to shape it. A concomitant distinctive feature of our time is the transformative visions and related transformative ideologies that political leaders and their followers develop. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century states—American, German, Japanese, Russian—were essentially caretaker entities that pacified their territories, governed them lightly—if often brutally—and had as a principal activity raising taxes to finance small bureaucracies and militaries, safeguard the privileged classes, and facilitate industrialization to various degrees. Much of the nineteenth-century globe, conquered and subjugated by European imperial powers, lacked indigenous states or substantial political capacities. Our era’s states, ever increasingly, are comparative institutional behemoths, with the resources, staff, communications, and organization to do, figuratively, a million times more for or against society and its members.

  The capacity to transform the world, to think not just about ruling over the territory in which people live but also about shaping and governing the people themselves, in every aspect of their lives, produces an orientation that can give rise to powerful transformative politics. Modern leaders can, in a practical sense, consider governing hundreds of millions, even billions of people, and not just loosely being sovereign over territory, but of controlling social, economic, and cultural life, even down to the family unit. They can in a practical sense think of slaughtering millions across large geographic areas. They have the power to change the social and economic order in radical ways, and relatively quickly. They can create a blueprint to fundamentally refashion societies socially and culturally, which they can—confident of substantial success—decide to implement. Many transformative projects (communist, Nazi, nationalist, ethnic, religious, and others) face real or imagined human impediments, groups of people putatively standing in the way, or who, as a matter of definition, must be eliminated. This modern political mindset includes a particularly modern political aesthetic of design and control. The mindset’s fundamentals characterize democratic and nonmurderous regimes no less than nondemocratic and murderous ones. But when wedded to other ideas, which happens especially frequently among nondemocratic regimes’ rulers and supporters, this modern political aesthetic can lead to plans for recrafting society, a wish for purity, as it is conceived, and intolerance of perceived imperfection or deviation.

  The most striking example of this eliminationist and exterminationist dreaming, planning, and implementation is, as with much else under discussion here, the Nazis. In Janu
ary 1942, months after the Germans had already moved into the systematic extermination phase of their eliminationist assault against the Jews, Reinhard Heydrich, who was in charge of the program, convened a meeting of leading officials from the relevant state and governmental ministries to discuss their participation. Heydrich itemized country by country, including ones not yet conquered, such as England, Ireland, Switzerland, and Turkey, the number of Jews they would slaughter. Mass murderers often make lists of people they intend to kill, but they are usually lists of individuals, or members of a political opposition or a targeted people’s elite. In the vast annals of eliminationist politics, there has never been, except in this one instance, a formal document itemizing country by country, across a continent, the millions of people slated for extermination. The German leadership had embarked on a program to slaughter more than eleven million Jews.2

  Modernity has bestowed upon the nation-state an increased communicative and learning capacity. Particularly starting with the second part of the twentieth century, and continuously accelerating, political leaders learn quickly of others’ policies and measures, and their successes or failures. These include policies and techniques of control, repression, and elimination. Our era has produced among political leaders (and even, if unconceptualized, among publics) around the world a much greater consciousness about eliminationist politics’ normalcy and practical efficacy, from erecting camps (both the Soviets and Nazis were inspired by the British “concentration camps” for the Boers) to mass murder. Many mass murderers or would-be mass murderers have explicitly referred to previous genocidal killers’ models, starting perhaps with Hitler himself invoking the slaughter of the Armenians, and continuing to Political Islamists today who, when contemplating their hoped-for annihilation of Israel’s Jews, regularly refer admiringly to the Germans’ exterminationist assault on the Jews, often lamenting