B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  LandZahl

  A. Altreich 131.800

  Ostmark 43.700

  Ostgabiete 420.000

  Generalgouvernement 2.284.000

  Bialystok

  Protektorat Buhmen und Nähren 74.200

  Eatland - Juidenfrei -

  Lettland 3.500

  Litauen 34.000

  Belgien 45.000

  Dänemark 5.600

  Frankreich / Busetztes Gebiet 165.000

  Unbesetztes Gobiet 700.000

  Griochenland 69.600

  Niederlande 160.800

  Norwegen 1.300

  B. Bulgarien 48.000

  England 330.000

  Finnland 2.300

  Irland 4.000

  Italian einschl. Sardinien 56.000

  Albanien 200

  Kroatien 40.000

  Portugal 3.000

  Humanien einschl. Bessarabien 342.000

  Schweden 8. 000

  Schweiz 18.000

  Serbien 10.000

  Slowakei 88.000

  Spanien 6.000

  Turkei (curop. Teil) 55.500

  Ungarn 742.800

  UdSSR 5.000.000

  Ukraine 2.994.684

  Veißrußland ausschl.

  Bislystok 446.484

  Zusammen: Uber 11.000.000

  From the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, January 1942

  that the Germans did not finish the job. The Holocaust, commonly referred to by the Nazis’ favorite euphemism, the “final solution,” is by far the model most frequently invoked by would-be mass murderers. This is so probably for many reasons: the Holocaust’s notoriety, its unequivocal annihilationist character, and the Jews’ continued status as targets for Arab leaders, media, and thinkers and for Political Islamists more generally, which only further increases the renown of Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust among those contemplating killing others.

  While the nation-state’s real power has made imagining, planning for, and then undertaking eliminationist politics a frequent and often practical activity, these conditions of greater power and greater transformative and destructive vision have themselves not produced our time’s mass slaughters and eliminations. A second structural political condition of modernity has turned standard antipathies and antagonisms into the basis for eliminationist politics.

  Prior to the advent of modernity, and particularly the twentieth century, humanity was mainly in a prepolitical state. Most people were not part of politics: They were cowed or quiescent subjects of emperors, kings, and nobles, not citizens or even potential citizens of countries. There was no real sense that people could govern themselves or participate meaningfully in their lives’ political governance, so they demanded few goods or services from their rulers (who had little capacity to supply them). This was so not because people were individually incapable of self-governance, but because the political and social structures did not allow for it. It was a predemocratic time. There could always be rebellions from within or invasion from without. Yet authoritarian governance’s fundamental legitimacy was, almost everywhere, not an issue. Indeed, authoritarian rule over a country’s or region’s depoliticized population was often sacralized by the so-called divine right of kings or churches. It was the unquestioned, perceived natural order.

  In our time, every person is a citizen or a potential citizen, every person is mobilized or potentially mobilized into politics. Political leaders face much more dissent and potential dissent than the rulers of predemocratic times did. In the modern world, if leaders are unwilling to accommodate the populace’s demands, including those of its different groups, then the leaders must be prepared to quell the dissent. Governing leaders, and the groups that support them, who oppose democracy or a necessary degree of universalist pluralism inevitably will have their rule and their regimes contested by people resolutely seeking democracy, self-determination, or pluralism, and a minimally fair portion of society’s economic product and social benefits. Leaders of nondemocratic regimes know this. Such political leaders also know that those pressing for fundamental political and economic change, including possibly self-determination and territorial secession, will not easily cease, and repression’s costs will likely grow.

  In the modern world, leaders of dictatorships of all kinds are therefore prone to using increasing repression and violence, which, being on a continuum with elimination’s other forms, tend to make leaders want to solve their self-conceived or self-created problems in a definitive and final manner by eliminating putatively problematic people. Modern dictatorship, requiring increasing repression and violence, produces a totalitarian logic and drive. Political leaders and their regime perceive the need to penetrate society ever more pervasively, to control as much of social life as possible. As repression and control increase, the stakes for the power holders and their followers grow, and the enmity of the repressed similarly deepens. The totalitarian impulse thus exacerbates modern dictatorship’s already inherent tendency to resort to eliminationist politics because it leads those in power and those benefiting from existing politics to perceive more and more social or political conduct as threatening, and to fear the consequences of a political reversal of fortune ever more intensely.

  Within the modern nation-state, systematic political and social tensions exist, making for high-stakes conflicts conducive to eliminationist politics and practice. In all countries economic development and people’s mobilization into politics create enormous strains. Rapid population growth in many countries further leads to intensive competition over scarce resources, including farmland in developing countries. These strains often produce a zero-sum politics, where one group’s benefits come at the expense of another’s. This in itself makes consensual and democratic politics a more difficult art to practice and sustain, and therefore tends to produce a politics of domination and repression, which inherently include an eliminationist impulse.

  Nation-building and its attendant challenges and problems have produced a second set of widespread strains. Nation-building requires political leaders to create a common sense of national belonging sufficient for a modern polity to function without state-rending conflict. Most acutely, problems of nation-building have existed in the countries that emerged after decolonization. Many of them were artificial in the sense of suddenly being composed of ethnic and religious groups thrown together with little in common, except sometimes their competition if not enmity for one another. These countries were torn not only by internal social and political conflicts and also cross-border conflicts with neighboring countries into which the same ethnic or religious groups had been split off, but also by their people’s generally poor preparation for managing a state in the modern world, a world of politically mobilized peoples, and of transforming eighteenth-century economies into twentieth-century ones. Nowhere has this problem been more visible and deadly than in the central African region containing Rwanda, Burundi, and Democratic Republic of the Congo, where different ethnic groups, most notably the bitter enemies Hutu and Tutsi, have cohabited in desperately poor countries and also split up among them, leading to repeated, serial, and sometimes colossal instances of mass slaughter. This region, like almost no other, can be characterized as being in a semipermanent state of eliminationist politics. In such states, civil war, or even smaller-scale internal conflict, tends to produce eliminationist inclinations because the enemy, even when vanquished, will still regularly contest power, and therefore be threatening.

  The challenges of nation-building or any kind of structural conflict, including those caused by economic development and modern inclusive politics, do not in themselves produce eliminationist responses, or eliminationist responses of any particular kind. That is dependent on other factors (discussed below). Nevertheless, these challenges and conflicts have given powerful impetus to one group or another, one set of rulers or another, to opt first for repressive politics and then for a politics of mass elimination. This has particularly been the case because such conflicts tend
to produce eliminationist ideologies that then organize political thinking, strategies, and action.

  In our era, when norms of universal rights, self-determination, and democracy prevail and economic and social change is a constant, nondemocratic politics and regimes are qualitatively different from previous eras. Today, they have a built-in propensity—a real one, and not just a hypothetical one—to adopt eliminationist politics, including their lethal variant. This propensity is so embedded in the structure of contemporary nondemocratic rule and tyranny that we must conceive of nondemocratic and tyrannical regimes as inherently proto-eliminationist, even exterminationist, and respond to them politically (as discussed in Chapter 11) in a manner reflecting this.

  As the previous chapter’s discussion shows, the international political environment critically influences the incidence of eliminationist assaults. When we consider that during our time, the international context has generally been, as it was in previous ages, permissive toward such politics, we see more clearly why our age has been so mass-murderously combustible. The international context’s contribution to enabling eliminationist politics has been still worse during our time. The international environment’s earlier permissive baseline toward eliminationist politics was due to states’ and international institutions’ hands-off approach to other states’ eliminationist politics. Our time has probably seen more deviation from this baseline in encouraging mass murder and eliminations than in discouraging them. Modernity’s international system has provided yet another distinctive impetus to make our time’s eliminationist politics unusually deadly.

  Modernity creates a transformative capacity and mindset that includes an eliminationist component. The structural conditions of modern nondemocracies and tyrannies inherently produce intensive political conflicts—often resulting from the dislocation of nation-building and of economic development. These conflicts create a propensity on the part of such systems’ inherently insecure power holders, drawing on their great capacities and inspired by their eliminationist notions, to adopt eliminationist solutions to eradicate political challenges and social unrest. But these structural conditions are only a portion of the eliminationist equation. Some proximate conditions, when present, tend to make leaders more likely to consider practicing, and then adopting, eliminationist politics and, when absent, tend to militate against such politics. Note the word tend. These paths are not determined. Precisely because they are not, we must return to the topic of why leaders decide to initiate mass murders and eliminations. The decision to eliminate people cannot be reduced to factors beyond the beliefs, personality, psychology, and moral character of the decision-makers. Nevertheless, some factors render this decision more or less possible and probable.

  Most leaders deciding to eliminate groups of people are fervent in their desire. Many are fanatical. But they are not crazy in the sense of being incapable of assessing the practicality of implementing their wishes. These men have managed to rise to power, a feat all but impossible to accomplish for any but a pragmatic practitioner of the possible. Hitler is a quintessential example. Having succeeded in a few years in turning a political party of two dozen into a mass movement, becoming Germany’s chancellor through the ballot box, and consolidating power into an immensely popular dictatorship, he then set out to fulfill his ideological program by exterminating and eliminating millions of people. Even then he carefully waited for the right time and opportunities to implement his murderous plans step by step. Whatever their differences, our time’s other mass murdering political leaders, Mehmet Talât and Ismail Enver, Stalin, Father Josef Tiso, Anton Pavelić, Mao Zedong, Haji Muhammad Suharto, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet, the junta leaders in Argentina, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Ríos Montt, Hafez al-Assad, Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, Théoneste Bagosora and the other Rwandan Hutu leaders, Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, and many more, were similar human amalgams of cunning and evil, adept Machiavellians, and hate-filled destroyers of targeted portions of humanity, against which they conducted a one-sided war.

  Because annihilationist and eliminationist assaults against large population groups are not trivial or routine undertakings, leaders must have a profound reason to pursue policies that could damn them among humanity’s worst criminals. Some vision of a fundamentally transformed society provides them with the idea and the drive to eliminate groups of people, instead of responding to real (or even imagined) conflicts with negotiation, accommodation, and compromise, or even—if deemed necessary—with lesser repressive measures. Whatever the particular rationale for mass elimination, whatever the particular conception of the intended victims, almost always there is at the root a complex of thinking that amalgamates three related, though by no means congruent, notions: the need for absolute control, the desire for purity, and the imperative to prevent the apocalypse. This radical antipluralist mindset seeks to forge a society of extreme, even total obedience—to regulate social and personal life; to purge domestic (and sometimes international) society of social and human impurities; and to fend off the catastrophe that putatively dissenting or impure people will bring about, hence a frequent apocalyptic mentality and commensurate action. Some variant of this mindset has been integral to most of our time’s eliminationist campaigns. The specific beliefs’ nature, from Nazi to communist to nationalist to racist to religious, that governs leaders bent upon eliminating, typically lethally, unwanted groups varies greatly—and the differences matter enormously for their eliminationist programs—but they share, without being reducible to, this radical intolerance complex.

  Still, some are more intolerant than others. Certain movements and regimes, Nazism, various communist regimes, and, today, Political Islam (discussed in Chapter 10), distinguish themselves among those which wanted and want to remold society, as eliminationist intolerance’s champions. These movements share three critical characteristics. First, they require conformity from people that many are unable to or would never want to fulfill. For the Nazis, most of humanity’s putatively immutable racial inferiority disqualifies them; for the communists, different social classes and groups were not ready or able to march in lockstep with history; and for the Political Islamists, the powerful, corrupt infidels will never acquiesce to Political Islam’s stultifying political-religious creed and practices. Second, these movements’ visions for society’s transformation require its utter purification. For the Nazis, in different ways, different racially disparaged groups posed various severe threats; for communists, until they realized the communist utopia, recalcitrant social groups always threatened counterrevolution; and for the Political Islamists, God’s will demands that all people serve him and live according to his Political Islamic law. Third, these movements conceive of their visionary transformations as necessary in their own societies and transnationally, ultimately for all humanity, because only then—for each movement differently—would harmony follow.

  These visions lead to the need to bring the world in line and extirpate all that is deemed recalcitrant, what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung; to create total unanimity of thought, meaning total conformity, what the Soviets called yedinomyshlenie; or to compel everyone to live according to strict laws allowing little room for personal freedom or deviation, what the Political Islamists call sharia. In each case, they reverse democratic pluralist societies’ basic creed, as all nondemocratic and tyrannical regimes do to varying degrees. The democratic creed is: He who is not against me is for me. Those not actively attacking their government or fellow citizens, breaking or seeking to tear down society’s laws, no matter how they otherwise choose to live their lives, are respected and allowed to exercise their political and civil rights, and follow their own notions of personal freedom of thought, conscience, and conduct. The creed of such visionary and radically intolerant dispensations as Nazism, various communisms, and Political Islam is: He who is not for me is against me. Anyone unable to or refusing to fall in line behind the prescribed transformative vision is an objective enemy who cannot be tolerated
but must have the recalcitrant part of himself—or if that is not possible, then the person as a whole—eliminated. Each movement has conceived of much though not all of humanity as Immanuel Kant’s “crooked timber,” out of which he declared “no straight thing was ever made.” Each, in its own way, cannot abide unstraightened human timber, and thus seeks to break and recast humanity—casting much into history’s garbage heap—and reshape and refasten the remaining portion according to each movement’s respective procrustean notions. Thus, their thoroughgoing eliminationist desires and assaults: Nazism’s Herculean destructiveness, Soviet, Chinese, North Korean, and Khmer Rouge communism’s “permanent purge,” and Political Islamists’ calls to kill millions, which some have already begun to execute. The Khmer Rouge’s maxim applies to them all: “What is too long must be shortened and made the right length,” with the added fact that for each, much of society and the world is “too long.”3

  When any leader, politician, or person speaks the language of absolute control, purity, or earthly or otherworldly apocalypse, he reveals a potentially eliminationist and exterminationist mindset. Still, this drive to eliminate targeted groups in itself is not sufficient for a program to be enacted. Leaders must believe that they can act with a high probability of success before they will risk initiating mass murder or elimination. Otherwise, their policy would be self-defeating. Leaders must believe that three conditions for success appear likely. They must have access to the targeted people. (This is usually not a problem when, as most are, the victims are a minority in that country.) They must judge that they can act with impunity domestically. They must also believe they act with impunity internationally, so their eliminationist program will not be self-defeating, triggering powerful outside intervention. This in particular is why war often serves as the best context for undertaking preexisting eliminationist desires. As Talât and Enver explained in a memorandum to German officials in which they discussed the Armenians’ elimination, “The work that is to be done must be done now; after the war it will be too late.”4 During war, other states have difficulty knowing what is happening within combatant countries and can more easily maintain or feign ignorance about the mass murdering, which reduces domestic and international pressure on them to intervene. War itself, whether interstate or civil, or counterinsurgent, usually places a country’s leaders at maximum risk, so the added danger to them of implementing an eliminationist campaign is small. Thus war and domestic military conflicts frequently alter the cost-benefit calculus, finally tipping the scales in favor of eliminating the hated groups, or become the domestic and international pretext for leaders to set in motion their willing followers, who are still easier to mobilize with even more plausible accounts for why, during war, the country must eliminate its enemies.