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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Mass murder and eliminations are, as those contemplating them understand, both high-risk strategies, because the danger for the political leaders undertaking them is enormous, and low-risk strategies with high payoffs, because political leaders undertake such campaigns when they expect success. When circumstances, such as war or domestic civil conflict, can be engineered to decrease the additional risk of moving against hated groups, then the time has come for the would-be perpetrators to act, and to act in accordance with their and their followers’ preexisting eliminationist beliefs, and with concrete strategic and often detailed tactical plans. This includes creating new eliminationist institutions, or designating existing ones for eliminationist operations, mapping out, as in a military campaign, operational zones and attack plans, and drawing up categories (often prioritized) of people to be slaughtered or expelled, and specific lists of people, including enemy elites, to be especially targeted.

  Such politically conscious and preexisting, concrete exterminationist and eliminationist measures guided the Turks’ murderous assault on the Armenians, the Germans’ eliminationist assaults on Jews and many others, the Indonesians’ slaughter of the communists among them, the Pakistanis’ butchery of Bangladeshis, the Serbs’ various eliminationist onslaughts of the 1990s, and many other mass slaughters and eliminations up to and including the Political Islamic Sudanese’s assault on Darfurians. In Rwanda, in December 1993, four months before the Hutu leaders’ plans to annihilate the Tutsi were put into effect, the Rwandan journal Le Flambeau published inside information about the training and planning given to the paramilitary Interahamwe, which in its outlines proved to be accurate:We learn today, with the greatest stupefaction that these Rwandese “tontons macoutes” [the brutal henchmen of the murderous Duvalier regime in Haiti] will implement a plot which the plotters will pass off as a civil war. The day of 20 December 1993, other sources talk of 23 December 1993, will be the fatal day of the “final solution.”

  Let us recall that the Nazi Germans and their chief Hitler baptised the operation to exterminate those they considered as the enemy of the blossoming of the Aryan race, notably the Jews, [the] final solution.

  Rwandese fascists and their chief have decided to apply “the final solution” to their fellow citizens judged enemies of the regime. This refers to their political adversaries, defenceless populations but also and above all those who have seen the hand of the regime in the latest massacres of the population.5

  The plan, several years in preparation, took a few months longer before the Hutu’s leaders found the propitious moment to implement it. During its preparation’s final phase, the Interahamwe rank and file received a crash course in weaponry so they could aid the mass killing. According to Jacques, who says he killed “about ten,”We were taught by corporals from the gendarmes. They gave us three days [of training]. . . . They only taught us how to use grenades and guns. Rifle training started in the city. But for the grenades it was elsewhere. Two days after the President died, thousands were trained at once.

  Three days after the President was killed, the military began to organize the interahamwe so that they could maintain the roadblocks. And youths from each neighbourhood went to get training to fight.6

  Eliminationist ideals and intent are almost never forged in the heat of battle. They are usually long in existence as desires, with their progenitors and bearers waiting for the right time to turn them into concrete, operational plans, and then still later, for the right opportunity to implement them. In February 1994, on the eve of the mass-murderous assault when the time seemed ripe and opportunity seemed around the corner, talk of slaughtering the Tutsi was already common in Kigali. A magazine published an article with the headline, “By the way, the Tutsi race could be extinguished.” The previous month the prominent Hutu newspaper Kangura (Wake Others Up) wrote revealingly and prophetically, “Who will survive the March War? [ . . . ] The masses will rise with the help of the army and the blood will flow freely.”7

  Political leaders, even tyrants, can sometimes have inhibitions against the radical measures of eliminationist assaults. But nothing more effectively disinhibits leaders and followers alike than a rationale for not having inhibitions in the first place, which eliminationist beliefs of many kinds supply. Less frequent, though in many instances critically important, has been the sight of one’s enemy slaughtering or expelling members of one’s own people or of other peoples, who is therefore said to have proven himself by his own hand to be a threatening barbarian deserving no mercy. The German occupation forces in the Soviet Union found dead (non-German) political prisoners the retreating Soviets had killed and left behind. This further reinforced their demonological views about a construct of their own fantasies, “Jewish-Bolshevism,” and their desire to eradicate the Jews, to whom they falsely imputed the murders (that many of the executed prisoners were Jewish mattered not at all to the Germans). One real or manufactured act of brutality by a member of a hated group can be enough to become a powerful symbol of malevolence and threat that becomes a battle cry or ideological sustenance for an eliminationist purge. For the British settlers in Kenya, this process of turning a few instances of violence into powerful symbols undergirding an eliminationist ideology against the Mau Mau, and more broadly against the Kikuyu people, has been well documented. During Mau Mau leader Johnstone “Jomo” Kenyatta’s trial, which began in December 1952, the British settlers in Kenya were up in arms, with many calling for the extermination of the Kikuyu. At a protest rally of more than 1,500 settlers (out of a total settler population of only 50,000) in January 1953 in Nairobi, calling for the elimination of the Mau Mau and the summary conviction of Kenyatta and his five codefendants, one British settler addressed Kenyan Legislative Council member Michael Blundell, who was trying to quell the crowd: “Michael, you’ll never cure this problem, you’ll never cure it. You put the troops into the [Kikuyu] villages and you shoot 50,000 of them, men, women and children.”8

  Tales, real or invented, of people killing or brutalizing members of another group when the thinking about that people is already grounded in deep prejudice and hatred has provided the impetus in many countries, and circumstances for those ready to join an eliminationist assault, to give themselves to their leaders’ initiatives to expel or slaughter the enemy people. This happened in the most concentrated fashion in Rwanda, where the assassination of Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana (likely perpetrated by Hutu members of his own movement) was the spectacular event blamed on the Tutsi, and the pretext for the exterminationist leadership of the governing National Republican Movement for Democracy to put into action plans long germinating for the “final solution” to their Tutsi problem. Pancrace Hakizamungili, a Hutu mass murderer, who told us of how Hutu always “sees a threat lurking in even the feeblest or kindest Tutsi,” explains more of this dynamic: “The radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsi; there was anger after the president’s death and a fear of falling under the rule of the inkotanyi.” And so with the hatred welling up in them, they yelled “let’s go hunting!”

  As in Rwanda, hearing reports of the enemy’s real or alleged atrocities can render this enemy, and the people in whose name they apparently act, dangerous in a qualitatively different way from ordinary enemies. In Rwanda and elsewhere, Hutu were continuously warned—it was an integral part of the Hutu’s cultural discourse even before Habyarimana’s assassination—that the struggle with the Tutsi was one of “kill or be killed.” Such alleged or real individual acts of violence by the hated group, often accompanied by readily believed accusations that such violence is a harbinger of a generalized assault, creates the rationale for treating this enemy, including noncombatants, with lethal finality. Such an enemy’s own putative conduct further easily engenders the thought that such people have already placed themselves outside any law and forfeited all rights and protections, and that by killing them as payback, one is only giving them what they deserve, a kind of rough justice. These cognitive and emoti
onal mechanisms operated powerfully in the aftermath of World War II in Central and Eastern Europe, as the peoples of many of those countries drove millions of ethnic Germans from their homes, killing many tens of thousands during the course of their self-understood revenge.

  Four Kinds of Eliminationist Assaults

  The critical nature of such beliefs, and the fact—it is a fact—that structural conditions and opportunity alone do not in themselves produce mass murders and eliminations, can be seen by examining eliminationist onslaughts along two fundamental dimensions. Almost all mass-murder and eliminationist politics are rooted in conflict over the scarce resources of territory and power, often grounded in the uncertainties of, and group demands made during, economic and political transformations. Who will control territory and who will have the power to define society’s nature and rhythms prominently play into how people conceive of the others’ putative threat and what, including economic advantage, is actually fought over. Yet because controlling territory is itself a form of power, a critical distinction exists between those instances where power alone is sought (to dominate and create a society of the perpetrators’ image), and where territory is also at stake. The other relevant dimension for mapping eliminationist onslaughts is whether the eliminationist politics are practiced domestically or outside the perpetrators’ country. All instances of eliminationist politics can be arrayed along these two dimensions of whether territory is contested and, when it is, whether it is contested within a country’s borders or abroad.

  Category 3 eliminationist assaults, imperialism at home, consists mainly of a state often representing society’s dominant group attacking a group or groups to take or secure their territory. The targeted group usually predominates in a particular area and is a perceived threat to secede or to overthrow the state and/or the groups it represents. The Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians, the Ibos’ slaughter of Hausa, the slaughters during Yugoslavia’s breakup, the Russians’ slaughter of Chechens, and the Sudanese Political Islamists’ slaughter of Darfurians today are such eliminationist assaults.

  Eliminationist Assaults

  Category 1 assaults are primarily aimed at domestic domination and transformation, not territory. They seek more to purify a country of a perceived ideological threat or to transform its polity and society to accord with the state’s and often the dominant group’s vision. Typically this includes the desire to secure the dominant or insurgent groups’ position and power. Such mass murdering and elimination include most communist slaughters, the lethal campaigns against leftists in Latin America, Saddam’s mass murdering, and the reciprocal killings in Rwanda and Burundi of Hutu and Tutsi. The strange case is Al Qaeda. Because Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders perceived the United States as the principal impediment to their totalitarian aims of dominating and transforming Islamic countries into Political Islamic theocracies, they struck the American homeland making it also madness abroad. But their aspirations were always overwhelmingly domestic.

  Category 4 assaults, imperialism abroad, consist of a state and its people seeking to subdue a foreign territory, to colonize or exploit it. Usually, the national group killing, expelling, incarcerating, or brutally subjugating the foreign territory’s people is within that territory a minority, often a tiny minority compared to the victim group. This was so of the Belgians in Congo, the Japanese in Asia, the Germans in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians in East Timor, and the Chinese in Tibet.

  Category 2 assaults, madness abroad, are the least numerous. They are slaughters abroad having nothing to do with territorial domination or with domestic conflicts that have a foreign component. The only such eliminationist assaults, all of them mass murders, are the Germans’ extermination of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma.

  Mapping eliminationist onslaughts along these two dimensions helps clarify several differing features. If we were to compare this breakdown to one for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the earlier eliminationist assaults would be weighted to category 4, imperialism abroad, when European colonizing powers sought to gain or secure territories on other continents. By the second half of the twentieth century, the age of imperialism was winding down, making for fewer contested territories abroad.

  This makes apparent a fundamental fact that is crucial for crafting institutions and policies to reduce eliminationist politics’ incidence: Almost all such politics in the recent past and today are domestic rather than internationalg. At least for the foreseeable future, the world is unlikely to see large-scale imperialist conquest. It is more likely to continue to suffer murderous domestic power struggles for group domination or a country’s integrity being contested from within.

  This matrix also highlights the realistic nature of the conflicts that are the contexts for eliminationist politics and mass murder. When people kill or expel others, power, control, or territory is almost always acutely at issue—even though their hatred or demonology wildly exceeds the real or perceived threat, and the murderous reaction is evil and irrational. Understanding most such assaults’ realistic basis further explains not only why the eliminationist politics of category 4, imperialism abroad, has mainly disappeared, but also why we are unlikely to see many such foreign imperialist and eliminationist forays as long as the international state system and international institutions maintain something resembling their current configurations (these issues are discussed further in Chapter 11).

  The realistic basis of eliminationist politics also highlights the oddness that category 2, madness abroad, is not empty. It is understandable that one country’s people might try to kill or eliminate the people of the territory or country they conquer and wish to control, exploit for resources, or colonize. But why the Germans would undertake a global assault on the Jews, seeking to annihilate a people abroad posing no threat to them, having no enmity for them, controlling no territory or critical resources that they wanted is simply not, by any rational standard, comprehensible. Only a rare and powerful ideological pathology could produce such bizarre politics—with a manifestly self-injurious cost-benefit calculus historically at odds with other mass eliminations. If the Germans had not slaughtered the Jews (and Sinti and Roma), most people, I expect, would have said that the mass murder of an utterly figmental enemy outside one’s country would never take place, and category 2 should be empty. It was madness abroad. That it has happened highlights the almost singular place of Jews (and Sinti and Roma) as victims in eliminationism’s annals.

  But this type of annihilationist assault is now more possible. As never before, technology empowers the weak to strike anywhere, making it thinkable for quasi-hallucinatory regimes and groups to lash out abroad genocidally, as Al Qaeda did at the United States and its people. With an unrivaled global power guaranteeing the world’s basic international political and economic order, suicidal attacks upon the United States can seem to make sense to the ideologized mind. Interestingly, the perpetrators of madness abroad’s two principal mass murders conceived of the assaults as defensive and liberationist against two targets, the Jews and the United States, deemed to be global powers and principally responsible for the world’s evil. This was totally fictional regarding Jews, making the madness complete. This was not fictional at least about the United States’ power, its actual and immensely powerful antagonism against Political Islam, making the attack grounded in reality and a militarily self-defeating, suicidal act of madness.

  For general explanatory purposes such exceptional and strange cases are far less important than the norm: realistic conflict over power, territory, or the desire to create a new political and social order. Such real conflicts are or could be almost everywhere. The danger of the most catastrophic forms of eliminationist politics is enormously widespread.

  Noneliminationist Outcomes

  Political leaders and followers have frequently practiced eliminationist politics. Yet compared to the enormously greater incidence of conflicts over power and territory and the desire t
o craft a new political and social order, such politics has been relatively infrequent. Why then do such conflicts and transformative desires sometimes produce eliminationist politics but mostly not? The answer cannot be the conflict’s kind or the structural conditions alone, including stressors or economic and political development, because many societies with such conflicts and structural relationships have not erupted in mass murder or elimination. The matrix below illustrates similar kinds of conflicts and structural relationships that have not produced eliminationist outcomes.