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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Noneliminationist Outcomes

  This matrix’s cases had similar causal factors of conflict, territory, context, etc. But those political leaders and regimes did not murder or eliminate their enemies. Why? Among the various reasons, two have been critical: their different, noneliminationist conceptions of the potential victims, and their adherence to a noneliminationist social and moral theory about right action. The idea that the potential targets are beings of a type that deserve to be eliminated is not one that animates the potential perpetrators. In those instances where such eliminationist notions might have existed, the regimes have been led by people embedded in unpropitious politics (including democratic politics) or simply unwilling to act politically in such a manner. Even if they have been, then they would have had to contend with societies unlikely to follow them.

  South Africa is a critical and revealing example. The conditions for a murderous onslaught by whites against blacks and then blacks against whites were there. The conventional wisdom about what produces genocides, focusing on structural conditions, conflict-ridden societies, enormous suffering, enormous hatred, or a previously suppressed and newly empowered majority’s thirst for revenge, suggests a bloodbath or perhaps two reciprocal bloodbaths. At the time, this was a widely articulated conventional wisdom about blacks’ coming to power. Whites did use political and legal measures and violence to control and exploit blacks in an elaborate and brutal system of segregation and disabilities, called apartheid, which itself was a complex form of eliminationist politics. However, the whites never expelled or slaughtered large numbers of blacks and never, as far as we know, considered it. Had the apartheid leaders not feared the highly attentive West’s reactions, they likely would have utterly eliminated the anti-apartheid black political leadership.

  The more predicted mass-murderous and eliminationist violence was expected to come from blacks against whites, led by the insurgent African National Congress, which for decades had been resisting and fighting the whites’ apartheid regime. The extreme oppression, exploitation, and violence blacks had suffered had lasted generations. Blacks lived in impoverished, barren reservations, known as Bantustans, while whites lived in relative luxury, even at European levels. Hatred of the whites, particularly of Afrikaners, for keeping blacks poor, denying them basic rights and freedoms, and using violence against them, was widespread. Why then, after decades of this unjust and dehumanizing system, was there no substantial revenge, no eliminationist onslaught?

  Many factors came into play, including the drawn-out negotiation process that created an understanding among white and black leaders; the peaceful transfer of power with interim confidence-building arrangements; the lessons African National Congress leaders undoubtedly drew from other African countries, such as Mozambique, where white minorities fled or were hounded out after black majorities wrested power from them, wrecking the national economy. But still, why did the structural conditions of a bitter conflict, lasting years and soaked in blood and suffering, with deep racial, linguistic, economic, and political fissures, resulting in the once subjugated, desperately needy majority turning the tables on a relatively small dominant minority, not lead to a slaughter or expulsion or some other form of violent domination and expropriation? The answer is as obvious as theories of structural causes are wrong: political leadership, and specifically the character, disposition, and foresight of the African National Congress’ most critical leader, Nelson Mandela, who had no desire to undertake an eliminationist program. Had black South Africans had a non-Mandelan leadership animated by an ideology of revenge, black nationalism, Marxist revolution, or self-enrichment, then it would have been easy to unleash the African National Congress and its followers in a violent eliminationist and expropriationist campaign against whites. With different political leaders operating under similar circumstances against a similar foe, the spark would have come to ignite hatred and retribution’s parched dry timber. A violent catastrophe would have ensued.

  Why could Mandela and the other African National Congress leaders see their way to a peaceful new South Africa? They knew the whites were neither demons nor subhumans (the transition process helped further humanize white leaders); they came to understand that the future would be better with whites as part of the nation, governed by democracy, rather than forced out or dispossessed to varying degrees; and no ideological vision of some purified, totalitarian, or millennial South African society guided them. The black leadership therefore created the humanizing Truth and Reconciliation process, where perpetrators, through public admissions of sins and crimes, remade themselves and reentered the ranks of beings fit for human cohabitation.

  The course of South African politics utterly falsifies structural theories of mass murder. It highlights political leaders’ critical part in deciding whether an eliminationist course will be chosen, and, if so, what kind. Finally, and perhaps most important, it offers lessons—including about political leaders’ capacity to learn that eliminationist politics may not pay and to choose to act accordingly against such politics—that are critical for designing policy measures to forestall future eliminationist politics.

  Ultimately, each case contained in the matrix of noneliminationist outcomes must be investigated individually and in-depth. Nevertheless, the fundamental factors that did not lead these contexts to erupt in murderous and eliminationist assaults were the political leaders’ differing conceptions of the victims and/or their adherence to a political vision that rendered elimination unthinkable or, in balance, not advisable.

  The Crucial Character of Perpetrators’ Beliefs

  These two matrices help us understand the critical role of the perpetrators’ beliefs about hated and disparaged groups in generating their desire and willingness to kill those groups, and then to act upon the desire. Why? Because they reveal the perpetrators’ beliefs about the targeted people to be the factor that engenders the motive and the motivation to kill or eliminate the targeted groups. Even with existing conflict, slaughtering or expelling hated or enemy groups is always a choice. Neither poverty nor war, nor multiethnic societies, nor acute ethnic conflict invariably, or even usually, produce mass murder or elimination. They also do not determine what kind and how much there will be.

  That the politics that produces mass death and elimination is discretionary can be seen in another related, indeed overlapping, realm, that of famines. Famines are not only or even principally caused by acts of nature. This has been long established, though it is little known. In our time, the modern state’s greatly expanded monitoring powers (it knows where food is needed), resource acquisition capacity (it can acquire food), and infrastructure (it can deliver the food) have long overcome nonhuman causes of famines. Whether state leaders decide not to alleviate famine situations or through their own policies to actually cause them, or armed killers physically prevent states and nonstate actors from providing food to famine regions and peoples, the cause and result are the same: willful political choices that predictably result in mass death, sometimes millions, with the means of death being willful starvation.

  That famine is a matter of politics and political leaders’ choices has been generally shown, though it can be most strikingly seen in the Indian subcontinent’s history alone, and then by comparing it with other regions. The subcontinent is a large, historically famine-plagued region containing developing countries of colossal populations. Until Indian independence in 1947, the British colonialists ignored vulnerable and even starving Indians’ well-being, so famines were common. Once the country was independent and democratic, Indian political authorities responded to regional and local shortages by bringing food into those regions (sometimes with international aid) and by giving the most destitute the economic means to acquire food for themselves. India ceased to be visited by starvation. This in itself is telling. Comparing India to China further highlights the critical role of politics and of human choice. China, facing similar problems of overpopulation, underdevelopment, and local food sho
rtages, continued to suffer famines, including massive ones. The Great Famine, undoubtedly human history’s most deadly famine, occurred in 1959, lasting two years while taking twenty million to forty million lives. It resulted from willful governmental policies.

  In the 1970s, two regions suffered from severe drought and a food crisis: India’s Maharashtra state and Africa’s Sahel region, which includes Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan. Maharashtra’s crisis, from 1972 to 1974, included a precipitous drop in average per capita food consumption, yet the Indian government intervened and famine was averted. The Sahel drought during the 1970s produced a severe famine that devastated the lives of millions, killing perhaps one million. But their deaths did not result from a natural catastrophe greater than that of Maharashtra. The Sahel countries actually had considerably more food available per capita—two to three times as much—during their famines than Maharashtra had during the dry years, and the Sahel’s per capita food availability was roughly equal to that of India as a whole. In the Sahel, political leaders chose not to distribute food to the needy. Finally, in 1974 in Bangladesh, India’s neighbor, perhaps one million people died in a famine. Yet in that year more food was available in Bangladesh than in previous or subsequent years, when there was no famine.910

  The people producing, or not alleviating, famines have various motives. Some famines are a tool in regimes’ mass eliminationist repertoire; others are the consequence of political leaders’ malign neglect. China’s Great Famine resulted from Mao’s murderous policies that willfully sacrificed millions in pursuit of his communist goals. The Sahel famine’s roots were not classically grounded in mass murder and elimination politics. But even with economic causes of people’s vulnerability to famine—insufficient work or wages—governments and political leaders decide whether to right the situation, in the immediate term principally by choosing whether to provide food or income transfers to the endangered people.

  Regimes willfully withholding food from people has been one of the recurring features of our time’s eliminationist and annihilationist assaults, often employed as an adjunct to other eliminationist measures. This makes analyzing famine politics, and its place in eliminationist politics, somewhat more complex but only when it is hard to decide whether a given instance of general or local food shortages is due to malign neglect, purposeful action, or both. We have already come across any number of instances of purposeful starvation to kill targeted peoples. The Germans fed the Jews in ghettos and camps starvation rations, leading to enormous death rates. The Germans willfully starved most of the millions of Soviet POWs they killed. On death marches regimes and their followers routinely deny adequate food to their victims, or as the Germans did to the Herero and the Turks did to the Armenians, drive them into inhospitable places so they will starve to death. The British, in their multipronged eliminationist program to neutralize the Kikuyu’s threat, underfed them, pruning their numbers and pressuring them to capitulate and renounce Mau Mau. Despite the many other horrors the British visited on the Kikuyu (discussed at greater length below), what many Kikuyu remember most about the eliminationist assault is the hunger. It was so bad and so obviously manufactured that many Kikuyu concluded that the British sought to starve them to death or into submission. As Wandia Muriithi explains: Hunger was the worst problem, that’s what was killing most of the people. They were starving us on purpose, hoping we would give in. The little time we were allowed to go to the shamba was too short to allow for any meaningful food gathering. Also, the area we were allowed to use was too small, because the largest areas had been declared Special Areas and were off-limits. So the allowed areas had been over-harvested, but that was what we had.

  The barbed-wire villages’ death tolls were enormous, with the most vulnerable falling prey to disease, as the vulnerable do when starving. One missionary recounts that it “was terribly pitiful how many of the children and the older Kikuyu were dying. They were so emaciated and so very susceptible to any kind of disease that came along.”11 Most of the 50,000 to 300,000 Kikuyu dead resulted from British starvation politics.

  Mass elimination is always preventable and always results from conscious political choice. Therefore, the perpetrators’ or potential perpetrators’ conception of potential target groups is the critical factor for leaders and followers alike to want to practice mass eliminationist and exterminationist politics and then to be willing to carry out its programs. This suggests several further inquiries. We must investigate more how such eliminationist conceptions about different groups are disseminated, which means also investigating the discourses that are structured by, contain, and spread such notions. We must consider how language is mass murder and elimination’s medium. And we must make sense of how such discourses and beliefs vary to produce various kinds of assaults.

  When the peculiarly modern mass-eliminationist leadership’s mindset finds propitious political circumstances for acting, it draws on, makes central, and sometimes helps solidify and amplify preexisting beliefs or a discourse about elimination, inflaming people’s smoldering wishes into burning desires. Discourses deprecating and disparaging targeted groups, leading people to hate and feel threatened by them, prepare the way before a mass elimination program is initiated. These discourses vary greatly. Some are more obviously eliminationist, even explicitly murderous, than others. Sometimes, as in Turkey regarding Armenians, Germany regarding Jews, Rwanda regarding Tutsi, and Serbia regarding Croats and Muslims, the discourse is long-standing, its underlying beliefs about the intended victims, which it reinforces and further spreads, are themselves deeply rooted in the cultures and widely (though not universally) shared. Other discourses are chronologically proximate to the elimination program’s onset while still resonating within the populace and being deeply felt by those sharing its fundamentals. This has often been the case under communist regimes, most notably the Soviets, the Chinese, and the Khmer Rouge. These and other communist leaderships, with newly won power, sought to prepare their followers and society more broadly for eliminationist initiatives, by convincing them that producing the future utopia necessitated the sacrifice of many people, specifically malignant class enemies and other groups deemed inimical to the revolution, the nation, or the future communist paradise. Such new discourses existed in Germany during the Nazi period regarding “life unworthy of living” and “useless eaters,” in many Latin American countries regarding leftists, and in the United States regarding Japanese. Because these discourses are less long-standing and are sometimes manufactured mainly from above (sometimes clashing with common deeply held values and beliefs), they often find less societal consensus and are more easily dispensed with when the regime or their proximate cause ends. Antisemitism, an age-old and deep-rooted discourse, continued to be powerful in Germany and many European countries after the war, and continues to this day, while the far less deep-rooted and widespread notion that “life unworthy of living” and “useless eaters” (including the mentally ill) should be killed, itself died with the Nazi regime.

  The preparatory Turkish discourse for slaughtering Armenians in 1915 was unmistakable, containing three facets: the need for a Turkic Turkey, an Islamic Turkey, and an internally pure Turkey so it could reestablish its greatness and glory. Under Turkish Ottoman rule, Turks conceived of the Armenians as an alien group to be tolerated as long as they remained loyal. With the Ottomans’ decline in the latter part of the nineteenth century and loss of territories to other countries and non-Turkish minorities in the twentieth century’s first part, Turks somewhat redefined the ever more nationalist Armenians through the lens of an ever more strident Turkish nationalism: as an alien, hostile, and threatening group. Annihilationist onslaughts from 1894 to 1896 that were essentially a massive crackdown on Armenian demands for more independence, and again after the Young Turk revolution in April 1909, helped form, shape, and intensify the discourse of disloyalty and the need for a purer, more Turkified Turkey. If your countrymen have already justly slaughtered people because of th
eir ethnicity or forced them to convert from a religion deemed noxious and alien, eliminating this people further, including by deadly means, will likely seem justified. Those killed deserved it, being of a character or having committed offenses that made eliminating them necessary and right. Such self-legitimizing, tautological reasoning is powerful. Mass elimination, including the mass murder of children, remains, after the fact, self-justifying to the perpetrating group unless it is explicitly and forcefully delegitimized (as in post-World War II Germany). Mass expulsions and slaughters sow the seeds for future eliminationist assaults. The logic that led to one eliminationist assault provides the rationale for new and future ones, if circumstances and political leaders suggest it. The Turks’ massive eliminationist assault upon the Armenians from 1894 to 1896 would rightly be called the Armenian Genocide—had an even more massive mass murder and elimination not followed twenty years later. From 1894 to 1896 the Turks slaughtered 150,000 to 300,000 Armenians, forced another 150,000 to convert to Islam, and expelled an additional 100,000 from the country. The Turks, as perpetrators repeatedly have, employed different eliminationist means as functional equivalents. They also availed themselves of a relatively rare eliminationist option as an acceptable partial “solution” to their “Armenian problem”: The character of their religiously infused demonology about the Armenians meant they could convert Armenians to Islam and thereby render them harmless and fit for cohabitation with Turks. By 1915, Turkey was animated by a nationalism much more oriented toward creating a Turkic nation, so the Turks, opting for a still more comprehensive eliminationist assault against the Armenians, began using a more final mix of means, to produce an enormously higher ratio of death and expulsion (close to two million) to forced conversions (of 100,000 to 200,000 women and young children). The German vice-consul in Erzurum, Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, based on his conversations with Turkish officials, reported their thinking in 1916: “The empire must be rebuilt on a Muslim and Pan-Turkist foundation. . . . Non-Muslim communities have to be Islamicized by force or, failing that, eliminated.”12 This more comprehensive murderousness partly resulted from a consciousness that eliminating Armenians must be more final because the Turks’ very actions would guarantee the Armenians’ enduring enmity. As Talât told American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, “We have been reproached for making no distinction between the innocent Armenians and the guilty; but that was utterly impossible, in view of the fact that those who were innocent today might be guilty tomorrow.”13 Eliminationist assaults’ logic—engendering enmity that might lead to revenge—produces among the perpetrators ever more insecurity and therefore ever more thought to continue or escalate such politics. What a man close to Pol Pot conveyed about the Cambodian mass murderer could be said, if somewhat less breathlessly, about many eliminationist leaders. Pol Pot “saw enemies as rotten flesh, as swollen flesh. Enemies surrounding. Enemies in front, enemies behind, enemies to the north, enemies to the south, enemies to the west, enemies to the east, enemies in all eight directions, enemies coming from all nine directions, closing in, leaving no space for breath. And he continually had us fortify our spirit, fortify our stance, fortify over and over, including measures to kill our own ranks.”14