In Rwanda a different, more explicitly demonizing and eliminationist discourse governed the country starting before the country’s independence from Belgium in 1962. The same can be said about Burundi, its intimate neighbor and sometimes mirror opposite. Each one’s eliminationist politics is hard to understand without referring to the other’s. In each country, with one group dominating the other, reciprocal racist ideologies of Hutu and Tutsi demonizing each other created ideational powder kegs that political leaders could explode at any moment. Each country’s coups, attempted coups, repressions, and violence of one group against the other, including mass slaughters and expulsions, greatly affected the other country’s political ideologies and politics. Published tracts codified each one’s eliminationist ideology. In 1990 in Rwanda, the politically dominant Hutu published in the authoritative newspaper Kangura, the religiously clothed “Ten Commandments of the Hutu.” In Burundi, the dominant Tutsi published their analog, “Seventeen Rules of Tutsi Conduct.” The Hutu’s Ten Commandments presumes and calls for an insuperable social, political, moral, and racial gulf between Hutu and Tutsi, with several of its commandments warning Hutu men of Tutsi women’s purely subversive nature, deeming any Hutu man marrying or having sexual relations with a Tutsi woman a “traitor.” They deem every Tutsi in business “dishonest,” declaring that the Tutsi’s “only aim is to enhance the supremacy of his ethnic group.” Any Hutu engaging in business with Tutsi is a “traitor.” Based in this conception of the Tutsi, the Hutu Ten Commandments logically calls for total Hutu political, educational, and military domination. The Hutu’s discourse about Tutsi depicted them as racially unalterable, demonic foes who had been suppressing and injuring the Hutu for hundreds of years.
The Tutsi’s reciprocal discourse was at least as racist, dehumanizing, and demonizing. In 1993 the “Seventeen Rules of Tutsi Conduct” codified in published form the long-established eliminationist stance toward the Hutu that had already erupted in several mass slaughters.
Do not trust a Hutu or anyone supposed to be one. . . . Try to locate Hutu residences so that you will know, when the time comes, whom to save and whom to liquidate. . . . Stay armed so as not to be caught by surprise. . . . Some Hutu women look like Tutsi, and their job is to spy on us. . . . There are subtle ways to exterminate Hutu people; you can isolate them in the bush, and make them disappear one after the other . . . you can send them pretty girls or Rwandese prostitutes; you can put TB in their food or drinks. . . . Hutu kids are spoiled and insouciant: just get hold of the kid who lost his way, then ask his father, elder, brother or mother to come and fetch him, and then kill them all.15
The Hutu’s and Tutsi’s dueling eliminationist discourses partly parallel (while being more explicitly and graphically murderous) the German eliminationist antisemitism about the Jews and the “Jewish problem.” What is remarkable about the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s eliminationist conflict is that it was reciprocal and historically a relatively recent construction, unlike the Germans’ one-sided eliminationist antisemitism that had roots and a continuous existence lasting centuries. Cynical Belgian colonialists bred the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s mutual enmity to more easily and effectively rule their colonial possession. Once the Hutu and Tutsi’s divide hardened, producing parallel demonizing discourses, both sides’ political and religious leaders and ideologues intensified and further racialized it. This shows that while the origins of an eliminationist discourse and its generational transmission must be explored to fully understand an eliminationist assault’s genesis, the discourse’s prior longevity is not a critical factor. Its existence at the moment political leaders decide to kill is what counts. Although a Nazi-like discourse about another people as evil cannot be created anywhere, the Tutsi’s and Hutu’s conflict also shows that under propitious circumstances, such as existed in central Africa (a divided society, with deep inequality and acute conflict over resources, one group’s domination of the other—originally Tutsi of Hutu—and determinedly malevolent politicians and propagandists), such views can be produced in a generation, hardened, passed on, and then reinforced as the ensuing violence seems to confirm the eliminationist discourse’s underpinnings and claims.
Among our time’s many eliminationist assaults, whether against small or large groups, whether over territory or not, whether at home or abroad, only the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews needed to be total, because the Germans considered them cosmic biological evil. The ground for mass murder was prepared in other European countries—in Croatia, France, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and others—by the widespread if varying pan-European Christian antisemitism, especially of the Catholic Church, nationalist and sometimes racist demonological assaults on the Jews, and nonlethal eliminationist policies of the 1930s. The Germans’ drive to kill all Jews, especially all Jewish children, has no parallel in mass murder or eliminationist politics’ annals. Many mass murderers slaughter children, but the Germans’ obsessiveness and ferocity in exterminating Jewish children, conceived of as evil’s biological seeds, distinguishes the German executioners from all others. In the camps called ghettos, they killed Jewish women who became pregnant. The biological thinking of German political leaders, the perpetrators, and many other Germans about the Jews’ alleged perniciousness resembled the rest of humanity’s or at least the public health authorities’ thinking about smallpox. To protect the world from smallpox’s scourge, all smallpox, namely the virus’ every instance, needed to be eradicated. One festering smallpox case could infect others, resuming its plague on humanity. On January 1, 1967, the World Health Organization launched its intensified Smallpox Eradication Program against a disease as old as known human history that still threatened 60 percent of the world’s population, and that infected at the time ten million to fifteen million people annually, killing between two million and four million, and leaving most of the rest disfigured or blind. The program took almost exactly a decade to produce a smallpox-free world.16
The German political leaders and perpetrators considered the Jews such a powerful biological force (like smallpox) for evil, afflicting humanity almost from the beginning of recorded time (like smallpox), that they embarked on a comparable total eradication plan that, coincidentally, moved toward its final goal at a pace—had their conquests continued—similar to the World Health Organization’s smallpox eradication campaign. Why would their plan differ given their beliefs, which Hitler summarized in the exterminatory campaign’s midst? “The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged to-day is of the same sort as the battle waged, during the last century, by [Louis] Pasteur and [Robert] Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus! Japan would have been contaminated, too, if it had stayed open to the Jews. We shall regain our health only by eliminating the Jew. Everything has a cause, nothing comes by chance” (my emphasis). 17 In working through the extermination program’s codification, the Wannsee Conference participants discussed the need for every Jew’s utter, total, and complete extermination in biological terms. The Germans believed the Jews surviving the brutal work-to-death regimen, to which some would be put, would be the most robust. They would therefore have to kill these especially dangerous foes outright. “For, if released,” the Wannsee Protocol tells us, these Jews “would, as a natural selection of the fittest, form a germ cell from which the Jewish race could regenerate itself.”18
The Nazi leadership and Germans more generally had very different discourses about other groups the regime and its helpers set out to kill or eliminate. Slavic peoples, the mentally ill, Bolsheviks, gays were the victims of prejudicial views rendering them lesser beings of one kind or another, but not the irredeemable, powerful, evil Germans broadly considered Jews to be, the ideological discovery of which Hitler and those sharing his views could speak in world historical terms as one of humankind’s “greatest revolutions.” Also, these other groups’ ideological construction, making it either necessary
or permissible to kill them, had lesser degrees of acceptance in Germany. The country’s political leaders did not undertake these other groups’ total extermination, met far more resistance from Germans to their eliminationist programs against them, and pursued their ultimately partial (though still catastrophic) elimination with considerably less drive and determination.
Analogously, country- or culture-specific powerful eliminationist discourses, grounded in models of the targeted group or groups as permissible or necessary to eliminate, existed for the Germans in South-West Africa, in Japan, for the British in Kenya, in Cambodia, in the Indian subcontinent, in Latin American countries, for other communist regimes, in the former Yugoslavia, for the Hutu, and for Political Islamists, among many others.
Radical intolerance is at the core of the eliminationist mindset. Even when a group—whether ethnic, religious, economic, or political—makes challenging demands on a country’s political leaders or dominant group, a more inclusive view of society and the state rather than an eliminationist response can get adopted. Political leaders and the groups they represent can make political compromises and sacrifices, even material ones, to resolve real or imagined conflicts without expulsion or murderous violence. This has often been done, especially but not only in countries that became or are democratic.
It needs to be emphasized that such deprecatory discourses about groups and peoples are not always explicitly eliminationist or murderous. More typically, they portray the people who will eventually be killed as worthless subhumans, evil, or a general threat, so that those participating in and exposed to such discourses become predisposed to accepting an eliminationist program or “solution.” The populaces may be aware of this disposition, as in Germany, in Burundi, among Serbs, and in Rwanda, or may not focus on policy options, particularly eliminationist ones, so they do not explicitly tell themselves or others that eliminating, let alone exterminating, the hated or feared group is their goal. Either way, when their political leaders decide to opt for an eliminationist solution, those sharing the discourse’s fundamentals and logical predispositions are ready for these beliefs to be activated into political action and to lend themselves in spirit or body to the eliminationist enterprise.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Thinking and Acting
IMAGINE THAT YOU LEARNED your government is about to start annihilating all people with red hair. Or all people in a certain city. Or all people with skin either lighter or darker than a certain shade. Or all people who profess one common religion or another. Would you be incredulous? Could you even make sense of such news? The people of many (though not all) countries would simply not believe it. But imagine you became convinced it is true. You would still be incredulous. Why would they do it? you might ask. Why would your government seek to slaughter ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, or six million people? Why butcher children by the thousands? For what reason? None of the rationales makes sense, because they violate what you know about your political system and its leaders, your society, and your fellow citizens.
A notable feature of eliminationist onslaughts is how easily the perpetrators, and the wider population from which they come, understand what is being done and why. In exterminationist and eliminationist assaults’ voluminous history, we find few instances of perpetrators, or members of their social and political groups, greeting the news of an impending or actual annihilation or elimination with incredulity, either born of a failure to comprehend its rationale or a belief in the deeds’ unequivocal monstrousness. This absence of incomprehension is striking, and undoubtedly to many readers startling, given the countries they live in. That perpetrators, and their groups and societies, immediately comprehend the eliminationist and annihilationist program as reasonable is explicable if the people are already prepared to find these eliminationist measures comprehensible, even desirable. In virtually all cases this has been so, as powerful discourses have readied the societies and people to consider the targeted groups noxious and dangerous. (A partial exception was the Soviet Union during the terror that, resulting from Joseph Stalin’s paranoia, was often arbitrary—Stalin turned on his party, loyal followers, and military’s officer corps.) Such socially shared beliefs remain just that—socially shared beliefs that are, whether partly submerged or publicly prominent, not accompanied by physical attacks—until the right moment arrives. Then, quickly, people understand that action previously deemed unimaginable, improbable, or impractical is now a permissible option. This occurs with many kinds of political opportunities, including when eliminating another sort of enemy, a hated and repressive political regime, suddenly becomes possible. Czechoslovakia’s President Václav Havel, during his 1990 New Year’s Day address not long after the Velvet Revolution brought down communism, asked, “How is it possible that so many people understood what to do and that none of them needed any advice or instructions?” 1 His rhetorical question applies equally to the perpetrators and social groups that implement and support one eliminationist onslaught after another.
In the former Yugoslavia’s various eliminationist assaults, rival ethnic communities, including the potential perpetrators among them, discussed and understood the putative demonic pasts of targeted groups and the necessity of eliminating them. Serbs referred to Bosnian Muslims as Turks, Christian Europe’s Muslim invaders and the Serbs’ centuries-long enemies. Serbs called Croats Ustashe, the fascists during the Nazi period who slaughtered Serbs. And Croats faced off against Serbian Chetniks, Serb paramilitaries during World War II. Not in the former Yugoslavia and almost never elsewhere do we find evidence that the perpetrators or the broader population were surprised by their leaders’ radical and lethal policies, or that they failed to understand the underlying motive grounded in an eliminationist conception of the victims. Some among the populations from which the perpetrators come may dissent from the majority’s view of the victims, morally oppose the measures, or deplore the eliminationist methods, particularly an annihilative onslaught’s licentiousness. But an overwhelmingly shared understanding of, and agreement with, the eliminationist program’s fundamentals has predated the actual assaults.
How does this come about? Not through peer pressure, not through blind obedience to authority, not because modernity has transformed people into bureaucrats, and not due to any other reductionist notion that has been posited in defiance of the historical record. It comes about through language and visual images as the bearers of cultural notions, including how to understand humanity and, in particular, other disparaged peoples and groups.
Of the five factors crucially contributing to our era’s exterminationist and eliminationist projects’ initiation and character, three—the modern state’s enormous transformative power, structural conflicts existing within states, and permissive international contexts—are structural factors that have systematically given impetus to political leaders to conceive of and act upon eliminationist aspirations. A fourth factor, the opportunity or immediate political context that makes it practical for political leaders to act on eliminationist desires, is contingent. The fifth feature, the beliefs that lead people to think it necessary to eliminate others, is, though common, not a systemic property of our time. Because the presence and content of such beliefs are highly variable, exploring them and the means for their widespread dissemination is critically important.
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