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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Discourse and the Dissemination of Eliminationist Beliefs

  Language is the principal medium for preparing people to support or perpetrate mass murder and elimination, because it is the vehicle for conceptualizing, conveying, and making persuasive the necessary prejudices and ideas. Visual images, such as caricature, often reinforce the prejudices and ideas and powerfully, sometimes more powerfully than language itself, encapsulate them in indelibly memorable forms. Personal experience is not what leads people to believe that those they target are noxious or dangerous, subhuman or demonic. How could it? The targeted people are overwhelmingly strangers, numbering in the tens of thousands or millions.

  Language’s elaborated notions, dire constructs, labeling, caricature, and reductionist and fear-inspiring stories teach people prejudices about entire groups of disparaged, despised, or feared people, and the necessity or logic of eliminationist solutions. The December 1993 issue of Kangura is ironically titled “Tutsi, Race of God” with the vertical words revealing what the Tutsi really are and their threat’s severity: “What weapons will we use to win over the inyenzi (cockroaches) for good?” The eliminationist answer, immanent in the discourse’s logic, can be seen in the image to the left, a machete, which, together with the anti-Tutsi leader of Rwanda in 1959, tell Hutu all they need to know about what should be and is in the offing. Elie Ngarambe recounts the common things Hutu believed about Tutsi—which made this newspaper cover both unremarkable and immediately comprehensible—as he discusses what they called Tutsi while they raped and killed Tutsi women: “First ‘Tutsi are snakes, Tutsi are an enemy, Tutsi are cruel,’ to disrespect them.

  Cover of December 1993 issue of Kangura

  Or ‘Inkotanyi they have tails,’ so many things to make them lose their true colors. They are ‘anti-Rwanda,’ ‘against the country,’ ‘anti-survivor, ’ ‘cockroach,’ ‘snakes.’ A snake is very bad, and it means something . . . even the Bible says that snake means something bad, evil. It was to humiliate them. They had no value.”2 So the Hutu killed them.

  Language and visual images—conveyed in talk and discussion, newspapers, magazines, and books, and radio, television, and today the Internet—give life to and spread notions that entire groups of people are vermin, are inherently treacherous, have the appetites, moral sense, or intellectual capacity of lower primates, pose danger, covet your house, wife, or land, seek your and your kind’s destruction, and willfully and obstinately block human or divine prosperity or progress. Herero are baboons and swine. Jews are bacilli or rats, or Bolsheviks or devils. Poles are subhumans. Kikuyu are vermin, animals, and barbarians. Bangladeshis are devils. Putatively impure Khmer are “diseased elements.” Maya are animals, pigs, and dogs. Tutsi are cockroaches, dogs, snakes, or zeros. Indonesian communists are infidels, as are Americans and many others. Darfurians are slaves. Metaphors of disease, infestations, predatory or dangerous animals, criminality, subhumanity, and malevolent supernatural beings abound. Such notions are first propagated linguistically and visually, then similarly conveyed to others, taught to new generations, further spread or intensified by political leaders and regimes. Although identifiable sociological or political factors (and occasionally cynical political leaders) may generate such notions, once they consolidate into socially shared prejudice, particularly when reinforced in political practice, they are strongly self-validating and reproducing, becoming the common-sense wisdom of their societies, groups, or cultures (or subcultures), circulating socially among ordinary people, and from parent to child, and then among the children themselves. Any study of mass murder and elimination that fails to give primacy to language and imagery as their generative medium and to the specific beliefs that people, through language, relate to one another and thereby reinforce, denies the fundamental reality of how people, whether leaders or followers, become cognitively, (to a large extent) psychologically, and emotionally prepared to give themselves to the violent elimination of others, and how people become mobilized to attack, dragoon, expel, or kill others.

  Language demeaning, expressing hate, or inspiring fear about others often coalesces into a stable, patterned set of beliefs, tropes, symbols, and charges often called a discourse but more properly called—because it conveys its social reality—a conversation. Different societies, ethnic groups, political parties, and political leaders and their followers have explicit, symbol-laden, and encoded conversations about other people or groups they deem noxious or perceive as threatening. These conversations can resemble acquaintances’ ongoing, years-long, multistranded discussions, sometimes impassioned and sometimes casual, that pick up where they left off and take off in new directions, repeating and returning to well-known themes even as they incorporate new notions and develop new arguments with unfolding events, resonating powerfully to those familiar with them as they listen attentively or as background music to the familiar tropes, while perhaps sounding striking to newcomers seeking to understand and assimilate their terms. In Rwanda, a powerful Hutu eliminationist discussion of the Tutsi was already long established when the quasi-governmental radio station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) became its new focal point in August 1993. Vianney Higiro, the director of the government’s official station, Radio Rwanda, explains in these notable terms: “These broadcasts were like a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of Primus [the local beer] in a bar. It was a conversation without a moderator and without any requirements as to the truth of what was said. The people who were there recounted what they had seen or heard during the day. The exchanges covered everything: rumors circulating on the hills, news from the national radio, conflicts among local political bosses. . . . It was all in fun. Some people left the bar, others came in, the conversation went on or stopped if it got too late, and the next day it took up again after work.”3 Leading up to the government’s initiation of the mass murder, radio stations and other media reinforced Hutu’s prejudicial views and deep suspicions of Tutsi, and further prepared them for the coming assault. During the exterminationist assault, radio became the principal source of Hutu’s understanding of unfolding events, forcefully exhorting ordinary Hutu to annihilate the Tutsi enemy. Augustin Bazimaziki, one of the Hutu killers, explains that the killing began with the “radio broadcast[ing] some news such as, ‘We need to kill all the Tutsi,’” and then, as they were mercilessly hunting them down, “the radio broadcasted the information such that we need to kill Tutsi seven days a week.”4

  Joseph-Désiré Bitero, one of the Nyamata region’s and Rwanda’s leading perpetrators, suggests how such a discourse can powerfully imbue people with an eliminationist mindset, even while they live side-by-side with those they will eventually attack:I was born surrounded by Tutsi in Kanazi. I always had Tutsi acquaintances and thought nothing of it. Still, I did grow up listening to history lessons and radio programs that were always talking about major problems between Hutu and Tutsi—though I lived among Tutsi who posed no problem. The situation was going to pieces due to the impossible gap between the worrisome news about the mess on the country’s borders and the peaceful people who lived next door. The situation was bound to come apart and go into either savagery or neighborliness.

  Hence the paradox, found in many societies that mass murderously erupt, of an edifice of relatively good local relations among neighbors from different groups existing upon a rotting, tottering foundation of prejudices, hatred, and suspicion that, when activated politically, engulfs all members of the other group, including those neighbors. Even if not literally correct for all mass murders and eliminations, when Bitero says, “You will never see the source of a genocide,” he expresses an essential truth about the difficulty of discerning the volcanic destructiveness embedded in something as seemingly innocuous as words, and to see the cause-and-effect relationship between the two, which is why so many who write about genocide do not see (or are unwilling to believe) “the source of a genocide.” Bitero explains:
“It is buried too deep in grudges, under an accumulation of misunderstandings that we were the last to inherit. We came of age at the worst moment in Rwanda’s history: we were taught to obey absolutely, raised in hatred, stuffed with slogans.”5 We must understand more about these socially shared grudges, accumulated misunderstandings, hatreds, and slogans, and about the eliminationist conversations they and other elements compose, including the explicit beliefs and images, and the underlying cultural models about the targeted group they construct, the logic for action they contain, and the relationship of different conversational stages to taking action against human targets.

  Such discourses often individually deserve substantial, even book-length treatment to be adequately represented and fully analyzed. Nevertheless, a common core of issues tells us a great deal about these discourses’ essence, and allows us to analyze them comparatively and to understand them as springboards to action. How these discourses present potential or intended victims offers insight into mass elimination’s patterns and features. Eliminationist discourses have relatively stable constructions or descriptions of the targeted groups, which include explicit, easily graspable accounts of the groups’ putative noxiousness, including coherent charges, manifest or implied, about their threat and at least implications of how to meet it. All prejudicial and eliminationist discourses contain a widespread, underlying cognitive model of the disparaged people that provides a foundation and general structure to the discourses’ more elaborated narratives, accounts, and characterizations of them.

  Three dimensions structure the models underlying such discourses. Groups (and individuals) with antipathies, antagonisms, or animus toward another group have a notion of how pernicious and therefore dangerous the group is or can be. They have some understanding of the source of that group’s perniciousness, whether their biology, their culture (including religion), or changeable environmental conditions, such as education, social opportunities, and discrimination. These two dimensions—putative perniciousness and its source—together provide an understanding of the disparaged group’s supposed threat, what might contain, forefend, or diffuse it, and that group’s transformability, in the short or long term. The third dimension of latent-to-manifest tells us how central these notions are at a given moment to those holding them, and clarifies how prejudices, hatreds, desires for vengeance, and other beliefs and emotions that suggest eliminationist action can simmer beneath the surface relatively harmlessly and then be quickly activated into violent, destructive, murderous action.

  An index of imputed group perniciousness and danger could be constructed for any and every group believed to harbor noxious qualities. As intergroup prejudice is commonplace and varies enormously, we would find a wide array of perniciousness scores, including low ones between northern and southern Italians, Prussians and Bavarians, Flemish and Walloons, Americans and Canadians, among Germans, French, Italians, and British for one another, among Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians for one another, and so on, or between German Catholics and Protestants, or Social Democrats and Christian Democrats or their counterparts in one European country after another. Many members of these national, regional, ethnic, religious, and political groups have antipathies or antagonisms for the other domestic or foreign groups, conceiving them to have unpleasant, noxious, or pernicious qualities (which may be moral, dispositional, or aspirational) and therefore to pose a challenge to the first group’s well-being or aspirations. Analyzing mild prejudices and antipathies—and real group differences and conflicts—in this way helps us understand that all such group differences can be scored for imputed perniciousness and danger. The noxious qualities imputed by British to French, German Social Democrats to Christian Democrats, Flemish to Walloons, or Swedes and Danes to one another do not remotely suggest to their bearers that an eliminationist solution is necessary. These low-level prejudices do not come close to suggesting the degree of perniciousness eliminationist and exterminationist thinking requires as a foundation.

  The enormous variation in different prejudices’ perniciousness reveals how misguided is the commonplace discussion (in the literatures on genocide and many other themes) of people’s construction of groups as an “other.” Hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of others exist depending on whether we are discussing nationalities, coalesced groups, genders, or individuals (every person is an other for every other person). Whoever identifies himself particularistically with one or more groups, as everyone does, or with those sharing some aspect of his or her identity, always defines those groups and people not falling into that particularistic universe as an other. Constructing others and having them constructed for you is inherent to human existence. Thus, the other is hardly a master category for illuminating eliminationist assaults, and the construction of others is effectively irrelevant for understanding or explaining such assaults (or just about anything else in social and political life). The issue is, rather, the kinds of others constructed by or for you as a member of a political movement, society, or culture or subculture, and how you conceive of them, including here especially their putative noxious qualities. It is not the undifferentiated notion of the ubiquitous other, but the hostile and prejudicial beliefs and emotions one group’s members have for another group that must be explored. And these beliefs can, as we see, be analyzed according to their sources and degrees of perniciousness.

  If we take an instance of more intense prejudice, in the United States among whites against blacks, it varies from nonexistent, to garden-variety prejudices and antipathies, to more substantial conceptions of blacks’ perniciousness. Whatever prejudice’s current levels (they have been declining for half a century), an eliminationist initiative against blacks would not even occur to whites. That is, except among white supremacists with a quasi-Nazi-like racist worldview accusing (even prior to Barack Obama’s becoming president) blacks, Jews, and others of capturing the American government and of working to subjugate and destroy Aryans or whites (Jews are not considered white). The Turner Diaries, a fictional diary of a white supremacist depicting a race war, and perhaps the white supremacist movement’s most widely read book, tells of blacks exerting “an increasingly degenerative influence on the culture and life styles of the inhabitants of North America.” Because white supremacists’ prejudices and political ideology are Nazi-like—their accounts and hatred of Jews sometimes come straight from Nazi writings—they fantasize about, discuss, and plan for an eliminationist assault against those they believe are destroying whiteness, Christianity, and goodness. The Turner Diaries explicitly discusses the danger to the white race as so extreme that to quell it, even innocents must perish: “But there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people—no way. It is a cancer too deeply rooted in our flesh. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us—if we don’t cut this cancer out of our living flesh—our whole race will die.”6 Timothy McVeigh, the mass murderer who in bombing the Oklahoma City federal building in April 1995 killed 168 people (with the injured, the casualties totaled more than one thousand), was a devotee of The Turner Diaries, in which such a bombing occurs. A few days before his attack, he sent excerpts from it to his sister. He brought a copy on the trip to Oklahoma City to perpetrate his atrocity against the alleged Zionist Occupation Government of the United States’ outpost there.

  We can distinguish, as we see for the degrees of perniciousness that American whites attribute to blacks, two fundamentally different conceptions of groups. One is of sufficient perniciousness to include an eliminationist logic suggesting or implying an eliminationist solution. The other is of far less perniciousness, not suggesting eliminationist thinking or acting. Some conceptions of groups occupy the border zone between the two, and because beliefs are somewhat fluid with changing contexts and circumstances, they may move from one side to the other. Most prejudices and hatreds, however, fall clearly on one side or the other of the eliminationist-noneliminationist line.

  We can leave beh
ind the enormous number of people’s conceptions of groups that are not eliminationist to plumb the character and differences of those that have led to exterminationist and eliminationist assaults. Keeping in mind these discourses contain conceptions of the source of groups’ perniciousness, we need to think further about the two principal ways they construct an understanding of the hated or feared group: dehumanization and demonization. Whether and how perpetrators dehumanize or demonize people matters enormously because it, together with the perpetrators’ broader social and moral theories, informs their eliminationist treatment of them.

  Dehumanization and Demonization

  The term dehumanization is rightly a commonplace of discussions of mass murder. It is used as a master category that describes the attitudes of killers, would-be killers, and larger groups toward actual or intended victims. But, as used, it serves to homogenize different kinds of beliefs, preventing further in-depth and comparative analysis, and most critically to variously elide or conceal two separate conceptual dimensions. A belief (really an assemblage of beliefs) exists that can properly be said to constitute the dehumanizing of others. It is that other people inherently lack qualities fundamental to being fully human in the sense of deserving moral respect, rights, and protection. Such beings are said to lack human capacities or powers and, as a definitional matter, do not need to be treated as humans. European colonizers believed this about the peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. A second belief (also complex and various) is the demonization of others. This belief is about other people’s moral quality, including their moral intentions. It holds the people to be, literally or figuratively, demonic, morally evil. This view can be grounded in a religious or quasi-religious sense that the devil or other malevolent supernatural beings inhabit or control, or are such people. Classic instances of demonization are medieval and early modern Europe’s and New England’s witch crazes, during which tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were accused of being possessed and demonic. Nevertheless, such beliefs usually have nothing to do with religion or the supernatural but are grounded in the view that people are of such evil nature and intentions they might as well be devils or possessed by one. Though many hated and disparaged groups are neither dehumanized nor demonized, those that are can be so in different ways and to varying degrees, so each dimension is a continuum with a range of values. The dimension of dehumanization is mainly about biological (cognitive, physical, etc.) capacity, held to be impaired. The dimension of demonization is mainly about moral character, held to be depraved, or so debased the people might as well be depraved.