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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Nottingham conveys British settlers and colonial administrators’ reigning view: “All we heard was how savage Mau Mau was, shoot to kill. You can’t imagine how often I heard, ‘The only good Kuke is a dead Kuke.’ There was this idea that Mau Mau was savage, just completely atavistic, and somehow had to be gotten rid of, regardless of how it was done. This idea was everywhere.”18 These beliefs, according to Nottingham, were so axiomatic among the British that even other district officers who had been at Oxford with him, even those who were to the left politically, believed they were justified and just in treating the Kikuyu brutally and murderously. Nottingham lays out the various elements of the cause and effect of the Britons’ beliefs and actions. First the racism: “The Kikuyu were considered as animals. Even wild animals.” Then the demonization grafted on top of it: “If you took the oath the British thought that this meant you were now throwing aside all things European. You were going back to what the Europeans mostly thought was the savage existence that you had before the Europeans came.” Then how this dehumanized and demonized amalgam shaped the Britons’ thinking about what they may and ought to do: “I think the Europeans thought that someone who took the oath was no longer acceptable as a human being. . . . and therefore they were beginning to act more and more as if they were faced with animals and not human beings. . . . I think that actually is what many of them really did think in the way that they talked.” This thinking led to the Britons’ murderous conduct and, because of its content, kept their consciences clear: “They [the Kikuyu] were therefore treated in the way that you would shoot a wild animal. And you wouldn’t think, ‘No, this has gone wrong. Sorry.’ . . . All they were shooting was a wild animal. Not a human being. Or if they were beating in a camp a wild animal, then they were just beating a wild animal and not a human being.”19

  A second example of such complexity is the Nazis’ and, more generally, Germans’ conception of Sinti and Roma, commonly called Gypsies. They dehumanized them in the extreme. Drawing on long-standing Europe-wide prejudice, the Germans deemed them worthless racial mishmash, asocial people, a disruptive excrescence on society. Yet they did not exactly demonize the Sinti and the Roma. Germans did not consider them to be, as they did Jews, secular incarnations of the devil, with conscious malevolence governing their every move, and therefore to seriously or existentially threaten Germans. While Germans coming into contact or under the influence of Jews could become, in the Germans’ hallucinatory conception, “verjudet” or “Jewified,” Germans had no notion that Sinti or Roma could spiritually or even physically contaminate them or, for that matter, that any other putative subhumans could (and neither do other eliminationist assaults’ perpetrators think this of their victims). Nevertheless, Germans deemed Sinti and Roma to be personally morally depraved and asocial, a kind of racial pollution that inevitably enormously harmed society. So they hunted down the Sinti and the Roma, exterminating between a quarter million and half a million of them around Europe. Yet these victims, whom the Germans mainly conceived of as one people, were never central to the Germans’ worldview, mindset, or eliminationist programs and policies, and, unlike with the Jews, the Germans did not expressly devote themselves to killing every last one.

  Dealing with Demons

  With these caveats in mind, analysis of eliminationist assaults’ can be greatly furthered by categorizing victims according to the perpetrators’ conception of them, using these two dimensions. This produces four victim categories: existential enemies, heretics, subhumans, and demons. Language and images dehumanizing or demonizing others communicate to those listening and sharing the discussion’s assumptions that an eliminationist drive against the disparaged and despised people makes sense. If a being is like a disease, or a bug, or a wild animal, or a barbarian, incapable of being reasoned with; if a being willfully threatens all that is good, the Volk, God, a world of justice and plenty for all; if a being is evil incarnate, then it follows that one must eradicate the disease, squash the bug, kill the wild animal, expel or slay the barbarian, destroy the threat, or extirpate the evil. Not to do so would be negligent folly, like leaving your young child in a bear- or devil-infested forest. The language of existential or national threat itself, or of the necessity to usher in the millennium, also often takes on Patterns of Dehumanization and Demonization of Eliminationist Victims

  Non-Demonized Demonized

  (1) Existential Enemies (2) Heretics

  Turks: Armenians Germans: communists, gay

  Germans: enemy “hostages” men

  Soviets: Kulaks Soviets: many victims

  Americans: Japanese-Americans Communist Chinese: many

  Poles: ethnic Germans victims

  Non- Dehumanized Ibos: Hausa Hindus and Muslims during

  Pakistanis: Bangladeshis 1947 partition

  Syrian Baathists: Hama Indonesians: communists

  Iraqi Baathists: Kurds, Shia, and Chile: leftists

  enemies of regime Argentina: leftists

  Serbs: Croats, Bosniaks, Kosovars El Salvador: leftists

  Croats: Serbs Guatemala: leftists

  Congo: most victims Political Islamists:

  North Korea: Koreans infidels/Americans

  Russia: Chechens Khmer Rouge: most victims

  (3) Subhumans (4) Demons

  Americans: Native Americans Germans: Jews

  Belgians: Congolese Croats: Jews

  Germans: Herero, Nama Slovaks: Jews

  Turks: Armenians Burundian Tutsi: Hutu

  Dehumanized Germans: Slavs, mentally ill, Sinti, and Roma Rwandan Hutu: Tutsi Political Islamists: Jews

  Japanese: most victims

  Britons: Kikuyu

  El Salvador: Indians

  Guatemalans: Maya

  Political Islamic Sudanese: black Africans

  Indonesians: East Timorese

  dehumanizing and demonizing tones toward the putatively problematic groups, providing a similar, powerful justification for eliminationist assaults.

  Analyzing potential perpetrators’ views of potential victims along these two dimensions provides critical distinctions for understanding their conception of the victims, and eliminationist politics’ internal logic, including what perpetrators do (or potential perpetrators might do) to deal with disparaged and despised groups. Category 1, existential enemies, contains people who are not dehumanized or demonized. They are targeted as enemies because they compete for resources or political power and, in the natural and unalterable struggle for domination and existence, must be vanquished before they vanquish you. In category 3, subhumans, are groups of dehumanized but not demonized people. They are seen as potentially but not necessarily dangerous barbarians or brutes or animals, unworthy of moral consideration. In category 2, heretics, are capable, demonized but not dehumanized human beings. Conceived of as not biologically different from other people, they, for some articulated reason—usually in the grip of a pernicious religious or secular ideology—willfully dissent from the hallowed creed and seek to harm you or prevent humanity’s salvation. And category 4, demons, are demonized and dehumanized beings. They are deemed inhuman creatures, willfully malevolent, a Christian secular incarnation of the devil or his minions.

  Perhaps surprisingly, these two imputed qualities of dehumanization and demonization not only are distinct from one another, but only infrequently appear together and rarely simultaneously in full force. Plumbing their relationship’s complexity and each notion’s generation would take us far afield. Two aspects need to be highlighted. Dehumanization, which almost inherently includes placing a diminished moral value on the dehumanized, is an attributed status principally informing how you treat such beings. Demonization, which is about others’ moral depravity and willful threat, is principally an attribute of how you think such beings treat or would treat you. These two qualities are not logically or empirically conjoined. Second, demonized beings tend to be thought of as too dangerous to live among you, which militates against people demonizing slaves or serfs o
r people too numerous (or in some ways too useful) to get rid of. Beasts of burden need not also be demons. Demonization, however, is often attached to people of the same nationality, ethnicity, even religion adhering to threatening political ideologies or political movements, so dehumanizing them (a biologically based inferiority) makes no sense, as you would explicitly or implicitly be dehumanizing yourself.

  Discourses dehumanizing and demonizing ethnic, social, political, or other groups typically enjoy popular participation and assent. Such discourses’ purpose, when not already taken for granted in a political culture, is to persuade others. When political regimes are also animated by such views, they can further intensify and spread the already powerful prejudices using governmental offices, the news media, and the educational system, and now the Internet. This creates a hothouse effect, turning such discourses into much of society’s common sense, percolating both downward and upward from civil society’s informal conversations, with people already harboring such views finding their views intensifying and becoming more central to their outlook. In almost all eliminationist discourses presaging eliminationist assaults, such broad popular participation and assent exists.

  The categories emerging from the dimensions of dehumanization and demonization suggest certain patterns of outcomes and explanations, but they do not provide a full account of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults, because other critical factors also influence the actors’ thinking and opportunities to act. Two other critical elements need to be examined, ultimately on a case-by-case basis. The perpetrators embed their understanding of the targeted group in broader social theories about politics, society, and humanity, and moral theories about goodness and right conduct. Some important general things can be said about this. Second, partly derived from this are perpetrators’ conceptions of the perniciousness of their targets, the source of the perniciousness, and the danger’s imminence.20

  People, both leaders and followers, consciously or not, adopt social and moral theories that guide them in deciding how to deal with people seemingly posing an extreme threat to their lives or well-being, or to cherished goals. Whether we call these stances theories, mindsets, or simply ways of thinking about disposing of such people, different approaches are discernible that form patterns: Certain ways of categorizing targeted peoples go hand-in-hand with certain kinds of programs. Logically and empirically, a different type of moral and social thinking tends to inform considerations of how to deal with each of the different kinds of targets, existential enemies, subhumans, heretics, and demons.

  Those facing existential enemies typically adopt a realpolitik approach and moral theory to their victims, which historically has governed group conflicts, and even in our time, probably more than any other. The world consists of power and domination, and intergroup life is inherently conflictual, with little possibility of peaceable and mutually beneficial solutions. In this world of zero-sum conflicts, you renounce violence and brutality at your peril. For eliminationist politics governed by such thinking, survival or prosperity mandates that you deal with your enemies—even though they are human beings like you and not demonic—according to dog-eat-dog realism. This, together with sufficient prejudice or group conflict, justifies eliminating your enemies. Slaughters and eliminationist assaults against subhumans, not necessarily total or gargantuan, follow as such thinking is applied to national or cultural groups contesting (or potentially contesting) power or territory.

  Those conceiving of enemies as heretics are themselves typically acting in the name of religious movements, whether classical religions such as Christianity or Islam, or secular religions such as communism (grounded in Marxism), or alternately in the battle against such movements. Their social and moral theory is concerned with bringing about the end of days, or a new order ushering in the terrestrial millennium, or at least preventing others from imposing on society a seemingly dystopian vision or apocalypse. Their need and justification is the call of God or history or a utopian end to conflict and facilitation of harmony and plenty. This thinking renders human beings puny abstractions, robbing them of moral standing or protection that is overridden by the moral call to bring about utopia. A stock Khmer Rouge phrase about those refusing to reform themselves and serve the revolution, repeated often during their murderous reign, encapsulates this thinking: “Keeping [urban dwellers] is no benefit; losing them is no loss.”21 Teeda Butt Mam, a survivor, heard it herself, as she explains: “They told us we were void. We were less than a grain of rice in a large pile. The Khmer Rouge said that the Communist revolution could be successful with only two people. Our lives had no significance to their great Communist nation, and they told us, ‘To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.’”22 The eliminationist politics following from such thinking, often found in onslaughts against heretics—said to embody the demonic principles or ideas they bear—can easily escalate to gargantuan slaughters, because these religious and political-religious movements’ and regimes’ adherents can see their enemies to be legion, as they consist not only of active ideological opponents but those who merely adhere to the old order or rival religious or political views.

  The utilitarian social and moral theory strongly characterizing eliminationist onslaughts against subhumans sees these dehumanized people in purely instrumental terms, to be killed, kept alive, or enslaved according to the perpetrators’ interests and needs. If subhumans are too numerous, then you kill the unnecessary or troublesome ones. If you need labor to produce your food or goods, then you enslave them. This mindset differs from that of realpolitik because the utilitarian calculus leads its bearers to dispose of people utterly callously, according to an economic calculus similar to using or disposing of animals or other resources. Edmond Picard, a Belgian senator, captures this mindset’s effects in his description of a caravan of dehumanized Africans, enslaved as porters carrying massive loads around rapids, whom he encountered in 1896 in the Belgian Congo:Unceasingly we meet these porters . . . black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loin-cloth for clothing, frizzy and bare head supporting the load—box, bale, ivory tusk . . . barrel-chested; most of them sickly, drooping under a burden increased by tiredness and insufficient food—a handful of rice and some stinking dried fish; pitiful walking caryatids, beasts of burden with thin monkey legs, with drawn features, eyes fixed and round from preoccupation with keeping their balance and from the daze of exhaustion. They come and go like this by the thousands . . . requisitioned by the State armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, trotting with bent knees, belly forward, an arm raised to steady the load, the other leaning on a long walking-stick, dusty and sweaty, insects spreading out across the mountains and valleys their many files and their task of Sisyphus, dying along the road or, the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages.23

  Picard’s description of the effects of the Belgians’ brutal utilitarianism was, if in different form, articulated fifty years later by Himmler as a normative principle in a 1943 speech in Posen to the assembled leadership corps of the SS:For the SS Man, one principle must apply absolutely: we must be honest, decent, loyal, and comradely to members of our own blood, and to no one else. What happens to the Russians, the Czechs, is totally indifferent to me. Whatever is available to us in good blood of our type, we will take for ourselves, that is, we will steal their children and bring them up with us, if necessary. Whether other races live well or die of hunger is only of interest to me insofar as we need them as slaves for our culture; otherwise that doesn’t interest me. Whether 10,000 Russian women fall down from exhaustion in building a tank ditch is of interest to me only insofar as the tank ditches are finished for Germany.24

  Other than abducting those Slavic children who, according to the Germans’ pseudo-biologistic racism, were of good racial stock, the Germans were to use the Slavic peoples mercilessly as production factors—which, it is worth noting, differed from Himmler and Ge
rmans’ conception of Jews as demons to be exterminated.

  When perpetrators want nothing from their subhuman targets but their land, they dispose of them one way or another, as required. When perpetrators are imperial colonialists not wishing to fully settle the territory and displace the putative subhumans, then their killing, though sometimes massive—as was the Belgians’ in Congo and the Germans’ in Poland and the Soviet Union—is usually more selective. When perpetrators see the putative subhumans as supportive (or potentially supportive) of resistance against them, they dispose of them murderously.