A striking feature of perpetrators’ stance toward subhumans standing in their way—by just being there or being seen as potentially resisting or prone to adopting demonized ideologies—is how prone they are to using eliminationist violence, how rarely they seek other solutions, how little are the hesitations, how quick is the trigger reflex, and how low the standard is for them to conclude the putative subhumans are or will become a threat. This common propensity among such perpetrators existed in Guatemala, as a secret CIA cable from Guatemala to Washington in February 1982 describes. Even though, the CIA reported, “the army has yet to encounter any major guerrilla force in the area,” it conducted an extensive eliminationist campaign against the Maya, following its instructions to “destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (EGP) and eliminate all sources or resistance.” What did this mean in an area where the guerrillas were not present? The CIA report explains: “The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil [Maya] population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.” Because of the perpetrators’ beliefs about the putative subhumans, they need little real evidence to conclude that a given village, people and buildings, must be destroyed. The CIA cable further explains: “When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or a village it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed. The army has found that most of the villages have been abandoned before the military forces arrive. An empty village is assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed.”25 The CIA rightly said the Maya’s hostility—not welcoming this murderous army with open arms—“is assumed.” Just as one would preemptively clear away brush to prevent brush fires, the Guatemalan regime and its followers cut down the subhuman Mayan brush before the guerrillas (here not even present) could set them off. Starting soon thereafter, the Guatemalan perpetrators executed a detailed, coordinated plan to sweep through Mayan areas, slaughtering the men, women, and children they found, because they defined the putatively subhuman Maya, likened to animals, as supporters or potential supporters of the still small, barely potent insurgency.
Perpetrators treat demons according to a perverted or inverted categorical imperative. The perpetrators act not out of a belief in zero-sum realpolitik or an eschatological mindset (though that might also be present), or some utilitarian calculus (unless the calculus always produces the same result), but according to their social and moral theory that they must destroy demons because doing so is in itself right, a warped categorical imperative. A German perpetrator from Vienna, who helped slaughter more than two thousand Jews in Mogilev in the Soviet Union, explained to his wife how his conception of the Jews helped calm his visceral discomfort at acting on this imperative: “My hand was shaking a bit with the first cars,” he wrote. “By the tenth car, I was aiming calmly and shooting dependably at the many women, children and babies. Bearing in mind that I have two babies at home, I knew that they would suffer exactly the same treatment, if not ten times as bad, at the hands of these hordes.”26 Perpetrators easily imagine beings they consider born demons committing the most heinous acts, as this man did, fantasizing as he shoots babies that the Jewish “hordes” might do “ten times as bad”!—whatever that could possibly mean. The perpetrators see themselves duty bound to eliminate such born demons, ideally to destroy them, even if they might control and temporarily use them before the final reckoning. They also, as the German serving at the Chelmno death camp conveyed in saying the Jews are born subhuman criminals, see killing such beings as natural. Himmler, in his Posen speech, made clear that annihilating the putative Jewish demons had become common sense: “I am thinking now of the evacuation of the Jews, the extirpation of the Jewish people. It is one of those things that’s easy to say: ‘The Jewish people will be extirpated,’ says every Party comrade, ‘that’s quite clear, it’s in our program: elimination of the Jews, extirpation; that’s what we’re doing.’” Because Himmler and the German perpetrators believed it necessary and just to extirpate such demons, Himmler could with genuineness offer his listeners a paean to their initial and enduring purity: “We can say that we have carried out this most difficult task out of love for our own people. And we have suffered no harm to our inner self, our soul, our character in so doing.”27
These mindsets can escalate to mass murder, even colossal ones. Whether they do, as we see, depends on many factors, including opportunity and contingent developments, such as political leaders attaining power wishing to act upon them. When they do act, such eliminationist conceptions can and do lead to different policies precisely because these beliefs and mindsets are compatible with multiple eliminationist practices. The people considering eliminating dehumanized or demonized people typically focus more on the need to eliminate the victims somehow using the functionally equivalent and compatible eliminationist means, rather than on specific policy proposals.
Leaders and followers alike generally do not publicly discuss (it is unnecessary) their eliminationist conceptions’ various practical potentialities—which depend upon contingent developments—until or shortly before the attack. This poses few if any problems for mobilizing the perpetrators and broader support, because widespread eliminationist beliefs preparing the way suggest the kinds of things that are sensible and that eventually will be done. If you know a wildfire, hurricane, or flood is coming your way, you need not hear of the necessity of protective measures, and when you learn of logical options or the ones the authorities adopt, you understand immediately the reasons for them and are likely to implement or support them to protect yourself and your family, property, and community. Putative human threats differ from natural disasters, but when severe—you believe another people wishes to enslave or kill all your people—the logic of understood response and necessary action are no different or less pressing. Hence the ease of activating and mobilizing previously latent or dormant beliefs for eliminationist assaults. What differs from a looming natural catastrophe is precisely the human (actually subhuman or demonic) element of the threat, often engendering a personalized fury in would-be and actual perpetrators, and, second, unlike natural catastrophes from which one can flee or just protect oneself, one can strike down the human threats, seeking to eliminate them altogether. Although perpetrators might not ideally choose the most radical and final eliminationist solution, if other eliminationist options appear insufficient, then extermination becomes more expedient. In some societies perpetrators merely wait for an opportunity to act. Opportunity becomes the limiting or enabling condition rather than the motive.
As we see, several factors influence when and what people will do to ensure their subjective sense of security and well-being. Still, certain patterns emerge.
Mass murders and eliminationist onslaughts against existential enemies— the Serbs’ serial assaults on Croats, Bosniaks, and Kosovars, and Saddam Hussein’s assaults on Kurds, Shias, and others—usually result from the brutal logic of war without moral restraints, including the one-sided war tyrants wage to sustain their conquest of their own countries’ populations, even when the victims are considered neither demons nor subhumans. This occurs in the struggle for territory or for extremely scarce or valuable resources, but also develops when perpetrators consider an enemy to have waged illegitimately savage war. Such assaults are often undertaken by tyrannical leaders seeking power and advantage at all costs, using terror and mass murder as a means of securing their suzerainty. How regimes deal with existential enemies is most difficult to explain in the sense of its being the least obvious. As realpolitik governs its amoral thinking, it can produce subjugation and selective killing, or more thoroughgoing slaughters. If territory is to be cleared, then the killing and elimination can be vast. If the eliminationist thrust is principally for domination, less killing ensues, because terror can work with much smaller killings. The social and moral theory underlying the perpetrators’ conceptions
of the victims, group and political life, and acceptable conduct inform the perpetrators’ choices. After all, most vanquished enemies in most wars are neither dehumanized nor demonized (and therefore qualify in eliminationist terms as existential enemies), and the winners, the potential perpetrators, choose not to eliminate them, lethally or otherwise.
The eliminations and slaughters of heretics include many of our time’s most massive ones. They are typically ideological assaults, whether politically or religiously based. The perpetrators deem the targets so inimical to their vision of the world as to be currently incorrigible, and therefore necessary to eliminate. The perpetrators’ visions of bringing about the political or religious millennium often render individual human beings into building blocks or inconsequential obstacles that must sometimes, if with a heavy heart, be discarded. Because such annihilations and eliminations are ideological and wedded to such un-achievable goals, they often engender a drive to kill that is firmly rooted in the fundamentals of the perpetrators’ worldview: Hence frequently their long duration and numerous victims. Potential perpetrators, lacking a positive reason to kill or permanently eliminate them, such as seeing them as an uncontrollable threat, often opt to de-demonize them by repressing and reeducating them, essentially a form of forced conversion, whether to a conventional religion or a secular one, such as communism. Whatever the chosen means, perpetrators tend to subject peoples construed as dangerous heretics to semipermanent eliminationism, because they see the enemies of the regime (religious or secular) to be vast and needing constant weeding; hence the establishment of totalitarian-like control, including camp systems that institutionalize eliminationist measures as politics’ and society’s constituent feature. There are two types of such political regimes. World systems are explicitly totalitarian in aspiration because they seek to reorder the world according to a fixed blueprint. Yet the world will not conform to the unworkable vision, so such regimes create more permanent institutions of domination, institutionalize their elimination programs, and make them their systems’ permanent or semipermanent part, lasting longer than other eliminationist forays. Non-world systems, non-totalitarian in aspiration, usually of the political Right, are more focused and less destructively omnivorous. The ideology animating the perpetrators’ and the designated enemies’ identities critically influences which type of eliminationist regime emerges.
People have a proclivity to eliminate subhumans. How they do, with what utilitarian positions, depends critically on their particular social theory about the putative subhumans, including their potential threat, and the perpetrators’ moral theory about themselves. The eliminationist options are principally a mixture of repression, enslavement, and killing. Shortly after General Lothar von Trotha’s annihilation edict for the Herero, German Chief of Staff General Alfred von Schlieffen explained the situation to Chancellor Bernard von Bülow: “One can agree with his plan of annihilating the whole people or driving them from the land. The possibility of whites living peacefully together with blacks after what has happened is very slight unless at first the blacks are reduced to forced labor, that is, a sort of slavery. An enflamed racial war can be ended only through the annihilation or complete subjugation of one of the parties.” For some perpetrators, locked in a territorial struggle, annihilation becomes a perceived necessity. For others there is a drive to eliminate the putative subhumans as they stand in the way of other goals, which for Germans during the Nazi period was world conquest in the context of ceaseless Darwinian struggle among races. Generally, the larger the dehumanized groups (if subjugation seems necessary), the larger (and more brutal) are the slaughters and eliminations. The other strategy for dealing with large groups of putative subhumans is decapitating their elites and killing a number sufficient to keep them in check.
Eliminationist attacks against demons, beings deemed an incorrigible extreme threat, also becomes permanent politics by total mass murder, or mass murder as social control. Because elimination, including extirpation of the putative demons, is an end in itself, the perpetrators generally wait for the opportunity to solve their so-called problem once and for all and then embark on systematic projects of total annihilation.
From Discourse to Action
Language, talk, conversation, discourses, and imagery are the medium of mass elimination, more properly the media that prepare people to countenance or perpetrate mass murder and elimination. They become more eliminationist in potential when their eliminationist fundamentals constitute a substantial part of a society’s or group’s culture or subculture. And the manner in which a group’s conversations deprecate other people critically informs its members’ manner of treating those people once an eliminationist campaign has been decided upon.
We need to think more about several critical things we know too little about in general: language as the soil containing the seeds of action, in this case mass murder and eliminationist politics more generally; the mechanisms transforming language and belief into action; and state-societal relations and the place of eliminationist language and discourse in them.
One of eliminationist politics’ most crucial and least understood aspects is how people, including potential perpetrators, make the transition from an initial language state and stage, composed of prejudice and hatred or the desire to purge and transform society, to a second one of talk of an actual elimination campaign, and then to the third in which the language of action is accompanied by its implementation. For eliminationist leaders, these transitions are generally straightforward and obvious. From prejudice and hatred, or the coolly calculated understanding of power, political leaders develop first the ideals of a partly or fully purged society, then the intention to turn the ideal into action should propitious circumstances materialize, and then, when the conditions for action are actually in place, they develop, promulgate, and begin to implement an actual policy of elimination. Ideals, in this case, are normative notions about a society’s and polity’s constitution, and the hated or feared group’s disposition. Intentions are the resolve to find a way to bring about that vision of a reconstituted society and polity. Policy is the actual implementation of plans reflecting the intentions.
The distinctiveness empirically and logically of each of these stages is clear. It is analogous to the process of first wanting to build a house of your dreams (the ideal), deciding that the time has arrived, so you begin thinking about finding a property and engaging an architect (the intention), and then after setting sights on the land and getting everything else in place, you acquire the property, commission a design, and build the house (the policy). Analyses of mass murder and eliminations typically fail to make these necessary distinctions, collapsing the three stages into an overwhelming focus on actual policy.
To understand more than policy implementation’s nuts and bolts, including identifying and making sense of imminently eliminationist political constellations, we need to explore in each eliminationist onslaught and future actual and potential one, all three aspects: ideals, intentions, and policy.
Mehmet Talât, Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, and Radovan Karadžić in Yugoslavia, and leader after leader went through these stages.h For Hitler, the ideal of a world without Jews dates from his political career’s beginning, which he articulated in one of his first political speeches in 1920 as “the removal of the Jews from our Volk,” which he specified during another speech that year as being so necessary that “we are animated with an inexorable resolve to seize the Evil [the Jews] by the roots and to exterminate it root and branch.” Yet Hitler—then a beer-hall rabble-rouser—was aware his ideals would remain idle until he had the capacity and opportunity to act, so he prophesied that an organization must arise “which one day will proceed with the deed.” Two years later journalist Josef Hell asked Hitler what he would do if ever he had a free hand with the Jews. Hitler, according to Hell, fell into a kind of reverie, “was seized by a sort of paroxysm,” raised his voice, and eventually shouted:Onc
e I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.28
Hitler knew that for his ideals to be acted upon, he needed power. Once in power, more than a decade later, Hitler, the prudent politician, knew he must bide his time before erecting the gallows. Still, his eliminationist ideals did become firm intentions, which he began to act upon in the 1930s first with generally nonlethal means. Then with the attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, when a comprehensive lethal program against the Jews finally became practical, Hitler acted on his by then firm intention, initiating the genocidal assault. That Hitler’s long-standing, articulated murderous ideals preceded his formulated intentions or plans, which preceded implemented policy is, as his own public and private words repeatedly conveyed, irrefutable.29
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