For Mao and the Chinese communist leaders, the ideal of a transformed and purified communist society derived from Marxism. The knowledge that they must use violence to achieve it derived from the experience of their mentors, the Soviets. Therefore, the intention to practice thoroughgoing eliminationist politics took shape much earlier than it had with the Soviets, crystallizing in mass-murderous thinking as the communists’ victory over the nationalists and assumption of power neared. In 1948, Mao in “agrarian reform” study materials conveyed to the party membership that his schemes for restructuring overpopulated China required that “one-tenth of the peasants would have to be destroyed.” One tenth of half a billion is fifty million. In 1948, Jen Pi-shih of the Communist Party’s Central Committee declared in a speech to the party cadres that “30,000,000 landlords and rich peasants would have to be destroyed.”30 The communist leadership’s intention already well formulated (and communicated to their ideologically like-minded followers), they began, upon taking power, to implement their eliminationist policies in programs of population movement, mass executions, and mass incarcerations of landlords, rich peasants, and other class enemies in the vast camp system they created. The communists exterminated Chinese on the order of magnitude that Mao and Jen had foretold well before they had begun.
The Serbian leadership had long harbored the ideal of eliminating non-Serbs and non-Orthodox from their dreamed-of greater Serbia, which as part of Yugoslavia was peopled by other ethnic groups. Among the many striking aspects of the Serbs’ mass-murderous and eliminationist assault on Croats, Bosniaks, and Kosovars are the many Serbian intellectuals involved, having also prepared the killing fields by enunciating and broadly disseminating eliminationist ideals among ordinary Serbs. The most widely read and influential Serbian literary work among Serbs was The Mountain Wreath, an epic poem published in 1847 by Vladika Petar Petrović Njegoš, who was the Montenegrin Orthodox Church’s head, Montenegro’s ruler, and modern Montenegrin and Serbian literature’s founder. The Mountain Wreath explicitly glorifies and calls for mass extermination. This archbishop’s poem, recognizing different eliminationist means’ functional equivalence and that the heretical enemies are, as heretics in principle are, redeemable, adopts a broader eliminationist tone, offering Muslims the eliminationist choice: convert or die:The blasphemers of Christ’s name
we will baptize with water or with blood!
We’ll drive the plague out of the pen!
Let the song of horror ring forth,
A true altar on a blood-stained rock.31
Grounded in this blood-stained, horror-exalting poem and vibrant corpus of literature, art, folk songs, symbols, and mythology, especially the Kosovo myth calling for vengeance against the Turks (a synonym for Muslims) and the Serbian empire’s reestablishment, Serbs developed a cultural orientation portraying themselves as a Christlike, victim people, needing to turn the sword on their enemies to re-create Christian Serbian virtue’s lost kingdom. In an infamous Serbian Memorandum published in 1986, sixteen members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences called for Serbs to prevent the further strangulation, indeed a grinding cultural and actual genocide of their people, and thereby provided the intellectual ideals and foundation for Milošević to act when the opportunity soon presented itself. Two hundred Serbian intellectuals submitted the memorandum as a petition to the Yugoslavian and Serbian national assemblies. It declared: “In less than fifty years, during two successive generations [the Serbian people was] twice exposed to physical annihilation, forced assimilation, conversion, cultural genocide, ideological indoctrination, devaluation and rejection of its own tradition under an imposed guilt complex, [and] intellectually and politically disarmed.” All Serbs had to be brought together into one nation-state for self-defense and to vanquish their enemies in their midst.32 Such was the Serbian social discourse structured around an ideal enunciated in poetry, myth, and “scientific” pronouncements, long before a firm intent could crystallize, and long before political organization came into being and opportunity materialized to make these Serbian intellectuals, poets, and leaders’ ideals the basis for a practical program and an executable policy.
More than in any of our time’s other eliminationist assaults, the Serbian leaders had imbibed and themselves helped to construct a discourse composed of a set of articulated eliminationist ideals, glorified in hortatory literary works, including poetry. When opportunity appeared, a striking number of such literary mass murderers forged the sword from the pen. Radovan Karadžić, a practicing psychiatrist and published poet, powerfully embodies how ideals precede intention and then their realization in policy. In 1971, he published the poem “Sarajevo,” which like many of his poems courses with the images of annihilation it foretold:I can hear the disaster actually marching
transformed into a bug—when the moment arrives:
it will crush the bug as a worn-out singer
is crushed by the silence and transformed into a voice.
The city is burning like a lump of incense,
our conscience is twisting in the smoke, too.
Empty clothes glide through the city. The stone,
built into houses, is dying red. The plague!33
Karadžić would become the Bosnian Serbs’ leader and the orchestrator of the Serbs’ mass murder and elimination in Bosnia. This included their almost four-year siege of multiethnic and therefore detested Sarajevo, destroying much of the city, systematically shelling its cultural institutions housing Bosnian Muslim history and culture, killing thousands, and driving away many more. Finally, Karadžić was able to fulfill his once idle ideal—twenty years later—so he did.
Vuk Drašković was even more explicit about his early mass-murderous ideals. Perhaps the leading figure among the Serbian writers’ cultural surge in the 1980s, he produced a spate of novels spreading anti-Croatian and anti-Muslim eliminationist ideals. Drašković, picking up on the deeply entrenched Serbian literary tradition of demonizing Muslims, penned a personal dedication in one of Vojislav Lubarda’s own novels, The Prayer, which he sent to Lubarda, thanking him for his inspirational novels conjuring hatred and calling for revenge against Bosnian Muslims, glorifying violence, and revering the knife. Drašković, adopting this theme in his own novel The Knife, wrote Lubarda: “While I was writing The Knife and both Prayers, and even The Judge, I could not shake off myself, out of myself, the excitement, the desperation and the desire, a horrible and immense desire to transform my pen into a sword . . . an excitement that has haunted me since the day when I read [your] Proud Stumbling. I thank you for it.” Drašković’s ideal, his desire, lay dormant. Then opportunity came. So this immensely popular and influential Serbian novelist, weaver of eliminationist ideals, founded and led a major Serbian nationalist political party and established the paramilitary Serbian Guard that committed mass murder and eliminations against Croats and Bosnians. The Serbian Guard’s military commander explained that Drašković’s words, his ideals, had moved him to action already in the 1980s, before Yugoslavia’s breakup: “I beat up many Muslims and Croatians on vacation in Cavtat [Croatia] because of his Nož [The Knife]. Reading that book, I would see red, I would get up, select the biggest fellow on the beach, and smash his teeth.”34
For political leaders’ followers and like-minded populaces, the various stages of ideals, intentions, and action, and the transitions through them, are less clear and more variable. Generally, followers move through a phase of discourse, a societal conversation (the regime might take a prominent, even preeminent, role) about the putatively problematic people that is typically heavy in deprecation, imprecation, and hatred, and light and vague in proposals; then, around the time of the leadership’s decision to attack, to considering programmatic solutions to the problem; and then finally to a conversation about action and the willingness to act, and, for those participating, the action itself. We saw Adolf Eichmann describing the three stages he went through: “I was an idealist. When I reached the conclusion that it wa
s necessary to do to the Jews what we did, I worked with the fanaticism a man can expect from himself.” First his ideals, then his conclusion about the right policy, then his willing and devoted action.35 The populace usually skips the intention stage—after all, ordinary people do not formulate policy—which is when the wish for a policy exists yet leaders must wait for the right time to enact it. For the populace, the three stages of variable length are imbibing and spreading notions about the putatively problematic people’s noxiousness, including often only some vague solutions; then either being signaled or learning of an impending solution; and finally resolving to support it (or not), including those called upon to willingly take part in the eliminationist assault.
In Kenya, the British settlers easily moved from having initial beliefs dehumanizing the Kikuyu to, when facing a powerful Kikuyu liberation movement and a few attacks, believing in radical action to meet the Kikuyu’s threat, to finally accepting or, as many did, even agitating that the radical measures must be eliminationist, even lethal. When dehumanized people appear to be no longer manageable or useful to those dehumanizing them, it seems so sensible as to feel natural to move rapidly from a utilitarian stance of domination and exploitation to being willing, even eager, to kill them or exploit them more brutally. Such a stance predominated among the British colonialists from when they colonized Kenya in the first part of the twentieth century. Francis Hall, who fought the Kikuyu, explains: “There is only one way of improving the Wakikuyu [and] that is wipe them out; I should be only too delighted to do so, but we have to depend on them for food supplies.” 36 When the British came to see Kikuyu as undependable and, worse, an active threat, they altered their practical thinking. For some British the transition was immediate, for others—holdout liberals—it lasted a year. The British moved from the half-century-long classical colonial domination, land expropriation, and labor exploitation stance, to seeking near total elimination, with differences only about the appropriate mix of killing, expulsion, and incarceration, and, for some, rehabilitation. Frank Lloyd, a Briton later knighted for his service to the British Empire, worked in the colonial administration throughout the eliminationist assault. Mau Mau, he explained, was “bestial,” an “evil movement.” He left no doubt about his and others’ conclusions: “Mau Mau had to be eliminated at all costs.” And by any means, as “something had to be done to remove these people from society.”37
Again and again one group’s members make an easy transition from an initial state of holding dehumanizing and/or demonizing beliefs about other groups’ or people’s perniciousness, which in their daily lives are tertiary, simmering with only latent potential beneath the surface, to a second state of these same beliefs becoming utterly central to their bearers’ consciousness and stance toward society and politics. All people can think of notions, beliefs, emotions they have about one thing or another that exist in relative states of latency, often for long periods, and then when circumstances change suddenly become far more central and urgent in their lives, thinking, and acting. This happens commonly with religious beliefs. During her life, a person’s belief in God may move between a relatively latent state of keeping God at bay, to times, perhaps during a personal crisis, a family death, or developing a relationship with a more religious person, when God becomes more central, perhaps only to recede again, and then continuing to wax and wane, become more and less present, more and less of an accepted guide to practice, including church attendance, and self-governance. The bedrock belief in God may never change. How important or central it is, in the complex of that person’s beliefs about the world, and in his or her complicated personal and social life, with all its personal, professional, and communal demands, how that person understands God’s place in his or her inventory of conduct, and many other aspects of that person’s life, can vary enormously, from being relatively latent to relatively manifest.
Less exalted beliefs, including eliminationist ones, move along this latent/manifest dimension. Bedrock beliefs demonizing or dehumanizing others that include hatred, prejudices, and fantastical notions, suggest in their logic that those people should have their pernicious qualities neutralized. Yet such beliefs might also find—depending on personal, social, and most critically political conditions, circumstances, and opportunities—lesser and greater expression and be a lesser or greater guide to action.
One Yugoslavian diplomat, a non-nationalist ethnic Croat, who knew from his own experience that only the communist dictatorship’s force had made the intense hatreds latent, used to love traveling in Bosnia’s “lovely countryside” and “entrancing” cities and towns. Yet he knew “there was a darker shadow to it all, not yet premonitory for us, but causing unease . . . we also sensed something was amiss.” What was it?
To be sure, the visible evidence of an undisturbed, ethnically mixed life was real. But something seemed to smolder beneath, a kind of second reality. Undercurrents of intolerance and suspicion could be spotted in unguarded, chance remarks of hateful envy or in snide comments about “those Croats,” or “Serbs,” or “Muslims,” “always sticking together”; in occasional displays of rage over real or alleged pork-barrel monies “always benefiting them”; and in furtive glances at Muslims going to the mosque in a largely Christian village, or at Catholics or Orthodox going to their churches in predominantly Muslim towns. Sotto voce one was told of widespread mutual mistrust, more in the countryside than in Sarajevo, but in some Sarajevo suburbs too. But this particular darker shadow was nothing uniquely Bosnian. It is equally descriptive of the conditions in the 1970s and particularly in the 1980s in many regions and localities all over Yugoslavia.38
Superficially, Serbs and Croats got along with each other, and with Muslims, without their prejudices, suspicions, or hatreds being extinguished. Their simmering antipathies persisted despite the communist leadership’s genuine endeavors to expel them from the minds and hearts of Yugoslavia’s various ethnic groups who, clinging also to their ethnic identities, never became “Yugoslavs.” The communist leadership’s multiethnic composition—Josip Tito was a Croat; the other leaders were Serbs, Slovenes, and Muslims—and the Marxist teaching of socialist harmony enforced by state power produced a thin veneer concealing the latent hatred. In Yugoslavia, as elsewhere, this time servicing an anti-eliminationist ideal, the government was ineffectual in teaching people views that went against their deepest beliefs and values.
During the 1970s, the time of greatest Potemkin harmony, one elderly Serb confessed about Croats, in the words of the American diplomat to whom he spoke, that “sometimes when he looked into their eyes, he could not help recalling the blood that stained the hands of those responsible for the slaughter of Serbs during the Second World War.”39
“He could not help recalling” this but he recalled it only “sometimes” under the Tito years’ politically imposed and harshly enforced long truce and cohabitation. One can easily see such thinking quickly moving from this relatively latent state to being manifest, central to this man’s views about, and bearing toward, the Croats in his sphere, when socialist harmony’s patina dissipated in a historical instant and expressing ethnic identities, prejudices, hatreds was unshackled, allowing ethnicity to resume as the main organizing principle of the country’s social and political life. So this man smiled disingenuously when such smiling was life’s condition, conscious of his real animus toward Croats—perhaps a mixture of hatred and anger, and of questions about what the Croats would again do with opportunity. Would he have smiled the same once life’s conditions, once his country’s and region’s politics, no longer demanded it but instead allowed for the opposite, and more? The same Serb harboring the same beliefs about Croats could, as so many did, become utterly transformed in his outward stance as his beliefs migrated from relative latency to a manifest state calling for urgent action. Hence the reams of testimony, especially from Bosnian Muslims, about their once-friendly neighbors falling upon them, revealing themselves to harbor the worst views, and expressing t
hem physically, by beating, raping, torturing, driving from their homes, and killing those with whom they, as this Serb had, once lived and worked side-by-side smiling.
Tutsi survivors and Hutu mass murderers alike recount how the Hutu’s hatred for Tutsi and discrimination against them was the underlying context for neighborly coexistence—which contrary to how some portray it, particularly foreigners who did not live it, was often not so neighborly—and also the context for the Hutu’s rapidly turning on them. I spoke about the issue with Esperance Nyirarugira, a rape victim, whose parents, six brothers, and other relatives Hutu neighbors all “cut into pieces with a machete.”
Esperance Nyirarugira, Concessa Kayiraba, and Veronique Mukasinafi, Rwamagana District, Eastern Province, Rwanda, April 2008
Q: Were these just local people who lived near here?
A: Yes, they were living here; they were not only neighbors but also our friends.
Q: Why would they do that to your family and to others?
A: I really don’t know. That one who killed my father was a good friend of his, very close friend. My dad had given him a cow. I really don’t understand.
Q: Did anybody force them to do it?
A: No. They killed us saying that we were Tutsi.
Q: Did you hear them say other things that would tell us anything about what they thought of Tutsi or why they were doing it?
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