B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  A: They were saying that Tutsi are dangerous, that they are snakes, they should be all killed, they should be exterminated.

  Q: And did many people say this?

  A: Yes, very many people were saying that.

  Q: How is it that they were one day living together and friends and then how did it change?

  A: I really don’t know. They changed like animals, we were living together, marrying each other, and people had kids together.

  Her friend, also a rape victim, Concessa Kayiraba agrees that the government “sensitized them [the Hutu] but they wouldn’t have done it if they [hadn’t] wanted to. They would have said that this person has shared everything with us; water, they have given us food and so on. . . . People you had given cows are the one who came and killed you. People who had married in both families killed their grandchildren. There are so many Hutu women in this area who took their children to hide them at their parents’ and they were killed by their brothers. . . . During the genocide people had changed. They had become like animals. They did not have any mercy for anyone.” Nyirarugira is clear about the reason for this: “Based on what I saw, Hutu thought of Tutsi as animals. They did not have the value of a human being.” Where did it come from?

  Q: Before the genocide, did you hear any anti-Tutsi propaganda?

  A: Yes, people were saying it.

  Q: But what kinds of things were being said?

  A: You could pass some people and they shout at you saying, “look at that cockroach,” “look at that snake.” All those kind of names. And during that time no Tutsi kid would pass in school.

  Kayiraba elaborates: “Hutu thought of Tutsi as animals because they were even calling them snakes. They were saying that when you want to kill snakes you hit them on the head. They said a lot of things. But they thought of us like animals . . . dangerous ones. They called us snakes most of the times because a snake is a very dangerous animal and poisonous.” According to their friend Veronique Mukasinafi, who with the others are part of a community of rape and genocide survivors, the Hutu used the very same language, images, and motivations from thirty years earlier when Hutu, then persecuting and killing Tutsi, apprehended her father “because they wanted to kill him. They took him and they were going to kill Tutsi, saying that they were cockroaches. They were calling their children snakes. Even in schools they were calling upon Tutsi to stand so that they can see them and Hutu to stay seated. Children were growing up knowing that they were either Tutsi or Hutu.”40

  A powerful, long-standing social discourse in the family, in the schools, by the government, with many signal moments, including the 1959 Hutu assault on Tutsi, conveyed the essential prejudicial notions and fanned that hatred. The Hutu killer Elie Ngarambe conveys the essence of this deeply rooted discourse of multiple strands:I am thirty-eight years old, I went to school even though I did not attend primary, and go to secondary. . . . But at school in 1983- 1984, I was studying in fifth grade and sixth grade. We used to be taught history. As soon as we entered the classrooms, they were asking your identity. They were asking, who were Hutu. You, this one is a Hutu, son of this one, who was born there, or this one who is a Tutsi was born in that place or there, so we grew up hearing those things. But we were also hearing the same things from our great-grandfather. We were hearing it also from our grandfather. When the war began in 1959 people [Tutsi] managed to flee, they went to the church and they did not . . . they managed to survive, others went to the neighboring provinces and they survived, but you think about it people were united that time. As the time went by . . . the cruelty also increased, the authority became tougher, the authority took tough measures, the enemy became Tutsi. In 1959 Tutsi felt discriminated and they fled away. After the Tutsi had fled Habyarimana took over the power in 1973 and that is when things became worse. It was impossible for Tutsi to get places in schools, and they couldn’t get jobs. . . . That is when they started the ideology of discriminating by region and race. It started to be chaos slowly, slowly and it was time for multiple political parties. Things became worse. Even the kid that learned that in school put it in practice based on what the teacher taught him. And that is how the killings started.41

  Hutu executioners describe how, while growing up around and playing soccer with Tutsi, they thought the worst things about them and said, as the mass murderer Pio Mutungirehe reports, that “we did not want them anywhere around us anymore.” Yet without the circumstances to act on these beliefs, they nevertheless lived with them relatively untroubled side-by-side. Another Hutu killer, Léopord Twagirayezu, captures this dissonant situation’s social and psychological complexity: It is awkward to talk about hatred between Hutu and Tutsi, because words changed meaning after the killings. Before, we [Hutu] could fool around among ourselves and say we were going to kill them all, and the next moment we would join them to share some work or a bottle. Jokes and threats were mixed together. We no longer paid heed to what we said. We could toss around awful words without awful thoughts. The Tutsi did not even get very upset. I mean, they didn’t draw apart because of those unfortunate discussions. Since then we have seen: those words brought on grave consequences.

  As Pio observes, believing and saying the things the Hutu did about the Tutsi, including drawing the logical conclusions about how they should solve their Tutsi problem, “it’s already sharpening the machete.” 42 And when the Hutu leaders activated the latent beliefs, ordinary Hutu took out their already sharpened machetes and used them. Simmering, smoldering hatreds conveyed in everyday talk are powerful, with a violent potential ready to be tapped. Ngarambe says it well that in the immediate period before the genocide, as the anti-Tutsi public discourse intensified, “the hatred grew, grew, grew, and things became worse when they said that the [president’s] plane crashed, because of what they [the Hutu] were taught, they thought ‘the enemy has come, he is going to kill you, they are fighting to come and take over the power, so let’s kill them [the Tutsi] and finish them all and we keep the country to ourselves.”43

  The Indonesians’ mass slaughter of communists surprised nearly all Western observers. Yet when the military engineered one eliminationist context, falsely blaming a failed coup on the lawful and peaceful Indonesian Communist Party, the passionately anticommunist military and religious political parties, with American encouragement, easily decided to initiate the annihilation of the communists. Once deciding upon this eliminationist solution to the electorally ascendant Communist Party’s political and social challenge, they easily mobilized anticommunist supporters across Indonesia, many being deeply religious, usually Islamic, of religious parties’ and orders’ followers, who butchered the atheistic communists among them, usually with bayonets or machetes, often leaving their bodies in rivers or caves, a potent warning to other would-be communists.

  The same has happened in so many mass slaughters and eliminations, from Turkey to the Holocaust to Guatemala to Rwanda, in eruptions that sometimes seem to come from nowhere—especially to outsiders knowing little more than that the perpetrators and victims were living intermingled relatively violence-free. Yet upon closer examination, these withering assaults have been shown to enjoy widespread social approval and participation because of hibernating, simmering, or only partly expressed beliefs by the peoples or groups whose members have risen to slaughter or eliminate the people they have always in their heart of hearts wanted to be rid of one way or another. Often members of the perpetrators’ group attack in unorganized or impromptu assaults, riots, or pogroms the members of the group the politically centrally initiated eliminationist program eventually victimizes. This in itself indicates eliminationist beliefs’ prior presence and their easy inflammation into violence. During the 1930s this occurred throughout Germany’s towns and villages once the Nazis governed Germany, and in Austria after Germany annexed it. Germans and Austrians previously living peacefully with Jews suddenly turned on them, sometimes at the behest of the regime’s officials or paramilitary storm troopers, persecuting them s
ocially and assaulting them physically. In Germany, even before Kristallnacht, the orchestrated nationwide proto-genocidal assault on the Jews in November 1938, Germans had made most of its rural areas and small towns Judenrein, “cleansed” of Jews, the Jews fleeing to the big cities’ relative anonymity. When in March 1938 the Germans marched in, ordinary Austrians spontaneously and ferociously assaulted and degraded the Jews among them, surprising even the Germans. Scenes of fur-bedecked Viennese women gleefully watching Jews compelled to wash streets with toothbrushes were emblematic. Then when the German government moved the eliminationist assault to its mass-murdering phase, many of these and other ordinary Germans and Austrians willingly lent themselves to it body and soul.

  A particularly significant moment when latent eliminationist beliefs became suddenly activated occurred across Eastern Europe, including in many locales in Lithuania, Ukraine, and Romania, in the immediate wake of the Germans’ attack on the Soviet Union at the end of June 1941. With the Germans’ emerging exterminationist assault upon the Jews giving the green light to the local peoples to vent their hatreds in violence, they sometimes in security forces, sometimes in paramilitaries, sometimes in impromptu groups, fell upon the Jews who for generations had lived among them, slaughtering them mercilessly, torturing them gleefully, sparing the Germans from doing the job themselves. In Eastern Galicia, Ukrainians rose up to slaughter Jews in village after village. Yeoshua Gertner, a survivor, reports from Eastern Galicia’s Kossiv region:We received reports from villages in the high mountains that initially struck us as hard to believe. The Hutsuls in the village of Jablonica, part of a mountain-dwelling Ukrainian group that had always lived in peace and harmony with the Jews, had seized the Jews in the village, locked them in a cellar on the pretext that the Romanians were coming to exterminate them, and herded them into the torrential Cheremosh River, where they all drowned. The man who had instigated this crime was reportedly the village priest. Only one Jewish woman survived; she fled to Kosov after the culprits had gone away. The next day the Hutsuls entered the neighboring village. To assure that no one would escape, they bound the Jews in barbed wire, in groups of three, before they tossed them into the rushing waters. There were seventy-four victims. The murderers looted everything they had left behind.

  Having completed their slaughter in the neighboring village, they went on to nearby Hriniowa. The Hutsuls who lived there, however, would not let them enter the village, maintaining that the killing of Jews was a matter for those native to the village, not for outsiders. In Hriniowa, no Jews were murdered; the local Hutsuls merely drove them from the village to Zabie and then looted their possessions.

  In Kosov, Hutsuls recounted what their priest had said about this in his sermon: those from Jablonica were much liked in the eyes of God, because they had both dispossessed and drowned the Jews; they would certainly be rewarded with Paradise. But the Hutsuls from Hriniowa, the priest intoned, would not enter the Garden of Eden. Yes, they had totally dispossessed the Jews but, for having been so neglectful as to spare their lives, would surely go to hell.44

  This uncoordinated but similar array of exterminationist forays, led by local elites, including sometimes priests who consecrated the exterminationist assaults, expressed the dual pathology of the powerful antisemitism coursing through the local cultures and peoples. The first pathology was the antisemitism itself, which, though differing from the racist-based form predominating among Germans, nevertheless was a fearsome religious-based antisemitism thoroughly demonizing the Jews as Christ killers, spoilers, and exploiters. The second pathology was this first one’s outgrowth, namely the antisemitically induced identification of the local Jews with the godless Bolsheviks, who had since 1939 occupied these regions, owing to the Hitler-Stalin Pact that had temporarily carved up Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe between the two mass murderers. Because the local peoples, as a matter of antisemitic hallucination, conceived of the Jews collectively as Bolsheviks, working with the Bolsheviks and committing or supporting the Bolsheviks’ crimes, when the Soviets retreated before the Germans’ military onslaught, they rose to rid themselves finally of the putative alien and pernicious Jewish presence, and did so with vengeance’s ferocious motivational fury in the most telling and cruel ways, by the hundreds and thousands in community after community. These mass murders are particularly significant because they, like so many of our time’s eliminationist assaults, demonstrate latent eliminationist beliefs rapidly channeling toward mass murder, and for two other reasons: Across regions and countries, from the north of Eastern Europe toward the south, the same latent hatred, without coordination, issued in kindred murderous results. Second, the local peoples committing the mass murder served not their own governments but an alien occupying force that had no legitimate authority over them whatsoever. The local peoples turned perpetrators were in no sense acting under state compulsion, or being obedient to authority, or being subjected to peer pressure by those serving in state units, or carrying out bureaucratic assignments. The local peoples turned willful perpetrators, finally able to act with impunity, were plainly and simply having a go at, and taking subjective revenge on, the hated and demonized Jews.

  If we think clearly about what we know about individual and social life in general, instead of allowing exterminationist and eliminationist assaults’ enormity to turn our heads inside-out, and to be explained away with mind-numbing clichés as out-of-this-world phenomena, then we can immediately grasp the normalcy of simmering, latent beliefs suddenly becoming manifest, potent, and deadly, and politically, which means as part of politics, how this works. How many individuals know others they believe (correctly or incorrectly) have wronged, injured, or treated them grossly unfairly, and, if allowed, would be happy, even eager, to beat up, “teach a lesson to,” “pay back,” perhaps kill them—and to do so with gusto? Some people feel this way about neighbors, coworkers, members of their social circle, not to mention competitors, outright antagonists, and those having vanquished them. Yet, with exceptions, these same people do not express their anger and hatreds, their conception of their tormentors’ due—in action or usually even verbally in public. Perhaps they do not think about it much, certainly not in these terms, because vengeance’s sine qua non—the opportunity to act with impunity—will never present itself. Yet if opportunity ever materialized, so the angry, resentful, and hating person could act with guaranteed impunity, even with social approval, then he likely would take his vengeance. If we think beyond one individual, to many people with such simmering hatreds born of the belief that another’s willful hands had unjustly and gravely harmed each of them, would we not expect many to eagerly exact revenge when socially sanctioned opportunity and impunity appeared?

  Why is it so hard to accept the same about the subterranean phenomenon of dehumanized and demonized conceptions of other people and other groups, of beliefs deeming them pernicious, dangerous, a source of great injury or a potential threat? They too burst out when political leaders offer bearers of such views the opportunity to vent them in word and particularly in deed. This is the real beast within unleashed. It is not some Conradian brute indiscriminately assaulting any targets just for fun, or some will-less automaton killing anyone just because someone tells him he should, or some fictitious bureaucratic mentality supposedly controlling the minds of modern man and woman. The beast is the latent prejudices, hatreds, and beliefs in others’ guilt or danger, which, when widely socially shared, quickly become manifest, and can be politically mobilized to produce eliminationist conflagrations.

  Nothing could be more ordinary.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Actual Minds, Actual Worlds

  PERHAPS THE MOST STUNNING fact about eliminationist and exterminationist politics is that the perpetrators almost always get their victims. In few social and political endeavors of comparable scale are the goals so regularly and fully achieved. Indeed, large eliminationist onslaughts, as we now know, usually begin only when the perpetrators are confident o
f success, owing to the overwhelmingly superior force they can unleash against defenseless people. More easily than the German army swept away the archaic Polish army in September 1939, the perpetrators, steamrolling stunned civilian populations, kill and eliminate a strikingly high percentage of their intended victims—often approaching 100 percent. We know this because indications of failure—substantial armed resistance, perpetrator casualties, mass escapes (that are not effectively expulsions)—rarely exist.

  Thus, unlike with other state policies, what produces an eliminationist policy’s successful implementation is not the issue. Instead, it is: What do the perpetrators want to do, and why? Perpetrators’ wants and their ensuing acts are themselves embedded in a larger transformative agenda of recasting and refashioning their world. What kinds of worlds do the perpetrators seek to create? What worlds do they make?

  Eliminationist politics is a politics of radical refashioning. Those pursuing it seek to transform societies and politics, by eradicating populations, recasting power relations, and homogenizing culture, values, and practices. The perpetrators thoroughly alter their domain—locally, nationally, regionally, or globally—leaders and followers swaggering godlike to transform their world as folk myths have gods do. Nikita Khrushchev, Joseph Stalin’s successor, recounts Stalin’s words upon deciding to move against Yugoslavia: “All I have to do is wiggle my finger and there will be no more Tito.” Khrushchev adds: “He didn’t succeed in the case of Tito. But inside our country he butchered and annihilated millions of people.”1 German planners in the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, animated by their politics’ untrammeled eliminationist spirit, drew up blueprints to deport to (not yet conquered) Siberia thirty-one million of the forty-five million inhabitants of large swaths of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics, noting almost in passing the extermination of the region’s five million to six million Jews. The Hutu became euphoric at refashioning their world. Elie Ngarambe, in the thick of it, explains: “Everyone who was a Hutu at that time during that regime, he thought of himself as strong, he thought he was on the top, he even thought that nothing would touch him, he even thought that the death was . . . death would not come down on him and kill him. He was hearing people [Tutsi] dying on the hill, cries of agony, noises. People. . . . and he was thinking he was powerful. I think he thought that there were no consequences. He thought he was successful. He thought that nothing would happen to him. He thought there was nothing. . . . nothing would happen to him or nothing would touch him. So, he thought only that one is supposed to die, and that the death would never approach him.”2