B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  A striking feature of prejudices and hatreds, of the dehumanizing and demonizing conceptions one group’s members have for another’s, is their intellectual and social leveling—within communities and, whatever the specific beliefs’ differences, across societies and civilizations. In given eliminationist communities, university professors and high school-educated janitors share common murderous views about targeted people. The same talk animates the lecture hall and the beer hall, the principal difference being the little separating highfalutin nonsense from plain nonsense. The “people of poets and thinkers,” as the Germans, Europe’s most highly educated people, liked to call themselves, were no different from illiterate Hutu farmers (Rwanda’s adult literacy rate, at around 50 percent, was among the world’s lowest). Intellectuals, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and clergy—the opinion leaders and in some cases, especially the clergy, moral leaders—validate the eliminationist beliefs and acts of their societies’ ordinary members and prospectively further sustain the perpetrators’ confidence in their people’s solidarity. We have already explored how Serbian writers and intellectuals, including the country’s most influential body of thinkers, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, laid down the common ideational foundation and even provided the political leadership for the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults. German intellectuals, doctors, jurists, teachers, clergy critically contributed to spreading eliminationist antisemitism and other racist and dehumanizing views in Germany before and during the Nazi period. Shelves of books, including some of the very early scholarly works on Nazism and the Holocaust, bear such titles as Hitler’s Professors, The Third Reich and Its Thinkers, The Nazi Doctors, Hitler’s Justice, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner.29 Such socially and culturally crucial people analogously prepared the ground for our time’s other mass slaughters and eliminations, including those done in the name of Marx and the promised land he and his intellectual epigones promised. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and others, who laid the foundation for and initiated the communists’ long-term eliminationist assault on many portions of Soviet society, were extremely intelligent men and authors of learned Marxist works. Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders were also relatively highly educated, having imbibed their foundational Marxism in Paris. In Rwanda, intellectuals prepared Hutu for what was to come, as Innocent Rwililiza, a Tutsi survivor, explains: “Genocide is not really a matter of poverty or lack of education. . . . In 1959 the Hutu relentlessly robbed, killed, and drove away Tutsi, but they never for a single day imagined exterminating them. It is the intellectuals who emancipated them, by planting the idea of genocide in their heads and sweeping away their hesitations.”30 After the fact, some perpetrators, finally seeing their deeds through the outside world’s condemning eyes, reflect on how their intellectuals, elites, and clergy led them astray.

  Intellectuals, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and clergy are also part of their societies. They too participate in the hateful discourses, in which they are no less, and often more, embedded than the communities’ other members who also create and sustain them. They too act or support the acts that follow on their logic. No significant part of the German elites thought the Jews wholly innocent and therefore dissented from the fundamentals of the eliminationist project against the Jews (though some would have preferred a nonlethal eliminationist solution). Even the leading German resistance groups to Hitler were profoundly antisemitic, which informed their future plans for Jews. One of the resistance’s central documents, prepared by leading Protestant theologians and university professors, contained an appendix called “Proposals for a Solution to the Jewish Problem in Germany,” which, referring to Jews, stated that a post-Nazi Germany would be justified in taking steps “to ward off the calamitous influence of one race on the national community.” Yet thanks to the highly effective exterminationist program, they could perhaps tolerate Jews in Germany, because “the number of Jews surviving and returning to Germany will not be so large that they could still be regarded as a danger to the German nation.”31 German elites were active, willing, and leading participants in the annihilationist assault on the Jews and in the Germans’ other eliminationist projects. Einsatzgruppen leaders slaughtering Jews in the Soviet Union were academically trained, as did the principal author and others working on the murderous and eliminationist anti-Slav General Plan for the East. Church leaders and clergy the world over, from Turkey, to Germany, to Croatia, to Indonesia, to Serbia, to Rwanda, and to the Political Islamic religious leaders and clerics in different countries, have actively and tacitly blessed mass murder. (Where, we should ask, have religious leaders opposed their countrymen’s or clansmen’s eliminationist assaults? If they had, such as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders who were instrumental in preventing the Bulgarian Jews’ deportation, or Pastor André Trocmé, who led an effort in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France that saved five thousand Jews, we would know and they would have prevented countless deaths. Yet we know of so few.) Local dignitaries often organized and led the Bosnian Serbs’ paramilitary or local killing institutions. In Rwanda, the local intellectuals were in the thick of the mass murder. Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a Tutsi teacher and survivor, explains: “The principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. . . . A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor—they all killed with their own hands. . . . These well educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes.”32 Well-educated people, leading professionals of one society after the next, together with those looking up to them, have closed ranks in a community of murderous consent.

  After eliminationist assaults, after the massive death toll and the vast suffering the perpetrators have inflicted become clear, in country after country, in town after town, the perpetrators return to their people, whose names they have blackened in the world’s eyes, but evidently not in their own. In every mass murder and elimination’s aftermath, the broader community in whose name the perpetrators acted has not socially or politically rejected, let alone punished, the perpetrators. (Punishment has occasionally been meted out by those defeating perpetrators or those replacing the perpetrating regime.) The perpetrators have not been turned into outcasts, not shunned, not treated in any way as a community would ordinarily treat murderers, let alone mass murderers in their midst. It did not happen in Turkey, in Germany, in Indonesia, in Serbia or among Serbs in Bosnia—who after the eliminationist assault continued to celebrate the Bosnian Serbian eliminationist architects Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić as heroes—in Burundi, in Rwanda among the Hutu themselves. Communities welcome the perpetrators back and, when necessary and feasible, have passionately risen to defend them. The social and communal solidarity the perpetrators find in the posteliminationist era merely continues the solidarity they experienced while assaulting their victims.

  We do not know the percentage of each community’s people who have supported the exterminationist and eliminationist politics perpetrators practiced in their name. Everywhere—among Turks, among Serbs, among Hutu—there has been some communal dissent. Even in Germany, where the evidence of broad and deep popular support for the eliminationist assault against the Jews is overwhelming, some dissent existed. (The ready knowledge we have of it and, often by the dissenters’ own admission, of their exceptional nature and isolation, further confirms Germans’ overwhelming support for the elimination.) Nevertheless, in our time’s lethal and nonlethal eliminationist assaults, we find among the broader relevant national or ethnic communities little credible evidence of widespread dissent from the eliminationist conceptions of the victims and the thinking underlying such politics, or of actual opposition to the eliminationist onslaughts themselves. But we have abundant evidence of active communal support and encouragement for the perpetrators, of the perpetrators’ comfort within their various communities and among their countrymen, and of the perpetrators’ smooth reintegration into their accepting communities when the mass
killings, expulsions, and incarcerations end.

  Camp Worlds

  One kind of community deserves special attention, as it is prominent among the things making our age politically distinctive: camps—usually called concentration camps—or more precisely, camp systems. They are typically worlds unto themselves. The camp system, distinct from yet intermeshing with society’s other systems, is a novel feature of eliminationist politics (differing from, though related to, earlier slave camps used to extract labor), and its creation critically demarcates one type of eliminationist onslaught from all others. Spatially fixed and temporally durable, a camp system usually marks mass murder and elimination as integral to a country’s social and political system. Its creation derives more from its leaders’ general conception of politics and the society they wish to govern or forge than from the specific conception of the victims (aside from the foundational belief that the victims must be violently eliminated).

  Blame for inventing modern camp systems belongs to the Spaniards, who emptied a good portion of Cuba for “concentration” into camps in 1896 to defeat rebellion. The Spaniards kept the camps in deplorable conditions so that perhaps 200,000 people, mainly women and children, perished. In South Africa in the twentieth century’s first years, the British, likely inspired by the Spaniards, incarcerated more than 100,000 Boer women and children, and blacks rebelling against them, in a camp system, taking more than 40,000 people’s lives, with each group’s minimum toll at 20,000. The British, wishing to secure their colonial rule against insurgencies, used camps elsewhere. In Malaysia, they sought to quash the communist and nationalist insurgency with a declared emergency in 1948 lasting years and a detention camp system incarcerating thirty thousand people, from which they expelled more than half to China. This turned out to be a strategic pilot program the British implemented full force in the 1950s in Kenya. After losing India, the empire’s “crown jewel,” in 1947, they were desperate to hold on to Kenya when, in 1952, the Mau Mau liberation movement challenged their draconian rule. Given that Mau Mau enjoyed the allegiance of most Kikuyu, whom the fifty thousand British settlers had been systematically dispossessing of their land, the British, in order to secure their colonial position, decided to eliminate Mau Mau and its bearers, which meant eliminating the Kikuyu population as effective claimants to their own land and to self-determination. They created an extensive and murderous camp system—so murderous that the common view was that their purpose was to kill Kikuyu, as they starved them, refused to let them farm their lands, and denied them medical treatment.33 This system was internally differentiated with several categories of camps, the British assigning individual Kikuyu to camps of varying severity designed to incarcerate, break, warehouse, or kill them. The British incarcerated perhaps 1.5 million Kikuyu, a good portion of the people, and killed tens of thousands (estimates range from 50,000 to 300,000).

  Entrance to the gulag camp Vorkuta, Soviet Union

  The British demonized the Kikuyu as Mau Mau cannibals (a wholly invented charge). This was layered upon a profound racism that held black Africans to be mentally and morally inferior, mixed with fear of Mau Mau insurgents who attacked and killed, initially, a few British settlers. Soon after the Mau Mau’s attacks began, the British, with both colonial administrators and settlers often forming the shock troops of the grinding onslaught, quickly created the “pipeline,” an array of more than one hundred formal camps, meant to be a system of holding pens and reeducative institutions (further augmented by scores of unofficial private settler camps and other camps) into which they drove perhaps a half million Kikuyu. The British then restricted most Kikuyu, more than one million deemed less threatening, to thoroughly inadequate tribal reserves, which, consisting literally of barbed-wire villages, were camps, or in John Nottingham’s formulation, “concentration camp villages,” except in name.34 As the British changed individual victims’ status, they imprisoned and shuttled them around the gulag of increasingly harsh concentration camps. The “pipeline” itself quickly worsened, as “reeducative” camps do, because of the inherent contradictions of such camps, which whatever their formal purpose incarcerate people the perpetrators believe must be eliminated. Josiah Mwangi Kariuki, a longtime British camp inmate, explains that as the British had set for themselves the impossible eliminationist task of eradicating the Mau Mau from the Kikuyu by getting Kikuyu to confess and recant, the camps devolved into something more horrible: “The ‘pipeline’ system in its original conception did not involve beating or hitting in any way. But because it was basically unsound it began to go slower and slower and it was at this stage that the Government officers employed the violence that in the end destroyed the use of confession as the foundation of the ‘pipeline.’ Few people anywhere feel bound by words uttered under torture.”35 Beyond this feature of the “pipeline,” the British colonial officials and settlers subjected the Kikuyu herded into camps to severe undernourishment, brutality, torture, and murder. Fueled by racism, a hallucinatory image of the Kikuyu as bloodthirsty savages, and the seemingly limitlessly justifying emotion of revenge, British perpetrators conducted themselves with cruelty reminiscent of the Germans’ treatment of Jews and others. Paul Mahehu, a Kikuyu survivor, explains that as he was watching a film about the Germans’ treatment of Jews in camps, he was thinking that that was what the British had done to his people.36

  The politics engendering camp systems are typically long-term imperial domination or the visionary transformation of a country’s social and political structure and fabric. For the Germans, the two went hand-in-hand. Such projects necessitate the violent domination or elimination of targeted, unwanted, or putatively recalcitrant groups, sometimes numbering tens of millions. The Germans, Soviets, Chinese communists, Khmer Rouge, and North Korean communists sought to transform society into subjectively ideal realms, purified by purging all they deemed inimical and unwholesome—albeit according to enormously different visions—which necessitated the elimination of millions or tens of millions of people, for whom they erected camps as the permanent instrument of a combination of domination, exploitation, and annihilation. The Japanese, like the British in Kenya, followed no such eschatological transformative vision. They erected their vast camp system for merciless domination and exploitation. Such political goals, which visionary transformative regimes often share, are incompatible with the quick and final kill, leading political leaders to create camp systems and their followers to staff them sympathetically. The Japanese sought to occupy East Asia as a gigantic empire to serve their master race, enslaving tens of millions as disposable minions to be worked brutally, including to death, to extract the natural resources and produce the materials necessary for Japan to expand and maintain its Orwellian-named “co-prosperity” sphere. The Germans sought to transform the European land mass, particularly in Germany and to the east, into a vast racialized latifundium that German overlords would settle, and enslaved putative subhumans would work to sustain while being pruned and kept in check through reproduction prevention and steady killing.