Returning to the perpetrators’ general practice of cruelty returns us to the discussion’s starting point: Whatever the differences in their cruelty’s sources and practices, the two most fundamental facts are constant: The perpetrators know the victims suffer excruciating physical and emotional pain and often substantial wounds and injuries, and that they themselves, operating in their leaders’ eliminationist programs, cause this suffering. No one can reasonably deny these two facts. The analysis here has focused on excess cruelty, for which the perpetrators are, by definition, that much more responsible. Their physical, verbal, and symbolic violence is gratuitous, unnecessary for the simple eliminationist act. They inflict it on their own initiative and at their pleasure. The perpetrators’ knowledge of the victims’ pain and suffering, and of their role in causing it, is true for excess cruelty’s other forms, those embedded in camps’ and other eliminationist institutions’ structures, in modes of “work,” and in the perpetrators’ collective displays. All such cruelty appears natural and normative to the perpetrators because they think of those they hate or see as a threat—whether or not they dehumanize or demonize them—as beings they must violently eliminate, having themselves, by their own nature or deeds, earned this deserved fate. This was no less true among the British perpetrators in Kenya than elsewhere, as Nottingham, the former colonial administrator, attests, saying that “the general approach was that they [the Kikuyu] were at fault for what they’d done. Tried to rise up and so . . . okay, it didn’t really matter very much how many died. . . . They were just getting what they deserved.”135 The cruelty appears natural also to the victims, a constituent feature of a world—their new world—the universe of eliminationist politics. The victims recognize that the perpetrators’ conduct is utterly pathological according to conventional civilization’s standards, or rather of noneliminationist civilization. But the perpetrators’ quotidian cruelties quickly resocialize the victims to bear and see the pathological as integral to their new social and personal worlds. This cruelty, flowing so naturally from people’s eliminationist conceptions, becoming a natural and seemingly normative part of the programs based on such conceptions, is the perpetrators’ self-justifying and satisfying self-expression. It is also the perpetrators’ means of communicating with the victims—about their nature, their abject state, their hopelessness, the ultimate fate awaiting them at the masters’ hands. Just as the perpetrators know they impart messages—often they make doubly sure by articulating them, with overlordship, derision, and laughter—the victims receive the messages unmistakably. Liisa Malkki, after recounting Burundian Tutsi’s unbearably gruesome tortures and killings of pregnant Hutu women and others, explains how well the survivors living in the Tanzanian refugee camp she studied understood the messages:The disemboweling of pregnant Hutu was interpreted as an effort to destroy the procreative capability, the “new life,” of the Hutu people. In several accounts, the unborn child or embryo was referred to, simply, as “the future.” The penetration of the head through the anus, as well as other means of crushing the head, were seen as a decapitation of the intellect, and, on a more general level, as an effort to render the Hutu people powerless, politically impotent. (Reference was never made to any mutilation of the penis.) In particular, it was said that the intention was to squash the Hutu’s efforts to gain higher education.136
The message the Tutsi delivered was the same as the Hutu received, as was true with analogous messages from Germans to Herero, from Turks to Armenians, from Germans to Jews, from Serbs to Bosnians, from Tutsi to Hutu in Rwanda, from Political Islamists to Darfurians, and from many more perpetrators to their victims. In Burundi, the Tutsi combined various eliminationist means to forestall a Hutu challenge to their power. They killed, prevented reproduction, and decapitated the Hutu collectively and individually. The Tutsi conveyed their message with sickening violence and sickening degradation, such as penetrating heads through anuses, in other words, with cruelty’s unsurpassable and horrifying clarity.
Actual Worlds
In most eliminationist assaults, the spirit of overall policy, the institutions chosen to implement it, the communities of consent, and the individual actors’ treatment of their individual victims spring, by and large, from the perpetrators’ shared mindset. The political leaders and perpetrators in the field act with little if any opposition from their own people or from victims. Thus, in each eliminationist assault an unusual consonance typically exists in how the perpetrators reshape the world in their overall treatment of the targeted groups, the nature and functioning of institutions the perpetrators form and of the communities in which they exist and which sustain them, and the perpetrators’ personalized actions. These individual eliminationist worlds, communal worlds, institutional worlds, and personal worlds add up everywhere—as perpetrators and their communities know and celebrate—to new or radically altered worlds, or, in Alphonse’s words, to “new days on the way.”
Nevertheless, differences exist in the worlds practitioners of eliminationist politics seek to create, and in how they choose to excise the malignant social and political tumors they see the targeted groups to be. Differences exist often within individual eliminationist assaults, and certainly across all such assaults, in the perpetrators’ comprehensiveness in targeting different categories of victims, from total or near total, to partial, to selective or demonstration killings. Differences exist within individual eliminationist assaults, and across all such assaults, in how the perpetrators combine or selectively employ eliminationist means for their targets—whether the targets are different groups, political, ethnic, religious, and others, or different sexes or ages. The mixtures of transformation, repression (incarceration), expulsion, prevention of reproduction, and extermination vary enormously. The perpetrators’ killing and treatment of women and children varies across eliminationist onslaughts, varies even at the same perpetrators’ hands. The Nazis slaughtered Jewish, Sinti, and Roma families in toto but did not target their German communist or socialist victims’ families, among many others. Differences exist in the perpetrators’ sequencing of their attacks, including when they kill people of different categories. Sometimes they target the entire universe of their victims simultaneously, sometimes the men first, sometimes the weak, leaving the strong for temporary labor exploitation. Some perpetrators create a camp system, with its far-reaching consequences for the regimes and societies. Others do not. Differences exist, also substantial, in the extent and kind of perpetrators’ cruelty, which, like much else that perpetrators do and do not do, can be theorized and linked to the perpetrators’ underlying conception of their victims.
Differences exist, sometimes within individual eliminationist assaults and always across eliminationist assaults, on the level of overall eliminationist strategy, policy, and implementation, on the level of institutional design and functioning, and on the level of individual perpetrators’ manner of treating targeted groups and individuals. Differences exist in the antiseptic halls of power, in the preparatory and hortatory airwaves, communities, and other means and locations of disseminating the views about hated and demeaned groups eventually targeted, and in the bloody, orderly, and wild killing fields and camps where the perpetrators, anything but antiseptically, face, use, misuse, and cut down their victims. Some differences and variations can be accounted for only with in-depth treatment of each individual eliminationist assault, focusing on the perpetrators’ conceptions of given targeted groups’ natures and perniciousness, each country’s and regime’s politics, especially the political leaders’ political thinking and aspirations, each regime’s leaders’ personal involvement and character, and their opportunities and constraints.
Many eliminationist acts’ compatibility with different conceptions of disparaged and despised groups, of perceived enemies, combined with uncertainties about opportunities for implementing different eliminationist measures and their likely efficacy, make it impossible to explain with certitude or to predict the eliminationist str
ategy, if any, leaders will embark upon, and then with what effect. Variations in opportunity, in leaders’ calculations, and in the eliminationist desires’ unpredictable expansion once perpetrators begin killing makes predicting or even retrospectively explaining the outcomes still harder. About each eliminationist onslaught a story can be told—a simple story and a multilayered, complex, and detailed narrative—which is true and which accounts for the kind of world the perpetrators create for themselves and their communities and the place within it, if any, for the targeted peoples. Such a story would account for the initiation of the slaughter and eliminationist forays, the perpetrators’ willingness to kill, their particular identities and forms of recruitment, the institutions used or devised, the victims’ selection, the mass murder’s scope and other outcomes, the perpetrators’ consensual communities’ nature, and the mass murder and elimination’s eventual end. But while each individual account is apt and explanatory, still, in sum they coalesce into the sometimes looser and sometimes firmer patterns seen here about which we can say and explain a great deal but which often still defy general, causal explanations. Whatever the other reasons, this, it should be remembered, is established as all but inevitable, given the idiosyncratic nature of the eliminationist mission’s initiation and very definition, which depends so much on a few men’s personalities, psychologies, hatreds, and calculations, and then on changing expectations, aspirations, and strategic goals and tactical possibilities once the always evolving onslaught begins and unfolds.
How the perpetrators’ notions evolve of how many and by what mixture of means they wish to eliminate the targeted group deserves more attention, as does their success in fulfilling their evolving notions at their different stages. Notice the term “evolve.” In eliminationist politics, the perpetrators more frequently evolve their notions—from ideals, to intentions, to policy, each one itself sometimes changing with developing political contexts and events. Sometimes the perpetrators embark on a focused assault, a coup de grâce, to eliminate once and for all a finite (if sometimes large) targeted group. In so many such assaults, however, the intended number of victims and eliminationist means changes along with facts on the ground, particularly if perpetrators construct a camp system as their civilization’s constituent feature.
Nevertheless, we should never lose sight of eliminationist politics and assaults’ most critical fact influencing virtually every aspect, from the creation of ideals, to intentions, to plans, to the decision to initiate them as policy, to the plethora of ways perpetrators on the ground implement them: people’s conceptions of the “others.” Whether or not the perpetrators demonize or dehumanize them, and how they understand the impediment, danger, or threat they see those “others” to be is fundamental for how they intend to treat the “others,” how they actually treat them, and how they would be willing to treat them. The keen memoirist Oscar Pinkus captures this critical and unavoidable eliminationist factor brilliantly in his description of a paradigmatic occurrence in the Germans’ eliminationist assault on European Jewry, an account that could have similarly occurred in Bosnia, Rwanda, and so many eliminationist assaults around the world.
In 1940 young German soldiers, western front veterans, arrived in Łosice, a town of eight thousand in Poland’s Lublin region. They initially acted courteously. Then they learned the town’s denizens were mainly Jews and “immediately they were transformed.” Pinkus explains: “Their Sie turned to du; they made us polish their boots and clubbed us for not tipping our hats promptly.”137 Nothing had changed. The Germans beheld people looking and acting exactly as before. Yet everything had changed. The Germans had gained knowledge that the people’s identity was their hated and putatively demonic foes whom they for the first time could attack. Like their countrymen across Central and Eastern Europe, they immediately became—in Pinkus’ apt formulation—“transformed,” using the demeaning “du” form of address, instead of the normal, respectful “Sie,” exacting symbolic obeisance, and beating the people not because of anything the people did, and not because of sudden new orders, but for only one reason: the Germans’ prior prejudices about and hatreds of Jews.
Actual minds create actual worlds.
PART III
CHANGING THE FUTURE
CHAPTER TEN
Prologue to the Future
MASS MURDER BEGINS in the minds of men. Dreams of eradicating the enemy in one’s midst or next door, of living in a purified society free of social, cultural, and political human pollutants, of radically refashioning society according to a promissory blueprint come easily to certain kinds of political leaders and even many ordinary people. But for people to apprehend such goals as a real option, as a legitimate and practical political option, eliminationist possibilities must be part of politics’ repertoire, which requires a real-world political context that permits and makes practical the act, and permits and makes practical the thinking. Except for the most wild and vicious dreamers, without such a political context, those exercising power and ordinary citizens alike will rarely even start down the mental pathway of considering how eliminating groups of people might actually be done.
As one political and human catastrophe after another has shown, mass-murderous and eliminationist politics have been on the minds, flowed from the lips, and moved the hands of our age’s leaders and followers alike. This past hundred years, humanity’s most mass exterminationist and eliminationist period, has seen mass murder, mass expulsions, vast camp systems, and mass rape entering for the first time the consciousness of the entire world, especially that of political leaders. These practices have become an available and potent implement in politics’ toolkit, readily and often successfully employed, and, in many political leaders’ and people’s eyes, deserving hardheaded consideration—in part because such assaults are not seriously attended to by outside countries, let alone met with opposing and decisive force. With all humanity’s mobilization into politics, and the growing insecurity of political tyrants and their followers repressing their own societies’ members—in addition to the modern world’s other specific features promoting eliminationist thinking—eliminationism has been ever more tempting, and practiced on a hitherto unthinkable scale.
This has produced two distinctive forms of mass-murderous and eliminationist politics, in addition to the common focused (or even iterative) eliminationist assault. Some political leaders employ eliminationism—as the extreme violent end of the continuum for dealing with political challenges or socially troublesome, unwanted, or disparaged groups—in a still more politically foundational and sustained manner. They transform their countries into permanent or at least semipermanent eliminationist entities, dependent upon a level of violence, often institutionalized in extensive killing campaigns and camp worlds, far exceeding the conventional repressive measures used to control discontented populations. Often tied to broad and thoroughgoing transformative visions, these eliminationist civilizations—Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, communist China, imperial Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and North Korea—include mass murder, expulsion, massive incarceration, and enslavement of peoples, as a constituent feature, sometimes the constituent feature, of their politics and societies.
In addition to our time’s imperial eliminations, from the Belgians in Congo and the Germans in South-West Africa to the Chinese in Tibet and the Indonesians in Timor, a fearsome kind of eliminationism as politics, including in the Balkans and central Africa, has developed. In both areas, reciprocal mass murdering and expulsions, and ongoing eliminationist danger, came to define the region’s politics. The Balkans’ politics, principally though not exclusively among Serbs, Croats, and Muslims, and central African politics, in Rwanda and Burundi and now Democratic Republic of the Congo, came to be characterized less by regime type, which ordinarily principally defines a country’s politics, than by a politics of iterative and reciprocal mass murder and elimination in the thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the mill
ions. Peace in certain times and regions has been but an interlude between wars. In these two regions, more conventional (if brutal dictatorial and repressive) politics have been but an interlude between mass murders and eliminations. A third instance, abruptly halted, occurred in Central and Eastern Europe. The Germans’ continent-wide exterminationist and multidimensional eliminationist assault was followed by the nonapocalyptic counterelimination, primarily expulsive, against ethnic Germans mainly by peoples the Germans had victimized, some of whom could reasonably expect that radical measures were necessary to forestall future German assaults. Germany’s long postwar occupation and political division and, in the west, its gradual transformation into a pluralist democracy were part of this radical political solution. In light of the many expelled, brutalized, and murdered ethnic German men, women, and children’s enormous suffering, it was by far the better part.
All modern tyrannies—which include nondemocratic regimes and formally democratic countries substantially restricting or violating political rights and civil liberties—have a substantial eliminationist potential. This potential often lurks just beneath the surface of the less destructive (if still destructive) forms of political repression such regimes, by definition, practice. Nevertheless, important developments over several decades and the contemporary political context have removed several major sources of eliminationist politics.
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