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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Imperial eliminationism is by and large over, unlikely to return in a world resembling our own. Local and small-scale imperial conquests and slaughters will likely occur. Yet the major powers that once practiced such assaults on a grand scale have tempered and transformed themselves. Nuclear weapons make the return of tyranny’s grand imperial aspirations along the lines of midcentury Germany or Japan or the postwar Soviet Union all but unthinkable. Only the United States and China are positioned to act in this manner anytime soon. For all its necessary and discretionary entanglements around the world, the United States is extraordinarily unlikely to embark on eliminationist imperialism abroad. China, in the throes of capitalist transformation, is somewhat of a wild card (and continues to demonstrate parochial eliminationism in Tibet), but its geostrategic territorial aspirations have always been local. China’s accelerating development, while retaining extremely troubling features, is on the whole positive.

  Grand communist eliminationism is over. Communism as a potent political ideology and force is spent. Its economic model is discredited as an irredeemable failure. Communism is extraordinarily unlikely to return in a world evolving in any manner resembling ours. The anticommunist counter- or preemptive slaughters, and the mindsets and politics producing them, have therefore also dissipated. A new democratic Germany ensconced in a new democratic and politically integrated Europe has replaced the great destructive force in the middle of Europe, Nazi Germany. The bulk of the continent has no realistic prospect of returning to the mass-murderous or eliminationist past.

  Current Political Situation (Relevant to Eliminationist Potential) in the Ten Most Populous Countries and the European Union

  More generally, the countries most capable of pursuing substantial regional eliminationist politics are far less likely to, owing to changes in the world and the countries’ greater mutually beneficial integration with each other and their regions. Globalization, its problems notwithstanding, promotes interdependent economies, increased cultural learning and shared outlooks, values, and norms, and democratizing and noninternationally belligerent politics that greatly contribute to this less threatening domestic and international environment. Looking at the ten most populous countries and the European Union, all having perpetrated or suffered eliminationist, including exterminationist, politics, we see that the number of those likely to again commit or suffer mass murder or elimination has dropped dramatically. Compared to almost all of their situations sixty, forty, or twenty years ago, the overall probability of such human catastrophes looks more remote.

  These considerable positive developments are a prologue to a more promising future—and yet, mass murder and elimination’s reality and threat do continue. Some of the regimes, assaults, and dangers are familiar. Others are new. They portend possible disaster for millions upon millions of people, and the world at large. Their constellation provides a prologue to another kind of future.

  Mass murder and eliminationist politics—as I have emphasized, even on a “small” scale of tens of thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands—are being practiced, and remain nontrivial or even likely possibilities in many regions. Sub-Saharan African countries, characterized by tensions and conflicts among domestic groups and peoples partly born of immense poverty, and mostly governed by tyrannical regimes, are still potentially rife for eliminationist onslaughts. The postcolonial reactions that produced the contexts for so many of our time’s slaughters have partly worked themselves out, yet the process is hardly complete, and the conflicts are far from fully resolved in many places. Similarly, many unstable and tyrannical regimes rule Asian countries, including some post-Soviet states.

  The problem with contemporary dictatorships and tyrannical regimes is threefold. As we see, and as I further discuss in Chapter 11, they are themselves proto-eliminationist entities domestically. They also more frequently covet neighbors’ territory, and therefore create the impetus for war, and also for practicing eliminationist politics abroad. Because they do not allow for the development of civil society and the social and political resources for people and groups to learn how to accommodate themselves to each other, regulate conflicts, and find noneliminationist solutions to problems, when the tyrannies finally end, they often leave behind eliminationist powder kegs. That happened in the former Yugoslavia, and this is what many fear for Iraq if the American and British presence becomes a short-lived interlude between Saddam Hussein’s mass-murderous regime and another eliminationist context. Even with their presence, there have been low-level, somewhat under the radar, mutual eliminationist expulsions and steady murderousness by Sunni of Shia in Sunni majority areas and by Shia of Sunni in Shia majority areas, which each group’s political leaders orchestrated and their various sectarian militias’ eliminationist cadres carried out. One or several eliminationist assaults and bloodbaths could yet occur.

  In addition to the long-existing worrisome areas and regime types, two new systemic threats, for now greatly overlapping, must be confronted directly: Political Islam and eliminationist nonstate actors, often referred to as terrorist groups.

  The New Threats

  Political Islam is a powerful transnational movement, with its adherents governing countries and vying for power in others, and with enormous political influence throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. Several of its regimes have practiced mass murder and eliminationist politics more generally, and many of its regimes, national movements, and leaders openly threaten to do so. Political Islam is today’s most dangerous eliminationist political movement. It has eliminationist civilizations’ hallmark features: tyrannical regimes, eliminationist-oriented leaders, transformative eschatological visions, populaces brimming with eliminationist beliefs and passions, a sense of impunity, and eliminationism at the center of its normal political repertoire and existing practice.

  Political Islam is avowedly totalitarian. Its leaders and followers erase the distinction between politics and religion, wanting to merge politics with and subordinate it to Islam in a domestic, regional, or ultimately global rule of fundamentalist, intolerant versions of Islam (which differ from more tolerant, pluralistic forms that are practiced, including by most Muslim-Americans). Hamas, one such Political Islamic movement, officially called the Islamic Resistance Movement, established its totalitarian grip on Gaza in 2006. Shortly after gaining power, Musa Abu Marzook, Hamas’ deputy chief leader-in-exile, said on Israeli radio, one of the principles the group will never compromise is “government according to the laws of the sharia,” the Quran’s fundamentalist, antidemocratic, and antipluralist laws, which after a period of prudential consolidation Hamas began to implement legislatively in December 2008.1

  Political Islam’s common ideological foundation and overarching concerns give it a shared purpose for which its leaders and followers can singly and in concert work (even if prudence dictates some comprise, to compel people already in Islamic countries to live according to Political Islam’s dictates, pursue eliminationist strategies against non-Muslims, spread eliminationist hatred, and call openly for mass violence, jihad, and even mass murder. Bin Laden, nakedly revealing Political Islam’s core eliminationist foundation, and how its mass murdering is but an interchangeable eliminationist means for nonbelievers, demands Americans’ conversion to Islam as a non-negotiable condition for Political Islamists to stop “fight[ing],” meaning killing Americans.2

  Political Islam has become the governing regime of countries, including Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, and others, quasi-states such as Hezbollah and Hamas, and the Taliban (after being dislodged from ruling Afghanistan), and nonstate entities including Al Qaeda. In many other countries, it is a powerful social and political movement. It already has as followers a good portion of the more than 1.2 billion Muslims in the world (though many Muslims find such politics anathema). Political Islam includes all those in power or vying for power (including secular leaders) using intolerant versions of Islam as a political ideology to mobilize Muslims at home or abroa
d for aggressive political action. Such politics are typically directed at those defying the Political Islamic line, especially abroad against non-Muslims, derogatorily called “infidels.” Political Islamists deem it lawful, even normative—their fatwas say this explicitly—to act against infidels in ways that would be criminal if done to Muslims.

  Political Islam’s leaders and adherents have committed mass murder and practiced eliminationist politics, or explicitly threaten to do so in Iran, Sudan, and the Palestinian Authority (Hamas), by the Political Islamic quasi-state and terrorist entities of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Al Qaeda. Political Islam is currently the one expressly, publicly, and unabashedly genocidal major political movement.

  Because this movement is not Islam itself but a political Islamic movement with a coherent and distinctive political ideology and goals, Political Islam is a term preferable to Islamo-fascism, militant Islam, radical Islam, Islamic fundamentalism, etc. Identifying Political Islam for what it is does not implicate Islam itself or all Muslims. Calling it Political Islam, and not one of the other terms in use, clarifies that politics, and not religion per se, is the issue. The phenomenon includes only Islamic-grounded political regimes, organizations, and initiatives that share (whatever their other, sometimes internecine, differences, Shia versus Sunni, Arab versus Persian, etc.) a common ideological foundation about Islam’s political primacy or its need to systematically and politically roll back the West—a conviction that the fundamentally corrupt modern world must be refashioned, including by annihilating others. Therein Political Islam resembles the international communist movement in its heyday. Whatever its internal divisions and differences, and antagonisms, it nonetheless sought to overcome putatively corrupt capitalism and reshape with violence the world according to its political ideology. Political Islam in its cohesion differs from the international communist movement, which relied on the Soviet Union’s authority and leadership, and political and economic support, for its organization and discipline. Political Islam, whatever the Iranian monetary support flowing to some groups, is, without a coordinating structure, internationally cohering almost exclusively through powerful religiously grounded political ideology.

  Political Islam is many things: totalitarian, aggressive, conquering, cocksure about its superiority and destiny to rule, intolerant, bristling with resentment, only tenuously in touch with aspects of reality. These are the hallmark features of past and present eliminationist regimes. Even without additional attributes that promote exterminationist and eliminationist politics, these features alone, especially their totalitarian, aggressive, and fantastical worldview, make Political Islamists, like our age’s other such regimes, persistent threats to practice eliminationist politics. Yet Political Islam’s threat is still greater because, at its core, Political Islam has three additional features exacerbating these common eliminationist tendencies: (1) the religious consecration of its tenets, emotions, and goals, putatively grounded in God’s—that is, Allah’s—will and to which slavish devotion is due; (2) the reflexive, insistent public demonization of opponents; and (3) a culture of death. By creating powerful eliminationist views and a powerful eliminationist discourse now central to Political Islamic politics, societies, and cultures, these three features have led Political Islamists to see mass murder and eliminationist assaults as necessary and desirable politics.

  Political Islamists, as a matter of oratorical definition, invoke Allah and Islam’s sacred text, the Quran, as inspiration, an eliminationist teaching tool, and to legitimize their political tyranny and eliminationist ideology and programs. This is not to say the Quran necessarily says what Political Islamists claim for its individual passages or as a whole, or that it cannot be interpreted or reinterpreted to support nontyrannical and noneliminationist orientations. Like other ancient sacred texts and religions, the Quran and Islam can be tempered or renovated to be more compatible with pluralism, modernity’s constituent political and civil feature. This has happened in various forms of Islam and Muslim communities in different countries. But it has not taken place in still many more countries, including by Islam’s leading forms in most of the Middle East where Political Islam reigns or is a powerful insurgency against existing regimes, such as the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is a branch), which seeks to take power in Egypt, and the Taliban and their allies threatening Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Political Islam’s second critical aspect is its demonizing of opponents. Its ideology, more than intolerant of other political and social practices, demonizes those not accepting Political Islam’s suzerainty and ways, those not converting to the prescribed form of Islam that a given Political Islamist regime, movement, or group practices. Political Islam holds its self-declared enemies, often nothing other than holdouts, to be demonic in their apostasy or, especially, their active resistance or opposition. Fueled and consecrated by their religious interpretations, Political Islamists demonize real and imagined foes seemingly reflexively, because they deem those resisting Political Islamists’ dictates as violating Islam, holiness, and Allah. Political Islam therefore provides a ready-made conception of other people and groups that, in God’s name, actively calls for their elimination, one way or another. Political Islamists especially consecrate, in their reading of Quranic texts, using lethal violence to bring about their enemies’ elimination.

  Political Islam’s third critical component promoting eliminationism is its culture, even cult, of death, which itself has several central features. Its foundation is the willingness to die (or at least to let Political Islam’s duped minions die) for Political Islam’s greater earthly and heavenly glory, and a place in paradise for the political-religious martyr. It is astonishing how many people, many educated and middle class, gladly blow themselves up to commit mass murder and spread mass terror demonstrating to the target people’s every member that he or she can be slaughtered at any time—all in Political Islam’s service.

  This culture of death originates and is grounded in the account of the decisive, legendary Battle of Qadisiyya in 636 leading to Islam’s conquest of Persia. The commander of the Muslim army and the Prophet Muhammad’s warrior, Khalid ibn Al-Walid, sent a message to Khosru, the Persian commander before the battle: “You should convert to Islam, and then you will be safe, for if you don’t, you should know that I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.”3 This willingness to die, and to encourage others to martyr themselves for Allah, is a regular glorified feature of Islamic societies and political movements, of media, sermons, and textbooks, and of Political Islamists’ slaughter of their enemies or mobilizing others to do so. It is rhetorically and behaviorally manifest throughout the movement, including in the well-known glorification of suicide bombers’ deaths in their and their families’ videotapes, public ceremonies, and its most prominent and powerful political leaders’ speeches. Hamas’ supreme leader Khaled Mashal’s broadcast to the world in the wake of Hamas’ election victory: “Today, you are fighting the army of Allah. You are fighting against peoples for whom death for the sake of Allah, and for the sake of honor and glory, is preferable to life.” Mashal and other major Political Islamic leaders glorify death, disseminate its culture, and deepen its powerful and near ubiquitous eliminationist discourse to its followers—in speeches and sermons, before adoring crowds and in television broadcasts and over the Internet, in interviews with reporters and educational material for children. In 9/11’s aftermath, Osama bin Laden explained to a reporter: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us.”4 Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, the architect in 2006 of the self-destructive war with Israel in Lebanon and, at least for a time, the Arab world’s most admired leader, similarly explained why Political Islamists will triumph over the Jews: “We are going to win, because they love life and we love death.”5 According to Nasrallah, this Political Islamic superiority can be explained by their Islamic faith. Nasrallah broadcast this in a televised speech explaining the joy of
dying for Allah, the joy of killing Jews, and the connection between the two:How can death become joyous? How can death become happiness? When Al-Hussein asked his nephew Al-Qassem, when he had not yet reached puberty: “How do you like the taste of death, son?” He answered that it was sweeter than honey. How can the foul taste of death become sweeter than honey? Only through conviction, ideology, and faith, through belief, and devotion.

  We do not want to live merely in order to eat, drink, and enjoy life’s pleasures, and leave our homeland to Israel so it will slaughter it upon the altar of its aspirations, desires, hate, and historic vendettas. Therefore, we are not interested in our own personal security. On the contrary, each of us lives his days and nights hoping more than anything to be killed for the sake of Allah.

  The most honorable death is to be killed, as the Leader Imam Al-Khamenei said when Abbas [Musawi] was martyred. He said: “Congratulations to ‘Abbas,’ congratulations to ‘Abbas.’” The most honorable death is death by killing, and the most honorable killing and the most glorious martyrdom is when a man is killed for the sake of Allah, by the enemies of Allah, the murderers of the prophets [i.e., the Jews].6

  Political Islam’s most powerful and revered leaders, Bin Laden, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (voice of the ruling mullahs led since 1989 by the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), Nasrallah, and Mashal, and, more broadly, sheiks, intellectuals, and suicide bombers, and, most fundamentally, the many who read and understand the Quran in this way, profess to love death and convince their followers, especially the children, to want to die and even more to slaughter those designated as Islam’s enemies. Little is more chilling, and more indicative of this death culture’s power and reach, than Political Islamists’ broadcasts and podcasts of music videos directed at children, depicting children happily explaining that they want to die for Allah by killing Islam’s enemies.7