The emergence of nonstate terror organizations, until now the most threatening ones being Political Islamist, poses the new danger of political leaderships and fanatical followers committed above all else to mass murder, as the means they, leaders and followers alike, think can best produce terror and achieve their political goals. For Political Islamist terror organizations, the goals are to destroy infidels and weaken their countries, to exact Islam’s vengeance for humiliations they blame on the West and Israel, and complete Political Islam’s conquest of ever more minds and hearts. Al Qaeda’s exterminationist assault on the World Trade Center using large, fuel-laden passenger planes is, if it and kindred eliminationist terror organizations have their way, but a first installment. The ever more destructive technologies that might fall into their hands make nonstate terror organizations, for the first time, a real rival to states as practitioners of mass annihilationist politics.
Nuclear weapons can be the great mass-murderous and eliminationist equalizer. Here is where technology changes the genocidal equation. Until today, the strong perpetrated mass exterminations and eliminations against the weak. With high technology, the weak finally have an opportunity to mass murder the strong. With this real possibility, they dream of it. They plan for it. They seek to bring it about. When in history, certainly in modern times, has a nonstate actor dreamt of taking down the world’s superpower? When has a political regime governing a country (Iran) with a GDP less than 3 percent of the West’s threatened to destroy it, sought the weapons to give it immunity, defiantly pursued them, continuing to likely nuclear capability, which it would, as an apocalyptic sword of Damocles, hang over its enemies’ heads and perhaps use against Israel or others?
More generally, the possible proliferation of nuclear weapons (also potentially chemical and biological weapons) into the hands of eliminationist-oriented tyrannies and, through theft or purchase or as a gift, of nonstate actors, makes the most massive annihilationist assault’s likelihood more than a remote hypothetical possibility. Industrially and technologically less advanced countries—including backward and bankrupt North Korea—can now develop nuclear weapons and delivery systems, including missiles. In twenty to thirty years, certainly in fifty, the technology and know-how for developing such weaponry will be widely if not generally available.
In thinking about the future of eliminationist politics, we must therefore consider combating these new major eliminationist threats that we have just begun to discern, understand, and figure out how to counteract. One is archaic, a political messianism of imperial religious tribalism, Political Islam, which has captured many states, threatens many more, and animates the most murderous contemporary nonstate actors. The other is science’s most powerful stepchild, nuclear weapons, long feared as the ultimate exterminationist and eliminationist tool, though so far kept in abeyance since its annihilationary birth’s twinned moment slaughtering Japanese. Uncompromising political messianism combining with nuclear weapons could yet produce the most fearsome instance of the power to commit mass murder.
Beyond these two new systemic eliminationist threats, the nondemocratic and tyrannical regimes composing more than half the world’s governments, are, as I discuss in the next chapter, inherently a real threat to perpetrate mass murder and elimination. The eliminationist politics plaguing our time, issuing in so much death and misery, have not faded into the past. To be sure, our twenty-first-century world, for the reasons discussed—communism is dead or spent, Nazism, imperial Japan, and imperialism in general are also gone—differs significantly from the twentieth century. Nevertheless, tyrannies’ or dictatorships’ continuing existence means the eliminationist past is still the eliminationist present and potentially a still more lethal future.
As we know, beliefs that might suggest eliminationist treatment is the way to deal with certain groups exist in the minds (and hearts) of many countries’ people. How many countries, among what people, and against whom, and the ease of activating and channeling them, is obviously unknown, though we can confidently assume such beliefs are in many places and therefore eliminationist politics’ now dormant potential is large. We know all nondemocratic, namely tyrannical, regimes are proto-eliminationist, with leaders figuratively at the eliminationist cannon’s trigger. So we continue to need, perhaps ever more, systems and policies to contain eliminationist beliefs’ latent potential, and to keep leaders from thinking that eliminationist politics makes good and practical political sense.
We must ask: Can we remove eliminationist practices from politics’ normal repertoire, just as slavery has been removed from social relations’ normal repertoire (even if countries continue practicing it clandestinely)? Can we dramatically reduce mass murder and elimination?
What sort of future will we choose to make?
CHAPTER ELEVEN
What We Can Do
CAN THERE BE any doubt that if the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda had been small countries nestled next to the United States, say immediately south of San Diego, then those countries’ leaders would not have embarked upon their eliminationist politics, let alone their exterminationist programs? Would Slobodan Milošević have tried to expel 1.5 million Kosovars into California, let alone slaughter eight thousand men (as he did in Srebrenica) in a city where Tijuana is today? Would he have set up concentration and rape camps and had roaming Serbian killing units within shouting distance of the American border, slaughtering men and raping women systematically in town after town? Would Théoneste Bagosora and the Hutu leadership have begun an attack to hack and club to death hundreds of thousands of people in full view of the American public and polity?
To ask these questions is to answer them: No. Milošević would not have dared. Bagosora and the Hutu leaders would not have dared. And had either done so, swift and massive American intervention would have ended the eliminationist assault, whatever its form. What does this thought experiment teach us? We can find out, if we ask why, proximate to San Diego, no political leaders, no matter the circumstances, would initiate mass expulsions and exterminations. What factors would make such a “solution” to any “problem” unfeasible, or unthinkable, even for political leaders wishing to adopt an eliminationist program and who, in other geographic settings and circumstances, would eagerly implement one? Slaughtering or expelling people by the hundreds of thousands in such a hypothetical North American country would be so unfeasible and unthinkable that we would not consider calling it prevention if a political leader, fearing intervention, would choose not to implement an eliminationist ideal. Because it would not be prevention in the narrow sense of taking action that forestalls an imminent assault, it is difficult for people to see that, in a broader sense, prevention is precisely what it would be.
The topic of prevention must be rethought. Doing so requires embedding its analysis in a discussion of several other themes that have emerged from this investigation. Just as eliminationist assaults are predicated upon a preparatory eliminationist discourse laying out the conceptions of problems and people putatively causing them, which provides the foundation for thinking that acting against those people is necessary and urgent, preventing such assaults requires an analogous, countervailing anti-eliminationist, or pro-human, discourse. This discourse has several components: an accurate recognition of the problem of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults and politics; an accurate understanding of the domestic and international failures producing our catastrophic state of affairs; and an agreement that we must urgently act to stop current and prevent future exterminationist and eliminationist assaults (including smaller ones), to send eliminationist politics on the road to extinction. This anti-eliminationist discourse must be structured around eliminationist politics’ most fundamental facts: They have been a politics of impunity with the perpetrators’ subjective benefits far outweighing the costs. Hence the frequency.
Such an anti-eliminationist discourse prepares the way for redressing the catastrophic state of affairs. This also has several components.
We must recognize that the possibility of effecting change in this large, difficult area, though unacknowledged, is real, practical, and achievable. We must establish it as right to do. We must create the necessary resolve to exercise our power for acting upon our duties. And we must devise the measures and policies that will effectively end eliminationist politics. In sum, we must reverse our time’s and human history’s prevailing equation by ensuring two things: Eliminationist politics will no longer be a politics of impunity, and when political leaders examine the social and political landscape they will know that initiating an exterminationist or eliminationist onslaught will incur for them enormously more costs than benefits.
The Need for a Powerful Anti-Eliminationist Discourse
Ordinary citizens, and political and media elites alike, must recognize eliminationist politics’ extent and character. At any moment, the problem, though grave, can appear local when in truth it is of broad, even global significance. A single snapshot often distorts the more general and systemic nature of political and social phenomena, including this one. From the start of the twentieth century, our era’s eliminations have, as we now know, produced death tolls of 127 million and perhaps as many as 175 million (or if China’s and the Soviet Union’s higher estimates are correct, still many more), far outnumbering war’s military casualties.
When we look more broadly to eliminationist campaigns, particularly including expulsions, the numbers are more shocking. The Soviets, in addition to killing on the order of ten million people, expelled vast populations from their homes and eliminated through incarceration in the gulag many millions more for long periods. The Indonesians slaughtered perhaps half a million communists and, by the regime’s own admission, deposited three times as many, 1.5 million, in camps, often for years. As part of their eliminationist campaign against nonbelieving communists, they compelled nonaffiliated Indonesians to adopt religion. In the wake of the mass slaughter, 2.8 million Indonesians in Java, Timor, and North Sumatra converted to Christianity or Islam. The Khmer Rouge killed 1.5 million and expelled and incarcerated in camps virtually the rest of the country’s 8 million people. In Ethiopia, the Mengistu regime eliminated from the country’s northern regions six to eight times the 250,000 they killed—upward of 2 million. The Guatemalan rightists slaughtered perhaps 200,000 people, leftists and mainly Maya, and expelled two and half to five times more—a half million to a million Maya. Saddam Hussein, in addition to murdering half a million Kurds, Marsh people, Shia, and others, expelled many hundreds of thousands more from their homes and regions. Seeking to eradicate all non-Arabic characteristics from Iraq’s Kirkuk region, Saddam also conducted a forced transformation campaign of unknown size, formally begun in 1997, compelling non-Arabic people, especially Kurds, Turkomans, and Assyrians, to renounce their ethnic identities and adopt an Arab one. The Serbian eliminationists, and their Croatian opposite numbers, in sum killed many tens of thousands and expelled many times that number, including, by the Serbs, 1.5 million Kosovars. As of 2009, Political Islamists have slaughtered more than 400,000 Darfurians and have expelled perhaps six times that number—2.5 million, after having killed two million and expelled more in Southern Sudan. Even the Germans, who readily annihilated those designated for elimination, expelled millions from their homes and regions. The list goes on and on, including India and Pakistan during the partition, China, North Korea, the Pakistanis in Bangladesh, Burundi, Rwanda, and many more.
The countries and peoples either perpetrating or suffering exterminationist and eliminationist campaigns span the globe and humanity. Billions of people have themselves been potential targets or have had relatives, friends, or members of their communities mass murdered or brutally expelled from their homes. It should not need to be said, but it does: Eliminationist politics, and its most acute exterminationist variant, is an urgent, first-order global problem.
If next week perpetrators assaulted one or five people in your neighborhood or community solely because of their identity, brutalizing and expelling them from their homes and neighborhood, or butchering them in the street, you would treat it as a cataclysm. It would receive intensive media coverage, produce a communal and societal uproar, and engender an immediate political response. People and resources would insistently mobilize against this and future occurrences. Why should we respond politically to the same acts differently—when the victim numbers multiply by a thousand or a million—just because the people are, or have been, or will be far from our homes?
The problem of eliminationist politics should not be reduced to bromides. The problem is not human nature. Mass murder and eliminations are not inevitable or unavoidable. Transnational forces beyond human control do not cause them. We need not throw up our hands in hopeless despair. The problem is straightforward and political. Although difficult, it can and must be addressed politically, with intellect, energy, institutional design, and resources. We must go beyond conventional thinking and practices.
First we must confront the facts—not romanticized fictions, not politicized and therefore obscured fictions, but the facts. Mass murder and eliminationist politics are humanity’s human scourge, more devastating than natural disasters, more murderous and worse than war. They destroy the lives of so many more people, devastate survivors among families, scar communities for generations, immutably alter societies and polities. Yet on the nightly local news mass annihilation receive far less attention—in absolute terms—than house fires. In relative terms, according to death toll and human suffering, the media underplay eliminationist slaughters and expulsions and incarcerations by a thousand to a million times. Western people’s misplaced values direct more attention to the latest sensational murder case—be it celebrity driven or not—than ongoing mass slaughters and eliminations in several countries. Take, in the United States, the media obsession and manufactured sensation (in 2004, while I was drafting this part of the book) of Scott Peterson’s murder of his pregnant wife, Laci Peterson, and destruction of the baby she was carrying. For more than a year, newspapers, magazines, and especially television covered the unfolding events with the diligence and fascination due a presidential election: the crime, the hunt for the killer, the arrest of first-name-familiar Scott, the prosecution’s and defense’s preparations, and, from gavel to gavel, the trial itself. Measured by the media coverage, one would have thought that, aside from the American war and occupation in Iraq and the presidential election itself between George W. Bush and John Kerry, Scott and Laci’s story was by far that year’s most important political or legal event.
Horrible as Scott’s murder of his pregnant wife and son-to-be was, Political Islamic Sudanese Arabs multiplied its horror hundreds of thousands of times with their contemporaneous mass expulsion and mass murder of Darfur’s people. Yet that campaign received a tiny fraction of media coverage, attention, and discussion in absolute terms and in proportion to its significance. Multiply this comparative neglect by the number of other American murder cases turned into media sensations for millions of people’s lurid viewing, and the neglect of the eliminationist assaults in Darfur—or those in the Democratic Republic of the Congo or Tibet or Chechnya or North Korea, and others—becomes that much more striking and morally reprehensible.
I commit here the supposed sin of sounding preachy. The media must do more to create and sustain a robust anti-eliminationist discourse. They must convey to the public—including political and policy elites— the facts about mass murders and eliminations as they take place, and about the leaders masterminding them. For all their failures, the American media, much too late, finally did this in Bosnia and thereby created pressure on the Clinton administration to act. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s President Haris Silajdžić maintains that the media were critical: “The media, the American media helped a great deal. They helped us in getting this story out.”1 Bosnia shows the media’s immense power to spur action, which only highlights their deficiencies in almost every other eliminationist instance. When an eliminationist assault beg
ins (or ideally before), the media must immediately and insistently convey that (1) the world community, as a community, faces urgent crises in one or several of its regions, (2) the world community can save the lives of hundreds, thousands, sometimes millions of people, and (3) not to do so is to be complicit in the carnage. This is the media’s duty—no less than they would certainly do all three if a criminal or terrorist band held twenty hostages barricaded in a government building in Washington, London, Berlin, Rome, Madrid, Paris, or Tokyo, or for that matter in rural or small-town America, Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain, France, or Japan.
The media’s failure to publicize individual mass murders and eliminations as they occur elsewhere is surpassed by their failure to convey the general problem of mass murder and elimination’s immensity and character. The basic facts are virtually unknown, even to interested elites. Why?
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