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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  Broad discussion of mass murder and elimination’s high frequency and colossal aggregate damage—and the international community’s and political leaders’ failure to take the easy measures not taken to prevent or stop them—might shame the world’s peoples, or at least some of them. Scholars, media, and politicians alike would face the moral burden of confronting their own unwillingness to do what they ought to and easily could do: help end these murders and assaults that dwarf all others. This media and political failure is not equivalent to the failure to publicize and analyze poverty and disease around the world for the simple reason that no domestic or global consensus exists that all people have a right (certainly an enforceable right) to specified minimal living standards (or what those standards would be) or freedom from easily preventable diseases. (The need for such a consensus is another topic.)2 Yet an international consensus, enshrined in international law, mandates that all people have the right not to be tortured, eliminated through expulsions, or murdered. Slaughtering children is unanimously held to be an unambiguous and great crime. Indeed, these are among the few universal rights international law and the world’s people commonly recognize and say it is a legal duty to stop. This norm not to slaughter people en masse, at least as a norm, is so powerful that even regimes routinely violating it formally recognize it.

  Discussing the facts about our time’s mass murders and eliminationist politics is also unpopular in many countries because so many of us would have to critically examine ourselves or our forbears. Harry Truman was a mass murderer. He should be put in the dock no less than Stalin, Pol Pot, and the others. A barrage of vitriolic and dishonest criticism will likely meet these statements. Powerful constituencies—political, media, academic, and others—in every country having practiced eliminationist politics pounce on those daring to speak politically explosive or discomforting truths. This leads to those positioned to disseminate the facts censoring themselves.

  After the publication of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, one European country’s former prime minister told me that even though he and, as he put it, “everyone” in his country knew my book about ordinary Germans’ antisemitically grounded willingness during the Nazi period to kill Jews is correct, had prospective publishers of the book prior to publication asked, he would have urged them not to publish it because he would have feared (wrongly, he then conceded) that its truths would harm the image of today’s Germany and Germans among his countrymen and worsen relations with Germany. Some prominent Jews told me not to address certain pressing issues in A Moral Reckoning, my book on the Catholic Church’s need to perform repair after the Holocaust—not because I was wrong, but because speaking the truth about the Church’s practices and tenets might encourage the Church to criticize those of Jews.

  Attacks on and intimidation of people speaking the truth about eliminationist assaults come mainly from those feeling afflicted by the facts, or from their surrogates. Those wanting truths to remain buried about Germans and the Catholic Church respectively, with German politicians, high Church officials, and their politicized allies in the academy leading the way, dishonestly and vociferously attacked my books and me. In 2005, Orhan Pamuk, the soon-to-be Nobel Prize-winning novelist, was subjected to kindred attacks and even indicted in Turkey (immense international pressure eventually led to the charges being dropped) for acknowledging the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians. This was part of the Turkish government’s and much of its society’s intimidation and disinformation campaign to have the world accept the fiction that it never happened. Similarly, Japanese rightists have unremittingly attacked and threatened violence against the Japanese Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe for telling the truth about the Japanese eliminationist assault on Okinawans at the end of World War II. In 2005, a Japanese court allowed a rightist-supported suit seeking to suppress his book Okinawa Notes about the forced mass suicides. The Japanese government, under the nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, a systematic denier of Japanese mass murders and eliminations, used the lawsuit as one of several pretexts to try to rewrite Japanese school textbooks to cover up Japanese lethal coercion against Okinawans. This led to Okinawans’ massive protest. Oe spent two and a half years successfully defending the lawsuit.3

  The formal and often well-organized deniers of discomfiting or inconvenient historical truths, such as Holocaust deniers, exist in virtually all countries whose people have perpetrated eliminationist onslaughts. Governments or powerful institutions and groups usually undertake extensive disinformation campaigns to confuse publics, intimidate those wanting to tell the truth, and forestall necessary measures of prevention, intervention, and repair. Turkey is but the best-known current example of prosecuting or intimidating those speaking such historical truths. (A Turkish diplomat in the United States once said privately that his two main tasks were maintaining the American foreign aid level and keeping the Armenian question off the table.) Turkey’s genocide denial has become so contentious that the European Union has made Turkey’s admission of the genocide a membership condition. In 2007, when the U.S. House of Representatives’ Foreign Relations Committee passed a nonbinding resolution (that was never likely to pass the full House) acknowledging the genocide, Turkey recalled its ambassador and threatened noncooperation in the Iraq war. Many German politicians and groups, though acknowledging most of the Holocaust’s basic facts, for years tried to suppress the truth about ordinary Germans’ willing role in perpetrating the Holocaust (blaming instead abstract structures or faceless Nazis—to which, in the postwar fairy tales, few Germans belonged).4 The Catholic Church, and for that matter, many European countries’ governments and peoples, have long remained silent about or stridently denied their participation in the Jews’ eliminationist and exterminationist persecution, though in the past decade some have tried to correct the historical record.5 After Stalin’s death and the gulag was dismantled, the Soviet Union proscribed speaking the truth about the mass murdering, and in Russia today many in and out of government still oppose it. Croats and Serbs each suppress the truth about their respective mass murders and eliminations against each other (and others) during the post-Yugoslavia recent past and the World War II-era more distant past. In Japan, the government and powerful groups systematically deny the Japanese’s mass-murdering and eliminationist practices immediately before and during World War II, including the mass murdering in Nanjing and elsewhere in Asia, and the systematic raping of Korean and other women and their enslavement as prostitutes, still referred to by the time’s euphemism of “comfort women.” A decade after the Hutu’s slaughter of the Tutsi, a movement to deny the genocide has developed, sadly including some French officials seeking to defend France’s honor by denying the deeds the French government abetted. It goes without saying, but nevertheless deserves emphasis, that during mass eliminations and while the perpetrators remain in power potentially to kill again, they and their supporters, and those not wanting to bring them to justice or remove them, cover up, disinform, and most of all practice silence. Such an example, likely unpopular to discuss in my usual circles, occurred recently.

  Publicizing the facts about eliminationist politics and assaults requires that media and politicians not only discuss them more frequently but also change how they do so. They know that the language they use, and how they frame issues, is powerful and persuasive. So let them use it in the service of the victims and potential victims. They do not hesitate to refer to serial killers, murderers of ten or twenty people, as serial killers or even mass murderers. But for the mass murderers of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of people, the media and politicians avoid similar linguistic accuracy and moral rectitude. They do not call the political leaders initiating, organizing, and overseeing such slaughters, or their followers doing the dirty work, mass murderers. Think of how different, at home and abroad, the publics’ conception would be of Stalin or Mao, or even of Hitler about whom the truth is regularly told, if we routinely referred to them as the mass murderer Stalin
, the mass murderer Mao, and the mass murderer Hitler. Consider how different the view of Indonesian leader Haji Muhammad Suharto, Hafez al-Assad of Syria, Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and José Efraín Ríos Montt of Guatemala, Milošević of Serbia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia, Saddam in Iraq, or Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir in Sudan would have been during their rule had we reflexively called them, instead of President Suharto, the Indonesian mass murderer Suharto; instead of President Assad, the Syrian mass murderer Assad; instead of Presidents Lucas Garcia and Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan mass murderers Luca Garcia and Ríos Montt, instead of President Milošević, the Serbian mass murderer Milošević; instead of President Tudjman, the Croatian mass murderer Tudjman; instead of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the mass murderer Saddam Hussein; instead of President al-Bashir, the Sudanese mass murderer al-Bashir. How much harder it would be for anyone abroad—foreign leaders, media, ordinary citizens—to pretend these butchers were legitimate leaders representing their people’s interests, fit to be supported or dealt with as anything but colossal criminals and menaces to humanity. With the information power of the Internet and satellite television, local elites and peoples (who might not otherwise know) would see how the world regards their murderous leaders of yesterday and today (and get a preview for thinking about tomorrow’s prospective mass murderers). Some (though certainly not all) leaders and their inner circles may be deterred from acting on their eliminationist ideals if they know that “mass murderer” is all but guaranteed to forever be a prefix to their names. Some leaders of countries, including those of democracies, might be deterred from aiding and abetting other regimes’ eliminationist onslaughts (several American presidents have lent such aid) if they too would be forever tagged with “mass-murdering accomplices” or “complicit in mass murder.”

  A new, more accurate, more powerful anti-eliminationist and pro-human discourse about mass murder and eliminations must develop. The language we use to describe eliminationist onslaughts should be descriptively accurate. We should avoid euphemisms and obfuscating locutions such as “ethnic cleansing.” We should call perpetrators committing mass murder “mass murderers.” We should use “genocide,” though analytically imprecise and therefore employed here sparingly, regularly and liberally for mass murders: It is codified in international law as the term to apply to large-scale mass murder and it, more than any other term, conveys the magnitude of the horror of what perpetrators do to their victims. We should apply the term “genocide” to eliminationist programs that combine mass murder with expulsion, even when the perpetrators expel many more than they kill, as the Serbs did to the Kosovars. Of course, we should always specify as accurately as possible the size and mix of large-scale killing, expulsions, and incarcerations in camps—and the perpetrators’ other brutalities—and the targets’ identities. When the Hutu began mass murdering the Tutsi, the Clinton administration, European governments, African governments, and the United Nations knew almost instantaneously from their diplomats, the UN peacekeepers on the ground, and news reports what the Hutu were doing. All of them should have immediately and unequivocally told their peoples and the world that the Hutu were committing genocide. The genocides in the former Yugoslavia should have at once been denounced for what they were, genocide—and the mass murderer Milošević as a genocidal killer—rather than whitewashed into “ethnic cleansing.” The burden of proof should have been shifted immediately to Milošević and the Serbs to demonstrate that they were not perpetrating genocide.

  Such dissimulation and failure to speak the truth continues today. The United Nations, the political organization most responsible and best positioned to speak and act authoritatively against genocide, is the most glaring offender. But this comes as no surprise for an organization that was complicit in the Rwandan annihilation and silent and inactive as it watched Saddam’s various eliminationist onslaughts unfold. When the United Nations issued its misleading Darfur report in January 2005 denying that the Sudanese government was committing genocide (“genocidal intent appears to be missing”)—tepidly deeming it a mere “situation” of “violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law”—governments and media around the world should have immediately denounced the report for what it really was: genocide denial more devastating than Holocaust denial, because it was whitewashing, minimizing, denying an ongoing genocide. They should have insisted the Political Islamic Sudanese government’s mass annihilation and expulsion of Darfurians be called genocide. Nothing less.

  Political leaders and the media analyzing mass murder and eliminations should avoid four frequent pitfalls: the languages of equivalence, primordial hatred, human nature, and abstract structures. The language of equivalence—explaining mass violence and killing and expulsions as resulting from “ethnic conflict”—is the frequent practice. It suggests that competition for which two parties are responsible produces these deeds. It also suggests that the putative ethnic conflict at issue has somehow spun out of control (as ethnic conflict is allegedly wont to do), that somehow mass murder just happened as a consequence of an escalating process. This misrepresents how mass murders and eliminations begin. The second pitfall, the language of primordial hatred, suggests inevitability. This, as we now know, is precisely the opposite of mass eliminations’ initiation and execution. If mass murder is presented as the outcome of primordial hatred, then it seems beyond rationality and impervious to rational policy initiatives. The third problem, the unarticulated frame for, or variously finding its way into, reporting of genocides is to write them off to human nature, an adult or juvenile variant of “boys will be boys,” or to the lamentable notion that certain countries, regimes, or peoples are primitive and cannot be held to civilized standards. All these and other depictions, such as treating killing and brutalities as war’s unfortunate or unavoidable byproduct or the expression of the unbearable distress of poverty, colonial injustice, or globalization, make annihilationist assaults seem “natural” and in some sense inevitable, or propelled forward by larger intractable forces, and therefore also unpreventable and unstoppable. These notions—whether explicit or implicit—disserve all political leaders and public alike who want mass murder and elimination to end. The fourth problem, a corollary of the first three, is the failure to discuss the real causes of genocide, in general and in individual instances, and specifically to name the people responsible. These pitfalls, to a greater or lesser degree, are to be found in U.S. President Bill Clinton’s cynical justification for standing by idly as the Serbs continued their systematic eliminationist assault on Bosnians: “Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen.”6

  The media, by being specific and accurate, can convey to elites and broader publics alike the genocide’s reality, that, before the world community’s eyes, with every passing day, week, and month, human beings are choosing to slaughter hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands and to brutalize still many more. The media can provide a realistic account of the horrors’ causes, helping people to understand the most critical facts: that we can, as a practical matter, stop eliminationist onslaughts before they start or once they are under way. Even if the media do not explicitly urge governments and peoples to act, which they should, they would implicitly do so by making the moral questions unavoidable merely through straightforward reporting of the facts: Political leaders initiate mass murders and eliminations as rational political calculations to achieve political ends (even when based on fantastical notions about the victims). If the media make this clear, they will also convey to everyone that the issue is one of evil and good—not some vague notion of evil but concrete evil embodied in the men setting out with full faculties to willfully destroy other human beings. These men, like Hitler and those serving him, can and therefore must be stopped.

  Lay out the facts. Lay out the causes. Lay out the (often low-cost) solutions (detailed below) in language that is precise, vivid, and individuated. The perpetrators and the victims should not be treated as abs
tractions. We should eschew or not use as stand-alone terms, terms such as “Hutu extremists,” earlier in Germany “the SS,” in Bosnia “Arkan’s Tigers,” or in Darfur “tribesmen.” In general, we should not use terms such as “extremists” and “radicals” for the perpetrators because they automatically and usually wrongly suggest that conventional political means cannot persuade or stop the perpetrators. Instead, we should regularly refer to them more descriptively accurately as, for example, Turkish, German, Hutu, Serbian, or Sudanese perpetrators or Turkish, German, Hutu, Serbian, or Sudanese killers, or Turkish, German, Hutu, Serbian, or Sudanese executioners, or even executors of their government’s or leaders’ genocidal policies. We should personalize victims as much as possible, posing the question to the viewing publics: What would you want done, what would you want your government to do, what would you want the international community to do, if the perpetrators were doing this to the family next door, or to the boys and girls living down the street? If the media simply reported and described exterminationist and eliminationist assaults accurately while they take place, many more people would support and even press their political leaders to stop shirking their duty.

  Terms such as mass murder and genocide should be readily used while eliminationist assaults take place. The usual practice of prefixing “alleged” before “mass murder,” or “genocide,” or the name of political leaders or military men responsible for them, only obfuscates what is clearly happening. We do not say the “alleged” war, or “alleged” war initiator to describe a war or the dictator starting it. We must shift the burden of proof in the court of public opinion, and require the prima facie guilty to demonstrate their innocence. After all, the world’s media and publics are engaged not in legal proceedings but in an attempt to shed light on catastrophic eliminationist assaults so they can be stopped. Many in the media say they want the world to learn of such horrors so that governments will act to end them. Let the media alter its reporting to facilitate these goals.