This also means the media should tell publics that international institutions and the world’s state system currently are ill-equipped to end mass murders and eliminations, and eliminationist politics more generally. Indeed, the international system’s institutions are constituted (in part quite purposely) so they will not and cannot effectively halt eliminationist politics. Exposing the incompetence, negligence, and complicity of international institutions, especially the United Nations, will wrest people from complacency, from assuming reflexively (as many do) that letting existing international institutions and international law operate according to their normal codes and procedures is best. Not surprisingly, many people look to the United Nations for guidance and to coordinate its member states against mass murder and eliminationist politics. This has been and continues to be hopelessly misguided. As the earlier discussion of the genocide convention shows and as I discuss further below, the United Nations has not been a force against mass murder and elimination but their enabler. It has promoted an effective do-nothing approach to ongoing eliminationist assaults. As the hegemonic international institution of the international system, it also prevents an alternative regime or organization from emerging with the structure, charter, membership, and politics to effectively combat and prevent, or at least greatly reduce the toll of, eliminationist politics. People need to see that only by fundamentally changing international institutions, and by pressing them and governments to act in ways they ordinarily do not, will stopping exterminationist politics be possible.
Beyond descriptive and analytical accuracy, we must adopt the language of moral responsibility and a realistic, defensible notion of judgment based on what actually moves people to kill. Although political leaders and a society’s fringe elements are deemed capable of having criminal, mass-murderous intentions, ordinary people lending themselves to exterminationist and eliminationist assaults instead are reflexively seen by many either as duped (or in the Germans’ case, coerced), or dismissed as uncivilized, backward barbarians. In fact, as we now know, exceptions notwithstanding, ordinary people become perpetrators or supporters of mass murder and eliminations out of conviction. Their beliefs about the putative noxious or threatening nature of, and hatred for, the victims lead them to think eliminating them to be right. So they brutalize, expel, and kill them willingly. How they come to these beliefs and emotions does not alter the basic facts about their mindset at the moment they kill, or expel, or otherwise eliminate their victims: They hate, or coolly decide that mass murder or another form of elimination is morally correct or politically necessary. They may know that others, especially outside their countries, see it as wrong. Yet they choose to kill and brutalize anyway. The problem of moral responsibility, when a perpetrator believes such destructive politics is justified, remains real (no matter how he comes to hate) so long as he acts willingly.
We have no difficulty judging and condemning political leaders for masterminding and setting into motion eliminationist onslaughts. We can judge and condemn individual perpetrators, such as a Serb on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, or Timothy McVeigh for blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City and slaughtering 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring another 850. But people have difficulty coming to the same conclusions for large numbers of ordinary Germans, Serbs, Hutu, and others. The vast number of the perpetrators, or their ordinariness (not having previously been members of “radical” political organizations), blunt judgment’s normal processes. Is it because we have difficulty in thinking of the perpetrators as anything but a mass, or have been misled into seeing them in this dehumanizing way? Or is it because it is too disturbing or threatening to think of ordinary people—perhaps otherwise seeming like you or me—willingly perpetrating such horrors? Or is it because the problem of genocide is too daunting, the horror too overwhelming, and so we ignore or redefine it (falsely) to manage it psychologically and emotionally? Or are our moral faculties dulled by the encrusted and misleading ways scholars and media, politicians and jurists have dealt with such problems, focusing on the eliminationist leaders and ignoring or denying ordinary perpetrators’ culpability, leading people to unthinkingly accept this false paradigm? People’s systematic failure in judgment’s exact causes are not clear, being likely variable, multiple, and overlapping. In any case, understanding those underlying causes matters less than acknowledging this systematic error: People, failing to maintain the individual perspective, reflexively opt for collective guilt and stereotypes about nationalities, or, this debased moral coin’s flip side, for absolving the perpetrators of responsibility, attributing full blame to leaders or structures or some other abstraction, blunting moral responsibility and further clouding our view. Instead, we must maintain an individual-level perspective, recognizing that many ordinary people as individuals can and do act in concert to harm and kill other people on a colossal scale for the same or similar reasons that lead a single ordinary person to choose to harm or kill others.
We must make it clear to publics around the world that almost no international prevention, intervention, or moral responses to the continuing succession of large and larger mass murders and eliminations exists. Internationally, eliminationist politics remains a politics of impunity. The problem is not that powerful countries—the United States, the European countries, and Japan—are too involved in foreign entanglements or adventures trying to save or prevent the ruin of millions of lives (though the Americans’ engagements in Iraq and, with NATO, in Afghanistan may seem to suggest too much adventurism). The problem is they are too little involved, and in wrong ways. Just as exterminationist and eliminationist politics are comprehensible and explicable, so are the possibilities for ending such politics. Elites and publics need to know explicitly that they—we—can effectively apply the brakes.
A large number of individual human beings (convicted of participating in the mass murder), working singly and together, extinguished the lives of a large number of individual human beings, dying singly and together, Tig prison camp, Kigali, Rwanda, April 2008, and skulls of victims, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Bugesera District, Rwanda, April 2008.
Before exploring how to change the calculus of mass murder and eliminationist politics, we need to understand current institutional, legal, and policy affairs—particularly internationally—and how we arrived where we are. The historical developments have created certain structures, laws, and norms that powerfully impede states from acting to prevent or stop eliminationist assaults and to bring about necessary changes to the international environment.
The International Community’s Promise and Pathologies
The task of ending eliminationist politics might seem less daunting if people understood the enormous fundamental progress we have made in other, equally challenging areas of domestic and international politics. The importance is twofold. First, hard-won, substantial improvement in some critical spheres suggests that progress is possible in others, including in reducing eliminationist politics’ incidence and magnitude. Second, the specific progress made in international politics’ other spheres helps explain the difficulty in bringing about the changes necessary to diminish eliminationist assaults. Three crucial, major areas of progress, after long, difficult, and costly struggles, are:1. To provide, in many countries, institutional and political protections for basic civil and human rights domestically.
2. To delegitimize and mainly end the imperial conquest and rule of foreign territories.
3. To remove, to a considerable extent, war (and its possibility) as a fundamental means for countries relating to one another and solving international disputes.
The first, protection of people’s basic domestic civil and political rights, has been won in many countries accomplished through sustained political effort to convince people that their societies and they themselves are better off with social and economic peace, the rule of law and respect of human rights, and democratic institutions, and simultaneous
ly to enshrine these practices in society’s and politics’ organization and to spread their norms so they become the common ethos. Many revolutions, wars, and domestically less violent battles had to be fought to create the political space for these developments to take place (in part by destroying nondemocratic regimes) and to underscore the folly of organizing politics and society along other lines.
Several international developments contributed to the second and third achievements of decreasing the incidence and political use of war, conquest, and the rule of foreign peoples. War’s costs are now recognized to be astronomical. Wars wreak physical destruction, ruin national finances, injure and take the lives of combatants and noncombatants (also having adverse economic consequences), and, in preparing for and then fighting wars, distort a country’s economy, society, and polity. Democracy’s spread, especially among the most industrially and militarily powerful countries, has also reduced the appetite for war. Democratic regimes rarely fight each other. Democratic governments seek peaceful solutions to conflicts because their publics, ultimately holding them electorally accountable, do not want their husbands, sons, neighbors, and countrymen dying unless necessary for national defense, usually narrowly construed. For these and other reasons, including its delegitimation owing to conceptions of human rights and people’s right to self-determination, colonization has become too costly and is seen as wrong. No longer a path to glory and supposed moral virtue and economic benefit, colonization is now commonly understood to bring the opposite—condemnation as oppression and exploitation. In many countries, especially the most powerful ones, two norms have replaced conquest, extraction, and glory: capitalism’s bookkeeping calculus—the desire not to sacrifice one’s own citizens for archaic values of adventure, manhood, and glory—and people’s right to political self-determination. The industrial democracies’ immense international, institutional, and informational power has extended democratic and enlightenment values, meaning domestic rights, around the globe, gaining constituencies in other countries. This in itself has strengthened many countries’ peoples favoring basic human rights and made such values a part of virtually all countries’ public norms, which in turn is powerfully self-ratifying and self-reinforcing, exerting pressure on governments and political leaders to live up to their publicly professed values.
Democratic and enlightenment norms’ precise contribution to these developments can be debated. Yet in altering how people, especially economic and political elites, came to understand what they valued and how to achieve their goals, their understanding of the social and political institutions constituting self-interest moved in these more ethically defensible directions. Many countries’ leaders and peoples came to understand that democracy—even if it entails sharing wealth and power often with disparaged groups—best promotes domestic peace, security, and prosperity. Most of the leaders and peoples of the world’s wealthy and powerful countries have similarly come to understand that imperialism leads to neither glory nor economic benefit (as was believed for hundreds of years), but the opposite. It is costly, distorts a country’s priorities, social compact, and politics, and leads to social strife in addition to and partly because of lives lost. War produces war. Many countries’ leaders and peoples (especially in democracies) have come to understand that, win or lose, war is economically self-destructive and corrupts one’s own society, not to mention kills off its young men. It therefore should not be undertaken lightly or without regard to its enormous human, material, social, and ultimately likely substantial political cost. Essentially, the institutions and norms that reduced domestic oppression and rights violations, imperialism, and (among the economically and politically advanced and powerful countries) war first emerged out of enlightened self-interest before being institutionalized and turned into powerful norms around the world, even if they have been imperfectly distributed and observed. These at least partly self-regarding norms have further, and crucially, become integral to international organizations, treaties, and norms, and built-in political restraints in democratic polities, constitutions (notably Japan’s), and policies.
These developments domestically (in many countries) and internationally are major advances. Right-thinking people around the world form a general consensus especially on the need to prevent war and imperialism, which are core principles of the United Nations, international law, and international institutions. These are world historical advances. Yet they could not have been foreseen in 1900. Why should we take for granted that other, analogous advances could not also have taken place, or are now not equally possible, no matter how unlikely they may initially appear?
For stopping domestic eliminationist politics and mass murder, such progress is wanting. Whatever the lip service, and whatever the UN genocide convention’s seeming provisions, strict and effective measures combating genocide even in genocide’s most narrowly construed meaning, let alone eliminationism’s many forms, do not exist in the international arena. Why? Answering that question requires us to examine the United Nations’ and international law’s failure to work toward stopping eliminationist and exterminationist politics and their active hindrance of such efforts—paradoxically, owing to advances in precisely some of the same aforementioned norms, considerations, and calculations we celebrate in other realms.
Existing laws and norms against (aggressive or nondefensive) war and against imperialism conflict with the international community’s need to intervene to protect other countries’ peoples from their own governments’ violent abuse. Such international laws and norms enormously hinder the international community and interested states from working effectively to stop such violations, even exterminationist and eliminationist assaults. The problem is clear. Forestalling impending eliminationist assaults, including mass murder, or arresting those under way, often requires countries to make (what is legally defined as) “aggressive” war and abrogate other countries’ sovereignty, including perhaps by invading and occupying them, which looks like imperialism.
Norms against war and imperialism have prevented new norms emerging for effective intervention against mass murder, expulsion, and incarceration. By default and design, the existing norms buttress the international community’s do-nothing practice regarding eliminationist politics. They complement the virtual global absence of a push for effective intervention with an active anti-interventionist stance grounded in norm, institution, and law.
Countries genuinely disapproving of eliminationist politics do not do what they (and others) have done with war and imperialism and what might be expected, namely work passionately toward effective international measures to prevent states from exterminating people. The countries most engaged in domestic eliminationist politics, nondemocracies and sham democracies, better described as tyrannies, including until recently most UN members, want to maintain such politics’ availability, so they do not want to empower the United Nations or other countries to interfere in their domestic politics. They fear, perhaps rightly, that their practices of denying democracy, ruling by violence and intimidation, and abrogating civil and human rights would come under international assault. The United Nations’ and international law’s insidious hands-off politics creates the circumstances for a still greater systematic danger. As today’s political repertoire includes eliminationist measures, and as ruling nondemocratic or tyrannical rulers live by the sword, tyrannies’ leaders and supporters know they themselves might one day use eliminationist means, which are part of today’s normal political repertoire. Most dictatorships employ murder, terror, or other violent practices at least episodically. Many use such violence systematically. All rely upon their threat. None, in principle, is far removed from circumstances that will move its leaders to escalate and expand their daily ruling methods into mass murder or elimination.
To understand why international protections generally favor nondemocratic, brutal governments and not the people they oppress, we must look to the United Nations’ history. The United Nations, whatever else it did
, for more than forty years served one of our time’s most generally destructive and specifically mass-murderous regimes, the Soviet Union, which could veto all resolutions of the Security Council, the United Nations’ effective governing and critical lawmaking body. No major initiative, legal or institutional, could succeed that threatened the Soviet Union’s or its many client regimes’ freedom to practice eliminationist politics. The UN genocide convention’s deformities and problems, as we know, greatly resulted from the Soviets’ insistence on eviscerating the convention, so it could not stop its own and its clients’ eliminationist practices. The convention’s exclusion of the mass murder of politically—as opposed to ethnically—defined groups, its requirement that an explicit intent to commit genocide be behind the murderous assault, and its high threshold of comprehensiveness and scope for mass murders to qualify as genocide, produced window-dressing law covering up inaction. That the United Nations would not adopt other measures and laws to effectively combat eliminationist politics was a foregone conclusion, given the Soviets’ veto, and starting in 1972, communist China’s.
Rogue and lawless Soviet Union and later communist China as veto wielders and central lawmakers alone would have inherently corrupted the United Nations and prevented it from combating eliminationist politics. Still, more lies behind its failures. For virtually all its history, the UN membership has been overwhelmingly dictatorships. As recently as 1987, 60 percent of the member countries were dictatorships, and only in 1991 did electoral democracies finally hit the 50 percent mark. Dictatorships dominated the General Assembly. Many supported the Soviet Union in the Security Council so it would not be isolated and more obviously branded an outlaw regime. Even since the Soviet Union’s fall, the UN membership has never dropped much below 40 percent dictatorships. In 2009, it stood at 38 percent. Throughout its history, the United Nations’ culture and bureaucracy has been greatly comprised of representatives of regimes wanting most of all a free hand to maintain their illegitimate rule, including by using eliminationist violence against those challenging or seeking to depose them.
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