The modern state’s enormously greater power and the concomitant awareness it can engage in transformative (including eliminationist) projects will only grow. Reorienting political leaders away from destructive toward positive transformative projects may be possible. Yet if we think more imaginatively about the modern state’s capacities, we see the international community has failed to recognize and exploit these capacities properly, and therefore to beneficially employ and further this generally positive aspect of modernity. The modern state’s transformative power, ability to monitor its domain, to influence and alter its every corner, and to learn quickly new possibilities, processes, and techniques from others have been almost completely lost on the international community, regarding its members individually and collectively considering their own international transformative capacities. The modern international community, like the modern nation-state, has enormously greater capacity to know what transpires anywhere in the world, including by monitoring its member states’ actions within their own countries, and to effect change with direct intervention and by teaching lessons to its constituent members. Just as today’s state capacity to effect transformative change dwarfs that of earlier states, today’s international state system’s parallel power dwarfs that of its predecessors. True, the international community’s stepwise development lagged the modern state’s at home, taking off only after World War II with the advent of modern telecommunications, supersonic transport, and the United States’ emergence as a superpower with a presence and ability to project power all over the world. The international community’s capacity to monitor events recently substantially advanced even more with satellites blanketing the globe—providing imagery even to private corporations and organizations, and to you (through Google)—with the Internet’s worldwide instant audio and visual communications, and with all manner of economic, nongovernmental organizational, media, and other personnel, which together compose the de facto information agents of globalization and allow their ever-increasing penetration of virtually all countries. The international system’s members have chosen, by and large, to exercise its modern strengths not on what goes on within its members’ borders, but overwhelmingly on relations among its members. Despite having these enormous capacities, the international community’s leaders have chosen not to reorient their decades-long successful emphasis from stopping violence between countries to addressing violence within countries, which is where eliminationist (and other kinds of) violence has overwhelmingly shifted.
Thinking hard about how to translate the modern international system’s vast capacities into commensurate practices that would diminish eliminationist politics can yield enormous benefits. In fact, any major prevention strategy’s assumption is that states, acting singly and in concert, including by altering the system’s fundamentals, do have the power to effect such positive transformative politics. While this seems obvious, it is not articulated or taken seriously as a foundation for stamping out eliminationist politics. And it compels us to ask: If the world’s anti-eliminationist political leaders genuinely wanted to use their countries’ colossal aggregate power to establish policies to reduce such politics’ frequency and destructiveness, what would they do?
The second feature of our age’s politics that has structurally transformed social antagonisms into the basis for eliminationist politics is the inclusion of all people into politics, meaning that they make or at least potentially will make political, economic, and social demands that cause tyrants and dominant political groups to feel insecure and therefore to be ready to contemplate using violence to eliminate their problem somehow. As Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Cheka, explains: “We are terrorizing the enemies of the Soviet government so as to suppress crime in embryo.”15 Even if the Soviets and other communist regimes took this eliminationist logic (by “crime,” Dzerzhinsky meant all real or imaginary opposition to the regime and its policies), the logic operates in all nondemocratic, namely tyrannical, regimes, creating an eliminationist propensity. This eliminationist propensity, and the insecurity underlying it, is exacerbated by the dual transitions many countries face: to capitalism and to an industrial or more advanced economy. And to building a nation, which necessitates all people’s inclusion in a generally acceptable political and social compact. Each transition typically causes substantial social strains, political demands, and conflicts. An additional, recent structural development, ever more disruptive to settled domestic arrangements, is globalization, which, with its international economic, cultural, and political influences, opens up and closes off opportunities to certain groups and people, creating winners and losers, whether they are ethnic, geographic, or class-based groups. These conflicts can create or exacerbate tensions, increase insecurity, and alter cost-benefit ratios, resulting in political leaders’ considering eliminationist politics.
Although conflicts emerging from such structural conditions in themselves do not produce mass murder or eliminations, reducing such conflicts’ frequency, scope, or intensity would diminish the basis for political leaders and elites considering employing eliminationist political means. The problem is that those (erroneously) claiming these structural conditions cause mass murder would also like—unrealistically and probably to the detriment of many countries’ peoples—to stop or greatly curtail these transitions to capitalism and economic development, to nation-building, people’s full political inclusion into their country’s politics, and to globalization. Whatever these modernizing and globalizing processes’ unevenness and short- and medium-term costs and transitions, whatever the considerable need to better manage them, they are surely necessary for general long-term greater prosperity. Within each country, domestic accommodations can be made to relieve the resulting tensions and conflicts, but that differs from self-defeatingly trying to derail these processes because they can engender conflicts, sometimes providing the basis for political leaders and their supporters to seek certain groups’ elimination.
Our age’s third contributing factor, the international context, has been differently permissive toward eliminationist politics, creating powerful positive or negative incentives for political leaders considering the advisability and feasibility of slaughtering or eliminating unwanted and hated groups. This aspect of the eliminationist equation can be radically and effectively altered to reduce such politics’ practice. If, for example, the world’s powerful countries created and honored an ironclad guarantee that they would invade any country whose people perpetrated mass murder or elimination, stop it, and capture or kill the political leaders, many fewer eliminationist assaults would occur. The tyrants and their cohorts, typically in poor and weak countries, would know that, even if they did not care for their own lives or power (though most obviously dearly do), their now-quixotic, eliminationist policy would be self-defeating. How the international context can be made less permissive toward and more effective in preventing mass murder and elimination, short of such guaranteed measures, is discussed below.
Whatever a country’s existing strains and conflicts, ultimately the fourth factor—political leaders’ and their critical followers’ understanding of the groups they consider pernicious or obstacles to cherished goals—leads to an eliminationist orientation, or not. Such beliefs are typically grounded in (often long-standing) prejudices and hatreds, or derive from an ideological orientation at the core of the political leaders’ and followers’ stance toward politics, their country, and its future. So altering these views in the short or medium term, and thereby reducing the cognitive and ideological basis for eliminationist or exterminationist politics, is not feasible. Of course, if a new political context internationally and domestically lowers political conflicts’ stakes, how political leaders and their followers view certain groups might also improve. This could be a secondary effect of other changes, yet targeting the potential perpetrators’ beliefs and values is unlikely to be an efficacious preventive strategy. The eliminationist ideologies rooted not in classical domestic
conflicts over territory, resources, or power, but in dehumanizing or demonizing conceptions of certain groups, would in any case not be susceptible to such changes or attempts. The most obvious, widespread, and dangerous such ideology today is Political Islam.
Finally, proximate factors create political leaders’ opportunity to transform eliminationist desires into violent eliminationist assaults. Here the modern international system’s power can be applied, and policies can be designed to prevent opportunities necessary for political leaders to initiate mass annihilation or elimination from appearing. Thus, in the intersection of proximate factors with the international system (and the context it provides), success in crafting prevention can occur.
Having worked through the five major factors contributing to eliminationist politics, thinking in a hardheaded manner about prevention should continue by building upon the analysis of the immediate general conditions that produce mass murder and eliminationist politics: Political leaders deciding to opt for such politics are able to do so institutionally, and have followers willing to implement the policies. The leaders moved by a conception of the victims, embedded in their understanding of their polity and society (or the ones they desire) and power’s dictates, opt at a seemingly propitious time to eliminate the victims or their putative threat. Institutionally, they must be able to put through policies domestically, and not face an international environment determined to make eliminationist politics suicidal. They must believe themselves to be powerful, effective, and immune. Followers must possess a conception of the victims, and a sense of impunity and necessity, that leads them to believe slaughtering or eliminating their neighbors and countrymen, women, and children, is right and desirable, and possible. A prevention regime cannot effectively address all of these elements. Eliminationist politics’ sine qua non—for political leaders only slightly less than their followers—is the conception of the victims, typically deep prejudice and hatred, leading the perpetrators to mark targeted groups as fundamentally different and dangerous and therefore in need of elimination. This, though powerfully driving eliminationist politics of all kinds, is, unfortunately, strongly resistant to an international prevention regime. Why? Combating prejudice and hatreds is notoriously difficult and can succeed only with enormous effort from within the prejudiced society itself, which is extraordinarily unlikely to be pursued in countries such notions and emotions plague. Education, the hoped-for general panacea, is, in any case, not a viable short- or medium-term option. This is so, without accounting for education’s dubious effectiveness—in general because of ideology’s self-validating and corrective-resistant power, and in particular when the education originates outside a country. Even when efficacious, which it has been on occasion in unusual circumstances after national or regional trauma and effective occupation (Germany and Japan after World War II), the benefits appear only after assiduous application lasting years, decades, or generations.16
Eliminationist politics’ constituent features—initiation, institutional freedom to act, and implementation—can each be addressed. Even though the prejudices and hatreds, the conceptions of groups and peoples that dehumanize or demonize them, that typically move political leaders to slaughter or eliminate large population groups, are in their essence irrational, the first constituent feature of eliminationist politics, the leaders’ decisions to initiate such programs, are still overwhelmingly clearheaded, calculated, and purposeful, in other words rational in rationality’s instrumental sense. In most instances, political leaders opt for such politics only when the opportunity appears propitious for success and to offer substantially more political and social benefits than costs. The international community can profoundly affect this calculus.
If eliminationist politics’ projected cost-benefit ratio became systematically weighted so the costs overwhelmingly outweighed the benefits, then such politics’ incidence would decline enormously. If we focus on increasing the probability not that perpetrators would actually fail to kill or expel their victims but that they would lose power and their lives, then several paths open up. A guarantee should exist that any political leader initiating a mass slaughter or elimination faces severe punishment. A guarantee should exist that his country’s membership in all international institutions is immediately suspended, and a total economic embargo is placed upon it. These would end only when the eliminationist assault ends and the country’s and the armed forces’ leaders are dead or surrender themselves to the competent international authorities.
Just as a conception of targeted groups as pernicious and deserving of elimination has been a prerequisite for eliminationist politics, so has such politics’ second constituent feature: the institutional freedom to act, more specifically a domestic politics making eliminationist programs possible to plan, enact, and carry out. Institutionally, such a politics’ foundation is the absence of democratic institutions, checks, and controls. The past century’s record is clear. Whatever a society’s and its leaders’ passions, prejudices, hatreds, a democratic political dispensation is a powerful brake on their being translated into action. Genuinely democratic institutions (inauthentic exceptions proving the rule) create strong safeguards, including ideological ones, against eliminationist politics and violence. Given that in our time democratic regimes—including in countries that had previously seen mass murder, notably across Latin America—rarely resort domestically to eliminationist politics, and given democracy’s representative mechanisms, a world of democracies would be a safer world. Enormously fewer mass murders, expulsions, incarcerations, and other associated violence would blight the globe.
The international community could easily do much more to affect eliminationist politics’ second constituent feature—by focusing on transforming tyrannies into democracies. If the international community withdrew the broad and substantial legitimacy it bountifully confers on tyrants, dictators, nondemocratic leaders of all stripes, stopped treating them as though they legitimately represent their countries and peoples, it would both delegitimize these leaders and regimes domestically, and tangibly pressure them to change. The mechanisms and further arguments for doing this I discuss below.
The third constituent feature in the eliminationist political complex is implementation, which revolves around political leaders’ followers being willing to become perpetrators. The international community’s capacity to directly influence perpetrators or would-be perpetrators—those physically rounding up, expelling, torturing, and killing the victims—is limited. Often outsiders have little access. The perpetrators’ or would-be perpetrators’ prejudices and hatreds, confirmed and legitimized by their country’s political leadership, are often so consuming that they wholeheartedly accept the wisdom and necessity of slaughtering or eliminating their targeted enemies. Still, we should try low-cost interventions. When mass murder or mass expulsions are under way, or it becomes obvious such politics may be imminent, the country should be bombarded with radio broadcasts, leaflets dropped from airplanes, and Internet postings of all kinds and e-mail messages informing its people that (1) mass murder and elimination are immoral and illegal assaults against all humanity, (2) the international community condemns them, and (3) anyone participating or abetting these deeds is liable to prosecution when the perpetrating regime falls, WHICH IT WILL. The broadcasts, transmissions, and leaflets should emphasize the international community’s commitment to toppling the mass-murdering regime, and underline emphatically that “following orders” will be no defense, legally or morally. Examples of perpetrators from other countries having paid dearly for their mass murdering and associated acts would be added.
Such informational barrages’ advantages are several. Many people among the groups from which the perpetrators are drawn need a reality check, a wake-up call revealing that the international community, world of neutral outsiders, condemns critical aspects of their worldviews, including the rightness of brutalizing, expelling, or slaughtering others. Some, perhaps many, would reconsider the eliminationist
policies (others would not). Furthermore, when facing prosecution, no perpetrator could plausibly claim he was ignorant his deeds were prosecutable transgressions or use following orders as a viable defense.
One highly critical subset of followers is far more prone to international persuasion: the political leaders’ lieutenants and high-ranking subordinates. It should be made emphatically and indisputably clear to them that holding leadership positions in the government or in military or police or administrative bodies initiating or carrying out eliminationist assaults makes them automatically liable for guaranteed punishment when the regime falls, WHICH IT WILL, even if they as individuals do not transmit eliminationist orders or perpetrate violence. In other words, it should be communicated to all high-level officials that by not opposing eliminationist politics they endanger themselves. They should resist such politics and if, despite their resistance, mass murder or elimination begins, they must resign or leave (surreptitiously) their positions immediately. Without this second and third tier of political, military, police, and administrative leaders and officers, a country’s leadership will be substantially more reluctant to practice mass elimination.
All relevant international institutions—the United Nations or any successor organization, regional political entities including the European Union, African Union, Association of Southeast Nations, and Organization of American States, international military and security associations including NATO, international trade institutions, chiefly the World Trade Organization, international law enforcement and criminal justice institutions, including Interpol and the International Criminal Court, among others—should produce a handbook or series of handbooks spelling out high officeholders’ responsibilities to prevent and resist eliminationist politics, and their culpability and penalties for failure. Such handbooks should be sent in every conceivable way—regular mail, e-mail, through international institutions, disseminated to local media—to every relevant officeholder in every country of the world, the moment a new government is formed or an individual takes office or gets promoted to specified political, administrative, military, and security offices. These officeholders’ and officers’ senior staff should be held similarly responsible and receive the same information, which would also spur them to inform their superiors. Every senior political, administrative, military, or police leader will know he will not be able to claim ignorance of his legal responsibility and culpability, or, through the means mentioned above, of the legal prohibition on such acts. The absolving cover that a perpetrator merely was following orders will dissolve as a rationale bolstering criminal cooperation or, after the fact, as an exculpatory option.
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