B002QX43GQ EBOK

by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  A robust prevention regime combating eliminationist and mass-murdering politics ought to do two things. The first, and most effective, component creates conditions preventing political leaders from even considering such politics. Changing political regimes from tyrannies to democracies would remove the principal institutional conditions permissive toward and even promoting eliminationist politics. It would also immediately or gradually change political leaders’ mindset toward seeing eliminationist measures as part of an actual, practical, or sensible political repertoire. Genuine democracy’s institutional checks against such politics would radically alter the cost-benefit analysis of leaders daring to contemplate murdering or eliminating hated or unwanted groups. This can be conceived as deterrence, in fact the most effective deterrence, because it essentially takes the acts off the table.

  An effective prevention regime’s second component addresses those instances when political leaders—whether in tyrannies or democracies—do contemplate eliminationist programs. It makes the costs so overwhelming that even these political leaders will ultimately opt for a noneliminationist path. This is deterrence of a more conventional and obvious kind. It changes the international political regime’s aspects permissive toward and even promoting eliminationist politics. Deterrence works by changing the cost-benefit analysis of the wholly or mainly rational, potential mass-murdering and eliminationist leaders, and of the followers at all levels, especially in command positions. If they, particularly the leaders, know that acting upon their eliminationist desires will almost certainly lead to their loss of power and imprisonment or death, choosing an eliminationist solution will not make practical sense.

  Each principal component of a prevention regime—increasing the number of democratic countries and creating a resistant international environment—could by itself make mass murder and eliminationist politics all but a thing of the past. Each is feasible or at least reasonably feasible. Still, a fully robust anti-eliminationist regime would include other features, especially more intensive interventionist measures to make eliminationist politics too costly and more difficult to pursue successfully.

  Leaders initiating mass murder and eliminations know that if they fail they will likely be deposed or worse. But because the condition of their embarking on such an inherently dangerous enterprise is their belief in their impunity and confidence of success, fear for their own power or safety hardly comes into play. Throughout our age, mass-murdering leaders have shown contempt for the international community’s capacities. When American Ambassador to Turkey Henry Morgenthau reacted to Mehmet Talât’s declaration in 1915 that his regime would follow through on its decision to eliminate the Armenians by telling Talât that “they would be condemned by the world,” Talât responded (in Morgenthau’s words) that “they would know how to defend themselves; in other words, he does not give a damn.”17 Three-quarters of a century later, Ali Hasan al-Majid, Saddam’s cousin and the organizer and commander of the exterminationist assault upon Iraq’s Kurds, which earned him the moniker “Chemical Ali,” indicated how little had changed. He, more colorfully, conveyed the international community’s ineffectiveness in deterring our age’s mass murderers. Speaking of the Kurds who would refuse to be deported, Hasan al-Majid declared: “I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? Fuck them! The international community, and those who listen to them!”18n

  This long-standing, well-founded sense of impunity from the international community must be changed. Eliminationist politics’ political leaders and principal perpetrators must be told that—even if eliminationist assaults succeed—they will be severely punished. They then must actually be punished. Several steps would accomplish this simply and effectively.

  An authoritative international watchdog organization should be created to identify mass murder and eliminations wherever they are practiced. The organization’s membership should be restricted to genuine democracies. Obviously, dictatorships (and sham democracies), by definition criminal and illegitimate, cannot have a say in an organization’s operations meant to prevent exactly such regimes in particular from becoming even worse transgressors and more murderous. The criteria for a state to be deemed engaging in eliminationist politics should be minimal. Let’s face it: Today it is usually easy to determine when a government, using its own formal security forces or its thinly disguised surrogates, is slaughtering or expelling or incarcerating groups of people or at least to have reason to suspect it is, and therefore have good cause to investigate the situation. Widespread reports of mass murder come first from surviving victims. Large population shifts suddenly occur. Refugees stream into neighboring countries (without credible evidence the refugees are fleeing conventional military operations). “Disappearances” of large numbers of people, including family and friends, become known. The perpetrating state closes the country or certain regions to outside media. Aerial and satellite imagery nonetheless provides pictorial evidence of despoliation and destruction. If the watchdog organization deems an investigation necessary, suspected countries’ noncooperation should be taken as prima facie indication of guilt.

  When this organization decides an eliminationist program is under way, it automatically triggers certain interventionist measures to stop the eliminationist assault. From the moment the watchdog organization learns of a possible new mass murder or elimination program, the organization must issue its ruling speedily; in a week’s time at most. Remember: Perpetrators can brutalize and kill thousands, tens of thousands of people every day.

  International law ought to be changed to buttress other measures to combat the most devastating complex of transgressions in existence, for which it currently is all but ineffectual. I say this without great regard for international law, as its relationship to domestic law in democracies is in name more than substance. This is so for two main reasons. The international society or community in the sense of being a real society or community—according to the nature of domestic societies, such as Italy, Japan, or Canada, or even the hybrid European Union—is mainly a fiction. The international community is really a loose collection of individual states—not even the societies and peoples they rule—that come together to agree or disagree, and work or more often not work together, on only a limited range of matters when convenient. There is little sense of actual community. People’s density of relations, mutual dependence, and sense of identity within their own societies, as members of a people or a nation, or as sharing in a political compact as citizens, are all missing from the international community. Existing international law is very much detached from any grounding in the actual practices and concerns of the people inhabiting this international noncommunity. Those making international law, such as the genocide convention, exacerbate this condition enormously. The lawmakers include multiple criminal entities, the world’s tyrannical regimes. Thus, international law floats above the world’s societies so no democratic accountability exists. The international law that gets made emerges through high-level bargaining among states, many of which should be likened to domestic crime syndicates.

  Still, international law and treaties are all we have, and so we must work to some extent within their parameters. But we should not fetishize this law as sacrosanct, or even treat it with the ordinary respect democratic countries’ law receives. Given international law’s near-total inadequacy regarding humanity’s greatest offenses—worse, given its enabling quality for the world’s mass murderers and eliminators—we should not treat it as a guide to right action. Certainly better international law is preferable, as is following it when possible, but if international law inhibits a country or group of countries (or even individuals) from intervening to stop a state program of mass slaughter or elimination because no legal provision authorizes such intervention, then we should treat this body of law with the contempt it calls upon itself.

  International law has codified “crimes against humanity” as well as the “crime of genocide,” an
d “war crimes.” They are part of the UN genocide convention (and the International Criminal Court’s statutes). In addition to the many other disqualifying problems of this convention and its treatment of mass murder and elimination, conceiving of these acts as crimes erects the inadequate frame for understanding and responding to them: law enforcement. Crime against humanity sounds grave, but crime does not convey the transgression’s enormity, the situation’s emergency, and the utterly urgent need to respond. Crime is dealt with by law enforcement, in an orderly way, and people feel little responsibility for crime and law enforcement in foreign countries. Leave it to them. Crime is also not inherently political—indeed, it usually is not political—and therefore understood not to be of national and international consequence or relevance. If instead eliminationist politics were conceptualized and legally codified as what it much more resembles, and what its own perpetrators think of it as, killing and population expulsion on war’s massive scale, and for its same ends—power, territory, domination, scarce resources, national and communal defense, and vanquishing a hated or feared enemy—such politics would be more appropriately and adequately framed and understood as a particular and particularly acute form of war. A new legal concept and law proscribing it would follow, called war against humanity. The advantages of this, beyond semantic preference, are several. War against humanity more accurately characterizes the magnitude and character of the phenomena currently falling under the rubrics of crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide. War against humanity characterizes them more accurately according to the perpetrators’ conception—throughout our time and around the world—of what they do, which is not anything that could be remotely related to crime, but clearly a war against a dangerous or recalcitrant enemy. War against humanity also characterizes them more accurately according to the deeds’ objective character: War’s scope is vast. Crime’s scope is small. States wage war. (Starting recently so do state-like entities, such as Hezbollah, from nonstate-controlled areas.) Crimes are committed in defiance of the state. Wars are systematic, mobilize an enormous number of people and institutions, have leaders and followers, and are pursued for political ends. Most crimes have none of these qualities—of particular note is crime’s generally apolitical character. Wars threaten everyone in their way. Crimes selectively victimize. Wars require countermobilization, that states and peoples make immense efforts to resist the enemy. Responsible law enforcement professionals deal with crime. Warmakers must be defeated. Crimes must be solved and punished. War must be eradicated from human relations. Crimes are something we will always live with.

  Crimes against humanity, bad as it sounds, has an oxymoronic quality. (Even its conceptualization as a plural—crimes—an agglomeration of individual acts, rather than an integral extreme violent political program, reveals its foundational misguidedness.) This is particularly so in our time, which has progressively seen war itself steadily metamorphose from opposing military forces mainly engaging each other to outright slaughters (and expulsions) of unarmed civilians. The ratio of military to civilian deaths and injuries during war was ten military casualties for every civilian casualty during World War I. Even in World War II, which became infamous for the Germans’ slaughter of civilians, the ratio was one to one. Since 1945, in more than two hundred civil wars—most wars have been fought within countries—the civilian to military casualty ratio has nearly reversed. Civilian deaths and injuries now outstrip military ones, by more than nine to one.19 War’s relationship to mass murder and eliminationist politics more broadly—as we now know from examining many eliminationist assaults and as the death figures powerfully show—is not that mass murder is war’s byproduct. Mass murder and eliminationist campaigns against targeted civilian groups or peoples have been ever more the reason for, and goal of, war, ever more what war is. If Carl von Clausewitz is correct that war is politics’ continuation by other means, today we must say that that politics is substantially the politics of elimination and extermination. (That this politics of war has emerged and come to predominate should not be surprising. Its causes are the same conditions of modernity that produce our time’s mass eliminationist politics.) Once we recognize that (1) such politics’ practice constitutes war and not a collection of crimes, and (2) what has been considered those crimes’ object—not individual people but humanity—is correctly understood as exterminationist and eliminationist assaults’ objects, then (3) the justification of reconceptualizing mass murder and other eliminations as war against humanity becomes even more compelling.

  Unlike crimes against humanity, war against humanity precisely captures the character and magnitude of perpetrators’ onslaughts in another fundamental way. When someone says that entire classes of people do not deserve to live, or live among us, he essentially declares war on a part of humanity, which qualifies, and should legally qualify, as war on humanity in general. How can we know the perpetrators will stop after completing their eliminationist assault on the first group or groups they target, or in the first country they target? The Turks did not. The Germans during the Nazi period did not. The Japanese did not. The Soviets did not. Where would Pol Pot have ended had he stayed in power or had somehow been able to conquer other countries? The Serbs went from area to area in the former Yugoslavia on their mass-murderous and eliminationist drives. Had they not been stopped, they likely would have gone still further. The Hutu mass murderers, defeated by the invading Tutsi army, retreated to neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they plunged that vast country and people further into chaos, slaughtering people, creating famine conditions, and raping women on a vast scale. Saddam’s mass murdering might have expanded exponentially had he defeated Iran or gained the nuclear weapons he was seeking in the 1980s with enormous determination and resources (nearly completing a nuclear facility before the Israelis destroyed it in 1981). The Political Islamists today slaughtered millions in Southern Sudan and then, almost predictably, started a subsequent and ongoing exterminationist and eliminationist drive in the country’s Darfur region. Political Islamists have genocide bombers active around the Middle East, in Europe, in Asia, and in the United States. Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, perhaps the most influential and inspirational suicide bombing leader within Political Islam, has openly declared the advisability of striking everywhere. At a rally in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, broadcast on Hezbollah’s television network, he urged Palestinians: “Martyrdom operations—suicide bombings—should be exported outside Palestine,” Nasrallah declared. “I encourage Palestinians to take suicide bombings worldwide. Don’t be shy about it.”20 While Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian genocide bombing groups have not yet acted upon this, their and other Political Islamists’ potential to carry out Nasrallah’s hortatory threat exists. Political Islamists, especially Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have regularly issued such threats, to strike everywhere with hundreds of “martyrs,” during moments of political tension. This is a small but significant part of Political Islamists’ more general calls to slaughter millions. And they have been spearheaded by the Iranian regime’s highly aggressive orientation toward many countries, bankroll, and drive to acquire nuclear weapons. Political Islamists have regional, continental, and, for some, even global eliminationist ambitions. At any moment, any Jew, any Dane, even the pope can become their target, just for being a Jew, a Dane, or speaking one’s mind, or for not wanting a country and its people to be annihilated, for just being a country’s citizen where political cartoons are permitted, for remarking that one religion is superior to another or insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Eliminationist perpetrators’ unmistakable record is that once conducting an exterminationist and eliminationist war against one part of humanity, their eliminationist aspirations frequently expand, imperiling other, often many, parts of humanity.

  War against humanity conveys the alarming threat mass murderers and eliminationist perpetrators pose, and countries’ and peoples’ urgent need to mobilize themselves to fight it. Theirs is a war against every
one or potentially everyone. It must be met with single-minded effort and full force. It must be defeated. It is an emergency situation entailing sacrifice, including individual sacrifice for greater good. That is why, in principle, none of us is a bystander. We are all implicated in the war itself. Humanity must engage a war against humanity with all possible military means to safeguard itself, and its every part.

  All humanity, all states, all political leaders, may and should seek to immediately defeat those waging war against humanity. This would empower and legitimize any state or group of states or, for that matter, nonstate groups or individuals to take conventional military action or covert measures against the perpetrators, who in conducting a war against humanity imperil everyone, making killing the perpetrators a defensive act. War’s permissive rules would apply instead of law enforcement’s highly restrictive rules, which ordinarily disallow cross-border activity. Neighboring states, alliances such as NATO, and powers that can conduct out-of-area operations such as the United States, France, and Britain would need no further justification for acting to stop mass murder or expulsions or incarcerations. All the alibis for inaction the United Nations’ multiple failures provide would disappear. Relevant states and their leaders would face increased pressure to act, because everyone would know of their authority and their presumptive duty to act. Beyond conventional military intervention, such arrangements would have two additional extremely powerful effects.