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Similarly, when in the late 1980s the United States stopped supporting Latin American tyrannies, making it clear that the military overthrow of democracy—the previous decades’ common occurrence—would lead to political and economic isolation, Latin America (except the communist anachronism Cuba) became near-wholly democratic and mainly free.
Freedom in the World 2008
Establishing and governing a United Democratic Nations would meet some problems. What actually qualifies as a genuine democracy or a free country, rather than a sham democracy such as Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, even before the fraudulently overturned 2008 election? Dealing with the nondemocratic colossus China and the ever more problematic democracy and increasingly authoritarian Russia is a substantial stumbling block. Identifying sham democracies, as Freedom House shows, is not difficult. Still, some judgment calls would be necessary and likely imperfect. Nevertheless, the difficulty of getting every case right does not justify getting all the obvious ones wrong by maintaining the tyrannical status quo. And there is no reason to succumb to carping holier-than-thous, cynics, or the illegitimate and injurious status quo’s dissimulating defenders who would maintain that admitting partly or wholly fake democracies and unfree countries into the United Democratic Nations would poison and therefore nullify the entire project. With China, the largest problem, the diplomatic thing to do, in both senses of diplomacy, is to make an exception. If necessary, the same should be done with Russia. Practical principles’ occasional compromise to further other far more important practical principles is preferable to the alternative of sacrificing them all—in this case, supporting all the world’s tyrants and brutes. Noble inconsistency, including not applying an operative principle to a few cases, trumps consistently applying the principle to no one, therefore standing by as tyrants brutalize, expel, and kill millions, and repress and suppress hundreds of millions more. To be sure, it would be better if the international system were not the anarchic and essentially lawless place it is, and we could devise a set of solutions to the problems of its governance that are desirable and doable. But as the treacherous and difficult international system is the real context for our making choices about how to proceed, the urgent need to save lives and improve the horrifying conditions under which so many people live powerfully argues for these proposals, which are superior to all others.
Democracy is no panacea. Yet, in sum, it is human existence’s boon. Democracy should be a prerequisite for deeming a country’s government legitimate. Those attacking this approach, arguing that insistently promoting democracy, and political and civil rights, as ineffective or dangerous, ignore the facts. When it has been tried, such as in Western Europe after World War II, by the European Union in Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe, and by the United States in Latin America, it has worked brilliantly.
The final substantial hurdle is to motivate the world’s democracies to organize themselves to create a more democratic, secure, and prosperous world. The cost would not be great. Praise would likely far exceed criticism. Over time, international governance’s and then steadily national governance’s reordering would enhance democratic countries’ security and lower their costs—including the colossal direct and indirect economic costs—of dealing with the human and economic destruction the world’s many undemocratic and tyrannical regimes cause.
A serious international prevention, intervention, and punishment regime to stop mass-murderous and eliminationist states and leaders from warring on their peoples and humanity, and a devoted international push for democratizing more countries to remove the institutional and political and cultural basis for political leaders to even see eliminationist politics as an option, are the basis for a more secure, more global structure that would greatly end eliminationist politics’ mass violence and vast destructiveness. Even if both are not simultaneously brought about, or achieved only in part, establishing just one will save the lives and prevent the misery of untold millions of men, women, and children.
The alternative is to wait around, yet again, to wait as today’s mass exterminations and eliminations go on day after day, and to wait until one or another, and then another, and then another of the manifestly proto-eliminationist regimes governing more than half the world’s countries decide to enact an elimination or genocide, and slaughters, expels, or incarcerates, and inflicts countless other cruelties on masses of people. How can we, in good faith as moral beings, as citizens of our countries, and as human beings belonging to a common humanity, choose to permit this to happen? How can we choose not to take simple and effective steps to prevent future wars against humanity?
NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
1 See Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1996), p. 513.
2 J. Samuel Walker, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s chief historian, explains: “Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why the Truman administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan. It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it.” See Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, “U.S. Responses to Dropping the Bomb,” NuclearFiles.Org, www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/history/pre-cold-war/hiroshima-nagasaki/us-responses-to-bomb.htm for other leading American military men and advisers’ views.The American government’s own authoritative immediate postwar United States Strategic Bombing Survey, which assessed the effects of bombing on Japan, confirmed that annihilating the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was militarily superfluous: “It seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.” See United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (Pacific War), Washington, D.C., 1 July 1946, http://www.anesi.com/ussbs01.htm#jstetw.
3 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956: The White House Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), pp. 312-313.
4 Draft of a White House press release, “Statement by the President of the United States,” ca. August 6, 1945, www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/bomb/small/mb10.htm.
5 The public opinion data are from J. Samuel Walker, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 98 and 5.
6 William D. Leahy, I Was There: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950), pp. 440-441.
7 Norimitsu Onishi, “Okinawans Protest Japan’s Plan to Revise Bitter Chapter of World War II,” New York Times, October 7, 2007, p. 8.
8 Kate Doyle, “The Atrocity Files: Deciphering the Archives of Guatemala’s Dirty War,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2007, p. 61.
9 Samantha Power, “A Problem From Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 307.
10 Eberhard Jäckel, ed., Hitler: Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924 (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), pp. 119-120.
11 Homer, The Iliad, trans. by Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), Book IV, p. 93.
12 Alisa Muratčauš, author interview, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, July 12, 2008.
13 Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist
Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Fall 1993): 173-175.
14 For a partial historical inventory of expulsions, ghettoizations, and mass murders of Jews, see Paul E. Grosser and Edwin G. Halperin, AntiSemitism: The Causes and Effects of a Prejudice (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1979); and Martin Gilbert, The Dent Atlas of Jewish History, 5th ed. (London: JM Dent, 1993).
15 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Foreword to the German Edition,” Hitlers Willige Vollstrecker: Ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (Berlin: Siedler, 1996), reprinted in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 480.
16 See Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence, Volume 2 of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
17 For this point I am in debt to Stanley Hoffmann.
18 Frontline, “Ghosts of Rwanda,” www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/ghosts/viewers/.
19 Rithy Uong, author interview, April 11, 2008, Lowell, Massachusetts.
20 For a methodological exception (whatever its deterministic shortcomings), see Barbara Harff, “No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955,” American Political Science Review (2003): 57-73.
21 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair (New York: Knopf, 2002).
CHAPTER TWO
1 Quoted in Horst Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting”: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama Against German Imperialism (1884-1915) (London: Zed, 1980), pp. 156-157. By saying “shots to be fired at them,” von Trotha had informed his troops that they should fire over the heads of the women and children so they would flee. He was explicit that no male prisoners should be taken, but it should not “give rise to atrocities committed on women and children.” He admonished his soldiers to “always bear in mind the good reputation that the German soldier has acquired.” But this was clearly salve for their consciences (or a deliberate falsehood entered into the historical record), as the Germans had been mercilessly slaughtering Herero women and children all along—which they continued to do after this order’s promulgation. Even if they had not themselves slaughtered the women and children, their formal order was to drive them into the desert where the Herero would all but surely die.
2 Kevork B. Bardakjian, Hitler and the Armenian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: The Zoryan Institute, 1985), p. 1.
3 Drechsler, “Let Us Die Fighting,” pp. 215-216.
4 Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany, presented to both houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty, August 1918 (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1918), p. 65.
5 James Bryce and Arnold Toynbee, The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916. Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Falloden by Viscount Bryce (Princeton, NJ: Gomidas Institute, 2000), Account 65, pp. 290-291.
6 Quoted in Donald E. Miller and Lorna Touryan Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 80.
7 Ibid., p. 84.
8 Matthias Bjørnlund, “‘A Fate Worse Than Dying’: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 34.
9 Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus, 3rd rev. ed. (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1997), pp. 347-361.
10 Johannes Lepsius, ed., Deutschland und Armenien, 1914-1918: Sammlung Diplomatischer Aktenstücke (Bremen, Germany: Donat & Temmen, 1986), p. 84.
11 Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 127; and Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, p. 207.
12 Cited in Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, vol. 2 (New York: Schocken, 1988), p. 1004.
13 U.S. Department of State, “Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo: An Accounting” (Washington, DC: U.S. State Department Report, 1999).
14 I first demonstrated these views’ hollowness in Hitler’s Willing Executioners and wrote more generally about them in “The Paradigm Challenged, Victim Testimony, Critical Evidence, and New Perspectives in the Study of the Holocaust,” Tikkun, July-August 1998, pp. 40-47.
15 For a discussion of the complexity and difficulty in arriving at figures, see Matthew White, “Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century,” Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm. White includes in his compilation the figures from other sources providing estimates for many mass slaughters, as well as estimates of individual mass murders contained in monographs, reports, and journalistic accounts.
16 Robert K. Hitchcock and Tara M. Twedt, “Physical and Cultural Genocide of Various Indigenous Peoples,” in Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 493-497; and Jason Clay, “Genocide in the Age of Enlightenment,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 12, no. 3: 1.
17 For one tabulation of mass murders according to regime type, see R. J. Rummel, “20th Century Democide,” www.mega.nu/ampp/rummel/sod.tab16a.1.gif.
18 Quoted in R. J. Rummel, China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991), p. 216.
CHAPTER THREE
1 Stacie E. Martin, “Native Americans,” Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005), p. 744.
2 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, “Foreword to the German Edition,” Hitlers Willige Vollstrecker: Ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust (Berlin: Siedler, 1996), reprinted in Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage, 1997), p. 480. For the development of Hitler’s political views, strategies, and policies regarding the Jews, see “The Nazis’ Assault on the Jews: Its Character and Evolution,” chapter 4 of Hitler’s Willing Executioners. My general argument made there, that it is an individual or a small political leadership that initiates mass murder, was picked up by Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), as part of his otherwise wrongheaded and reductionist account of mass murder.
3 See Taner Akçam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), pp. 155-156.
4 For an account of what is known of this meeting, see Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 55-59.
5 Dawit Wolde Giorgis, Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea, 1989), pp. 290-291.
6 Vahakn N. Dadrian, “The Secret Young-Turk Ittihadist Conference and the Decision for the World War I Genocide of the Armenians,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7, no. 2 (Fall 1993): 173-175.
7 Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1919), p. 342.
CHAPTER FOUR