I write books with different people in mind: the general public, scholars, religious and other institutional leaders, myself, and, with this book, politicians and policy-makers. The weight that each of these different kinds of people have in my mind vary from book to book, and within each book from one section to the next. To spend a moment on myself, I find it odd I am sometimes accused of hubris or arrogance for daring to say things others have not said—though these charges are also perfectly understandable, as my books have been treated and responded to, also by so many so-called scholars, as political events, especially but not only by those feeling threatened by the truths they contain. I say this because it seems odd to me that anyone would expend the enormous time and energy it takes to write and publish a book unless believing he had original and important things to say. I write books only on topics I think are important and about which I think I have something fundamentally new, different, and right to convey to others, and not just something or any old thing, but enough or perhaps more than enough to change the understanding of the book’s subject and themes. Then I endeavor to write the books in ways that adhere to or even push forward the best current understanding of scholarly analysis, and to do so in a way that every engaged citizen, not just the social scientific cognoscenti, can read. Then I let the chips fall. It turns out I have written on grim topics, topics of life and death, topics of sweeping importance and scope, topics that engage or inflame people’s minds and hearts. I do so always with what Max Weber discussed in another context, a sense of calling, and always, ever more here, with a dual sense of vocation, which in this instance are not in tension: the vocation of science or scholarship, which is the ethic of ultimate ends, and the vocation of politics, which is the ethic of responsibility. As a devotee of the ethics of ultimate ends, I write to the best of my understanding and with all my intellectual care and might (whatever that might be) what is true. As a devotee of the ethics of responsibility, I seek to impart these truths to all who care and, as much as possible, to all who do not, and especially to those who can influence others and the world’s events—in order to shape the world, the worlds of people’s understanding and actions, and thus to improve people’s lot however much a man, or this man, sitting at his computer keyboard and then taking to the media pages and airwaves, can.
As in my other books, I do all this in this book by asking questions that differ markedly from the questions others have asked who have addressed genocide. It is my thinking through of the problem from the beginning, rethinking both what we need to study, namely what the object of study is—both in kind and in size, and its various dimensions (even dispensing with the analytically problematic term genocide)—how to organize and present the analysis, how to explain and interpret virtually every aspect of eliminationist assaults, and then, of course, how to stop them. The analysis I present is therefore about mass murder, more broadly, about mass elimination, and not about other authors’ work. It is my attempt to substantially recast our understanding of the phenomenon, and not to engage in debates with writer X or writer Y about what he or she has said on point A or point B. Obviously, I differ from many other authors on how to understand many aspects of mass murder and elimination, from conceptualizing mass murder and other eliminationist measures as being cut from the same cloth, to embedding them in a broader understanding of eliminationist politics and politics more broadly. Carrying on debates on these points is of interest mainly or perhaps only to those authors. For readers, including other scholars, the critical issue is understanding eliminationist assaults, destroyers of so many people and breakers of so many societies past, present, and potentially future. Eliminationist assaults’ basic contours are known with many useful and fine books presenting the individual narratives, and as this book is not about those narratives but instead seeks to explore the whys and wherefores neglected or treated in inadequate ways, I have also resisted the fetish of citing sources and loading the book with such unnecessary heft because once one gets into this, the vast monographic sources just on many individual mass murders are shoreless.
This book is not about other people’s interpretations. It is not meant to be an exhaustive documentation of any individual mass murder, let alone a history of our time’s sweep of mass murders, let alone eliminations. The facts, in any case, are generally straightforward. This book rather seeks to reconceptualize, understand anew, interpret differently, explain adequately, and to propose workable responses to this catastrophic and systematic problem of eliminationism. This book is about our, or more specifically, my ability to do or propose all these in fresh, compelling, and correct ways. That is what I present. That is what you will judge.
For the general reader, I recommend several general sources dealing with the essential contours of our time’s mass murders that contain much of the basic historical material mentioned in this book: Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity; Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Genocide in the Twentieth Century and their subsequent Century of Genocide; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, eds., The History and Sociology of Genocide; Paul Hollander, ed., From the Gulag to the Killing Fields; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil; R. J. Rummel, Death By Government ; and 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. The monographic literature on individual mass murders is often large. On the Holocaust alone, it would fill a decent-sized library. Mentioning here just a few extremely helpful works in no way implies there are not many, many others that could also be cited for other eliminationist assaults or for the ones the works themselves treat: on the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians, Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide; on the Holocaust, my own Hitler’s Willing Executioners; on the Soviet gulag, Anne Applebaum, Gulag; on Cambodia, Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime; on Rwanda, Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season; and on the U.S. response to exterminationist assaults, Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell. In addition to the historical treatments themselves, many of these sources present excellent selections of witness testimony. It is important, however, to understand that just because these and other publications contain facts and figures that provide the foundation for an analysis of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults, it does not mean that I agree or disagree with any of the specific or many interpretations and explanations they offer.
Not merely other people’s books, but other people have also been indispensable for this book. For their comments and support, I am thankful to Clive Priddle, Mustafa Emirbayer, Esther Newberg, Peter Osnos, Paul Pier-son, Thane Rosenbaum, and Susan Weinberg. I am also thankful, and more, to my mother and father, Norma Goldhagen and Erich Goldhagen, for all they have singly and together done to make this book possible. My father continues to provide me unending intellectual companionship and inspiration. His appearance in the film, for which he accompanied me, or rather I him, on his first trip back to where he survived the Holocaust, provides only a small, though to me a cherished, part of the recognition he deserves for his own seminal thinking and for his incalculable contributions to my intellectual formation and work.
Most of all, I want to thank Sarah Williams Goldhagen for everything, a slight but enormous portion of which is the many, many improvements she has made to this book owing to her skilled editing hand and still more skilled mind.
INDEX
Locators in italics indicate figures or tables.
Abe, Shinzo
Abstract structures, as cause of genocide
Abu Ghraib prison
Accountability for mass murder. See Perpetrators’ impunity
Acculturation
Action
agency and
beliefs and
discourse and
eliminationist beliefs and
intent and
Afghanistan
Africa
annihilationist assaults in
famine in
potential for eliminationism in
African National Congress
African Union (Organization of African Unity)
Agency
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud
Akef, Mohammed Mahdi
Albright, Madeleine
Al Qaeda
Afghanistan and
September 11, 2001 and
targets of
Al-Walid, Khalid ibn
Amin
Amnesty International
Amoral utilitarianism
Anand, Mulk Raj
Andreeva, Anna
Annan, Kofi
Anti-eliminationist discourse
attempts to hide facts of eliminationist outcomes
components of
development of
language of
media and
personalizing victims in
self-examination and
See also Eliminationist discourse
Anti-imperialism
Antisemitism
geographic variation in
in German resistance groups
Hitler and
Holocaust and
of Political Islam
Arab countries
annihilationist assaults in
failure to condemn mass murder
Arendt, Hannah
Argentina
Arginskaya, Irena
Aristotle
Arkan (Željko Ražnatović)
Arkan’s Tigers
Armenians
eliminationist assaults against
death marches
decision to annihilate
discourse for
forced labor and
iterative
mobile killing squads and
rape of women by Kurds
Turks’ prejudice and
Turks’ treatment of children
Asia, annihilationist assaults in
Askwith, Thomas
Assad, Hafez al-
Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors (Sarajevo)
Association of Southeast Nations
Assyrians
Auschwitz
Authority, over perpetrators
Bagosora, Théoneste
Balakian, Krikoris
“Banality of evil”
Bangladesh
current political situation
death marches
eliminationist politics in
end of eliminationist assault
famine in
mass murder by Pakistanis in
Pakistanis’ rape of women in
targeting of victims
Barabaig
Baring, Evelyn
Bartlet, Leslie
Bashir, Omar al-
Bataan Death March
Bazimaziki, Augustin
Beardsley, Brent
Belgians
Beliefs
actions and
of perpetrators (see Perpetrators’ beliefs)
Benedict XVI
Berg Damara, slaughter of
Binding, Karl
bin Laden, Osama
Biological warfare weapons
Bitero, Joseph-Désiré
Blundell, Michael
Bormann, Martin
Bosnia, eliminationist assault in
failure of U.S. to act in
intervention in
media coverage of
NATO intervention in
rape of women in
Serbian camps
Serbian rape camps
targeting victims
Bounties, for leading perpetrators of eliminationist campaigns
Boutros-Ghali, Boutros
Brazil
Brecht, Berthold
British
demeanor of perpetrators of Kikuyu elimination
from ideal of eliminating Kikuyu to policy
invasion of Iraq
See also Kikuyu
Brunner, Alois
Bukovsky, Vladimir
Bülow, Bernard von
Bunani, Fulgence
Bureaucracies eliminationist
Bureaucratic mindset, of perpetrators
Burundi, Tutsi’s slaughter of Hutu in
demeanor of perpetrators
eliminationist discourse
end of
excess cruelty and
failure to intervene in
iterative
treatment of children
Bush, George W.
Bush administration (George H. W.), Iraq and
Butterfield, Fox
Bystanders
CALDH (Center for Human Rights Legal Action)
Cambodia. See Khmer Rouge
Camp systems
British
Chinese
contradictions of
degradation of victims
differential treatment of prisoners
durability of
economic irrationalism of
excess cruelty and
expansion of
German
Hitler and
Japanese
Khmer Rouge
labor camps
mortality rates
populace’s knowledge of
rape camps
Serbian
societal transformation and
Soviet gulag
work as ideologically necessary in
Carter, Jimmy
Cartoons of Prophet Muhammed
Catholic Church
elimination of Jews and
Rwandan genocide and
Ceausescu, Nicolae
Chams
Change, human society and embrace of
Charismatic leadership
Chechnya
Chemical weapons
Chemical weapons’ victims
Chen, Tomasa Osorio
Chhun Von
Children, eliminationist assault on
Chile
China
current political situation
death toll under Mao
eliminationist assaults in
eliminationist politics in
famine in
Japanese in
labor camps in
murder of Tibetan monks
Chinese camp system (Laogai)
Christianity, transformation and
Christopher, Warren
CIA
Civil liberties, degree of freedom and
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