B002QX43GQ EBOK
Page 82
b Had an accurate account of the Holocaust been accepted from the beginning, then this singular fascination with and dread of the Holocaust might not have developed. It might still have been understood as the most horrific episode of bigotry and hatred’s consequences, but its central place in the West’s existential musings and the academy’s detached, abstract theorizing would have been unlikely. Silence about other genocides, a stunning disregard of the facts (including that the Germans shot and starved millions, that antisemitism among Germans was rampant, and so on), and adherence to the paradigm described above led scholars away from fundamental questions (such as the killers’ identities, patterns of choices, and motives) and helped to produce a widely held, partly mythologized view of this period that robbed the killers of their agency and humanity and that obscured central features of the Holocaust, such as the perpetrators’ widespread, systematic, willful cruelty and glee.
c How distancing perpetrators from the effects of their killings might make them more willing to slaughter others, which may have occurred with the firebombing, carpet bombing, and nuclear bombing during World War II, is a different matter. But in the overwhelming majority of eliminationist assaults in our time and before, face-to-face has been mass elimination and slaughter’s dominant mode. Had the United States, for example, established the beachhead in Japan hypothesized in this book’s opening, Truman likely would not have ordered American officers and soldiers to systematically execute tens of thousands of Japanese men, women, and children or, had he done so, they likely would have refused to do it.
d Jean Hatzfeld’s book of Hutu perpetrators’ testimony identifies them throughout by their first name, so I follow his practice here.
e Similarly, the Bolshevik Revolution and all that followed, including Joseph Stalin’s rise to power, likely never would have occurred had Lenin not returned to Russia from Switzerland—even Leon Trotsky, an avowed Marxist, conceded this—which itself occurred only because of the cunning, strategically brilliant decision by the Germans to transport Lenin in 1917 from exile back to Russia so he could foment revolution and hasten Germany’s defeat of Russia in World War I.
f Brazil may be the exception insofar as Brazilians’ destruction of the country’s indigenous peoples may not have imprinted Brazilians’ consciousnesses as profoundly as the other eliminationist assaults have other peoples’.
g This is that much truer if we (as I do) conceive of the eliminationist politics that follow the breakup of empires and of countries, or attempted secessions, as domestic. In the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, different governments and ethnic groups fought over whether territories would remain a part of the countries or emerge as independent successor states. Essentially, secessionist movements contested territories formerly dominated by central governments and the ethnic groups they represented.
h This is, however, not true of Lenin and initially probably Stalin, the revolutionary vanguard of Marxist revolutions, supported at first by only 100,000 communists, and unexpectedly governing a vast, mainly peasant, and resistant society. They improvised a great deal, though in keeping with their Marxist understanding of how, under the urgent pressure of “history,” to forge the future utopia.
i Although perpetrators’ intentions are not relevant for defining mass murders and eliminations, they are critical for the different task of explaining eliminationism’s various outcomes.
j Accounting for population size, the Germans’ rate compared to that of the second largest per-year killers, the communist Chinese, becomes enormously greater. The Chinese dominion contained more than 700 million people, two to five times that of the Germans (fluctuating with the war’s course) during their most intensive mass murdering.
k Another example: “We peasants, we were using our traditional weapons. It is for that reason that when you were hacking you were supposed to cut [the Tutsi] into two pieces. There was times where you would hack him and not cut him into two pieces and you hurt him only and think that he was dead. . . . Let’s say that we are going in the squad that is going to kill and loot, we meet someone and we are almost five of us, one of us says, ‘Let’s see who is going to be the first to hack him.’ The one who hacks the first runs, and the second one also hacks and runs.”
l In most settings, given current empirical knowledge (and even under better informational conditions), it is difficult to disentangle the mix of cruelty’s different types and sources, and to confidently analyze their distribution in a given eliminationist assault or even in a single camp. We know little about this crucial aspect of the perpetrators’ conduct and inner lives—most about the Germans and increasingly more about the Hutu—because cruelty’s precise nature and sources are difficult to fathom, and for the different eliminationist assaults in general, we either have few or no such investigations.
m Although Political Islamists’ mass-murderous and eliminationist orientation has not only Israelis but also Jews squarely in its sights (in December 2006, 37 percent of British Muslims said British Jews are “legitimate targets as part of the struggle for justice in the Middle East”), violent eliminationism is by no means exclusively or even principally directed at Jews or Israel.
n Hasan al-Majid was tried and convicted for his mass murders only twenty years later, after the United States and Britain defeated Saddam for reasons that had nothing to do with the eliminationist assaults on the Kurds or others.
o The massive publicizing of this program—in handbooks, Internet postings, e-mails, radio transmissions, etc.—would make it that much more effective than Rewards for Justice, which has worked despite its enormous underpublicizing in the relevant regions.
p Though a life sentence likely deters less than the death penalty, it might save some innocent people’s lives by inducing perpetrators to surrender to the court rather than continue with the eliminationist assaults and risk someone collecting on the substantial “dead or alive” bounty.
q Diplomatic and other aid would simultaneously be offered to help the threatening leadership defuse the situation, but with an effective and universally known preventive system of this sort in place, any country that would go so far as to trigger its robust antieliminationist measures would likely be well past the point where conventional diplomacy would work.
r The possible rejoinder that this will empower states to use the right to intervene against eliminationism as a flimsy pretext to invade other countries is not well grounded. States wishing to invade others will do so regardless, and the powerful reasons preventing states from doing so—deterrence, international interventionist measures, and the many costs war entails, which inherently destabilizes tyrannies making war—will operate forcefully and effectively, just as it otherwise does.
Copyright © 2009 by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™, a member of the Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1321, New York, NY 10107.
PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
Text set in 10.75 point Sabon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah.
Includes index.
eISBN : 978-0-786-74656-9
1. Genocide—Psychological aspects. 2. Genocide—Prevention. 3. Racism—Psychological aspects. 4. Prejudices—Psychological aspects. 5. Hate—Case studies. 6. Group identity—Case studies. I.Title.
HV6322.7.G.15’1—dc22 2009028035