Genocide is much discussed and poorly understood. It is regularly decried, yet little is done to prevent it. It is seen to be one of the most intractable of modern phenomena, a periodic cataclysm that erupts seemingly out of nowhere, often in distant places--Indonesia, Guatemala, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur--where ethnic conflict or hatred is said to have spun out of control. So we can do little about it. Bill Clinton said as much while Serbs were slaughtering Bosnians: "Until these folks get tired of killing each other, bad things will continue to happen."
Perhaps we fail to prevent genocides not because they can't be stopped, and not just because we lack the will to stop them, but because we have misunderstood their nature. Perhaps if we understood genocide properly, a feasible path to stopping this scourge of humanity would become apparent. It may seem bold to say that we have not understood genocide. But, after studying the subject for decades, that is the conclusion I have reached. Genocides are so horrifying, so seemingly in defiance of the ordinary rhythms of social life, so threatening to what we believe we know about ourselves and the world--so out of this world--that we don't think clearly about them. We need to start over and rethink their every aspect: What they are. How they begin. How and why they end. Why they unfold as they do. Why victims are chosen. Why the killers kill. And, most of all, what we can do to stop them.
Even something as fundamental as the real extent of the problem is unknown. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, mass murderers have killed more, perhaps many more, than 100 million people--a much greater number than have died as a consequence of conventional military operations. So genocide is, by this fundamental measure, worse than war. Furthermore, people tend to think of our era's mass slaughters--of Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, Tutsis, Kosovars, and Darfuris (not to mention recent history's long list of less-well-known mass murders)--as discrete, unusual events. This is wrong: Large-scale mass murder is a systemic feature of modern states and the international system, and that is how we should begin to treat it.
The foundational problem, in fact, is not even genocide. Genocide, however we define it, is but one expression of a broader and more fundamental phenomenon: eliminationism.
Political and social conflicts among groups exist in all human societies. In many societies, groups come to be seen as deleterious to the well-being of the majority or, sometimes, a powerful minority. How this happens and the character of the pernicious qualities projected onto such groups vary enormously. When it does, people can deem the perniciousness of such populaces to be so great that they want to neutralize them by eliminating the group or by destroying its capacity to inflict putative harm. So they employ any of the five principal means of elimination: forced transformation, repression, expulsion, prevention of reproduction, or extermination. But, whatever means they choose, the desire and the attempt to eliminate peoples or groups should be understood as the core problem.
Precisely because these eliminationist means are functional equivalents, perpetrators typically use several of them simultaneously. The Turks did so for the Armenians. The Germans did so for the Jews. The Sudanese have done so for their victims, and so did the Serbs. Alisa Muratčauš, former president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, explains that the Serbs "aimed to eliminate all Bosnian people." Yet they used a variety of means: "Some people will be expelled to another country, a Western country. Some people would be killed. Some people will be [kept] alive for maybe [the Serbs'] personal needs. Who knows? Maybe like slavery."
Whenever we see these large-scale violent assaults, such as expulsions or incarcerations mixed together with killing, we should immediately recognize them as being eliminationist assaults (which could also expand into much larger-scale killing) and respond to them with all the vigor that we ought to apply to genocides. And we should certainly not sit on our hands with pointless debates about definitions--does it qualify as genocide?--as we have done with the former Yugoslavia and Darfur. We should realize that the non-lethal aspects of eliminationist assaults are as critical to combat as the killing itself. Appreciating this helps to make clear that the problem we are confronting is even more vast and more urgent. Genocide and eliminationism should no longer receive the third-rate treatment that they currently do from our politicians: They should be at the core of present and future international policy-making.
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COMMENTS (3)
The intellectual and genocide.
It's about what I expected.
Given human history to date genocide must in some manner be hard wired into testosterone. It is masculine through and through. And since the savagery of men has not lessened at all over the centuries one can only assume it will not end in our lifetime. Given the 20th century alone only the most naive would even discuss the possibility of ending genocide and not be intent only on examining it as a theoretical exercise in futility.
As long as boys are brainwashed [in many different communities, for many different reasons] to see themselves as part of the chosen religion, tribe, caste, class, ethnic group, race, gender etc. those who are ... view full comment
The intellectual and genocide.
It's about what I expected.
Given human history to date genocide must in some manner be hard wired into testosterone. It is masculine through and through. And since the savagery of men has not lessened at all over the centuries one can only assume it will not end in our lifetime. Given the 20th century alone only the most naive would even discuss the possibility of ending genocide and not be intent only on examining it as a theoretical exercise in futility.
As long as boys are brainwashed [in many different communities, for many different reasons] to see themselves as part of the chosen religion, tribe, caste, class, ethnic group, race, gender etc. those who are born of the lesser Gods will always be in danger of being....eliminated?
It's never really out of the question, is it?
Then there is the role those of wealth and power play in manipulating these things in order to suborn the feckless flocks of sheep [aka dittoheads] to do the dirty work for them.
DJG:
Mass murder and elimination are thus politics not in a superficial sense, but at their core, because they are purposeful, calculated acts of leaders meant to achieve political goals.
george:
This is at the core, true. But these monsters are not born this way. They are boys who internalize the alleged perogatives of their gender. They merely have more rather than less access to the circumstantial contexts that permit them to take it to more catastophic levels. In my view, genocide and manhood, taken to it's logical, psycho-somatic extreme, are virtually interchangable in the right set of circumstances. We see it scaled back to a ritual every Sunday on the football field when these brutes train to eliminate the opposition in any way they can. It's just more civilized now [then, say, in the Roman coliseum] because pro football is practically a family pastime now. Like WWE wrestling. It's Big Business.
But what do young boys watching this brutal crap learn about being a man?
Well, not to commit genocide, of course. So many other more horrific variables must be in place too. But it's just a different destination down the same All Man path.
Goldhagen then sets about listing some of our more infamous mass murderers. All men. All brutes. But it is still a stretch to pretend we can ever know "Why?" they do it. There are just too many complex and conflicting relationships unfolding to ever pin it down "intellectually".
Start instead with commonsense: They are all men raised to embrace their testosterone rather than confront it for what it is----the most dangerous threat to human [and humane] existence. Especially in the modern world where men no longer need to gather together in order to go out and hunt down food....or defend the tribe from lions.
It's truly the most treacherous of biological anachronisms. So, confront it that way.
Really: After reading this article how many of you are convinced the world's leaders will follow Goldhagen's prescriptions and end genocide once and for all?
Not in a million years. Not as long as men [rich and powerful men] still run the world.
Or as Dylan once advised:
Democracy don't rule the world/you better get that through your head/this world is ruled by violence/but I guess that's better left unsaid.
The violence that men do.
george walton
daj
This is an interesting article, although it is far too theoretical. The responsibility to protect movement essentially seeks all of the goals the author supports, but he simply dismisses it as working too slow. The reality is that there are entrenched interests on the national and international political levels that are opposed to this new framework. It would be great if the United States could simply vaporize Omar Al Bashir with one of our predator drones, and I have little doubt that we could do this if the administration was so inclined, but there are oodles of groups opposed to such an eventuality. For example, US intelligence agencies which utilize the information collected by elimin ... view full comment
This is an interesting article, although it is far too theoretical. The responsibility to protect movement essentially seeks all of the goals the author supports, but he simply dismisses it as working too slow. The reality is that there are entrenched interests on the national and international political levels that are opposed to this new framework. It would be great if the United States could simply vaporize Omar Al Bashir with one of our predator drones, and I have little doubt that we could do this if the administration was so inclined, but there are oodles of groups opposed to such an eventuality. For example, US intelligence agencies which utilize the information collected by eliminationist regimes to conduct the very antiterrorism operations the author lauds, not to mention the Chinese government, which needs a stable regime in Khartoum to conduct business with. The strongest point of the article is when the author proposes the bounty system for enforcement of anti genocide laws. The reason it is the strongest is because unlike the rest of the piece it is actually a workable idea that might do some good. The weakest part of the piece is the author's assertion that we need to do more to understand genocide, without any real follow through in terms of increasing our understanding. There's nothing in this piece that activists don't already realize. We understand genocide well enough. It can be broken down into various stages, which are repeated across historical examples. It occurs because it helps the command politically. This is not groundbreaking. The activist group I'm in at UCLA has been teaching this stuff to high school students in presentations for years. What actually cripples the anti genocide movement is not a lack of knowledge, it is a lack of money and pressure we can bring to bear on politicians when they do things like try to run out the clock on Sudan policy review rather than risk alienating the Chinese government. That is why the best chance for preventing mass atrocities in the future lies in the unsexy work of building a massive political organization in the United States along the lines of something like the NRA, but opposed to mass atrocities. When we have that, we just might have the leverage to eliminate eliminationists. That is something that could be accomplished. Making every country in the world a democracy is not.
The problem is that it is politically incorrect to act against any regime so long as it is anti-Semitic, anti-American, or, preferably, both.
Muslim fascists kill millions and it's somehow ok. Israel kills a handful of terrorists in self-defence and the world weeps crocodile tears.
The problem is that it is politically incorrect to act against any regime so long as it is anti-Semitic, anti-American, or, preferably, both.
Muslim fascists kill millions and it's somehow ok. Israel kills a handful of terrorists in self-defence and the world weeps crocodile tears.