The corollary of this transformative power and its attendant eliminationist projects is that people, particularly political leaders, know they are imperiled by others who, if in the position to do so, might undertake their own transformative projects. This knowledge produces enormous insecurity and feeds leaders’ suspicions or paranoiac tendencies. This can thus spur power holders to act preemptively to eliminate populations they define as problematic or threatening in order to secure their power or the order of society. Political leaders’ greater awareness of existing arrangements’ impermanence, including power holders’ tenure, together with the knowledge that they can transform society, makes political leaders still more likely to act preemptively, in a subjective sense “defensively” to secure their well-being, and offensively to quickly realize their dreams.
All countries, groups, and people face a complex world beset by difficulties, challenges, obstacles, and problems. All develop bodies of thought, called political ideologies, to make sense of that world and how to manage it. Modern political ideologies are calls to action, often calls to arms, calls therefore for transformation. Whatever else a political ideology does, it typically answers three questions: What is the political problem? Who or what is the problem’s source? What is the political solution?17 In the modern world, political leaders and their followers have frequently answered the questions as follows: The problem is extreme, even life-threatening. The enemy is an identifiable group of people, demarcated by skin color, ethnicity, religion, class, or political allegiance. The solution to defang said enemies must in some way be “final.” Hence eliminationism. The particular ideologies animating modern eliminationist politics have varied greatly, from communism to imperialism to Nazism. Some ideologies have emphasized the need to purify society. Others have called for utopia or the end of days (without God, man brings it about). Still others have glorified naked power and enrichment. Many roads lead to an eliminationist end.
The Problems Defined
Analyzing our time’s mass murders and eliminationist projects requires us to clarify critical concepts and to choose an approach adequate to the task. A range of problems besets discussions of these issues. These problems include the already familiar, critical one of defining genocide. Once the definition is settled upon, the crucial issues for undertaking an actual study are the questions asked, and the cases chosen for investigation.
Discussions of genocide often founder over definitions, producing seemingly endless debates, and then whether one or another instance of mass killing qualifies under a given definition. Questions include whether the mass slaughter or intended slaughter must be total, as in the Holocaust (leading some to say the Holocaust is the only genocide). If not, then how many people or what percentage of the targeted group must be killed? Must killing be the principal form of assault or may it be part of a broader policy? Does the assaulted group’s nature matter? The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which codifies the international legal definition of genocide, for example, does not admit groups defined politically, such as the communist Indonesias slaughtered in 1965, or economically, such as the kulaks (rich peasants) slaughtered by the Soviets. If a group is forcibly denied its ability to maintain and perpetuate its collective identity, even absent mass killing, does this qualify as genocide? The problem with these debates is not that definitions are unimportant. To the contrary, they are crucial, because definitions shape the questions asked, the research undertaken, the biases introduced, the understandings emerging, and, ultimately, the conclusions’ validity. Politically, definitions critically inform whether people correctly identify events for what they are, and the policies they consider or enact to prevent or stop different kinds of assaults.
The problem with these debates is that genocide’s common definitions exclude both elimination’s nonlethal forms and the many instances of lethal eliminationist assaults deemed too small or partial. By restricting the universe of study to the largest mass slaughters—the Holocaust, the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians, the Soviets’, the Chinese’s, Cambodia, Rwanda, etc.—important questions remain unasked, such as why some people opt to commit large-scale slaughter, others smaller-scale slaughter, others nonlethal forms of elimination, and others nothing at all against hated or feared groups. Lacking a sufficient comparative foundation, the conclusions drawn are unnecessarily limited in range and deficient. The policy prescriptions that follow are inadequate.
The problem besetting the struggle over genocide’s definition is threefold. First genocide is split off from kindred phenomena that are seamlessly interwoven. Genocide (however defined), smaller mass killings, and elimination’s other forms are on a continuum, and perpetrators often use several eliminationist means in conjunction with one another. So treating genocide as a qualitatively different phenomenon discrete from mass elimination’s other forms, in addition to being conceptually untenable, violates the reality of eliminationist politics and practice.
The Holocaust has been seen as the paradigmatic genocide (though many by now have gotten away from this practice), or at least as the starting point for thinking about how to define and understand genocide. As former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali betrayed, this is both common and dangerous. “I was not realizing that there was a real genocide,” says Boutros-Ghali, speaking retrospectively about the Rwandan mass murder. “Because there is a definition—for us, genocide was the gas chamber, what happened in Germany. You need to have a sophisticated European machinery to do a real genocide. We were not realizing that with just a machete you can do a genocide. It takes time for us to understand.”18 Even if Boutros-Ghali was not being honest about his and others’ failure to recognize the Rwandan mass murder as a colossal mass murder—as a genocide—his statement contains a truth that led him to think that it would be believed and therefore exculpate him for his failure.
Because of how the Holocaust has been understood, including the misplaced fixation on modern technology and gas chambers, and the wrongheaded insistence that the killing’s comprehensiveness be used as a benchmark, its paradigm has misled people about the real nature of genocide and mass murder. Even the Holocaust itself is, in its own terms, widely misconceived. The Holocaust was not a stand-alone killing event, but part of the Germans’ broad-based eliminationist assault against Jews for which the Germans used and even experimented with a wide variety of eliminationist means. It was not a genocide that began when the Germans’ systematic mass extermination program commenced in 1941 and ended in 1945, but rather the culmination of an already intensive eliminationist assault by Germans upon Jews during the 1930s, which led to the elimination of two-thirds of the Jews from Germany proper before the Germans replaced one set of eliminationist policies—expulsion, segregation, repression, and episodic killing—with the most lethal and final eliminationist policy, total annihilation.
The second problem is that even when focusing only on the mass-murder form of eliminationism, the conventional conception of genocide has been too narrow, encompassing only slaughters totaling in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But these enormous mass murders are really just the largest instances of a general phenomenon of all large-scale mass killings—including ones that seem “small” only by comparison to those conventionally termed “genocide.”
The third problem is analytical. Definitions of genocide typically include elements of the factors that produce it, which are expressed by such words as “intent” and “wanted.” Doing this restricts the scope of study and biases results. This is a more technical issue in social analysis, which I mention here only briefly. A basic premise of social science is that a factor that might account for outcomes—in this case mass murder or elimination—should not be used to define the phenomenon to be studied. Doing so excludes from the analysis all cases that do not conform to the preconceived notion of what is causing the outcomes, and thus promises false conclusions. Doing so is also faulty, because it prejudges that factor
as critical even before the analysis begins, making the results tautological. This does not mean that intent is unimportant or that I will not discuss it. Political leaders and others often articulate their intent, and to the extent that we can identify intent, it is crucial to analyze and understand it. But this does mean that intent should not be a criterion for determining what instances qualify as genocide, or what instances of mass death or elimination should be included in the investigation.
These initial conclusions suggest several important things. Because mass killing is but one act in the repertoire of functionally equivalent eliminationist acts, and because whenever people have perpetrated genocide, they have simultaneously used other eliminationist policies, it is misleading to isolate genocide as a discrete phenomenon. Moreover, we should not restrict our study to only our time’s largest mass slaughters, those totaling in the millions and some in the hundreds of thousands. We should instead include all instances of mass killing that are not war dead and that do not occur under conditions of anarchy or political chaos. Mass killing can be defined as the killing of more than a few hundred people, say, a thousand. War dead, which is a conceptually distinct topic, consists of military and civilian casualties caused during conventional or guerrilla war that are not outright massacres and that, according to some defensible account of military operations, occur during operations that target military forces, installations, or production while keeping civilian deaths reasonably proportionate to that purpose. These initial conclusions further suggest that the domain of study includes not just killing but also all eliminationist outcomes—including Serbs’ expulsions of Bosniaks and Kosovars, the North Korean communists’ incarceration of Koreans in concentration camps, the Indonesian government’s forced conversion of communists in the mass murder’s aftermath, the Germans’ enslavement of millions of Europeans during the Nazi period.
Because a domain of study’s definition cannot include the factor that purportedly explains it, the domain must be defined exclusively by outcomes. These initial conclusions also mandate that an explicit intent to eliminate, let alone to kill, a group not be a criterion of inclusion. Furthermore, because eliminationist policies are part of politics more broadly, failing to study genocide and eliminationist politics within a political framework misconstrues its nature. Mass murder is a political act that can be and must be analyzed with the same tools and levelheadedness we use to understand other political acts and programs, which also means that we should reject startling or reductionist conclusions (which have all too often been the norm) that violate what we know about politics.
If a large number of people, except through defensible military operations, are eliminated in any manner, why should this not be part of a study of genocide, which rightly becomes a study of mass murder, which rightly becomes a study of mass elimination? This question is particularly acute regarding famine. Famine has been used as a purposeful method of mass murder during our time, so in many instances death through famine cannot be distinguished from mass murder. Famine, or calculated starvation, has been used, or at least deliberately tolerated, by the Soviets, the Germans, communist Chinese, the British in Kenya, the Hausa against the Ibo in Nigeria, Khmer Rouge, communist North Koreans, Ethiopians in Eritrea, Zimbabwe against regions of political opposition, the Political Islamists in Southern Sudan and now Darfur, and elsewhere. In most places for most of our age, governments could have prevented famine with available food stocks, which they chose not to distribute or, in rare cases of shortage, they could have received aid from other countries and chose not to. Rithy Uong, a survivor of four years under the Khmer Rouge, explains. They “let us starve to death. They wouldn’t give the plenty of food that they had, to us to eat. They wouldn’t give us regular medicine to take when we got sick. They let us die. With starvation.”19 Whenever governments have not alleviated famine conditions, political leaders decided not to say no to mass death—in other words, they said yes. Seen in this light, the politics of famines and starvation resemble the politics of mass murder and elimination.
An examination of eliminationism’s many forms, irrespective of means or intent, is still larger than the already large study of mass murder. So while remaining cognizant of all forms of eliminationism for drawing conclusions, the presentation here focuses systematically on mass murder—the murder of more than a few hundred in several massacres—and to a somewhat lesser extent on expulsions, discussing eliminationism’s other forms and means, including famine, forced transformations, repression, and prevention of reproduction, less systematically, mainly when they accompany more conventional mass murder and expulsions.
A second set of problems goes beyond definitional matters. Studies of genocide either mainly restrict themselves to a subset of usually the most familiar and largest mass killings, devote individual chapters to narrating them, and draw some conclusions in a final chapter, or they float above the material on a general level to offer conclusions without a solid and broad empirical foundation.20 Works on genocide also often seek its essence—sometimes found in the Holocaust together with a select few of mass murder’s most notorious instances—focusing on uncovering what makes the genocides similar. This can be discerned already at the beginning of most studies, which are restricted to whatever conforms to the stated definition of genocide, or are guided by typologies that fall within that restricted definition’s boundaries. Unearthing regularities and similarities among mass slaughters is important. Explaining their differences is equally important. All mass murders vary from all others. We must understand these differences if we are to comprehend both the general phenomenon and its individual manifestations. The variations become that much more multifarious and therefore important to understand, when the inquiry expands from mass murder to include eliminationism’s other forms.
We must address all mass murders and eliminations from our time and consider both the similarities and differences among them. We must also examine instances such as South Africa, where mass slaughter did not occur, even though the conditions for it seemed propitious. Only by also considering such instances can we understand why some countries and not others erupt in mass murder and elimination.
A third set of problems revolves around the questions asked. Aside from the extensive discussion of definitional matters, the only question systematically addressed in the literature is why genocides occur. When someone writes or says: How can we explain genocide? the question typically really means: How can we explain why genocides begin? That question usually boils down to examining the circumstances producing genocides. Yet mass murder and elimination has a natural history. Every stage, not just the first, requires systematic investigation and explanation.
To be sure, any eliminationist assault’s first feature is its initiation. Why does it occur? Yet once political leaders initiate it, many things must happen for it to be carried out. Leaders must mobilize or create institutions for the killing or expulsions. They must devise procedures for selecting and apprehending the victims. They must find people to slaughter or otherwise eliminate the targeted people. Which people become perpetrators? Why do they carry out the slaughter, or decide not to? How is the mass killing and elimination, in the end, implemented?
All annihilationist and eliminationist campaigns also end. How they stop also varies. The role of domestic and international actors is not the same in all mass murders and eliminations. Why do eliminationist onslaughts end, and why do they not end earlier or later?
Eliminationist and annihilationist campaigns produce different outcomes. The perpetrators kill different mixes of people, sometimes primarily men, sometimes also women and children. Sometimes they kill comprehensively, sometimes selectively, and the criteria of selectivity vary. The perpetrators do many other things to their victims aside from killing or expelling them, which also vary substantially in eliminationist assaults. The extent and character of the perpetrators’ cruelty, aside from the killing itself, are not constant. The perpetrators’ relocation and disposse
ssion of victim groups also vary. How can these and other outcomes of eliminationist campaigns be explained?
The aftermath of mass murders and eliminations takes us beyond the horrific deeds’ commission, so I do not treat its many aspects here in depth. Wounded and broken people, groups, and societies must find a way to go on. How they do so deserves its own lengthy and systematic study. In various ways and admixtures, survivors and their societies seek to engage or put the past behind them. This is also true for the perpetrators and for the peoples supporting them. The issues that victims and perpetrators alike must confront, if only to deny and suppress them, are: acknowledging and publicizing what happened, bringing the perpetrators to justice, and repairing what can be repaired, politically, materially, and morally. I have addressed these general themes in another book, A Moral Reckoning, and also for that reason will not take them up here.21 A final issue victims and perpetrators must confront is ensuring that eliminationist assaults do not recur, which, as with other themes relevant to understanding their aftermath, depends also on the international community.
Laying out and explaining these various sets of themes—mass murder and elimination’s (1) initiation, (2) implementation, (3) cessation, and (4) variations in outcomes—form this book’s empirical and analytical core. Until now, in the general literature on genocide only the first has been treated systematically. Part I and Part II are devoted to analyzing these themes, and, by drawing together and going beyond these investigations’ findings, these sections form the basis in Part III for crafting policies to substantially reduce mass murder and elimination’s incidence and toll.
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