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by Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah

  In these annihilationist and eliminationist campaigns, the Germans used every conceivable violent eliminationist means, from brutally repressing and enslaving, to deporting large populations, to incarcerating people in camps, to preventing reproduction by sterilizing them, to decapitating peoples by destroying their elites, to slaughtering entire populations. They invented and experimented with different killing techniques (including lethal injections, explosive bullets, and gas vans), in order to find ones that would maximize their various murderous values. They drew on professional cadres of killers, drafted citizens into the task, and employed or allowed just about any German in the vicinity to participate. Except for possibly in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, in no other country, certainly not in the modern era, was elimination, and specifically mass murder, such a reflexive state instrument, or internalized by so many ordinary citizens as the all but automatic solution to a vast range of real and perceived obstacles and problems.

  Seeing the Germans’ slaughters as our era’s emblematic moment of mass annihilation and those who perpetrated them in this manner as its emblematic mass murderers is further justified by the aspect of the Holocaust that actually does make it singular: the unparalleled drive to kill every Jew, including every child, and not just in their own country but in other countries, ultimately in the world.

  This partial overview of our time’s mass annihilations reveals mass murder to have many facets, which the Germans’ killings during the Nazi period encapsulate. It also shows the erroneousness of the simple formulae that have been foisted upon the public by theorists of modernity and the so-called human condition and by the often blinkered and misguided scholarship on the Holocaust, which has also been a major source of images and slogans about genocide in general. Mass elimination and its lethal variant are complex phenomena that take many forms and have differing features. They defy the simpleminded, ahistorical, and reductionist slogans of “total war,” “the banality of evil,” “assembly-line killing,” “bureaucratic killing,” “ordinary men,” slogans that had once been the stock and trade of the Holocaust’s interpreters and, more generally, mass slaughters’ commentators.

  The Scope of Eliminationist Assaults

  Surveying some salient moments and some of the many aspects of our age’s mass eliminations only suggests their frequency, scope, and character. Mass annihilations spanned virtually the entire era. Since the beginning of the twentieth century there has been no time when the world was free from ongoing mass annihilation. The number of people who have been mass murdered is, conservatively estimated, 83 million. When purposeful famine is included, the number becomes 127 million, and if the higher estimates are correct the total number of victims of mass murder may be 175 million or more. If we take the conservative estimate, then roughly 2 percent of all people who died during our time were felled by mass murderers. If the high number is correct, then it is more than 4 percent, in other words one of every twenty-five people.15 If the higher number is correct, their number exceeds the population of all but seven countries today. And all the victims’ children, and their children’s children, that would have been born, never were or will be.

  The geographic distribution of our age’s mass annihilations spans the globe. The Americas, from Argentina and Chile at the southern tip, to Brazil at the heart, up through Guatemala and El Salvador, have suffered it mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. From 1910 to 1920, the pre-revolutionary and then revolutionary Mexican regimes killed hundreds of thousands of people. Prior to 9/11, the United States has been spared such ravages, though the United States perpetrated mass murder against the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and during the cold war gave covert aid and public tacit support to mass murderers in many countries, including in Latin America.

  Europe has had the most victims. A higher percentage of countries there than elsewhere have fallen victim to mass murderers, who mainly served two regimes: Nazism and Soviet communism. Virtually every European country was touched by Nazism’s volcanic murderousness, and many peoples, including Croats, Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Ukrainians, themselves slaughtered the Jews of their own countries or helped the Germans do so. All peoples of the multiethnic, multireligious Soviet empire lost members to the Bolsheviks. The peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, among them Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs, some of whom suffered enormous loss of life at the hands of the Germans during World War II, themselves undertook, after the Germans’ defeat, retributory eliminationist campaigns against ethnic Germans, forcibly expelling roughly 10 million and killing tens of thousands. The Balkans have been a local zone of elimination. During World War II, with German encouragement, Croats slaughtered Serbs, Jews, Sinti, and Roma, then Josip Tito’s communist regime during its consolidation of power after 1944 killed on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 people. With Yugoslavia’s breakup in the 1990s, Serbs and Croats perpetrated mass murder and expulsions, including the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults against Bosniaks and then Kosovars. Turks, whose country is geostrategically part of Europe, not only exterminated their Armenians and other Christian minorities, including Greeks and Assyrians, during World War I, but earlier annihilated 150,000 to 300,000 Armenians from 1894 to 1896, as well as nearly 5,000 Greek villagers in retribution for a 1903 revolt in Macedonia. During their war with Greece from 1919 to 1923, Turks slaughtered perhaps another 200,000 Greeks. In the 1980s and 1990s, Turks killed 15,000 to 30,000 Kurds. Not only has mass murder victimized most European countries, but the people of many of them have also been perpetrators. The European death toll (this includes the Soviets’ Asian victims) to eliminationist onslaughts is in the tens of millions.

  Africa has seen the most individual annihilationist assaults, even though it has had fewer victims than Europe or Asia. In the first part of the century and during the later struggles over decolonization, the European colonizers, such as the Germans in South-West Africa, the Belgians in Congo, the French in French Equatorial Africa, the Italians in Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941, the British in Kenya from 1952 to 1956, and the Portuguese in Angola in 1961 through 1962 committed mass murder—in some places, including Congo, on a colossal scale. They also fomented enmities among different African peoples, as the Belgians did with the Hutu and Tutsi, that would eventually erupt into killing sprees. In the century’s second half, the politically and ethnically fragmented African countries have suffered mainly domestic mass murders as a tool in struggles over power and economic benefit. They include the Hausa’s and Ibo’s killing of each other, mainly through engineered starvation, totaling 1 million between 1967 and 1970, when the Ibo seceded from Nigeria to form the short-lived country of Biafra. Idi Amin’s butchery of perhaps 300,000 Ugandans between 1971 and 1979 made his name synonymous with mass murder. In 1972 in Burundi, the Hutu slaughtered about 100,000 Tutsi. Twenty years later, in 1994, the Hutu in neighboring Rwanda unleashed their total extermination campaign against the Tutsi. Between 1998 and 2004, many participants perpetrated mass slaughter in the regional war fought in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the mass murdering continues today. Many African countries have suffered induced or preventable famines, in which millions of people perished, famines that often coincided with other eliminationist measures. Between 1974 and 1991 the Dergue political regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia slaughtered perhaps 150,000 political enemies, killed perhaps another 100,000 during a regional expulsion program of 1.5 million to 2 million people, and caused another million to die through famine.

  The Arab crescent, spanning parts of Africa and Asia and composed of countries governed generally by brutal dictatorships, has suffered widespread mass murder since World War II. In a final colonial attack from 1954 to 1962, the French murdered perhaps tens of thousands, more likely hundreds of thousands, of Algerian Muslims in outright massacres and through privation in camps, in their desperate attempt to hold on to the last vestige of empire. After France’s defeat, the new Algerian regime killed many tens of thousands of Algerians fo
r collaborating with the French. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein and the Baathists slaughtered 200,000 to 300,000 Kurds from 1987 to 1991 and 60,000 Shia Marsh people in 1991-1992, as part of their overall mass murdering that numbered perhaps half a million. Syria’s Assad and the Alawites decimated the people of Hama. The region’s most catastrophic annihilation is ongoing. In Sudan, following on the heels of the Arab Muslim northerners’ killing (mainly by inducing famine but also with extensive direct killing) of upward of 2 million black Christian southerners over twenty years, they have, in the past few years, been conducting an eliminationist campaign against overwhelmingly black Muslims in the western Sudan region of Darfur, killing more than 400,000, expelling more than 2.5 million, and burning hundreds of villages so the people will have no place to return to.

  Asia has suffered the largest number of gargantuan mass slaughters, with every major country being the site of eliminationist projects. In addition to the Japanese mass murders during World War II of several million people, mainly in China, though also in Burma, East Timor, Korea, Manchuria, Philippines, and elsewhere; the Chinese communists’ murdering of a mind-boggling number of people, perhaps between 50 million and 70 million Chinese, and an additional 1.2 million Tibetans; and the Khmer Rouge’s lethal eliminationist system in Cambodia, the continent has seen killings of hundreds of thousands during India’s partition from 1946 to 1948, and of between 1 million and 3 million during the Pakistanis’ onslaught against seceding Bangladesh in 1971. The Vietnamese communists’ long-term campaign of killing opponents, starting in 1945 with the war against the French and ending in the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the 1980s, have produced widely diverging estimates of the victims. They killed perhaps 200,000 to 300,000 people (it might be many more), a figure that does not include the 200,000 boat people who died fleeing the regime. North Korean communists have (not including famine deaths) killed perhaps 2 million people since the regime’s inception. Indonesians have on their ledger approximately half a million communists in 1965-1966, and 200,000 East Timorese starting in 1975, when Indonesia invaded the country upon the Portuguese colonizers’ departure. Other killings include those by colonizers in the twentieth century’s first part; a multinational force, including Americans, in China during the Boxer Rebellion; the French in Indochina; and the Dutch in the East Indies and West Indies. Mass-murderous famines have also afflicted Asia. During their attempt from 1958 to 1961 to rapidly transform China socially and economically, known as the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese communists caused a famine that took the lives of perhaps 25 million people (included in the total above). North Korea let 2 million to 3.5 million people die owing to famine between 1995 and 1998.

  In our age, mass elimination and extermination have visited all parts of the world not just geographically but also socially, with peoples of virtually every imaginable type of group falling victim: people defined by ascriptive characteristics such as skin color, by genetic endowments such as autism, by social or cultural identities such as ethnicity or religion, by sexuality, and by political identity, such as national membership, or political affiliation such as being a communist or being an anticommunist. Germans during the Nazi period slaughtered people in all these kinds of groups.

  One particular category of victims has repeatedly been targeted in eliminationist and exterminationist assaults, and yet it has been barely noticed: indigenous peoples. From 1900 to 1957 Brazilians alone obliterated more than eighty Indian tribes, with the indigenous population declining from perhaps 1 million to fewer than 200,000. In Latin America, Asia, and Africa, dozens of exterminationist and eliminationist assaults against indigenous peoples have been documented, including the Paraguayans against the Aché from 1966 to 1976, the El Salvadorans against Indians from 1980 to 1992, the Tanzanians against the Barabaig from 1990 to 1992, the Filipinos against the Agta in 1988, and the Laotians against the H’mong from 1979 to 1986. More groups of indigenous peoples have likely been destroyed during our age than in any other comparable time period. 16

  Mass murder and elimination’s perpetrators have come from all parts of the economic and political spectrums: Nazis, conventional rightist regimes, democratic countries, communists, nationalists, and regimes guided by no particular ideology. Nevertheless, during the past century communist regimes, led and inspired by the Soviet Union and China, have killed more people than any other regime type. Democracies have been by far the least murderous type (although as colonizers—where democracies transform themselves into tyrannies—they have killed liberally), measured in the number of mass slaughters and of victims. 17 Except the Germans’ and the Japanese’s killings shortly before and during World War II, and the Europeans’ mainly earlier colonial predations in Africa, mass murders have been principally domestic. Perpetrators have overwhelmingly killed their countrymen.

  Our time has been an age of mass murder. More so, mass murder and eliminations are among our age’s defining characteristics. People understand individual eliminationist campaigns—the Holocaust or, more recently, the mass slaughters in Rwanda and Darfur—to be horrific. Yet only when the mass slaughters and eliminations of our age or even of recent times are seen in aggregate does the horror’s true immensity become clear. Mass annihilation and elimination are not just an ad hoc problem that crops up with the latest or next instance of mass slaughter or expulsion, usually, for Westerners, in some seemingly remote place. They ought to be understood as among our time’s most pressing and systematically produced political problems. They should be at the center of security discussions in the United Nations and in other international and domestic forums concerned with security, the international order, and justice. That they are not shows how skewed are our depiction and understanding of the past century and the one just begun.

  Estimates for mass murders are usually imprecise. High estimates are often two or three times low estimates. For the largest mass murders, estimates vary by millions, and even, as for that of the Chinese communists, tens of millions. Most perpetrators keep few if any records, and often sequester or destroy those they do make. Many mass murders are intertwined with war and other forms of elimination, so it is hard to disentangle what deaths are murders. They have often occurred in politically closed or distant places, and against people of color, so little has become known of what has transpired, or its magnitude.

  Nevertheless, it is critically important to present figures for individual mass murders and eliminations, and also aggregate figures, keeping in mind the theme is politically charged (with propagandists and partisans on all sides ready to attack those who do not accept their views). I present here the best estimates based on the figures that others have given, fully aware that any given figure may lead to vociferous criticism that it is an exaggeration or understatement. Some estimates might be wide of the actual mark, by millions.

  Still, in aggregate, even mid-range estimates produce a frightening, largely unknown portrait of our time. As we have seen, since the twentieth century began, human beings have mass murdered directly or through famine a conservatively estimated 127 million people, and may have killed as many as 175 million. By the lower figure, mass murderers have killed more than twice as many people than the 61 million people (42 million military deaths, 19 million civilian deaths) dying in war. By the higher figure, mass murderers have killed almost three times as many. By any reasonable accounting, mass murder and elimination have been more lethal than war. Yet war is reflexively, and wrongly, considered the major problem of violence around the world, being international security institutions’ and public attention’s overwhelming focus.

  During the past century’s second half and into the twenty-first century, the vast majority of people have lived in countries victimized by the systematic annihilation of parts of their population either during their lifetimes or in their countries’ recent pasts. They have themselves been such annihilation’s targets or near targets, been perpetrators or sympathized with perpetrators, or been related to, or on the sides of, victims or per
petrators. For most people, mass murder and elimination have not been merely a distant problem, but integral and prominent in their mental, emotional, and existential landscapes. This was driven home to the New York Times’ Fox Butterfield while in Beijing in 1979-1980 during the aftermath of Mao’s death and the Cultural Revolution. Butterfield later wrote about the consequences of the Chinese communists’ various mass murderous and eliminationist politics: “Almost every Chinese I got to know during my twenty months in Peking had a tale of political persecution. . . . From their stories it seems as if a whole generation of Chinese . . . had known nothing but arbitrary accusations, violent swings in the political line, unjustified arrests, torture, and imprisonment. Few Chinese I knew felt free from the fear of physical or psychological abuse and the pervasive sense of injustice.”18