Society-centered perspectives identify the source of an animus that can motivate people to annihilate others. Ethnic conflict, or great prejudice, can produce the desire, and a justification for slaughtering others. But society-centered perspectives otherwise suffer failings similar to state-centered views. They cannot explain why some ethnic conflicts or prejudices produce systematic mass murder, whereas others do not—such as in the American South against blacks, in South Africa against blacks and then against whites, in Western European countries against Muslims, or in most countries past and present. Societal accounts cannot explain the mass murder of groups that are not the object of intensive social conflict or cultural prejudice, including the victims of communist regimes. And they cannot explain the timing of mass murder, of, for example, the various phases of the Germans’ eliminationist program against the Jews or of their various assaults on their other targeted groups. Society-centered views also rely on the disqualifying assumption that intensive social conflict or prejudice will reflexively provide the impetus for a state program of mass annihilation, and that the state’s character (the regime type, the leaders’ character, etc.) is of little or no causal importance, because the state, as an obedient servant, is a conveyor belt for powerful social groups’ murderous desires.
Individual-centered views may reveal something about what moves certain individuals in the destructive process, but they do not address mass annihilation’s broader political and social contexts. They tend to treat people as universal abstractions, having the same psychological properties and reaction to external stimuli. They, like the state- and society-centered perspectives, cannot explain why similar conditions only sometimes produce mass murder, why only some hated groups are targeted, or the timing of the killing.
By privileging one arena—the political, the social, or the individual—each of these views misses much that is essential to initiating mass murder. Each depends upon a causal chain that assumes steps that need explanation. (As do existing analyses that point to a confluence of causal factors.) Each has a deterministic bent to it, having not unequivocally rejected the notion that certain factors determine the perpetration of mass murder. And each could not possibly provide the explanation for why mass murder begins because none specifies the mechanism that unleashes it.
Whatever other factors may be present, whatever other events may occur, whatever other acts may be taken, mass killing and elimination’s initiation consists of a discrete act that takes place at an identifiable moment. The many existing accounts do not explain why mass annihilation is undertaken at the time that it is—even though this act is, compared to much in the social and political world, relatively simple and straightforward. This suggests that the act of initiating mass murder does not lend itself to a systematic, causal explanation. If it did, we would know it.
A New Perspective
Explaining the initiation of mass murder and eliminations requires that we recognize that certain conditions or factors of state or society create the opportunities and increase the probability a mass annihilation or elimination will be set in motion, but that none of these conditions, singly or in combination, inexorably produces such assaults. We must accept that different paths lead to mass murder and that the patterns that exist are partial. We must treat politics as central in the genesis of mass murder. We must specify the source and character of people’s motivation to slaughter others. Perhaps most important, we must acknowledge that only one or a few people initiate a mass annihilation or elimination. As I adopted in Hitler’s Willing Executioners an explicitly multilevel and multifaceted approach with different causal components for the different aspects—state initiation, implementation, source of motivation, etc.—of mass murder and elimination as the only way to explain the Holocaust’s perpetration, it became clear to me that the same is necessary for understanding eliminationist and exterminationist politics in general. Regarding the initiation of mass murder, I wrote, analyzing in detail the evolution of Adolf Hitler’s eliminationist thinking about Jews into a total annihilation policy, “the most virulent hatred, whether it be antisemitism or some other form of racism or prejudice, does not result in systematic slaughter unless political leaders mobilize and organize those who hate into a program of killing.”2 This means that at some point, one or a few people consciously, willfully, and with full capacity to do otherwise, decide to slaughter other human beings by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions—or to eliminate them in another way. This decision-making moment is not reducible to or determined by other factors. It is generated by the will to kill and also the forge for translating that will into a firm resolve to perpetrate the act. It is therefore the self-sufficient account for why these people perpetrate mass murder and elimination.
The Central Committee of the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress, the political party ruling Turkey, decided to eliminate, mainly to exterminate, the Armenians probably in March 1915, after, according to one of its members, “long and in-depth discussions.” The Central Committee’s leaders were Mehmet Talât and Ismail Enver, whose stewardship and approval of the eliminationist assault they repeatedly affirmed in Turkish documents and in discussions with foreign diplomats, including with American Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who has copiously related the rather candid discussions they had with him about their desire to annihilate the Armenians, as they responded to his objections and arguments that they desist. The Turkish leaders opted, as part of their political remaking of Turkey, to finally solve what they and many Turks, and the previous Ottoman regime, considered an acute political problem, the existence of this substantial non-Turkic minority within an ever more aggressively Turkic Turkey. The Armenians’ position had been a theme in Turkey’s politics and life for decades, resulting in previous eliminationist and exterminationist assaults. Now, under the cover of war, Talât and Enver, with the other Central Committee leaders, finally decided decisively. Talât, in a letter dated May 26, 1915, announced to the head of parliament, known as the grand vizier, that deportations must begin so that Turkey could eliminate its Armenian problem. This leadership decision was coolly calculated. Talât explains: “Preparations and presentations have been proposed and considered for a final end, in a comprehensive and absolute way, to this issue, which constitutes an important matter among the vital issues for the state.” He further informed Morgenthau “that the Union and Progress Committee had carefully considered the matter in all its details and that the policy which was being pursued was that which they had officially adopted. He said that I must not get the idea that the deportations had been decided upon hastily; in reality, they were the result of prolonged and careful deliberation.” German consul general Johann Mordtmann reported on June 30 that Talât had instructed him “a few weeks” earlier that “‘what we are talking about . . . is the elimination of Armenians.’”3
Hitler both created general eliminationist and exterminationist policy orientation and took the decisions for individual programs. Shortly after assuming power he issued the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, mandating the compulsory sterilization of Germans “suffering from a hereditary disease,” including feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, blindness, deafness, physical deformities, and alcoholism, if they were deemed hereditary. This first of the Germans’ formal mass elimination programs destroyed more than 300,000 people’s reproductive capacities. Hitler authorized the camp system’s creation around the same time. Hitler, holding sterilization to be a second-best eliminationist means for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled, ordered in 1939 that such children and adults be systematically exterminated in a “euthanasia” program. He created the general contours for the eastern conquered territories’ murderous subjugation, starting with Poland, in preparation for which he infamously declared that no one any longer spoke about the Armenians. And Hitler made the critical decisions to move policy forward in every stage of the eliminationist assault agains
t the Jews, culminating in spring 1941 with his decision for systematic mass murder during the coming assault on the Soviet Union and its Jews.
Shortly after the Khmer Rouge took power, Pol Pot presided over a five-day meeting of its military and civilian leaders. He personally enunciated his transformative and eliminationist program’s central contours. His second in command, Nuon Chea, elaborated on the programs’ and procedures’ details. Five people have testified (three were present; two received accounts from their superiors who had been there), with general consistency, about Pol Pot’s orders for the eliminationist expulsion of people from cities and towns, the expulsion from Cambodia of all ethnic Vietnamese, and the establishment of the camp system, called “cooperatives.” One participant explains: “It was Pol Pot who distributed this plan personally.” Pol Pot declared: “Don’t use money, don’t let people live in the cities.” He specifically singled out one group: “Monks, they said, were to be disbanded, put aside as a ‘special class,’ the most important to fight. They had to be wiped out . . . I heard Pol Pot say this myself.” A third participant describes Nuon Chea delivering the general killing order:In order to achieve the construction of socialism progressively and advance all together in the set period, we must take care to carefully screen internal agents in the party, in the armed forces, in the various organizations and ministries, in the government, and among the masses of the people [my emphasis]. We have to carefully screen them, Nuon Chea said. He mentioned “the line of carefully screening internal agents to improve and purify, in order to implement the line of building socialism. . . . ”
This was a very important order to kill. Their careful screening was to take all measures so that people were pure. The line laid down must be followed at all costs. . . . If people could not do it, they would be taken away and killed. This was called the line of “careful screening.” . . . The words “carefully screen” were the killing principle . . . and were stated strongly on 20 May. It was to be done.4
In Ethiopia, the Dergue’s mass murdering and regional expulsion program was leader Mengistu Haile Mariam’s brainchild. Dawit Wolde Giorgis, the commissioner of the euphemistic Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, the institution that was to carry out the deportations, relates its inception: “In the beginning of October 1984 . . . Mengistu called me into his office. He told me, out of the blue, that he was planning a massive national resettlement campaign. He planned to move 300,000 families, 1.5 million people, from Wollo and Tigray to South-western Ethiopia in nine months. I was amazed at these numbers. He said that this was the opportune moment to implement this project, which he claimed to have been considering for a long time, since the people couldn’t refuse. They were helpless. . . . ” Dawit then describes Mengistu’s rationale, which Mengistu emphasized was tied to his political transformative objectives, including using the target areas as places for politically undesirable people and “to depopulate rebel areas in order to deprive the guerrillas of support.” Dawit continues:It was one of those rare moments when he becomes relatively frank and one gets a glimpse of the real Mengistu. I told him that it would be a fatal mistake to attempt to settle 300,000 families in nine months. . . . He refused to see my points. He said that he would support my agency with the necessary manpower and financial backing. He argued that the RRC could mobilize international support. I was instructed to draw up a tentative operational plan.
Mengistu was overflowing with enthusiasm as he told me all this. It was clear that he considered this project to be the panacea for all the ills of the country. Mengistu loves campaigns, and this was something he could sink his teeth into.5
Initiating mass murder and elimination is a quintessential act of human agency, of choice. This act is typically accompanied by the total conviction with which Talât and Enver faced down Morgenthau, Hitler so often openly demonstrated when speaking about the need for and, then coming, extermination of the Jews, that Joseph Stalin was known for, that Nuon Chea conveyed (Pol Pot was reserved), that Mengistu demonstrated, and that Political Islamists, including Osama bin Laden, regularly parade. It is sometimes—for all we know, often—accompanied by the kind of enthusiasm that Dawit describes Mengistu displaying as he, like other eliminationist dreamers and perpetrators, contemplated this “panacea for all the ills of the country.”
Anyone who asserts that the initiation of violent and lethal eliminations is determined by structures or forces simply overlooks the facts of the orders and the meetings in which they were promulgated, the facts of the many other orders and meetings in which they were not, and the facts of decision after decision to initiate (or not to initiate) one exterminationist and eliminationist program after another. There is no mass murder or elimination I know that could not have been avoided had one person or a few people decided to do otherwise, which they easily could have done. There is no mass murder or elimination that could not have been avoided had other people held power. This means that the worldviews, aspirations, and moral framework, the prejudices and hatreds, and the personalities of the person or small group of people who make the eliminationist decision are crucial. These specific individuals, their ideas and personalities, require investigation.
A general framework for answering the basic questions about the initiation of mass annihilations and eliminations—why they begin, why only some groups get targeted, why certain means are chosen, and why they begin when they do—starts with the conditions that first generate the idea that mass killing or elimination may be desirable, and the conditions that then make it practical, namely thinkable as policy. Many societies contain groups that others hate or think dangerous, and would therefore like to eliminate. Why, then, do the eliminationist views around the world get transformed into actual annihilation or elimination against some of them, actually only a small percentage of such groups, but not others?
War, nation-building conflicts, extreme challenges to the state or national integrity, and intense ethnic strife increase the likelihood that eliminationist sentiment will be inflamed, brought into politics, and turned into policy, including lethal policy. They create conditions that make eliminationist, even annihilationist politics more thinkable and more practicable—but never certain, or even likely. Just as war made the Germans’ annihilation of the mentally ill, the Jews, and the Sinti and Roma feasible but did not lead Germany’s conquerors to annihilate Germans; just as American nation-building led to the eliminationist policies against Native Americans but did not produce similar policies toward others threatening the national project, so too do challenges to the state and intense ethnic conflict sometimes provide the context for merciless annihilation and eliminations, and at other times do no such thing.
South Africa is an example of an intense conflict that produced protracted violence, but not mass annihilation, by either whites or blacks against the other. For decades, mutually incompatible visions of the nation and politics, ethnic conflict between blacks and whites, and military and civil fighting between the African National Congress and the white apartheid state dominated the country. Yet these overlapping and reinforcing conflicts never resulted in the whites’ annihilating those they believed would destroy their society and perhaps themselves. These conflicts, and all that blacks had suffered, also did not lead the African National Congress and blacks, upon taking power, to annihilate whites or even the apartheidists (as many had feared). Few countries have had more long-lasting and intensive domestic conflicts than South Africa. According to most perspectives on mass annihilation, South Africa should have suffered one mass murder campaign, if not successive or reciprocal campaigns. South Africa’s history, during and after its apartheid years, resoundingly belies structural or deterministic theories of mass murder.
Various circumstances facilitate people’s choosing a path leading to mass murder or elimination, but political leaders are compelled neither to choose that path nor to reach its end. Whatever a country’s stresses, whatever the real or imagined threats, however intensive its ethnic conflicts, if p
olitical leaders do not enact an exterminationist or eliminationist program, then mass murder, expulsion, and incarceration do not occur. The critical factor is the political leaders: Some move states or groups to commit mass murder. Others, where mass murder would be possible, do not.
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