The Centrality of Political Leaders
Mass annihilation or elimination begins when leaders are animated by an eliminationist ideology and are determined to turn broadly existing eliminationist sentiment into a state policy of extermination or elimination. The best known such instance is Germany, where Hitler, who from the beginning of his political career was determined to eliminate the Jews, tapped into Germans’ widespread, already existing anti-Jewish eliminationist beliefs, and mobilized them first to support or participate in the brutal eliminationist policies during the 1930s of segregating Jews—removing them from most economic and professional activity, creating systematic legal and social disabilities, subjecting them to violence and murder, and driving most of them to emigrate—and then in elimination’s exterminationist variant during the war. Hitler could mobilize such beliefs, which existed within many European countries and within the Catholic Church and the German Protestant churches, precisely because these beliefs, whatever their variations, broadly accorded with his own and with his eliminationist project’s fundamentals. This was also true, often to a lesser extent, about Hitler’s various racist and biological views that led to the slaughter and despoliation of the Germans’ many non-Jewish victims.
This mechanism and pattern has characterized our age’s mass murders and eliminations. Talât easily mobilized preexisting anti-Armenian eliminationist views among many Turks. The political and military leadership in Indonesia in 1965 mobilized existing profound and widespread anticommunist hatred. The Tutsi leaders in Burundi in 1970 activated their followers to slaughter Hutu, and the Hutu leaders in neighboring Rwanda in 1994 did the same against Tutsi. In Yugoslavia, the deep-seated animosity of Serbs for Croats and Muslims was long-standing, so Slobodan Milošević easily got Serbs to support and implement his eliminationist projects.
Less frequently, eliminationist leaders assume power in a society where their views are not broadly shared, and they nevertheless enact their eliminationist ideals. Cadres of like-minded followers form their vanguard for the eventual mass elimination, or over time inculcate their eliminationist views into a significant portion of society, most quickly and effectively the young. This occurred in the Soviet Union, in China, and in North Korea. Saddam Hussein similarly brought to power with him his Baath Party and then inculcated into new generations of Iraqis his murderous Baathist credo.
But most often, even in societies that harbor broad eliminationist sentiment, murderous leaders do not come to power. Because they do not, most eliminationist beliefs around the world never get transformed into eliminationist policy. Before Talât took power in Turkey, Turks widely hated Armenians and had even been mobilized twice in the previous decades in orgies of mass slaughter. However, the leadership preceding Talât chose not to bring about the Armenians’ total elimination, and therefore no national-scale mass murder and expulsion program occurred—even though it easily could have. It took Talât and Enver’s decision to set complete mass murder and elimination into motion. For decades prior to Hitler’s ascension, a broad consensus in German society existed that Jews should be eliminated, but there was no mass elimination, let alone annihilation. When Hitler, after a victory in national elections, assumed Germany’s chancellorship in January 1933 and almost immediately embarked upon a high-profile, explicit eliminationist program against the Jews, the conditions of society had not appreciably changed from when his predecessors had not undertaken any such program. In each case it was political leaders who made the difference. More recently, Serbs’ long-standing wish to eliminate Muslims from their midst produced no eliminationist onslaught until Milošević activated such beliefs behind his murderous program of a purified, greater Serbia for the Serbs. Since Rwandan independence in 1962, anti-Tutsi eliminationist sentiment has widely existed among Hutu. But it has produced mass murder only when the Hutu leaders decided it should: in December 1963, from 1990 to 1993 on a sporadic and clearly preparatory scale with Hutu perpetrating at least seventeen trial massacres, and then in 1994, when the opportunity finally seemed propitious, in the intended final comprehensive annihilationist scale. At other times, the Hutu leaders allowed the powerful hatred against the Tutsi to lie dormant. Parallel though reversed circumstances between Hutu and Tutsi have existed for several decades in neighboring Burundi, leading the Tutsi political leaders to initiate five mass slaughters of Hutu over two decades.
More generally, in every instance of repeated mass murders and eliminations in a given country or region upon a targeted group after intervals of years—including various murderous assaults in the Indian subcontinent between Muslims and Hindu and Pakistanis and Bengalis, or the Muslim Arab northern Sudanese against the Christian and animist black southern Sudanese—the starts and stops are orchestrated from above and are not just the ebbs and flows of disorganized passions among the involved groups’ ordinary members.
Political leaders are the critical actors setting eliminationist policies and mass annihilations in motion. They are not some faceless, abstract entity, not some bureaucracy, but one or a few identifiable people governing a country, who are typically extremely well known to followers and victims. Talât, Enver, and a handful of others decided to slaughter the Armenians. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, and then Stalin, created the Soviet Union’s eliminationist institutions and programs. Hitler decided to annihilate European Jewry and to sterilize and then kill mentally ill Germans. Together with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS and other security forces, and a few others, he set in motion policies that led to the deaths of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and others, many inside the Germans’ camp system and many outside it at the hands of the SS, the military, or other police forces. Harry Truman, alone, decided to annihilate the Japanese of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mao Zedong was the prime mover of the Chinese communists’ gargantuan slaughters. General Haji Muhammad Suharto in Indonesia gave the order for the slaughter of the Indonesian Communist Party’s members. General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s ruler, set his army to murder millions of Bangladeshis. Idi Amin initiated the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in Uganda. Presidents Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia and José Efraín Ríos Montt were responsible for the mass murder and elimination in Guatemala of Maya under the guise of counterinsurgency. Mengistu masterminded and initiated the various Ethiopian eliminationist and exterminationist programs. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge leaders around him instituted the murderous policies that took millions of Cambodians’ lives. The Argentinean junta’s members started the Dirty War against their real and imagined enemies. Augusto Pinochet authorized the slaughter of thousands in Chile. Hafez al-Assad gave the order to indiscriminately slaughter people in Hama. Saddam Hussein orchestrated the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Milošević enacted one Serbian murderous eliminationist onslaught after the next. After President Juvénal Habyarimana’s assassination, Théoneste Bagosora, the Ministry of Defense’s director of services, and a small circle of associates set in motion the comprehensive annihilative assault on the Tutsi and the targeted one on their Hutu enemies. Omar al-Bashir and the other Political Islamists ruling Sudan initiated the mass murders and expulsions first against the southern Sudanese and then against the people of Darfur. Bin Laden ordered the mass murder of the World Trade Center’s and Pentagon’s occupants.
Naming the people who initiated mass murders and other eliminationist assaults during the past century could go on. They had advisers and underlings who may have influenced them or who may have themselves originated the programs’ parts. But in the end, these people, political leaders all, were the prime movers.
These and the other initiators of exterminationist and eliminationist programs did not have their hands forced, whatever exactly that might mean. If any leader had been somehow compelled to initiate such a program, then that would mean only that someone else was making the decision, so the onus would merely fall on that person or persons, and the analysis of the destructive program’s initiation would be shifted from the
titular decision-maker to the actual ones. And if somehow a mass-murdering leader were brought to power by a public bent on slaughtering or eliminating some designated enemy, explicitly to enact that public’s wish, then the symbiotic relationship between eliminationist leaders and followers would differ somewhat, with the leader still critical for initiating the eliminationist program. This somewhat different relationship has not existed in our time. Almost all mass-murderous and eliminationist leaders (overwhelmingly true of domestic ones) have come to power nondemocratically. They have usually taken power without announcing their future policies, which they typically have not yet decided upon, or even so concretely conceived.
The people who moved many other people to destroy and displace still others had confidantes and needed the cooperation of followers to create the often elaborate operational plans, and then to implement them. When these political leaders decided to initiate the preparatory planning, and then the eliminationist programs themselves, they invested executive and administrative responsibilities in their subordinates. Planning has often been months, sometimes years, in the making—further evidence that mass murders do not just erupt spontaneously from uncontrollable hatred and rage, and are not responses to victims’ provocations. Organizing mass murder and eliminations requires strategic and tactical preparation, including delegating responsibilities to different institutions and people, creating operational plans with sequences of actions, detailing targets, often including priority lists for killing, figuring out how to minimize resistance from the victims, determining how and when to dispose of the victim group (or groups) and the various categories of people within them, and deciding how to maintain desired levels of secrecy or publicity. Because of such planning, exterminationist and eliminationist assaults often occur simultaneously across a country or region to minimize escape. Practically every aspect of planning can be seen in the document that appears to have resulted from secret deliberations by five members of the Turkish leadership, including Talât, who probably presided, that took place in either December 1914 or January 1915 and thus preceded the eliminationist assault by several months. The document was acquired by the British high commissioner in Constantinople, which gave it the name “The 10 commandments of the COMITE UNION AND PROGRES”:1. Profiting by the Arts: 3 and 4 of Comite Union and Progres, close all Armenian Societies, and arrest all who worked against Government at any time among them and send them into the provinces such as Bagdad or Mosul, and wipe them out either on the road or there.
2. Collect arms.
3. Excite Moslem opinion by suitable and special means, in places as Van, Erzeroum, Adana, where as a point of fact the Armenians have already won the hatred of the Moslems, provoke organized massacres as the Russians did at Baku.
4. Leave all executive to the people in provinces such as Erzeroum, Van, Mamuret ul Aziz, and Bitlis, and use Military disciplinary forces (i.e., Gendarmerie) ostensibly to stop massacres while on the contrary in places as Adan, Sivas, Broussa, Ismidt and Smyrna actively help the Moslems with military force.
5. Apply measures to exterminate all males under 50, priests and teachers, leave girls and children to be Islamized.
6. Carry away the families of all who succeed in escaping and apply measures to cut them off from all connection with their native place.
7. On the ground that Armenian officials may be spies, expel and drive them out absolutely from every Government department or post.
8. Kill off in an appropriate manner all Armenians in the Army—this to be left to the military to do.
9. All action to begin everywhere simultaneously, and thus leave no time for preparation of defensive measures.
10. Pay attention to the strictly confidential nature of these instructions, which may not go beyond two or three persons.
In some exterminationist and eliminationist assaults, the prime movers promulgate explicit policies and, together with their inner circles, maintain oversight and centralized control over the main contours of preparation and execution. Others set in motion a general eliminationist enterprise with broad authorization to subordinates to operationalize it. Always there is some combination of central control and local initiative. With mass murders and eliminations of the Germans’, the Soviets’, or the Chinese’s scale, or under such poor capacities of command and control, as in Turkey, Cambodia, Rwanda, or Sudan, the political leaders naturally delegated much executive authority and decision-making to those in the killing fields.
Whatever latitude political leaders granted their acolytes, the leaders have been the prime movers of the annihilative and eliminationist onslaughts. Had each of them said no, which each could have, or rather had each of them chosen not to say yes (often where no question was being asked), then our era’s many mass slaughters and eliminations would never have occurred. Even in those rare cases where it might be reasonably argued that another person or persons might have forced the hand of the then-reluctant mass murderer, or toppled him, we cannot be certain that the slaughters would have ensued anyway. And certainly not all (or perhaps even any) would have reached the magnitude of the colossal mass murders and eliminations of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam, and others.
Had Talât, Enver, and others had a different vision for a more pluralistic Turkey, then there would have been no genocide of the Armenians. Had Hitler decided otherwise, then there would have been no Holocaust. Had Stalin been opposed to mass killing and elimination, then no vast expansion of the gulag. Had Truman listened to those urging him to adopt a different strategy, then no initial nuclear incineration in Hiroshima, and no second one in Nagasaki. Had Mao not sought the violent transformation of China, then no camp system, murderous Great Leap Forward, or Cultural Revolution and other barbarities. Had Suharto not wanted to forcibly take and then hold power, had he not seen the Indonesian Communist Party’s annihilation, a potential obstacle to his ambitions, as a desirable preemptive measure, then there would have been no mass slaughter in Indonesia. And had Suharto not opted for imperial aggrandizement by invading and decimating the opposition in East Timor, then no grinding mass slaughter of the East Timorese. Had Idi Amin not chosen to rule with licentiousness and murderous brutality, then no mass slaughtering of Ugandans. Had Pinochet and the generals in Chile, or the junta in Argentina, not wanted to rule by a rightist dictatorship, or had they been willing to tolerate opposition, then no systematic murders of those they “disappeared.” Had Lucas Garcia and Ríos Montt, and the Guatemalan army’s leading generals, not defined Maya as guerrilla supporters and had they been willing to open up political space to hear Maya grievances, then hundreds of thousands of Maya would still be alive, and many hundreds of thousands more would still be living in their towns and villages, which would not have been obliterated from Guatemala’s map. Had Pol Pot chosen a peaceful course after taking power, then no Cambodian killing fields. Had Assad not wanted to demonstrate that he would brook no opposition, then no considerable leveling of Hama. Had Saddam chosen to help Iraq flourish rather than pursue his power and destructive dreams, then his many murdered victims would be alive. Had Milošević been content with a smaller Serbia (or even perhaps a federated Yugoslavia), then no mass murderous and eliminationist assaults in Bosnia or Kosovo. Had the Hutu leaders not been animated by a vision of an ethnically and politically purified Rwanda, then no comprehensive annihilative assault on the Tutsi. Had al-Bashir and the Political Islamists around him not been determined to remake Sudan according to their totalitarian political theological doctrine, then the millions in the south and in Darfur whom they slaughtered or expelled would still be living in their homes. Had bin Laden decided to accept that Arab and Muslim peoples should fully take part in the modern world, rather than lash out at the country and people he despises as modernity’s principal agent, then the World Trade Center towers would still stand.
To understand why mass annihilations, expulsions, and eliminations begin in each instance would require lengthy investigations and excursions into each case’s
often complex politics, including explicating the context for the leaders’ choice to eliminate real and imagined enemies rather than to deal with them in other ways—as American nation-building and so many instances from other countries show is possible. The instances from American nation-building are actually ones of extreme conflict where the targeted groups (certainly the Tories and the southerners) threatened the American political state and nation’s existence. The perpetrators of many, indeed most, mass murders and eliminations act against groups that do not pose any such powerful threat. So why do they kill? And the overwhelming majority of political conflicts do not result in mass murders and eliminations. So why do some?
Delving more deeply into each eliminationist instance’s broader political context and struggles would reveal relevant factors: In Indonesia a distemper with President Sukarno’s politics led others to want to stop him; in Guatemala the Right and the military’s political machinations formed a backdrop that had nothing per se to do with their leftist or Maya victims; in Rwanda a critical conflict existed not just between Hutu and Tutsi but also among the dominant Hutu parties and factions; in other instances there were other relevant circumstances, conflicts, and disposition of forces. Yet none of these constellations in themselves explains the mass murders, mass expulsions, the camp systems, and brutal incarcerations, not to mention the other cruelties, soon to be discussed, that political leaders and their followers visit upon their victims. Even after providing a fuller context of the politics of each country in which the specific antagonism for the targeted groups and peoples occurred, the critical questions would remain: Why have political leaders conceived of certain groups as noxious? Why in ways that suggest a problem so extreme as to make them consider violent, even lethal elimination as a solution? Why did they choose such violent and destructive solutions to the putative problems and not others? And in addition to needing answers to these questions in every individual case, the broader issue of whether any general conclusions can be drawn about the initiation of mass murder and eliminations remains. Some can: With rare exception, our time’s mass murdering and eliminationist leaders have been radical antipluralists, seeking purity or homogenization, or to forfend the apocalypse, or bring about their vision of utopia. The leaders all possessed beliefs about their victims and the broader social and political world that rendered their victims’ killing or elimination subjectively good, necessary, and just. The leaders’ beliefs that their victims, or their putative threat, must somehow be eliminated, or their allegiance to a transformative vision that would eventually mark certain peoples or groups for elimination, predated substantially their actual initiation of the eliminationist onslaught. This means that we must understand both the generation of their eliminationist beliefs and the eventual circumstances that gave the mass murderers the opportunity to act upon them.
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