Once a regime chooses its eliminationist institutions, the logistics of mass annihilation and elimination are not difficult. When the intended victims are coterminous with a city, town, or building, the municipality or structure itself can be targeted, as the Americans did with Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo, the Americans and British did with Dresden, Assad did with Hama, and bin Laden did with the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon (in what, strangely, is conceived of as only a terrorist attack and not also the genocidal or eliminationist assault that it was). In more conventional mass murders and eliminations, the killers easily round up the victims. Sometimes the perpetrators and victims are segmented geographically, as in Biafra and in the assault by the Political Islamists governing in northern Sudan first on black African people in southern Sudan, and now those of the large western region of Darfur (the size of France). Sometimes physical markers such as skin color differentiate the perpetrators and the victims. Generally, the killers or their local helpers know their targets and where to locate them. This was true of the Germans in South-West Africa, the Turks, the Germans, the Croats during World War II, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians slaughtering the communists, the Serbs in Bosnia and then Kosovo, the Tutsi in Burundi, the Hutu in Rwanda, Saddam’s henchmen in Iraq, and in so many other instances. In Germany itself, the Germans used genealogical records to determine who they would treat as a Jew in the small percentage of cases where the quantity of a person’s Jewish “blood” was in doubt (exceptions aside, the amount needed to be at least 50 percent). Outside of their own country, the Germans were far less particular, ready to slaughter just about anyone local people identified as Jews; in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and elsewhere, many were happy to oblige. When Lithuanians, Ukrainians, or Poles, such as in Poland’s 1941 Jedwabne massacre, slaughtered the Jews, with German encouragement or assistance, they were murdering their own neighbors whom they knew well, a phenomenon seen recently by a virtually uncomprehending world in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, particularly Bosnia.
In annihilationist assaults, the perpetrators either congregate their victims at collection points, sometimes using the ruse that they are relocating them. The Germans used this standard technique to deport Jews to the death camps or to take them outside a city to be shot. The Turks earlier and the Khmer Rouge later did the same for their massive, lethal death marches. Or, as the Germans also often did and the perpetrators did in Indonesia, Burundi, and Rwanda, or in several Latin American countries, as in Guatemala or El Salvador, they suddenly and with overwhelming force descend upon their victims. With rare exceptions, the perpetrators manage to kill an extraordinarily high percentage of the victims they actually try to apprehend. They succeed similarly with expulsions and eliminationist incarceration campaigns. Few other political programs are so successful and produce such high yields.
All this is organized with varying combinations of centralized control and local initiative. Political leaders, after opting for annihilation programs, almost always orchestrate them from the political center, with standard communication channels transmitting orders to killing institutions and field commanders. As with other aspects of mass murder, how regimes manage and monitor those implementing their eliminationist and exterminationist programs varies. Different killing sites and institutions provide a range of opportunities for perpetrators to take lethal initiative. Regimes can more easily oversee camp guards than perpetrators shepherding death marches or in mobile killing squads, especially when killing in small groups. Most eliminationist assaults have poor command and control structures because they take place in technologically underdeveloped countries, such as Turkey in 1915, Cambodia, or Rwanda, with poorly monitored new institutions and under improvised conditions over vast terrains.
Whatever the formal command pathways, the reality, which leaders understand, is that at the point of attack, perpetrators can themselves decide a great deal about how and whom to kill. Dejan Pavlović, an independent Serbian journalist, explains how it worked in Bosnia: “State Security sent men to each Bosnian municipality looking for trusted persons who would act as allies. These ‘trusted persons’ would be told that the area needed to be secured for reasons of convoy security or military strategy, and that as a result, the Muslims needed to be cleared out.” Sometimes the local police chief, sometimes the mayor, sometimes the hospital director would be in charge. “You’ll never find one method or one chain of command for ethnic cleansing,” Pavlović comments about the former Yugoslavia, “because in each area, the person or group responsible for carrying out the ethnic cleansing was different. Each commander used a different method based on the tools he had.”35 The Germans’ command and control systems were probably as formal and good as any, yet every German in the east could at a whim choose to murder Jews and other so-called subhumans without fearing punishment. In eliminationist assaults, the perpetrators quickly learn that overzealousness in wiping out the targeted enemy is not penalized. The perpetrators know they may do as they wish. The number of instances in which perpetrators have been reprimanded or punished for overdoing it is, as far as we know, exceedingly small.
Just as eliminationist and annihilationist institutions vary temporally and spatially, so do eliminationist programs as a whole. Temporally, mass murders and eliminations can be (1) focused, a single, time-bounded assault, (2) iterative, a series of focused assaults, or (3) systemic, continual and drawn out.
Focused mass murders and eliminations are common. Where the targeted group or groups’ death is pursued as an end in itself, or for some immediate strategic gain, and not as part of some larger transformative project, focused killings result. The Americans’ nuclear bombings of the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute the most fearsome, instantaneous of all mass murders. Each attack lasted a few seconds (although many died later and others continued to suffer from radiation poisoning). If the American attacks on Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s people are seen as the culmination of the annihilative bombing campaign against the Japanese in Tokyo, Kyoto, and elsewhere, then Americans’ slaughtering of Japanese from the air lasted somewhat longer. Focused mass killings and eliminations, other than nuclear annihilations, can begin and end quickly, as did Al Qaeda’s destruction of the World Trade Center, and Assad’s mass murder of Hama’s people. They can also last months or even several years, as did the Germans’ extermination of the Herero and then of the Nama, Indonesians’ slaughter of communists, the Serbs’ various eliminationist onslaughts of the 1990s, and Saddam’s eliminationist assault against the Marsh people.
Iterative mass murders and eliminations consist of political leaders initiating the slaughter of a group’s members, halting it, and then re-launching the slaughter sometimes years later. The Turks mass murdered Armenians on three occasions. Although these slaughters spanned almost two decades, they were of one piece. Since decolonization, Burundi has seen four substantial murderous forays by Tutsi against Hutu, killing thousands in 1965, more than 100,000 in 1972, perhaps 20,000 in 1988, and 3,000 in 1991. In 1993, reciprocal killings, first of Tutsi by Hutu, and then by the Tutsi army of Hutu, took an estimated 25,000 lives on each side. Neighboring Rwanda saw the first mass slaughter between these two groups, when the Hutu killed perhaps 10,000 Tutsi in December 1963 and January 1964 (which inflamed and heightened the insecurity of the Tutsi in neighboring Burundi) and then the colossal bloodbath of 800,000 Tutsi in 1994. The Croats’ successive slaughter of Serbs during World War II, and then again their murder and expulsion campaign during Yugoslavia’s breakup, could also be seen as iterative slaughters, as could the Serbs’ reciprocal slaughter of Croats in 1991-1992. Iterative mass murdering and elimination may be part of a general eliminationist, even annihilationist strategy, or it may be lethal domination’s most brutal form, used to thin out and weaken the targeted people and to intimidate them with the real threat of renewed annihilative assaults.
Systemic mass annihilation and elimination consist of ongoing acts that are not iterative and episod
ic, but an integral part of a regime’s rule. For this to happen, regimes establish enduring eliminationist institutions, typically a camp system. This occurred in the brutal Belgian and French colonial regimes in Congo and French Equatorial Africa, respectively; Germany during the Nazi period; the Soviet Union; midcentury Japan; communist China; the British colonization of Kenya; Cambodia; Baathist Iraq; and North Korea. Other regimes, also sometimes using camps, undertake frequent eliminationist and exterminationist assaults or campaigns, often repeatedly using the same cadres of killers, who may be special army units. Such regimes existed in Uganda, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Vietnam, and Iraq. Systemic mass murder and elimination occur when political leaders decide to achieve their goals, or deal with opposition or unwanted people, with lethal violence or policies that, whatever the reasons for their design, the leaders know will end in mass death. Even though political leaders’ attacks against some discrete groups are sometimes focused, as were the Khmer Rouge’s killing of the Cham and the Germans’ murderous assault against the Polish elite in 1940, mass murder and elimination become these leaders’ normal political practice as they impose their rule on highly resistant populations or ones not conforming to the leaders’ transformative visions. It is those leaders seeking to alter their societies in some revolutionary ideology’s image who construct vast camp systems, as both sustainable and flexible tools for sequestering and dominating or, over time, killing vast numbers of people.
Some perpetrators’ eliminationist campaigns, both focused and iterative, are related to the assaults others perpetrate upon them and other people. Poles, Czechs, and others’ expulsions and killings of ethnic Germans after World War II immediately followed the Germans’ annihilationist onslaughts in Central and Eastern Europe, though their occupation of Czech lands had been, by the Germans’ standards, relatively tame. Croats and Serbs have iteratively slaughtered one another, during World War II and then fifty years later during Yugoslavia’s breakup. The Hutu and Tutsi in Burundi and Rwanda have iteratively slaughtered one another and caused hundreds of thousands to flee in seven major exterminationist episodes since the countries gained independence from Belgium in 1962. In these places, a clear dynamic of reciprocity has set in, where mass elimination has become each group’s principal tool for neutralizing real and perceived enemies.
Mass murder and elimination’s spatial and temporal aspects tend to be intertwined. Focused mass murderers mainly kill their victims around where they find them, whether in the victims’ homes, outdoors, or at some nearby designated killing site. When the perpetrators of focused mass slaughters and expulsions remove people from their locales, they often use death marches. Iterative mass murders mimic focused ones spatially. Systemic mass murders and eliminations have longer time horizons and institutional structures that include enduring, fixed installations, so their perpetrators regularly remove the victims from their home environs, especially to camps, even if they also may conduct, as the Germans in particular did, local killing operations.
The Sympathies of Others and the Problem of Resistance
Many people, aside from the perpetrators and victims, know of the ongoing assaults and (unlike the generally helpless victims) have some capacity to influence them. These bystanders may be physically present watching the killings, living in the perpetrators’ countries or areas of occupation, or powerful actors, such as presidents and prime ministers, in countries outside the eliminationist zones. In overt or subtle ways, they either help or hinder the perpetrators. The failure of families, friends, and countrymen to disapprove of, or to hinder eliminationist acts, can help the perpetrators, especially when it strengthens their resolve to kill. The moral status of such acts of omission, important to investigate, is a long discussion that I have taken up in A Moral Reckoning.
Similar to perpetrators, bystanders are positioned differently vis-à-vis mass killing and elimination. Some work in state or military institutions, even in eliminationist institutions, without being involved in the eliminationist program. Others, the ones most frequently referred to as bystanders, stand by while the perpetrators drag entire families, often neighbors, from their houses, watch as they shoot or stab their victims or as death marches limp through their towns, or dwell near the camps where victims live in misery and die. Most frequently, these bystanders—sharing the critical identity (national, ethnic, religious, etc.) with the perpetrators—know that the perpetrators believe themselves to be acting in the bystanders’ name and for their good. Such bystanders have existed in virtually every mass murder and elimination. Turks, Germans, Indians and Pakistanis, British settlers in Kenya, Hutu, Serbs, and many other peoples have literally and figuratively watched their countrymen butcher or otherwise eliminate their neighbors. Some bystanders, such as the peoples of occupied countries or of nonperpetrator groups, do not share the perpetrators’ critical identity. They are under the occupier’s boot, subject to violence, and, as a group, might be potential victims. Such bystanders include Poles and others under German occupation, repressed minorities in the Soviet Union, and people in any occupied country or disputed territory where a large but not comprehensive mass murder is being perpetrated. Finally, bystanders exist outside the mass murder or elimination’s geographic realm. The most important are state leaders and officials, and sometimes those of transnational organizations, such as the Catholic Church, the Red Cross, or corporations. How they can influence a mass annihilation or elimination is taken up in later chapters.
Domestic bystanders can have a direct or indirect influence on mass murder. In many countries, bystanders help perpetrators by identifying victims or locating where they are hiding. In doing so, they transform themselves into perpetrators. Many other bystanders succor the perpetrators with expressions of approval or encouragement, or solidaristic hatred, or with tangible aid of food, shelter, and goods. Just by not conveying disapproval in overt or subtle ways, bystanders reassure perpetrators that they do not stand alone.
When bystanders disapprove of an eliminationist assault, they can save people’s lives. It is nonsense to maintain that it is impossible to aid people targeted for extermination—a notion that so many writers about Nazism and the Holocaust have put forward that exculpates Germans, the peoples of occupied countries, and religious institutions, especially the Catholic Church. Looking to guerrilla insurgencies, we know that if a country’s people do not support its government, the insurgents will receive food, shelter, aid, and intelligence. This was true for Polish partisans in Poland, Soviet partisans in the Soviet Union, the French underground in France, to name just a few, during World War II. Similar aid could be given, and sometimes is, to the people targeted in eliminationist assaults. When it is not, it tells us a great deal about a populace’s attitude toward the mass killing and elimination. When people give aid, many lives can be preserved. The Danish people saved virtually all the Jews among them, including many non-Danes, by ferrying them to noncombatant Sweden. Although the Bulgarian government handed over Jews from territories it occupied in Greece and Yugoslavia to the Germans who slaughtered them, under much pressure from the Bulgarian public, parliamentarians, and most significant, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church’s leadership, it refused to allow the Germans to deport and murder Bulgaria’s own Jews. If a large percentage of Germans or Hutu or Serbs had believed the annihilation of Jews, Tutsi, or Muslims, respectively, to be one of our age’s great horrors, then their countrymen certainly would have killed many fewer Jews, Tutsi, or Muslims, perhaps not even a substantial number at all. More locally, the French of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon saved between three thousand and five thousand Jews, even though Germans were all around their region and often in their town. Across Europe, including in many Catholic institutions, individual dissenters saved Jews, totaling in the thousands. In Rwanda, individual Hutu who dissented from the common anti-Tutsi creed managed to save many Tutsi, and Hutu Muslims frequently showed solidarity for and aided their Tutsi coreligionists. Even if the circumstances, institutional infrastructu
re, and resources inhibit large-scale rescues, disapproving bystanders can still save many lives, one by one, or a handful here and a handful there.
Mao Zedong’s famous dictum provides an essential question: Who are the fish in the sea of bystanders—the perpetrators or the victims? When it is the perpetrators, which has been the rule, then the victims have nowhere to run or hide. Bystander hostility to victims is ultimately a significant factor contributing directly and contextually to an enormous number of deaths. The bystander problem, as it is typically discussed, is: Why do people stand by idly in the face of horrors? But as we see, this renders the issue falsely by concealing more than a figurative half of the problem, which is the various kinds of support that bystanders freely give to the perpetrators.
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