Bystanders’ support for mass exterminations and eliminations is critical for another important reason: The perpetrators are rarely confronted with widespread, let alone successful, resistance because without bystander support the victims have no reasonable prospect of preventing the executioners from killing or eliminating them. This would hardly be worth mentioning, except that the blame-the-victim cliché has been intoned incessantly when discussing the Jews’ conduct—“like sheep to slaughter”—during the Holocaust. For people to resist eliminationist assaults, they must have some possibility of success. Under hopeless conditions, usually only small-scale, symbolic resistance is possible. Rational calculation and people’s psychological propensities suppress the urge to fight. The targeted groups understand that resistance guarantees death, and as long as people hold out hope of survival, they are unlikely to fight. This is especially so as men (who generally lead resistance) have endangered families requiring their continuing presence. Not surprisingly, Jews in some ghettos and camps revolted when the annihilation’s comprehensiveness had proceeded to a point of absolute hopelessness. These revolts produced, perhaps, symbolic victory but ended in catastrophic defeat.
Many factors must be present for resistance to be more than quixotic or symbolic. The victims must have weapons, organization, time to coordinate, military experience, leadership, and refuge (which requires sympathetic bystanders locally or across reachable international borders). Absent any of these factors, effective resistance is not possible. These factors are almost never all present, and they certainly were not for the Jews facing the Germans’ military and annihilationist colossus. The Jews were dragooned by the military machine that had smashed Europe’s armies. The Jews had few weapons, no military or paramilitary organization, little military expertise, no time whatsoever to organize themselves before being pulverized, and no refuge, because in many countries, especially in Eastern Europe, the local population generally hated them. Moreover, the Germans quickly starved the Jews of Eastern Europe into weakened and sickened states. The Jews in ghettos and camps were surrounded by overwhelming force, unable even to leave their prisons’ confines.
The non-Jews forming major resistance movements against the Germans had enormously more favorable conditions: friendly populations, arms, military know-how and organization, help from the allies, etc., and they were not penned in camps, surrounded by machine guns. Even with such advantages, most, representing a tiny part of their country’s populations, were unable to become operational until the Germans had already slaughtered most of the Jews they would kill. How could the Jews have done better? Millions of Soviet POWs, young military men with organization, and leadership, and initial vigor, died passively in German camps. If these men, whose families were not with them, could not muster themselves against the Germans, how could the Jews be expected to have done more?
Effective resistance to annihilationist and eliminationist onslaughts has been rare. The overwhelming majority of our age’s victims have not raised a hand, armed or otherwise, in self-defense. In China, the Soviet Union, and Japanese-occupied Asia, in Turkey, Burundi, and Bosnia, in South-West Africa, Cambodia, and Rwanda, in Indonesia, Iraq, and Sudan, and on and on, unendangered perpetrators have slaughtered, expelled, or incarcerated masses of impotent people. The Indonesians’ sudden onslaught upon the communist victims so stunned them that they offered little resistance, and in some areas even went to their deaths in an orderly and expectant manner, as in Bali, where communists donned “white ceremonial burial robes and marched calmly with policemen or village officials to their places of execution.”36 A mass murderer in Java relates an episode that to him was emblematic of the victims’ pliancy: “There was an instance, where a Communist was kneeling to have his head cut off. The executioner told him, ‘Lift up your head a little, so I can cut better.’ The man about to die immediately lifted his head to help his executioner.”37 And the Indonesian victims were members of a militant and highly organized political party! People targeted by annihilationist and eliminationist assaults usually have only the most circumscribed agency of choosing to die earlier, and in one way rather than another. Except for the lucky or extraordinary few individual victims, mass murders and eliminations are almost purely a perpetrator-run affair.
Victims have resisted when they are already armed, organized, and not so overwhelmingly outgunned. In Rwanda, as word spread of the Hutu’s accelerating mass murdering, few Tutsi initially resisted. The Tutsi’s already operational rebel army did launch an offensive campaign that eventually stopped the mass murder, defeating the Hutu and conquering the country. Sometimes targeted people can anticipate a coming attack and flee to safety. German Jews knew that the Germans, who had made them socially dead, were bent upon their violent elimination. In just six years, starting in 1933, almost two-thirds of them fled Germany even though gaining admittance to other countries was very difficult and they had to forfeit most of their wealth. Then the war began making escape impossible. Similarly, Denmark’s Jews’ stealing away to hospitable Sweden was an escape of the slaughter, though not by suicidal armed resistance. Other Jews managing to elude the Germans had the worse fortune of reaching “neutral” Switzerland, which often forced them to return to Germany, to death.
When an annihilationist campaign begins, particularly in developing countries where governments and armies have but tenuous control, many flee the murderers, producing a second eliminationist result and huge refugee problems. Causing such flight is often an integral part of the eliminationist plan. Short of the victims’ leaving preemptively or having armed forces ready to meet the perpetrators on their killing fields, the denouement has already been scripted: Most of the targeted people die. Even in Rwanda, the Tutsi cavalry arrived 800,000 or more lives late.
Perpetrators employ a number of tactics to reduce resistance. They surprise or overwhelm the victims, leaving them no time to flee, let alone to organize effective resistance. The Germans, the Indonesians, the Hutu, the Guatemalans, the Baathists, the Serbs, and the Political Islamic Sudanese, among others, did this. Perpetrators also forestall effective resistance by terrorizing victims so they know that resistance portends catastrophic retribution. The Soviets, Chinese, Khmer Rouge, North Koreans, Baathists in Syria, and Baathists in Iraq, Germans, and others did this. Finally, there is the Khmer Rouge’s strategy of such intensive supervision and terror that the victims fear communicating with one another even to the most minimal degree necessary for organizing resistance. The North Koreans, and to some extent the Soviets, appear also to have done this.
Mass murder and elimination are not like war. Their success rate is enormously higher than that of military campaigns. No army opposes the perpetrators as they descend on their victims and expel, kill, or imprison them in camps. Perpetrators’ casualties are almost always tiny because the victims often do nothing more than occasionally raising an unarmed hand in self-defense as the machete comes down or as the trigger is pulled. Books about mass murders and endless pages of eyewitness testimonies—from perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—rarely report victims killing perpetrators. The perpetrators know that they face no immediate martial threat from their victims and can proceed virtually unimpeded. They know this even when they attack civilians who actually or putatively support rebels or the opposing side in a civil war. Eliminationist perpetrators often later claim they were acting defensively, yet in any conventional military sense of an imminent threat, the perpetrators know that there is none. In any conventional sense of what constitutes a palpable actual threat—as opposed to a threat the perpetrators, owing to their hatred, prejudices, or political ideology, may believe exists—such claims are transparently false. (The Germans while slaughtering six million Jews lost perhaps a few hundred men, most of whom died when Jews in camps and ghettos, seeing that the end was near, revolted.) The British at the time of their eliminationist campaign against the Kikuyu put forward this preposterous claim. They incarcerated approximately 1.5 million Kikuyu in a brut
al camp system and killed tens of thousands (estimates range from 50,000 to 300,000), all, according to the British, in response to the putative acute threat and unsurpassable savagery of the Kikuyu liberation movement known as Mau Mau. How many whites did the bestial Mau Mau kill? Thirty-two. Such similarly transparently false claims by perpetrators that they face an imminent physical threat have been made by (or in defense of) Turks, Germans, Harry Truman, Indonesians, Tutsi in Burundi, and Hutu in Rwanda. They have been made on behalf of perpetrators across Latin America, in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, and El Salvador, where the Right was fending off the Left. And on behalf of the Soviets and the Chinese, namely of communist regimes battling real and imaginary enemies who threatened the chimerical harmonious communist future.
Such false justifications continue to be put forward today in setting after setting by retrospective apologists, who act as guardians of national or group honor. They claim that the perpetrators had the mindset of those at war, or that they genuinely feared their victims as if the fear had been anything but an outgrowth of their prejudice, racism, and hatred. Yet nothing about mass slaughter and elimination, with the exception of pulling the trigger, is like military conflict or an actual emergency situation where the victims threaten the perpetrators or their countrymen’s lives. This is self-evidently the case when, as they typically do, the perpetrators slaughter or brutally drive from their homes women and children. As Pancrace Hakizamungili, a Hutu mass murderer, explains, “In a war, you kill someone who fights you or promises you harm. In killings of this kind, you kill the Tutsi woman you used to listen to the radio with, or the kind lady who put medicinal plants on your wound, or your sister who was married to a Tutsi. . . . You slaughter the woman same as the man. That is the difference, which changes everything.”38 A wealth of evidence from perpetrators around the world, especially the Germans during the Nazi period, flatly falsifies the military comparison and the notion that their manifestly helpless victims ever posed a physical or military threat. Instead, the perpetrators know their mass slaughter and elimination are purposive political acts that irrevocably transform their societies and polities.
Transformative Politics, Transformative Results
Eliminationist assaults are strategic political acts embedded in larger political contexts, practices, and goals. Perpetrators therefore do things to their victims that, strictly speaking, go beyond their immediate tasks of annihilating, expelling, or incarcerating them, and their acts have political, social, economic, and cultural consequences beyond the already momentous facts that people lose their homes, families, and lives. What follows is a preparatory sketch about these themes that subsequent chapters elaborate upon.
Politically, the perpetrators with their eliminationist programs remove or at least severely weaken people who would contest their power. In Burundi, Tutsi slaughtered Hutu in a more targeted fashion, and in Rwanda, Hutu slaughtered Tutsi comprehensively, each to forestall a lessening of their power. Liisa Malkki quotes Burundian Hutu survivors describing the Tutsi’s systematic decapitation of the Hutu by slaughtering their elite:They wanted to kill my clan because my clan was educated. The clans which were educated, cultivated, they were killed. In my clan there were school teachers, medical assistants, agronomists . . . some evangelists—not yet priests—and two who were in the army. . . . All have been exterminated. Among those [kin] who were educated, it is I alone who remain. . . . There are many persons who leave Burundi to-day because one kills every day. The pupils, the students . . . It is because these are intellectuals. . . . One killed many Hutu university people.
The government workers . . . They were arrested when they were in their offices working. The others also in their places—for example, an agronomist, when he was walking in the fields where he works, he was arrested. There were medical technicians, professors. . . . Or the artisans in the garage, or those who worked in printing houses or in the ateliers where furniture is made. They were killed there, on the spot.
Be you a student, this is a cause; be you a rich [person], that is a cause; be you a man who dares to say a valid word to the population, that is a cause. In short, it is a racial hate.39
The Indonesian government, with the army and nonmilitary anticommunists, removed its opponents from contesting political power by annihilating the critical mass of a popular communist party, putting many other communists in camps, and forcing still others to convert to either Islam or Christianity. The Pakistanis targeted the Bengalis’ political, communal, and intellectual elite, most intensively when the Indians were about to defeat them, which is when they began during a three-day period to systematically slaughter the leadership of the soon-to-be rival country. In many Latin American countries, including Argentina and El Salvador, rightist tyrannies victimized people challenging power from the Left. In Chile the Right’s mass murdering and removal of the Left started with its overthrow of a democratically elected Marxist government. In Germany the Nazis killed or incarcerated leading German communists and socialists to consolidate their power in 1933. And after conquering Poland, they slaughtered members of the Polish elite to reduce resistance to the Germans’ occupation and transformative plans. Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, in a planning meeting for the “extraordinary pacification” of Poland, reported that Hitler had told him that (these are Frank’s words) “what we have now identified as the leadership elements in Poland is what is to be liquidated.”40 The Germans’ assault on the Poles combined the qualities of a nineteenth-century imperial land grab with the purposeful murder of significant elements of the population and brutal suppression and exploitation of those left alive. Similarly in the Soviet Union, the Germans sought out and killed the communist elites. But the Germans did not kill Jews for reasons of power, because Germany’s Jews did not contest power and had nothing that the Germans wanted. This is also true of other countries’ Jews, who were no more dangerous to Germany than their countrymen. After consolidating their rule, the Soviets, the Chinese communists, and other communist regimes also faced no contestation of power, so it was not an actual factor in their mass eliminations. Removing political rivals or those who might foment resistance increases the perpetrators’ security and power and, once eliminationist assaults are decided upon and begun, the perpetrators facilitate their eliminationist and political projects’ further execution by initially killing the targeted people’s elites. Targeting elites was also part of the eliminationist programs of the Turks, British in Kenya, Indonesians, Guatemalans, Serbs, Hutu, and many more.
Socially and economically, perpetrators expropriate targeted peoples sometimes of territory and always of homes, belongings, and social and economic positions (though individual perpetrators often do not personally benefit). While the victims’ personal losses are almost always incidental to mass annihilations and eliminations’ larger political goals, their territorial losses have often been integral to them. This was the case for the Germans in South-West Africa, for the Belgians in Congo, for the Turks’ slaughter of the Armenians, for the Germans’ push into Eastern Europe, where they sought Lebensraum, imperial living space, for the Poles’ expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland after World War II, for the British in Kenya, for the Chinese eliminationist campaign in Tibet, for the Serbs’ onslaughts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many others. But it was not the case for the Germans’ slaughter of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma, the communists’ decades-long slaughters in China proper, or the Khmer Rouge’s mass murders. Serbs killed and expelled their Bosnian Muslim neighbors not only to Serbify the territory. Some also took the victims’ homes, belongings, and places in the social and economic order. While the Khmer Rouge removed their victims from their homes and belongings, they, unlike the Serbs, had no designs upon such possessions.
Economically, the perpetrators can also exploit the victims’ labor—even if they do so irrationally and, according to ordinary standards, unproductively. They put victims to work for prior ideological and expressive reasons, as the Germans did to the Jews
or the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodians. They also do so as a practical and almost incidental accoutrement to the fundamental eliminationist enterprise itself.
Eliminationist perpetrators alter their societies’ social composition and structure. Their societies’ faces are irrevocably changed, and the social structures are mangled and shuffled. The obvious losers are the victims. The winners, those assuming improved places in the social array, are variable. Sometimes the perpetrators themselves gain new positions—victims’ homes, valuables, and goods. But it is usually bystanders, or selected groups or individuals among them, who take over the victims’ social positions.
Culturally, the perpetrators spread their dominance by annihilating completely or partially (and then suppressing) competing forms and practices. Eliminationist assaults almost always substantially homogenize a country, not only politically and socially but also in this way. The perpetrators often destroy and expel people precisely because they bear despised or rival cultural ideas and practices. This is particularly evident when religion is the impetus for one leadership and group to slaughter or eliminate another. Religious leaders’ support of mass murderers and their eliminationist goals often shocks, though it should not. German Catholic and Protestant clergy supported, often tangibly, the Jews’ elimination from German society, and some even justified, promoted, or tacitly supported the mass annihilation itself. The Slovakian Catholic Church was itself deeply complicit in the mass murder of the country’s Jews, issuing an avowedly antisemitic pastoral letter to be read in every church explaining and justifying the Jews’ deportation (to Auschwitz). Catholic bishops and priests supported the Croats’ murderous onslaught against Jews and Orthodox Serbs during World War II. Orthodox leaders supported the Serbs’ eliminationist assaults against Muslims during the 1990s, even opening their churches to the perpetrators for planning and organizing local eliminationist campaigns. The Orthodox Bishop Vasilije of Tuzla-Zvornik in Bosnia, an area of intensive killings and other brutalities, was one of Arkan’s more impassioned supporters. Several Orthodox bishops from Croatia and Bosnia presided over Arkan’s wedding in 1994, two years after he initiated the eliminationist assaults in Bosnia. During the fully mythologized event, celebrating Arkan’s exploits symbolically, Arkan clothed himself as a Serbian hero and his bride was the Maiden of Kosovo, a Mary Magdalene figure.41 In Turkey, Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, and other religious leaders have supported, blessed, and sometimes participated in mass murder and eliminations. In Rwanda, many Catholic clergy tangibly assisted the mass murderers, lending themselves and their authority to organizational meetings, delivering Tutsi to the executioners, ferreting out hiding parishioners, and even participating in the actual killings. A Tutsi woman, a Catholic elementary school teacher, recalls:The priest, Nyandwe, came to my house. My husband [who is Hutu] was not there. Nyandwe asked my children, “Where is she?” They said that I was sick. He came into the house, entering even into my bedroom. He said, “come! I will hide you, because there is an attack.” . . . He said “I’ll take you to the CND [police].” He grabbed me by the arm and took me by force. He dragged me out into the street and we started to go by foot toward the church. But arriving on the path, I saw a huge crowd. There were many people, wearing banana leaves, carrying machetes. I broke free from him and ran. I went to hide in the home of a friend. He wanted to turn me over to the crowd that was preparing to attack the church. It was he who prevented people from leaving the church.42
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