Whether or not the perpetrators understand cultural homogenization to be an important goal, their eliminationist onslaughts increase it substantially. During World War II the Soviets deported and dispersed different national groups Stalin deemed disloyal and thereby, in addition to substantial human losses, destroyed the infrastructure—schools, newspapers, cultural institutions—necessary for maintaining a thriving ethnic culture. Sometimes an eliminationist onslaught is, or includes, a nonmurderous, transformative cultural (and social) initiative, such as when perpetrators compel victims to convert or renounce their religion, as the Khmer Rouge forced the Muslim Cham to do. The result is a transformed public cultural life, in which previously contested or plural cultural ideas or practices, including historical understandings, disappear, initiating the reign of a far more homogenized and diminished field of culture that is more to the perpetrators’ liking.
The perpetrators know that destroying the victims’ cultural institutions, objects, and artifacts further undermines them. Serbs purposely shelled the major cultural institutions in Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, as they sought not only to eliminate Bosniaks from Bosnia but also to obliterate their communal and cultural existence’s foundation. They first destroyed the Oriental Institute, burning the largest collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts in southeastern Europe, then the National Museum, and finally the National Library, incinerating more than one million books, more than 100,000 manuscripts and rare books, and centuries of the country’s historical records. For the artist Aida Mušanović, and certainly for other Sarajevans, seeing their principal cultural repository engulfed in flames and then having the smoke, ash, and wisps of burnt paper hovering over and raining down on their city, “was the most apocalyptic thing I’d ever seen.”43 Indonesians forced 2.5 million communists to adopt religion and thereby renounce godless communist atheism. Communists routinely destroyed or appropriated for other uses churches, temples, and other buildings belonging to different religions. The Germans destroyed or burned more than 250 synagogues in Germany alone on Kristallnacht, the proto-genocidal assault of November 9, 1938, and they destroyed many more across Europe, sometimes, as in Białystok’s main synagogue, using them as figurative and ironic funeral pyres to burn hundreds or thousands of Jews alive. Serbs, as a self-conscious attempt to eradicate all vestiges of and the foundations for Muslim life in the hoped-for greater Serbia, systematically destroyed mosques and entire Bosniak and Kosovar villages, as the Germans before them had destroyed hundreds of Polish areas they wished to Germanify. Croats, in their own eliminationist assault on Serbs and Bosniaks, did the same to Orthodox churches and mosques. Perpetrators target not just the victim groups’ religious buildings and symbols but also their religious leaders. Of the ten thousand Tibetans the Chinese slaughtered in suppressing a rebellion in the capital of Lhasa in 1959, they killed eight hundred Buddhist monks. A novice monk recalls, “The Chinese began closing down monasteries and arresting the high lamas and abbots. Those abbots who had opposed the Chinese were arrested, subjected to thamzing [a ‘struggle session’ that often included verbal condemnations and severe beatings] and sent to prison. Many died under torture, others committed suicide.” The Chinese used the rebellion as a pretext to stamp out Tibetan Buddhism, destroying most of the country’s monasteries by 1961, and killing, sending to labor camps, or compelling most of the monks to leave the few surviving monasteries.44 In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge methodically destroyed Buddhist temples and shrines, and slaughtered Buddhist monks, so that only seventy of 2,680 monks from eight monasteries were alive when the Khmer Rouge fell after only four years. Extrapolating to the rest of Cambodia, which the evidence suggests is warranted, fewer than two thousand of seventy thousand monks may have survived, a 97 percent extermination rate.45 The Germans, having thought out and planned the Jews’ total eradication with an unparalleled purposefulness, precision, and thoroughness, set about to save Jewish books, artifacts, and photographs so that when there were no Jews or Jewishness on the planet, they would have evidence of the putative demonic race that walked the earth until the Germans had extirpated it.
The perpetrators do butcher the political, social, economic, and cultural spheres of their society or of other countries, yet their most immediate objects of transformation are the individual bodies and psyches of their victims—of those left alive and even often, before striking the lethal blow, those they kill. As in Franz Kafka’s penal colony, they seek to inscribe on their victims’ bodies and souls their own conceptions of them as degraded, worthless, or hated, to be used, maimed, discarded at the perpetrators’ pleasure. Some perpetrators kill their victims, doing little or nothing else to them, and when the perpetrators slaughter or expel their victims by the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands many victims perish without suffering any additional personal act of cruelty or degradation. Yet those eliminating their real or putative enemies often seek to mark them before snuffing out their lives or banishing them from the land. As one Tibetan explains, “We were forced to see our orderly Buddhist universe collapse into chaos, both in mental and physical terms. The Chinese Communists, full of revolutionary zeal and utterly without any human sentiment, deliberately set out to prove to us that what we pathetically believed in was nothing more than a mirage.”46 The perpetrators make their victims hear their hatred. They taunt and mock them. They torture them in myriad ways. They physically mark and maim them. A specific torture, understood by the perpetrators but rarely by interpreters to be torture, and which needs separate analysis (see Chapter 9), is rape. Perpetrators use their victims as playthings, forcing them to perform painful, self-denigrating, and, for the perpetrators, amusing acts. They laugh at their victims’ sufferings. They express their domination and vent their passions and aggression against them, all the while conveying the victims’ powerlessness. The murderers and torturers physically and symbolically transcribe the new power and the new social and moral relationships on the victims’ bodies and minds. Even though many, in some cases all, of the victims will perish, the perpetrators in varying degrees seek to express their power, have it understood, and thereby legitimize it to themselves as they announce that no political rules, law, or morality apply to the victims save their victimizers’ matrix of suffering, degradation, and death.
Mass murders and eliminations ultimately are far-flung transformative political campaigns that—even if not always so conceived—leave a more thoroughgoing mark on societies and set more profound processes of change in motion than virtually any other kind of politics or individual program. For many societies afflicted by such politics, eliminationist and exterminationist programs are the most profound of any political program that takes place within their extended time period, rivaling or exceeding even the effects of major economic growth. In many instances, these transformative effects are part of a visionary goal of creating a new society, but even when not linked to calls to transformative arms, they radically transform the societies, often beyond recognition, albeit in a somewhat different manner, anyway.
CHAPTER FIVE
Why the Perpetrators Act
TO UNDERSTAND WHAT MOTIVATES mass murderers and eliminationists, we must keep in mind all the perpetrators do. Until recently, the rare analyses of mass murder that focus on the perpetrators’ conduct addressed only the killing itself. Such blinders exclude much, perhaps most, of the perpetrators’ conduct needing explanation, specifically the perpetrators’ other eliminationist deeds, brutalities, and expressive acts. For instance, the perpetrators’ treatment of children is not focused on, let alone appropriately highlighted, even though they immensely brutalize children and kill them, often most gruesomely. This failure, repeated for the perpetrators’ other nonlethal acts, effectively excludes or greatly reduces such acts’ enormous descriptive significance from the recounting of events, and their analytical centrality from the inquiry into the events’ causes and meaning. Such omissions produce faulty depictions, conclusions, and explanations of the perpetrators’ acti
ons, and false understandings of the broader events—renderings that bear only a caricatured relationship to the actual horrors and their commission.
Perhaps even more surprising, until a dozen years ago the writings about mass murder paid little attention to the perpetrators and their actions. This oversight probably derived from various factors, the most important being the widespread reflexive assumption among interpreters and the general public that genocidal killers approve of their own deeds. There was no pressing reason to investigate something that seemed so obvious. Still, even since this theme became a topic of investigation, a systematic lack of engagement and therefore clarity about the killers’ actions and motives remain. The perpetrators’ willing participation in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Darfur, and elsewhere seems so obvious that in treatments of individual mass murders the question “Why did they do what they did?” has been mainly a nonissue. Yet in general treatments of genocide, one or another untested postulate that, strangely, often denies this willingness, is simply asserted. Thus critical questions are not explicitly asked: Do the perpetrators think their victims deserving or undeserving of their fate? This question may seem akin to asking whether Japanese soldiers in World War II wanted to win and believed killing American soldiers right, or whether the American soldiers fighting the Japanese similarly supported their cause. The question seems nonsensical, or certainly not worth dwelling upon. As a result, the relevant evidence is not systematically explored. The answers to this and other questions are therefore also not sharply etched.
To be sure, slaughtering unarmed men, women, and children might be met with more varied and complex attitudes than killing enemy soldiers in a war that is deemed just. And in some wars, many soldiers are uncertain about their cause’s wisdom and justice. This was so for American soldiers in Vietnam, particularly in the war’s latter stages, producing widespread insubordination, including soldiers killing officers so frequently that the term for it, fragging, entered the war’s lexicon.
The questions about people’s willingness to perpetrate violence are anything but nonsensical—for war, mass murder, and eliminations. When leaders give eliminationist orders, why do people implement them? In answering this question we must consider that the motivations of the eliminationist leaders and of their followers committing the brutalities and murders might not be the same. As with other political acts, leaders might not be candid about their motives and aspirations, being more interested in gaining their followers’ compliance than ensuring their agreement. The perpetrators on the ground may have reasons to act that, while compatible with the leaders’ goals, differ from what moves the leaders. Just as leaders have various reasons for initiating eliminationist programs, including mass murder, and just as virtually every aspect of such programs varies, it may be that, in different mass murders and eliminations, killers kill and eliminate their victims for different reasons, whatever commonalities or patterns also exist.
Why do the killers kill? Why do they slaughter children? Why do they treat their victims in all their dehumanizing and violent ways? Analogous questions about bystanders’ actions and nonactions should be asked. Why do they do what they do?
Bringing clarity to this nexus of themes about perpetrators’ willingness and motivation to kill (and about bystanders) requires that a series of related questions and possibilities be systematically addressed so that some notions can be excluded and others examined in greater depth. The most important and certainly the initial such question is: Does the perpetrator believe the victims deserve to die or, more broadly, to be eliminated? This question is critical and unavoidable, even if it is typically ignored and unmentioned. It is not possible for people not to have a view about whether it is right or wrong to slaughter or to drive from their homes and country thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of men, women, and children. A two-by-two matrix, with one dimension being a perpetrator’s attitude to the annihilation (or elimination)—does he approve or not approve?—and the second dimension being his actions—does he kill or does he not kill?—specifies in each case the question that must be answered:
If the answer is yes, that the perpetrator believes the victims deserve to die, that the eliminationist program, including its lethal component, is right and just, then the next question is: How does he come to believe this? If the answer is no, namely that the perpetrator thinks that killing or eliminating the victims is morally wrong, then other questions must be asked to ascertain why he kills or contributes to the elimination program’s goals. Does he believe the victims are dangerous, guilty of severe transgressions, unfit to exist within the perpetrators’ society, or for whatever reason deserving of elimination, but disapproves of the punishment of death or of other violent eliminationist measures? If this is so, does he disapprove because he deems the punishment too harsh—in other words, unjust because it is disproportionate—or because he considers the punishment itself inherently immoral? If the perpetrator is disapproving for whatever reason, then he is being induced to act against his will. How is this done?
Put differently, do the perpetrators think they are doing their people a great, historic service, or do they think they are morally transgressing and committing a great crime? If the latter, then how, emotionally and psychologically, do they persist?
To answer the questions relevant to understanding why the perpetrators act as they do, we must first establish why the killers kill and why the expellers expel.
Why Do the Killers Kill?
Two fundamentally opposed positions hold that a perpetrator kills because he approves of the act, or that he kills despite his disapproval or lack of approval. Various postulates have been put forward to explain how people are brought to kill even though, as is sometimes claimed, all, or most, of them think the killing to be wrong and criminal or at least do not believe it to be right.
Perhaps the most prevalent notion explicitly or implicitly governing discussions of mass murder is that the perpetrators are coerced. This explanation is put forward, like a mantra, by those wishing to absolve Germans of the Holocaust, not least of all by many Germans themselves, those alive during the Nazi period and those who later came of age. Coercion is also asserted or insinuated by other eliminationist assaults’ perpetrators and their apologists (when not denying the events themselves). It is understandable that defeated or deposed perpetrators reflexively try to escape culpability and to that end seek to elicit pity by claiming they were terrorized and coerced into doing terrible things, or without making explicit such claims, focus attention on the mass murdering regime’s real or alleged brutality and tyranny. Even independent of such claims’ rhetorical power, many people reflexively conclude that many perpetrators must have been forced to kill because, after all, they were serving brutal dictatorships. Moreover, there is a reinforcing tendency to equate power with agency and, therefore, to wrongly deny agency and responsibility to the less powerful followers.
The claim of coercion has been most stridently pressed and most thoroughly, indeed exhaustively, investigated for the German perpetrators. It has been proven to be a fiction. It was concocted and eagerly accepted by those wishing to absolve Germans of criminal culpability. During the Holocaust, no German perpetrator was ever killed, sent to a concentration camp, imprisoned, or punished in any serious way for refusing to kill Jews. Many knew they did not have to kill, because their commanders explicitly told them so. Some men accepted their commander’s offer and removed themselves from the task of killing. Nothing happened to them; they were given other duties. And their mass-murdering comrades knew this. We know of these facts principally because the perpetrators themselves have testified they did not have to kill and because the Federal Republic of Germany’s legal authorities have investigated every claim that someone was killed or severely punished for refusing to kill and have demonstrably proven them false.1 The German mass murderers were not coerced, and of the many who were explicitly offered a way not to kill, almost every one chose—that’s right, chose�
��to exterminate Jews, including Jewish children. Knowing this suggests that we should think about the issue more generally. When we do, it becomes clear why leaders do not use coercion to get their followers to slaughter others.
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