Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder - Softcover

Chirot, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691145946 ISBN 13: 9780691145945

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

Genocide, mass murder, massacres. The words themselves are chilling, evoking images of the slaughter of countless innocents. What dark impulses lurk in our minds that even today can justify the eradication of thousands and even millions of unarmed human beings caught in the crossfire of political, cultural, or ethnic hostilities? This question lies at the heart of Why Not Kill Them All? Cowritten by historical sociologist Daniel Chirot and psychologist Clark McCauley, the book goes beyond exploring the motives that have provided the psychological underpinnings for genocidal killings. It offers a historical and comparative context that adds up to a causal taxonomy of genocidal events.


Rather than suggesting that such horrors are the product of abnormal or criminal minds, the authors emphasize the normality of these horrors: killing by category has occurred on every continent and in every century. But genocide is much less common than the imbalance of power that makes it possible. Throughout history human societies have developed techniques aimed at limiting intergroup violence. Incorporating ethnographic, historical, and current political evidence, this book examines the mechanisms of constraint that human societies have employed to temper partisan passions and reduce carnage.


Might an understanding of these mechanisms lead the world of the twenty-first century away from mass murder? Why Not Kill Them All? makes clear that there are no simple solutions, but that progress is most likely to be made through a combination of international pressures, new institutions and laws, and education. If genocide is to become a grisly relic of the past, we must fully comprehend the complex history of violent conflict and the struggle between hatred and tolerance that is waged in the human heart.


In a new preface, the authors discuss recent mass violence and reaffirm the importance of education and understanding in the prevention of future genocides.

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Daniel Chirot is the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Professor of International Studies and professor of sociology at the University of Washington. Clark McCauley is the Rachel C. Hale Professor of Science and Mathematics and codirector of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at Bryn Mawr College, and founding editor of "Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways toward Terrorism and Genocide".

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"Why Not Kill Them All? is an excellent book that adopts a fresh and complex approach to the problem of mass killings. In a study that ranges widely around the globe and through history, Chirot and McCauley demonstrate that genocides and other large-scale atrocities are relatively rare events. The human capacity for evil is deep-seated, the authors argue, but so is our inclination to settle conflicts amicably. The ties that bind us together are at least as strong as the forces that always threaten to rupture human connections. The challenge is to foster the social, cultural, and political tendencies that lead to cohesion rather than conflict. In their conclusion, the authors develop a set of powerful recommendations that students, policymakers, and concerned citizens will all want to consider."--Eric D. Weitz, Professor of History, University of Minnesota, author of A Century of Genocide

"In recent years a parade of social commentators has grappled with the question of the causes of mass killing and genocide. But none of these researchers have brought the breadth of historical and sociological comparison to the issue that Chirot and McCauley do. None has delved as deeply into the social psychology that rationalizes violence. A brilliant synthesis of psychology and historical sociology, this book breaks new ground in the study of mass violence. Troubling and yet hopeful, the book will appeal to specialists as well as the general reader trying to make sense of one of the most morally perplexing issues of our age."--Robert Hefner, Professor of Anthropology, Boston University

"In this wide-ranging book, Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley make an important contribution to our understanding of genocide and other atrocities by seeking to explain why these tragic events are not more common. By posing this counterintuitive question the authors remind us that although genocide remains far more frequent than we might hope, it is in fact remarkably rare compared to the innumerable motives and opportunities that exist for violence between human social groups. In uncovering the mechanisms already in place in most societies that act to mitigate such violence, they help point the way to making genocide even less common in the future."--Ben Valentino, Dartmouth College, author of Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century

"In their new book, Chirot and McCauley bring to bear on the issue of mass murder a rich ethnographic literature dealing with the ubiquitous subject of violence in society. In particular, they draw the attention of readers to various institutions and practices that emerged in collective life to control violence. Why Not Kill Them All? is bound to become a standard text in university classes addressing the subject of genocide and mass political murder."--Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

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Why Not Kill Them All?

The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political MurderBy Daniel Chirot Clark Mccauley

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14594-5

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition..........................................................................ixAcknowledgments...........................................................................................xvINTRODUCTION Are We Killers or Peacemakers?..............................................................1CHAPTER ONE Why Genocides? Are They Different Now Than in the Past?......................................11CHAPTER TWO The Psychological Foundations of Genocidal Killing...........................................51CHAPTER THREE Why Is Limited Warfare More Common Than Genocide?..........................................95CHAPTER FOUR Strategies to Decrease the Chances of Mass Political Murder in Our Time.....................149CONCLUSION Our Question Answered.........................................................................211References................................................................................................219Index.....................................................................................................249

Chapter One

Why Genocides? Are They Different Now Than in the Past?

Qui tacet, consentire videtur. (He who keeps silent seems to consent.) —From a letter written by General von Trotha, commander of the German army in Southwest Africa, to German Chancellor Bülow in 1905 (Dedering 1999)

The term genocide was coined only in 1944 (Lemkin 1944) and was designated as an international crime by the United Nations in 1948 (L. Kuper 1981, 210–14). Ethnic cleansing is an even newer term. It came into use during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s and was declared a crime against humanity by the United Nations in 1993 (Teitel 1996, 81). Though the two terms are distinct, there is considerable overlap in their meaning. In practice, modern episodes of ethnic cleansing have caused large numbers of deaths and often conform to the United Nations' definition of genocide, which is the attempt to destroy "in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group" (Fein 1990, 1; Freeman 1995, 209). Norman Naimark's historical account of such catastrophes in Europe in the twentieth century (including the genocide of Armenians in Anatolia in 1915) shows that what may have begun in some cases as state-sponsored ethnic cleansing quickly turned into mass killing by deliberate murder, abuse, famine, and disease. Such, for example, was the case with the Germans expelled from large parts of eastern Europe after World War II. About 11.5 million civilian Germans were "cleansed" from this area, of whom up to 2.5 million died. Most of these deportations and deaths took place in the last year of World War II, but more than half a million deaths occurred after the war, particularly in deportations from Poland and Czechoslovakia (Naimark 2001, 14, 110–38, 187).

Neither genocide nor ethnic cleansing is unique to the twentieth century. When the Cherokees were expelled from the southeastern United States in 1838, the resulting death rates certainly mark the episode as genocidal even though it was not the specific intent of the U.S. government at that time to exterminate them. Those who made it to what would later become Oklahoma and survived the hardships and disease remained there, more or less unmolested. Nevertheless, a recent demographic estimate suggests that as many as 20 percent of the sixteen thousand Cherokees deported on the "Trail of Tears" died on the way, and if deaths from disease immediately after resettlement are counted, the death toll may be closer to 50 percent. The damage done to the Cherokees would certainly have been considered genocidal by our own era's standards (Farb 1968, 250; Thornton 1990, 47–80).

The terms genocide and ethnic cleansing have come to be interpreted in somewhat similar ways, as extreme examples of attempts by a politically dominant group, typically claiming to represent a majority of the people in a given political entity, to get rid of specific ethnic or racial groups viewed as enemies. In fact, the definition of ethnic is very fuzzy. The Nazis treated Jews as an ethnic group defined by a common heredity, or what is sometimes called a race, not as a religiously defined one. Bosnian Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats also treated each other as ethnic or racial entities, not as religious ones. Nor were the Armenians in 1915 singled out because of their religion, but because the Ottoman authorities perceived them as an ethnic nation, a people sharing a common culture and hereditary kinship bent on carving out a new, hostile state in the heart of Anatolia. Neither conversion nor how any of these people prayed was the issue (Browning 1992a; Glenny 1993; Suny 1993). The biggest case of genocide in the late twentieth century, the slaughter of Tutsis by the Hutus then in power in Rwanda in 1994, had no religious component at all; in fact, on close inspection, it is questionable whether these two groups were really distinct ethnicities at all, as they had intermarried for four centuries, spoke the same language, and practiced the same religions. Gérard Prunier considers them to have been "status groups," in Max Weber's sense, rather than "ethnic groups" (1997). Nevertheless, the rest of the world interpreted Hutus and Tutsis as different ethnicities, and so did many Hutu and Tutsi themselves. This has reinforced the notion that genocides are the most extreme example of ethnic cleansing. Because of the salience of modern examples of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and perhaps because of United Nations focus on such examples, these are now widely considered to be the most common forms of political mass murder.

Despite this currently popular interpretation, it would be shortsighted to think that mass murder and expulsion are limited to ethnic enemies. Genocide is part of a larger phenomenon of mass killing that has, at various times, targeted groups defined in terms of their religion, ideology, economic class, or merely because of the region in which they lived. If religion seems to have been secondary to ethnic and national concerns in twentieth-century examples, or in many of the cases associated with European expansion into the Americas and Australia, that was not always the case in the past; and in the twentieth century itself, ethnicity or nationality were not the only reasons for which certain groups were subjected to mass deportation and murder.

Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 on religious grounds and could escape this fate by converting, unlike the Jews who faced Hitler's genocide. In the Spanish case, the "cleansing" was religious, not specifically ethnic, at least in the minds of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, who ordered the expulsion under pressure from the Catholic Church's Holy Office of the Inquisition. About half of the eighty thousand Jews living in Spain in 1492 fled, and most of the rest converted. About two thousand converted Jews were executed in the period encompassing the decades immediately before the expulsion through about 1530, but the vast majority of conversos gradually blended into Christian Spain. As in all cases, the motives for this episode are complex, and the continuing persecution of converted Jews suggests that some of the Inquisitors were specifically anti-Semitic and had "ethnic" rather than purely religious motives. But the king and queen of Spain insisted that this was not their objective, and they tried to protect converted Jews (Kamen 1998, 16–27, 56–60).

A much more recent, and far bloodier example of genocidal persecution that was not specifically ethnic comes from the late 1920s to the early 1930s, when Joseph Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union, caused some eight million supposedly prosperous peasants and their families (kulaks) to be killed and deported to deadly work camps in terribly harsh conditions because of their membership in what was defined as an antisocialist economic class. Millions of other people were subsequently killed and deported, often to die of overwork and deprivation in the late 1930s because they were labeled as anticommunists, or as the wrong kind of communist—Trotskyites, Bukharinites, and so on (Courtois et al. 1999, 146–202). This is why in the negotiations after World War II that led to the United Nations convention outlawing genocide, the Soviets made sure that mass persecution on the basis of ideology or class position would not be included as a genocidal act, even though the Western powers wanted such a provision (L. Kuper 1981, 138–50).

Stepping back nine centuries, we encounter yet a different kind of example based not on ethnicity, religion, or ideology, but simply on regional politics. In 1069, William the Conqueror, who had installed himself as the king of England three years earlier, commanded that Yorkshire be cleared of its population in order to break the ability of the Anglo-Saxon lords of that region to continue their resistance to the Norman conquest. No one is sure how many died, but the systematic destruction of villages and crops, the widespread murder and flights into the surrounding mountains, where enslavement by Scottish tribes or starvation awaited the refugees, greatly reduced the population. Two decades later, after the area had been partly resettled by immigrants from elsewhere in England and brought under control by Norman lords seeking peasants to cultivate their lands, the population density of Yorkshire was still only one-fifth that of neighboring territories (Kapelle 1979, 118–90). This was mass expulsion and slaughter purely on the basis of political geography, as Anglo-Saxon peasants in more submissive regions were not treated this way, and Anglo-Saxon lords who collaborated with the new Norman hierarchy were gradually absorbed into the ruling class.

We can label all these cases as examples of mass political murder and expulsion, because whatever categories were used to target victims, the aim was political. That is, a certain group was deemed to pose a threat of some sort to those in control, and therefore it had to be eliminated. The specific motives and explanations given for these acts varied, but they were all united by this single theme.

After World War II, the Soviet Union and its political allies in eastern Europe viewed the German population in the areas they controlled as a long-range threat that might provoke a resurgent Germany allied with the United States to claim territories to the east, as it had in 1938 and 1939–and furthermore, both the Soviets and the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe felt that the crimes committed by the Nazis amply justified revenge against all Germans (Naimark 2001, 108–10). In Bosnia, during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, as in the case of William's atrocities in Yorkshire nine centuries earlier, it was largely a matter of territorial control that was at issue, though killing was often justified on the basis of historical claims and retribution (Glenny 2000, 626–49). Jews were identified by the Spanish Inquisition and monarchy as an encouragement to the backsliding of conversos and therefore as a threat to the project of turning Spain into a thoroughly Catholic society (Kamen 1998, 20). Supposed Trotskyites in the Soviet Union, along with kulaks, "wreckers" (former Party allies whom Stalin disliked), and vast numbers of other kinds of undesirables posed an ideological threat to Stalin's rule and goals. Their presence was used as the excuse for the failings in Stalin's economic policy, and they had to be eliminated in order to construct Stalin's version of socialism (Lih 1995). Cherokees were expelled from Georgia and adjoining U.S. states because white settlers wanted their land. They were not a direct political threat, but the land they owned was coveted, and allowing them to stay in place would have made it difficult to seize (R. Davis 1979, 129–47). Tutsis were perceived to threaten the political control of the Hutu elite (Prunier 1997, 192– 212). Armenians were thought to threaten the very survival of a Turkish and Muslim Ottoman Empire (Adanir 2001, 71–81). Finally, Hitler perceived Jews as a racially polluting, dangerous disease that threatened the strength of the German Aryan race and as members of a world conspiracy to overthrow his regime and ruin Germany. That Hitler was obsessed with the importance of racial purity is shown by his programs to kill homosexuals, the mentally deficient, and Gypsies, though none with the single-minded determination with which he pursued those whom he considered his "race's" most dangerous enemy (Burleigh and Wippermann 1991). It hardly matters how correct Hitler's perception was, or Stalin's, or that of any of the other perpetrators of such acts. The designated victims were viewed as politically dangerous, or at the very least a major impediment to the goals of those in power. Getting rid of them in one way or another was necessary in order to carry out those goals.

This raises the first of two important questions that we need to answer. What conditions lead to mass political murder or mass expulsions? What are the causes of such genocidal policies? Clearly, there must be more than one. Even in the short list of examples given above, the ideological and social circumstances of the genocidal episodes varied greatly. William the Conqueror, Governor Lumpkin of Georgia (a fervent advocate of Cherokee removal), and Hitler had quite different motives, aside from all wanting to remove a threat to their interests. William had no racial or strong ethnic prejudices but just wanted to rule. Anglo-Saxon lords who cooperated could be incorporated into his ruling elite, and peasants were there to be taxed and used, not exterminated unless they somehow threatened his control. Their ethnicity was irrelevant. Governor Lumpkin, on the other hand, had contempt for the Cherokees and considered all Native Americans as (in his words) "a savage race of heathens." But he viewed them as more of an annoyance than a major threat and was content to see them expelled to a distant land where, or so he believed, white U.S. citizens had no interests. He even claimed that this was for the Cherokees' own good, to save them from competition with a "superior" race (Lumpkin 1969, 1:57, 2:150). For Hitler, Jews were not just an annoyance, but a deadly disease. At a dinner with Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, on February 22, 1942, Hitler said: "The discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revolutions that have taken place in the world. The battle in which we are engaged today is of the same sort as the battle waged during the last century by Pasteur and Koch. How many diseases have their origin in the Jewish virus!" (Hitler [1941–43] 1973, 332). Stalin had yet another set of reasons for his mass murders. His were based on a particular reading of Marxist-Leninist ideology that saw the elimination of class enemies as a necessary part of the construction of socialism, and he interpreted any obstacle to his project as proof of class-based resistance (Tucker 1990).

These illustrative examples are useful but do not yet create the kind of systematic typology that would help us understand such acts. In order to do this, the term genocidal has to be defined simply enough to clear away many of the ideological and historical disputes about what was intentional or in some sense accidental, and what can be justified by some sort of complex rationalization or must be viewed as criminal. A convenient way of doing this is to say that a genocidal mass murder is politically motivated violence that directly or indirectly kills a substantial proportion of a targeted population, combatants and noncombatants alike, regardless of their age or gender. Both mass murders that were planned ahead of time, as in the case of the Jewish Holocaust, and those that were a by-product of an expulsion, as in the case of the Cherokees, are included in this definition. Intent and the ideology behind such killings do matter as we establish our typology, but these may vary considerably from one type to the other, and it is almost impossible to try to adjudicate among competing claims about the intentionality, justice, or injustice of many of these catastrophes. One need only look at the vast literature about, for example, the Armenian genocide to see how contentious an issue it remains to this day, even though no serious historian doubts that something terrible did indeed happen. This does not mean that we ought to avoid all moral judgment when considering genocidal killings; but it does mean that without a general typology we are too prone to see each example as a unique product of a few depraved individuals. Yet, as should become obvious, genocidal events have been common enough to suggest that they cannot be explained as some kind of deviant behavior. On the contrary, given the right circumstances, normal human beings are all too ready to kill by category.

Only a few hundred may be killed if the targeted population is small and localized, or millions if it is large and widespread. Typically, the larger the mass murder, the more likely it is to be studied, and the really huge cases are those that most preoccupy the bulk of the literature on genocidal behavior. As it is our contention that we should not limit ourselves to just these well-known cases to understand why such actions occur, it is self-defeating to try to define genocide or mass murder in a precise numerical way. If more than a hundred Muslims in a town in India are killed by extremist Hindus, as happened in some of the cases described in Ashutosh Varshney's book (2002, to be discussed below in chapter 4), that is a genocidal act, even if it is very far from being a general genocide directed against the more than 150 million Indian Muslims. If everyone in a small village is killed in a war in Highland New Guinea, as has happened, that is genocidal as well, even if such an event seems almost trivial compared with the major genocides. Most studies of mass political murder focus on the largest events, those that can unquestionably be called genocides, so our typology will be based on what is known about these major events. Only later in the book will we turn to many smaller-scale events to bolster our understanding of the phenomenon, and then we will explain why it is so important to study the whole range of such deadly episodes, not just the major ones that now tend to define the field of genocide studies.

Once established, a typology that sets out the kinds of situations likely to produce genocidal slaughters can then be used to answer the second important question raised by the study of such events. Are modern genocides and ethnic cleansings different from earlier ones? No one with any historical knowledge doubts that mass murder of noncombatants and deadly expulsions of whole groups of people are very old, but many sophisticated theorists believe that the thoroughness and scope of such events in the twentieth century far surpassed anything in the past and have been a product of modernity itself. Zygmunt Bauman has written (perhaps hyperbolically): "It is the adventurers and dilettantes like Genghis Khan and Peter the Hermit [who inspired the slaughter of Jews during the First Crusade in the late eleventh century] that our modern, rational society has discredited.... It is the practitioners of cool, thorough and systematic genocide like Stalin and Hitler for whom modern, rational society paved the way" (Bauman 1989, 90).

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0691145946
• ISBN 13: 9780691145945
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Sprache: Englisch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar