IS THE CREMATORIUM HALF-FULL OR HALF-EMPTY?
By Carlin Romano
The Chronicle of Higher Education
September 22, 2006 Friday
The Chronicle Review; Pg. 13 Vol. 53 No. 5
As fall-term courses begin in comparative literature and comparative
law, three leaders — let’s not dignify them by speaking of "world"
leaders — look poised to join the syllabi of "comparative genocide,"
a less-taught but urgently needed staple on university curricula.
Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, after nodding to civilized
opinion by releasing Chicago Tribune foreign correspondent Paul Salopek
"on humanitarian grounds," has ordered his janjaweed savages back
into action to strafe and massacre Sudanese villagers of Darfur.
"What happened in Rwanda," a refugee, Sheik Abdullah Muhammad Ali, told
New York Times reporter Lydia Polgreen recently, "it will happen here."
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad, shortly to enjoy the hospitality
of the world’s largest Jewish city during his visit to the U.N. —
try a knish while you’re there, Mr. President — continues to play
for time to acquire nuclear weapons while declining to withdraw his
judgment that Israel should "be wiped off the map."
China’s reactionary President Hu Jintao, a longtime colorless Communist
apparatchik who, like Putin in Russia, is slowly dragging his country
back to totalitarianism after brief spasms of liberalization, continues
to add missiles to the thousands already pointed at Taiwan. (If you
think that unpublicized crisis hardly simmers like the other two,
just wait till China’s shortsighted trading partners permit it to
get even richer and more powerful, and past its 2008 summer Olympics.)
Those are just so-called elected leaders. The self-anointed capos
of Islamic Jihad, to mark the fifth anniversary of 9/11, promised
to extend their own brand of mass murder from Europe and the United
States to Israel and conservative Arab states.
What to do? Can we eliminate love, laughter, or any other human
impulse as enduring as the hunger to kill all one’s enemies?
The seemingly endless examples of genocide cited throughout Why Not
Kill Them All? The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder,
by Daniel Chirot and Clark McCauley (Princeton University Press,
2006), threaten to overwhelm the book’s subtitle before one reaches
the "prevention" part.
Except for Ahmadinejad and other Holocaust deniers, most people know
and think of Hitler’s murder of 6 million Jews and others as the
quintessential case. But what a trail of tears once you go comparative.
Stalin’s elimination of millions of kulaks and others in the 1930s
purges. Mao’s Great Leap Forward that led to as many as 40 million
deaths between 1956 and 1960. The Khmer Rouge’s massacre of some 2
million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979. The 1994 slaughter of Tutsis
by Hutus in Rwanda. The ethnic cleansing of Kosovo in the 1990s. The
Indonesian killings of Communists and leftists in the 1960s. The
Japanese "Rape of Nanking" in 1937-38. The Armenian genocide
perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. The German massacre of
the Herero tribe in 1904 in what is now Namibia.
And it’s not all somebody else. Under the flexible yet sensibly
explained notions of "genocide" and mass political murder that the
authors propose, Americans must also look in the mirror as they
confront some actions, among them the U.S. attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and the joint U.S. and British firebombings of Dresden and
other German cities.
To the authors’ credit, they take a broad view on how many angels need
to be machine-gunned off the head of a pin to say "genocide," and they
stretch back historically. There’s the forced 1838 expulsion of the
Cherokees from the southeastern United States that led to thousands
of deaths. The St. Bartholomew Day’s massacre of Protestants by
Catholics in 1572. Genghis Khan’s 13th-century bloodlettings. William
the Conqueror’s extermination of Yorkshire gentry in 1069. Caesar’s
vengeance against the Germanic Eburon tribe in 53 BC. They even
contemplate Yahweh’s commands to the Israelites to massacre the
Midianites and Amalekites.
Chirot, a professor of international studies and sociology at the
University of Washington, and McCauley, a psychology professor at
Bryn Mawr College who also directs the University of Pennsylvania’s
Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, believe
"mass killing is neither irrational nor in any sense ‘crazy.’"
Genocide is a largely "rational" policy decision that can, in
principle, be combated and blocked by counter measures.
"Rationality," they concede in their introduction, "is a very slippery
concept, but in general we believe that most political massacres
are quite deliberate, are directed by or at least approved by the
authorities, and that they have a goal, even if the actual murderers
can take advantage of momentary passions and a lust for killing that
appears in such events. The rationale behind such actions may be based
on false information, on essentializing prejudice, or on reasoning
that is more self-interested than logical, but this does not lessen
the fact that the perpetrators believe that mass killing is the right
thing to do."
Also fundamental to the authors’ approach is the conviction that
mass political murder, for all the examples that they produce,
"is rare in relation to the kind of power imbalance that makes such
killing possible," that we should be surprised "that there are not
more of them."
Is the crematorium half-full or half-empty? Chirot and McCauley
represent the "half-empty" optimists.
So they outline the multiple psychological and social causes of mass
political murder — convenience, revenge, general fear of defeat,
fear of pollution by an "inferior race," greed — distinguishing
those factors while acknowledging that they often mix in specific
cases. They assert, for example, that the "most intractable cause of
genocidal killings emerges when competing groups … feel that the
very presence of the other, of the enemy, so sullies the environment
that normal life is not possible as long as they exist."
The book’s novel thrust, however, is the confidence that we possess
social cures for this disease. Almost all take the form of engagement
with one’s enemies. Historically, as Chirot and McCauley point out,
marriage outside the "us" group long tempered hostilities between
"us" and "them." Commercial relations, they note (without mentioning
Thomas Friedman’s "McDonald’s thesis" about capitalist democracies
not waging war against each other) inhibit the stirring of genocide.
Spreading Enlightenment ideas and emphasizing individual rights over
communal identities help, as do "objective examinations of the past"
such as "truth and reconciliation" commissions. The famous cold war
"hotline" between Washington and Moscow is just one concrete example
of how keeping in touch can work.
"Developing exchanges with other groups," Chirot and McCauley
write, "lessens the chances that any conflict will reach genocidal
proportions. Codes of honor, moral teachings, and formal rules to
govern conflicts have the same effect."
Given such counterforces, the authors state early on, "we plan to
show that there is no reason to despair."
Maybe. Scholars will pick apart their reasoning for years. For the
general public, political activists, and officials, the lingering
question is whether leaders or followers can or do think rationally
about such an issue. Did "codes of honor" inhibit men like Hitler
and Stalin? Chirot and McCauley reply that genocidal followers
typically think less fanatically than leaders. Farsighted policies of
engagement can thus stem genocide from the bottom up rather than the
top down. "Those who want to set forest fires," the authors write in
a rare punchy image, "will always be around, but if they have less
material to work with, they are more likely to fail."
For all that, they warn, "no single method seems to us to offer a
comprehensive solution." They also state bluntly that the world has
been retribalized on a very large scale" in the 21st century, and, as
a result: "The future holds more genocidal episodes. …Today’s world
seems poised for a whole new set of massacres, perhaps religiously
based, that will combine the horrors of 20th-century, state-sponsored
killing with the faith-based ideological intolerance of the great wars
of religion that bloodied many parts of the world in earlier eras."
Few university-press books organize a topic so persuasively that, in
a just world, they should contribute to the founding of a discipline,
or at least a staple course. Why Not Kill Them All? does just that.
As the children of foreign elites attend our universities, the thought
that they might read this book, or take such a course, comforts. It
does not completely reassure.
Chirot and McCauley offer important wisdom — that is, when you
think about mass murder rationally. But such conversations outside
the academy are few. The ones we know, such as Wannsee, didn’t quite
resemble a pro-and-con Ivy League seminar.
"Can’t we all just keep talking?" Rodney King might ask. Only if
the would-be mass murderers — the Ahmadinejads and Hus and Hassan
al-Bashirs — let us.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and literary critic
for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory
at the University of Pennsylvania.