DELIBERATE EVIL
By Adam Kirsch
Tablet Magazine
/books/19226/deliberate-evil/
Oct 27 2009
In a new book, Daniel Goldhagen broadens the indictment he leveled in
‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’
Thirteen years ago, the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen caused an
international sensation with his book about the Holocaust, Hitler’s
Willing Executioners. The title alone gives a good sense of why
Goldhagen’s thesis was so provocative, especially in Germany, where
it sparked a nationwide debate. The mystery of why so many ordinary
German citizens proved ready to participate or collude in genocide
had confounded thinkers since 1945; philosophers, theologians,
sociologists, and historians had done their best to answer it.
Goldhagen cut through this Gordian knot by simply asserting that the
people who tried to annihilate the Jews did so because they wanted
to annihilate the Jews. As he writes, they were "willing because
they were antisemites who believed that exterminating Jews was right
and necessary."
The major attraction of this idea is that it restores clarity to
the matter of guilt and blame. If the Holocaust is an expression
of radical human evil, or the product of a bureaucratized society,
or the work of authoritarian personalities–to name just a few of
the most famous interpretations–then every society and even every
individual is potentially just as guilty. Instead of anger, we must
feel fear–the fear that what the Germans did in the 1940s could
happen again anywhere, anytime. But if we can say that the Germans
were guilty simply because they chose evil–Nazism and its corollary
anti-Semitism–then we, who reject such evils, are secure against
guilt, and our anger can remain righteous.
It would seem to be a strong argument against Goldhagen’s
approach–which its critics accused of being reductionist and
"monocausal"–that genocide has become a horribly durable feature of
our world. The Nazi Holocaust remains the supreme example, but it has
rivals in murderousness: the Turkish annihilation of the Armenians
during World War I, Stalin’s and Mao’s assaults on their own peoples,
the Khmer Rouge’s remaking of Cambodia at the cost of 20 percent of
its population, the Serb war on Bosnian Muslims, the Hutu butchery of
the Tutsi, and most recently, the genocide in Darfur. If Goldhagen is
right, and the Holocaust can be explained primarily by the evil ideas
and choices of ordinary Germans, then it seems that each one of these
countries and peoples has also been consciously, deliberately evil.
That is, in fact, the premise of Goldhagen’s new book, Worse than War:
Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity. In this
passionate, informed, and often frustrating book, Goldhagen essentially
turns the monocausal explanation of Hitler’s Willing Executioners into
a universal model. Each time we find a genocide–or, as he prefers to
call it, "eliminationist" violence, a term that avoids the technical
limitations of genocide–we will find something like what prevailed
in Nazi Germany: a people, under the sway of an ideologically extreme
leadership, which out of fear and hatred decides to annihilate a group
of perceived enemies. "The problem is extreme, even life-threatening,"
as Goldhagen summarizes this mindset. "The enemy is an identifiable
group of people, demarcated by skin color, ethnicity, religion, class,
or political allegiance. The solution to defang said enemies must in
some way be ‘final.’ Hence eliminationism."
Most of this long book (about 600 pages, excluding notes) is devoted to
elaborating this basic idea with reference to the well-known atrocities
listed above (and a few others: Guatemala’s massacre of Mayans and
Indonesia’s campaign against communists are recurrent subjects). The
sheer volume of facts and stories about genocide that Goldhagen
relates is enough to make Worse than War a powerful and extremely
depressing book. "The number of people who have been mass murdered
[in the 20th century] is, conservatively estimated, 83 million,"
he writes early on. "When purposeful famine is included, the number
becomes 127 million, and if the higher estimates are correct the total
number of victims of mass murder may be 175 million or more." This
means than between 2 and 4 percent of all deaths in the last century
were due to genocidal violence–and that is not including deaths in
"ordinary" warfare.
But such figures are notoriously impossible to grasp. What genocide
really means can be understood simply by reading pages 175-180 of
Worse than War, in which Goldhagen offers anecdotes of horror from
around the world–Turkey, Germany, Bangladesh, Bosnia, and on and on.
It is Dante’s Inferno in miniature, except that it is all real and,
indeed, brutally matter-of-fact, as in this episode from Cambodia under
the Khmer Rouge: "At that instant, the edge of the ax cut open the
man’s chest. Blood spurted and I heard a roaring groan, loud enough
to startle the animals…. After the cadre had opened up the man’s
chest, he took out the liver. One man exclaimed, ‘One man’s liver is
another man’s food.’ Then a second man quickly placed the liver on
an old stump where he sliced it horizontally and fried it in a pan
with pig grease." Anyone with a tendency to become sentimental about
the human race should keep this book at hand as an antidote.
Worse than War is energized by moral passion but it is also
disorganized. Goldhagen frequently returns to the same events, adding
new details out of sheer indignation. Discussing, for instance,
the power of language and images to dehumanize victims, Goldhagen
proceeds to give examples:
Herero are baboons and swine. Jews are bacilli or rats, or Bolsheviks
or devils. Poles are subhumans. Kikuyu are vermin, animals, and
barbarians. Bangladeshis are devils. Putatively impure Khmer are
‘diseased elements.’ Maya are animals, pigs, and dogs. Tutsi are
cockroats, dogs, snakes, or zeros. Indonesian communists are infidels,
as are Americans and many others. Darfurians are slaves.
This catalog is representative of Goldhagen’s style: it inspires
outrage and conveys a broad historical picture, but it is too rapid
and repetitive to add much to our understanding.
What’s more, the point Goldhagen is making here is actually an obvious
one: people demonize their enemies. Elaboration, in this case, does
not mean deepening or complication, and the same is true of Worse
than War in general. The bulk of the book consists of a number
of taxonomies of genocide, in which Goldhagen classifies events
with the help of rudimentary charts and matrices. We read about
"state-centered perspectives," "society-centered perspectives," and
"individual-centered perspectives"; "four kinds of eliminationist
assaults," with four "noneliminationist outcomes; dehumanization
versus demonization of victims; eliminationist worlds, communal worlds,
camp worlds, and actual worlds; and many more."
What all these rubrics have in common is that they describe without
explaining. In the end, the reader is left with basically the same
understanding of eliminationist violence Goldhagen offered at the
beginning: people commit genocide out of fear and hatred. And as in
Hitler’s Willing Executioners, this conclusion is oddly satisfying,
because the reader can be quite sure that she does not feel such
hatred and would never commit such crimes. Indeed, Goldhagen says
this explicitly, in a passage that represents the emotional core of
the book:
Think of the difficulty you may have, and that so many people do
have, in reading this book’s descriptions of perpetrators torturing
or killing innocent men, women, or children…. Think of how much
harder–ten, a hundred, a thousand, an infinite number of times
harder–it would be for you to be killing, slaughtering, butchering
a man with a machete. Or a woman. Or a child. You cut him. Then cut
him again. Then cut him again and again. Think of listening to the
person you are about to murder begging, crying for mercy, for her life.
To such rhetorical manipulation, the reader can only respond–of
course, you’re right, I could never do such a thing. Yet even if this
is true of the 500,000 or so people whom Goldhagen is addressing–the
potential readership for Worse than War, people who have thought enough
about genocide to want to read a book about it–the fact remains that,
in any given population, there are a more than sufficient number
who would be willing to commit such crimes. As history shows, it has
never been a problem for a murderous government to find enough killers
among its people, or to obtain the acquiescence or support of many
more. (Nor should the enlightened be too sure of themselves–every
genocide has its idealists and its intellectuals.)
It would be nice to think that this is not true of all countries at
all times–that there are not, in the United States, a hundred thousand
people who could be recruited to commit genocide by a regime intent on
doing so. But I think there can be no doubt that such people do exist.
(The people who were guilty of Abu Ghraib could easily have been
guilty of much worse, and indeed some of them are.) The problem is
that these people are impossible to identify in advance. They are
ordinary citizens and soldiers, wives and husbands, just as most
of the people who committed the Holocaust were before 1933. That is
the real mystery of evil, which Goldhagen has not so much solved as
declined to contemplate.
Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the
author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish
Encounters book series.