Curbing the killers

The Sunday Times (London)

January 24, 2010
Edition 1;
National Edition

BY: MAX HASTINGS

WORSE THAN WAR: Genocide, Eliminationism and the Ongoing Assault on
Humanity by DANIEL JONAH GOLDHAGEN Little, Brown £25 pp658 It is
widely supposed that wars between peoples are the bloodiest
misfortunes to descend upon humanity, but Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
observes that vastly more deaths result from deliberate acts of policy
by national rulers. He credits Mao with 50m murders, Hitler 20m,
Stalin 8m, the Kims in Korea 4m, the Turks in Armenia 2m. Pol Pot
massacred only about 1.7m, but as these represented 20% of Cambodia’s
population, it was scarcely a negligible contribution.

Goldhagen, a former Harvard professor and author of the controversial
Holocaust study Hitler’s Willing Executioners, notes that mass murder
requires a huge cast of killers. He estimates that half a million
Germans were directly complicit in Hitler’s crimes, and this figure is
credible. During the first world war, the Turks had no difficulty in
recruiting special units to slaughter Armenians. When the kaiser’s
General Lothar von Trotha in 1904 set out to eliminate the Hereros of
southwest Africa – modern Namibia – German soldiers showed no
reluctance to implement the policy, killing some 60,000 with such
familiar refinements as tossing babies on bayonets.

The author asserts that "the perpetrators of mass annihilation and
elimination are not born as killers… They have to be made". But this
is seldom hard to achieve under a determined national leader, with a
population anyway ill-disposed towards the victims – as were Germans
towards Jews and Slavs under Hitler – and an indoctrination programme
that persuades the murderers that their victims deserve their fate.

Goldhagen is an impassioned polemicist, whose every page reflects his
rage towards those responsible for crimes against humanity, whether in
Darfur, Kosovo or East Timor. But he is also a sensationalist, hence
the first line of his book: "Harry Truman…was a mass murderer." The
president’s authorisation of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki was, he claims confidently, an act to be judged alongside
those of the world’s great historic killers.

Whatever view one takes of Truman’s 1945 decision, this is a
simplification unworthy of a serious academic. The US president was
not attempting to wipe out the Japanese people. Who can doubt that, if
the Tokyo government had accepted logic and surrendered, the bombs
would not have been dropped? Goldhagen’s claim that 300,000 people
died as a result of the attacks is open to question, as are most of
the statistics he so confidently cites. I have often remarked in my
own books that all large numbers relating to the second world war and
other great historic events must be treated with caution.

The author cheerfully and repeatedly affirms that the British in Kenya
during the Mau Mau insurgency in the 1950s were guilty of mass murder.
There is no doubt that the colonial regime behaved badly, sometimes
atrociously, towards the Kikuyu. But there is no credible evidence to
suggest that what took place in British internment camps can
reasonably be compared to the actions of the Serbs in former
Yugoslavia, Mugabe in Zimbabwe (whose conduct is not discussed by
Goldhagen), or the Japanese in wartime China.

The author states: "The need to eliminate the Jews was self-evident to
and stated as a matter of course by the Catholic Church’s leaders."
The papacy scarcely emerged with credit from the second world war, but
this remark is ridiculous.

It is a pity that Goldhagen makes so many foolish assertions and wild
generalisations, because the theme he addresses is so important. He is
right to say that "the racism of people in the West is palpable… when
it comes to mass murder…among people of colour". His frustration is
merited, about the willingness of most of the world to indulge regimes
guilty of systematic slaughter: "Mass murder is a political act. It is
not a frenzied outburst of crazed individuals."

He suggests some recipes for deterring genocide.

First, he proposes setting bounties of, say, $10m for the surrender of
a national leader guilty of crimes against humanity, and $1m apiece
for members of the killer’s cabinet. He urges the scrapping of the
United Nations – "illegitimate, and ineffectual, and corrupt". He says
the UN is an enabler of tyrannies, and should be replaced by a new
international body committed to democratic ideals. "How can we choose
not to take the simple and effective steps to prevent future crimes
against humanity?" he asks. He proposes that national leaders who
reject ultimatums to desist from killing should face air bombing of
their government centres and institutions. The world, he says, needs
"a serious international prevention, intervention and punishment
regime".

The theoretical moral case for Goldhagen’s proposals is irresistible.
But so are the practical objections. The bombing programme by western
democracies necessary to suppress the world’s mass murderers would
daunt George W Bush. The obstacles in the path of justice administered
against black tyrants by white air forces are insuperable.

Goldhagen’s book is a rant that mingles appropriate rage towards some
of history’s most evil people with passages of reckless silliness. Of
course, the author is right to rail against genocides, as have a few
others before him. But his work shows what can go wrong when a clever
man succumbs to fatal intellectual indiscipline.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress