{"id":39,"date":"2010-04-13T14:36:40","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T19:36:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/?p=39"},"modified":"2010-04-13T17:42:07","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T22:42:07","slug":"understanding-genocide-transformative-politics-transformative-results","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/stories-essays\/understanding-genocides\/understanding-genocide-transformative-politics-transformative-results\/39\/","title":{"rendered":"Transformative Politics, Transformative Results"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the book <\/em>Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit \"Public<\/a>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

Eliminationist assaults are strategic political acts embedded in larger political contexts, practices, and goals. Perpetrators therefore do things to their victims that, strictly speaking, go beyond their immediate tasks of annihilating, expelling, or incarcerating them, and their acts have political, social, economic, and cultural consequences beyond the al\u00adready momentous facts that people lose their homes, families, and lives. What follows is a preparatory sketch about these themes that subse\u00adquent chapters elaborate upon.<\/p>\n

Politically, the perpetrators with their eliminationist programs re\u00admove or at least severely weaken people who would contest their power. In Burundi, Tutsi slaughtered Hutu in a more targeted fashion, and in Rwanda, Hutu slaughtered Tutsi comprehensively, each to fore\u00adstall a lessening of their power. Liisa Malkki quotes Burundian Hutu survivors describing the Tutsi\u2019s systematic decapitation of the Hutu by slaughtering their elite:<\/p>\n

They wanted to kill my clan because my clan was educated. The clans which were educated, cultivated, they were killed. In my clan there were school teachers, medical assistants, agronomists . . . some evangelists\u2014not yet priests\u2014and two who were in the army. . . . All have been exterminated. Among those [kin] who were educated, it is I alone who remain. . . . There are many persons who leave Burundi to-day because one kills every day. The pupils, the students . . . It is because these are intellectuals. . . . One killed many Hutu university people.<\/p>\n

The government workers . . . They were arrested when they were in their offices working. The others also in their places\u2014for example, an agronomist, when he was walking in the fields where he works, he was arrested. There were medical technicians, professors. . . . Or the artisans in the garage, or those who worked in printing houses or in the ateliers where furniture is made. They were killed there, on the spot.<\/p>\n

Be you a student, this is a cause; be you a rich [person], that is a cause; be you a man who dares to say a valid word to the population, that is a cause. In short, it is a racial hate.39 <\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Indonesian government, with the army and nonmilitary anticom\u00admunists, removed its opponents from contesting political power by an\u00adnihilating the critical mass of a popular communist party, putting many other communists in camps, and forcing still others to convert to ei\u00adther Islam or Christianity. The Pakistanis targeted the Bengalis\u2019 politi\u00adcal, communal, and intellectual elite, most intensively when the Indians were about to defeat them, which is when they began during a three-day period to systematically slaughter the leadership of the soon-to-be rival country. In many Latin American countries, including Argentina and El Salvador, rightist tyrannies victimized people challenging power from the Left. In Chile the Right\u2019s mass murdering and removal of the Left started with its overthrow of a democratically elected Marxist gov\u00adernment. In Germany the Nazis killed or incarcerated leading German communists and socialists to consolidate their power in 1933. And after conquering Poland, they slaughtered members of the Polish elite to re\u00adduce resistance to the Germans\u2019 occupation and transformative plans. Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, in a planning meeting for the \u201cextraordinary pacification\u201d of Poland, reported that Hitler had told him that (these are Frank\u2019s words) \u201cwhat we have now identified as the leadership elements in Poland is what is to be liquidated.\u201d40 <\/sup>The Germans\u2019 assault on the Poles combined the qualities of a nineteenth-century imperial land grab with the purposeful murder of significant elements of the population and brutal suppression and exploitation of those left alive. Similarly in the Soviet Union, the Germans sought out and killed the communist elites. But the Germans did not kill Jews for reasons of power, because Germany\u2019s Jews did not contest power and had nothing that the Germans wanted. This is also true of other countries\u2019 Jews, who were no more dangerous to Germany than their countrymen. After consolidating their rule, the Soviets, the Chinese communists, and other communist regimes also faced no contestation of power, so it was not an actual factor in their mass eliminations. Re\u00admoving political rivals or those who might foment resistance increases the perpetrators\u2019 security and power and, once eliminationist assaults are decided upon and begun, the perpetrators facilitate their eliminationist and political projects\u2019 further execution by initially killing the targeted people\u2019s elites. Targeting elites was also part of the eliminationist pro\u00adgrams of the Turks, British in Kenya, Indonesians, Guatemalans, Serbs, Hutu, and many more.<\/p>\n

Socially and economically, perpetrators expropriate targeted peoples sometimes of territory and always of homes, belongings, and social and economic positions (though individual perpetrators often do not per\u00adsonally benefit). While the victims\u2019 personal losses are almost always in\u00adcidental to mass annihilations and eliminations\u2019 larger political goals, their territorial losses have often been integral to them. This was the case for the Germans in South-West Africa, for the Belgians in Congo, for the Turks\u2019 slaughter of the Armenians, for the Germans\u2019 push into Eastern Europe, where they sought Lebensraum, imperial living space, for the Poles\u2019 expulsion of ethnic Germans from Poland after World War II, for the British in Kenya, for the Chinese eliminationist cam\u00adpaign in Tibet, for the Serbs\u2019 onslaughts in Bosnia and Kosovo, and many others. But it was not the case for the Germans\u2019 slaughter of the Jews, Sinti, and Roma, the communists\u2019 decades-long slaughters in China proper, or the Khmer Rouge\u2019s mass murders. Serbs killed and expelled their Bosnian Muslim neighbors not only to Serbify the terri\u00adtory. Some also took the victims\u2019 homes, belongings, and places in the social and economic order. While the Khmer Rouge removed their vic\u00adtims from their homes and belongings, they, unlike the Serbs, had no designs upon such possessions.<\/p>\n

Economically, the perpetrators can also exploit the victims\u2019 labor\u2014 even if they do so irrationally and, according to ordinary standards, unproductively. They put victims to work for prior ideological and ex\u00adpressive reasons, as the Germans did to the Jews or the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodians. They also do so as a practical and almost inciden\u00adtal accoutrement to the fundamental eliminationist enterprise itself.<\/p>\n

Eliminationist perpetrators alter their societies\u2019 social composition and structure. Their societies\u2019 faces are irrevocably changed, and the social structures are mangled and shuffled. The obvious losers are the victims. The winners, those assuming improved places in the social array, are variable. Sometimes the perpetrators themselves gain new positions\u2014victims\u2019 homes, valuables, and goods. But it is usually by\u00adstanders, or selected groups or individuals among them, who take over the victims\u2019 social positions.<\/p>\n

Culturally, the perpetrators spread their dominance by annihilating completely or partially (and then suppressing) competing forms and practices. Eliminationist assaults almost always substantially homoge\u00adnize a country, not only politically and socially but also in this way. The perpetrators often destroy and expel people precisely because they bear despised or rival cultural ideas and practices. This is particularly evident when religion is the impetus for one leadership and group to slaughter or eliminate another. Religious leaders\u2019 support of mass mur\u00adderers and their eliminationist goals often shocks, though it should not. German Catholic and Protestant clergy supported, often tangibly, the Jews\u2019 elimination from German society, and some even justified, pro\u00admoted, or tacitly supported the mass annihilation itself. The Slovakian Catholic Church was itself deeply complicit in the mass murder of the country\u2019s Jews, issuing an avowedly antisemitic pastoral letter to be read in every church explaining and justifying the Jews\u2019 deportation (to Auschwitz). Catholic bishops and priests supported the Croats\u2019 mur\u00adderous onslaught against Jews and Orthodox Serbs during World War II. Orthodox leaders supported the Serbs\u2019 eliminationist assaults against Muslims during the 1990s, even opening their churches to the perpetrators for planning and organizing local eliminationist cam\u00adpaigns. The Orthodox Bishop Vasilije of Tuzla-Zvornik in Bosnia, an area of intensive killings and other brutalities, was one of Arkan\u2019s more impassioned supporters. Several Orthodox bishops from Croatia and Bosnia presided over Arkan\u2019s wedding in 1994, two years after he ini\u00adtiated the eliminationist assaults in Bosnia. During the fully mytholo\u00adgized event, celebrating Arkan\u2019s exploits symbolically, Arkan clothed himself as a Serbian hero and his bride was the Maiden of Kosovo, a Mary Magdalene figure.41 <\/sup>In Turkey, Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Islamic, Buddhist, Christian, and other religious leaders have sup\u00adported, blessed, and sometimes participated in mass murder and elim\u00adinations. In Rwanda, many Catholic clergy tangibly assisted the mass murderers, lending themselves and their authority to organizational meetings, delivering Tutsi to the executioners, ferreting out hiding parishioners, and even participating in the actual killings. A Tutsi woman, a Catholic elementary school teacher, recalls:<\/p>\n

The priest, Nyandwe, came to my house. My husband [who is Hutu] was not there. Nyandwe asked my children, \u201cWhere is she?\u201d They said that I was sick. He came into the house, entering even into my bedroom. He said, \u201ccome! I will hide you, because there is an at\u00adtack.\u201d . . . He said \u201cI\u2019ll take you to the CND [police].\u201d He grabbed me by the arm and took me by force. He dragged me out into the street and we started to go by foot toward the church. But arriving on the path, I saw a huge crowd. There were many people, wearing ba\u00adnana leaves, carrying machetes. I broke free from him and ran. I went to hide in the home of a friend. He wanted to turn me over to the crowd that was preparing to attack the church. It was he who pre\u00advented people from leaving the church.42 <\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whether or not the perpetrators understand cultural homogeniza\u00adtion 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 addi\u00adtion to substantial human losses, destroyed the infrastructure\u2014schools, newspapers, cultural institutions\u2014necessary 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 plu\u00adral cultural ideas or practices, including historical understandings, dis\u00adappear, initiating the reign of a far more homogenized and diminished field of culture that is more to the perpetrators\u2019 liking.<\/p>\n

The perpetrators know that destroying the victims\u2019 cultural institu\u00adtions, objects, and artifacts further undermines them. Serbs purposely shelled the major cultural institutions in Bosnia\u2019s capital, Sarajevo, as they sought not only to eliminate Bosniaks from Bosnia but also to oblit\u00aderate their communal and cultural existence\u2019s 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\u2019s historical records. For the artist Aida Mu\u0161anoviN, 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, \u201cwas the most apocalyptic thing I\u2019d ever seen.\u201d43 <\/sup>Indonesians forced<\/p>\n

2.5 million communists to adopt religion and thereby renounce god\u00adless communist atheism. Communists routinely destroyed or appropri\u00adated 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 as\u00adsault of November 9, 1938, and they destroyed many more across Eu\u00adrope, sometimes, as in Bia\u0142ystok\u2019s 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 vil\u00adlages, as the Germans before them had destroyed hundreds of Polish areas they wished to Germanify. Croats, in their own eliminationist as\u00adsault on Serbs and Bosniaks, did the same to Orthodox churches and mosques. Perpetrators target not just the victim groups\u2019 religious build\u00adings and symbols but also their religious leaders. Of the ten thousand Tibetans the Chinese slaughtered in suppressing a rebellion in the cap\u00adital of Lhasa in 1959, they killed eight hundred Buddhist monks. A novice monk recalls, \u201cThe Chinese began closing down monasteries and arresting the high lamas and abbots. Those abbots who had op\u00adposed the Chinese were arrested, subjected to thamzing [a \u2018struggle ses\u00adsion\u2019 that often included verbal condemnations and severe beatings] and sent to prison. Many died under torture, others committed sui\u00adcide.\u201d The Chinese used the rebellion as a pretext to stamp out Tibetan Buddhism, destroying most of the country\u2019s monasteries by 1961, and killing, sending to labor camps, or compelling most of the monks to leave the few surviving monasteries.44 <\/sup>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 sug\u00adgests is warranted, fewer than two thousand of seventy thousand monks may have survived, a 97 percent extermination rate.45 <\/sup>The Ger\u00admans, having thought out and planned the Jews\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

The perpetrators do butcher the political, social, economic, and cul\u00adtural spheres of their society or of other countries, yet their most im\u00admediate objects of transformation are the individual bodies and psyches of their victims\u2014of those left alive and even often, before striking the lethal blow, those they kill. As in Franz Kafka\u2019s penal colony, they seek to inscribe on their victims\u2019 bodies and souls their own conceptions of them as degraded, worthless, or hated, to be used, maimed, discarded at the perpetrators\u2019 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 en\u00ademies often seek to mark them before snuffing out their lives or ban\u00adishing them from the land. As one Tibetan explains, \u201cWe were forced to see our orderly Buddhist universe collapse into chaos, both in men\u00adtal 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.\u201d46 <\/sup>The perpetrators make their victims hear their ha\u00adtred. 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\u2019 sufferings. They express their domination and vent their passions and aggression against them, all the while conveying the victims\u2019 powerlessness. The murderers and torturers physically and symbolically transcribe the new power and the new social and moral relationships on the victims\u2019 bod\u00adies 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 an\u00adnounce that no political rules, law, or morality apply to the victims save their victimizers\u2019 matrix of suffering, degradation, and death.<\/p>\n

Mass murders and eliminations ultimately are far-flung transforma\u00adtive political campaigns that\u2014even if not always so conceived\u2014leave 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 pe\u00adriod, 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 be\u00adyond recognition, albeit in a somewhat different manner, anyway.<\/p>\n

\n

39. Quoted in Malkki, Purity and Exile<\/em>, p. 98.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

40. Hans Frank, Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen, 1939\u20131945<\/em>, ed. by Werner Pr\u00e4g and Wolfgang Jacobmeyer (Stuttgart, Germany: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1975), entry of May 30, 1940, p. 212.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

41. See Michael A. Sells, \u201cKosovo Mythology and the Bosnian Genocide,\u201d in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack, eds., In God\u2019s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century <\/em>(New York: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 187\u2013188.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

42. Timothy Longman, \u201cChristian Churches and Genocide in Rwanda,\u201d in Bartov and Mack, eds., In God\u2019s Name<\/em>, p. 156.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

43. Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 1\u20132.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

44. Mary Craig, Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet <\/em>(London: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 123\u2013124.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

45. Kiernan, \u201cThe Cambodian Genocide\u20141975\u20131979,\u201d, p. 436.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

46. Dawa Norbu, Red Star Over Tibet <\/em>(New Delhi, India: Sterling, 1987), p. 220.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit Eliminationist assaults are strategic political acts embedded in larger political contexts, practices, and goals. Perpetrators therefore do things […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7531],"tags":[7519,7493,7505,254,7518,984,2552,7492],"class_list":["post-39","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-understanding-genocides","tag-book-excerpts","tag-daniel-goldhagen","tag-essays","tag-genocide","tag-political-leaders","tag-politics","tag-rwanda","tag-worse-than-war"],"yoast_head":"\nUnderstanding Genocide ~ Transformative Politics, Transformative Results | Worse Than War | PBS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/stories-essays\/understanding-genocides\/understanding-genocide-transformative-politics-transformative-results\/39\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Understanding Genocide ~ Transformative Politics, Transformative Results | Worse Than War | PBS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the book Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. Excerpted by arrangement with PublicAffairs, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2009. For more information, please visit Eliminationist assaults are strategic political acts embedded in larger political contexts, practices, and goals. 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