{"id":43,"date":"2010-04-13T09:01:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T14:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/?p=43"},"modified":"2010-04-13T17:46:39","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T22:46:39","slug":"understanding-genocide-communal-worlds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/stories-essays\/understanding-genocides\/understanding-genocide-communal-worlds\/43\/","title":{"rendered":"Communal Worlds"},"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

Although significant, dissenters, both individuals and small groups, re\u00adceive disproportionate attention compared to an overwhelmingly im\u00adportant but neglected theme: the perpetrators\u2019 communities. In Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners<\/em>, I wrote about the Holocaust\u2019s perpetrators in a manner that restored their humanity. I treated them fully as human be\u00adings having views about their deeds and making decisions about how to act, not as abstractions wrested from their lives\u2019 real social contexts but, as they actually were, embedded in their social relations. Such an approach was at the time absent, even stridently opposed. The German perpetrators of the Holocaust and of eliminationist and extermina\u00adtionist assaults on Poles, Russians, Sinti, Roma, and other targeted peo\u00adples operated within broader communities. They undertook their deeds often over long periods, always with considerable time on their hands to reflect. They had social lives. Wives and girlfriends accompanied many of them (many of whom also became perpetrators). The perpe\u00adtrators went to church, played sports, even organized athletic competi\u00adtions. They attended cultural events, went to movies, and had parties. They wrote revealing letters to loved ones and went home on furlough. Most of all they talked\u2014while on duty, while off duty, while eating meals and driving places, among themselves and others, discussing the days\u2019 events, their historic deeds, and more. Those many German per\u00adpetrators carrying out their brutal eliminationist tasks in Germany it\u00adself, especially in the camps densely blanketing the country, often lived at home. After a day of mistreating and brutalizing, and even killing victims, they returned to their families, had dinner, played with their children. They spent time with friends, also went to church, and did all the social and communal things, including talking about work, that people do. What is true about the German perpetrators\u2019 rich social and communal lives is also obviously true, a commonplace, about other mass eliminations\u2019 perpetrators.<\/p>\n

Yet if you pretend people killing, expelling, or brutalizing others are atomized individuals, are under authority\u2019s hammer or intense social psychological pressure with no capacity to think, or are bureaucratic abstractions instead of real human beings; if you toss around mind-deadening phrases such as \u201cbanality of evil\u201d or \u201cobedience to author\u00adity\u201d or \u201cgroup pressure,\u201d or treat mass murder as if an artificial social psychological environment, such as the Zimbardo Experiment of a tiny number of people (twenty-four) for a short time (six days) with no ex\u00adperimental controls to speak of, so it was not really an \u201cexperiment\u201d in a scientific or social scientific sense, is a guide to its perpetrators\u2019 real\u00adity and existences as people with families, friends, and communal lives; or if you postulate these fictive and dehumanizing reductions of the perpetrators as a tautological account of their actions and, more broadly, as a way of conceiving and discussing them, then there is no reason, as we have seen, to investigate how they come to hold their views about the world and their victims (or even what those views are). There is also no reason to examine the perpetrators in their multiple communal contexts while committing their eliminationist acts or to ex\u00adamine their social relations, ways of living, and activities. The hard\u00adheaded questions we ask to ascertain the perpetrators\u2019 motives and their sources, and the bystanders\u2019 attitudes and their sources, also pro\u00advide answers that can be built upon to explore the perpetrators\u2019 rela\u00adtionship to the bystanders helping to form the communal contexts of the perpetrators\u2019 eliminationist actions and lives.<\/p>\n

The analytically unfortunate fact is that we know little about elim\u00adinationist perpetrators\u2019 communal lives. Some perpetrators, in the So\u00adviet gulag\u2019s frozen reaches, were removed from conventional social life. Yet many other eliminationist perpetrators are like the Germans, going home to dinner and out with friends, partaking in cultural events, attending church, talking about their deeds with others and among themselves\u2014comparing notes, swapping stories, and discussing their deeds\u2019 historic significance\u2014and carrying on with their lives. This was so for the Japanese in Asia, the British in Kenya, the Indonesians slaughtering communists, the communist Chinese, the Tutsi in Burundi, the Serbs in Bosnia, the Hutu in Rwanda, the Political Islamists in Sudan, and so many more, certainly of most perpetrators killing people within their own country. As do other Hutu executioners, L\u00e9opord Twagirayezu conveys the easy conversational and convivial nature of the perpetrators\u2019 talk and social lives: \u201cIn the evening, we told about Tutsi who had been obstinate, those who had gotten themselves caught, those who had gotten away. Some of us had contests. Others made pre\u00addictions or bets to win an extra Primus [beer]. The bragging amused us\u2014even if you lost, you put on a smile.\u201d18 <\/sup><\/p>\n

The evidence strongly suggests that perpetrators live in a milieu over\u00adwhelmingly supporting and affirming their treatment of the victims in the name of and for their people. As with eliminationist assaults\u2019 many other aspects, if broad principled opposition or dissent had existed, then there would be abundant credible contemporaneous evidence about it. It does not. Nothing suggests that family and friends, or community members generally, saw or treated the perpetrators with disapproval, let alone the withering condemnation that would be directed at those considered among humanity\u2019s worst criminals. Nothing suggests that family, friends, and community members treated the killing and other eliminationist acts as anything more distasteful than an unpleasant part of a necessary elim\u00adinationist time and project. Nothing suggests that the perpetrators\u2019 com\u00admunity and social and recreational lives were normalcy\u2019s salve to guilty consciences. And nothing suggests that their communities were saying to them: You are a good man despite what you do. Rather the communal verdict was: You are a good man because of what you do. Nothing sug\u00adgests that during eliminationist onslaughts the perpetrators\u2019 existences are psychically and social-relationally fragmented. Rather, they consisted of integrated selves, with integrated minds, in integrated communities with their self-conceived heroic, violent acts on behalf of their country, their people, their God, or humanity harmonizing with their communal exis\u00adtences and with family, friends, and acquaintances. In Indonesia, through\u00adout Bali, \u201cwhole villages, including children, took part in an island-wide witch-hunt for Communists, who were slashed and clubbed and chopped to death by communal consent.\u201d19 <\/sup>In Bosnia, the ethnic Serbian commu\u00adnity was so supportive of the eliminationist assault, and so deeply com\u00adplicit and involved, that the extremely knowledgeable Alisa Murat\u010dau\u0161, president of the Association of Concentration Camp Torture Survivors in Sarajevo, maintains that \u201ca lot of people from Republika Srpska [Bosnian Serbs] were involved in the crimes, and I think that actually maybe 70 or 80 percent of Republika Srpska\u2019s population should be actually punished in prison, in jail.\u201d Adamant that she does not mean they merely \u201csup\u00adported\u201d the crimes of raping, torturing, expelling, and killing people, de\u00adstroying their houses, and more, she explains that they \u201cactually committed crimes. People who returned to their original community meet very often their perpetrators, [who say] \u2018Oh, hi, hello.\u2019\u201d20 <\/sup>In Rwanda, an in-depth study about one community of killers shows how the perpetra\u00adtors slaughtered their victims with incredible cruelty and lived their lives with family, friends, and community in a thoroughly integrated and sym\u00adbiotic way. Jean Hatzfeld, its author, writes: \u201cIn 1994, between eleven in the morning on Monday April 11 and two in the afternoon on Saturday May 14, about fifty thousand Tutsi, out of a population of around fifty\u00ad nine thousand, were massacred by machete, murdered every day of the week, from nine-thirty in the morning until four in the afternoon, by Hutu neighbors and militiamen, on the hills of the commune of Nyamata, in Rwanda.\u201d This, he adds, \u201cis the point of departure of this book.\u201d21 <\/sup><\/p>\n

\"Clothing<\/a>

Clothing of the victims, Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Bugesera District, Rwanda, April 2008.<\/p><\/div>\n

Although we need more evidence to draw firmly grounded general con\u00adclusions for certain eliminationist assaults, the substantial existing evidence suggests that, overwhelmingly, ordinary people, moved by their hatreds and prejudices, by their beliefs in victims\u2019 evil or noxiousness, by their con\u00adviction that they and others ought to eliminate the victims, support their countrymen, ethnic group members, or village or communal members\u2019 killing, expelling, or brutalizing others\u2014as Germans did during the Nazi period, as Poles of Jedwabne did, as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe did regarding ethnic Germans, as British settlers in Kenya did, as Bosnian Serbs did, and as Hutu across Rwanda did. The killers, and those near them in their cities, towns, and villages, and especially those emo\u00adtionally dear to them, constitute mutually supportive eliminationist com\u00admunities. Alphonse Hitiyaremye, a Hutu mass murderer, conveys how the Nyamata commune\u2019s ordinary Hutu had this unmistakably affirmed, starting with the killing\u2019s first day, a machete butchering orgy of five thousand Tutsi holed up in the local church and then in the Sainte-Marthe Maternity Hospital:<\/p>\n

The first evening, coming home from the massacre in the church, our welcome was very well put together by the organizers. We all met up back on the soccer field. Guns were shooting in the air, whistles and suchlike musical instruments were sounding.<\/p>\n

The children pushed into the center all the cows rounded up dur\u00ading the day. Burgomaster [the mayor] Bernard offered the forty fattest ones to the interahamwe, to thank them, and the other cows to the people, to encourage them. We spent the evening slaughtering the cat\u00adtle, singing, and chatting about the new days on the way. It was the most terrific celebration.22 <\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The perpetrators of mass annihilation and elimination know they exist in supportive eliminationist milieus; they themselves witness the open communal expressions of support. The eliminationist campaign against the Jews was immensely popular among Germans not only during the pre-exterminationist phase of the 1930s, as everyone in Germany knew\u2014the regime and ordinary Germans alike openly celebrated it with fanfare\u2014but also during the mass-murderous phase starting in 1941.<\/p>\n

To see how this knowledge of the Germans\u2019 broad base of support for the Jews\u2019 elimination was acted upon by the regime, shared by Ger\u00adman bystanders, and communicated by the perpetrators to their loved ones, we need merely to look to Europe\u2019s largest concentration of Jews, the Warsaw Ghetto camp in the heart of Poland\u2019s capital. Did the Ger\u00adman leadership try to hide half a million Jews\u2019 inhuman conditions? Not at all. In the midst of the Germans\u2019 all-out extermination of the Jews, the German Labor Front\u2019s recreational organization for German workers, called Strength Through Joy, organized coach tours of the ghetto where the Germans were starving the Jews to death on fewer than four hundred calories a day.<\/p>\n

The Polish government in exile reported in May 1942:<\/p>\n

Every day large coaches come to the ghetto; they take soldiers through as if it was a zoo. It is the thing to do to provoke the wild an\u00adimals. Often soldiers strike out at passers-by with long whips as they drive through. They go to the cemetery where they take pictures. They compel the families of the dead and the rabbis to interrupt the funeral and to pose in front of their lenses. They set up genre pic\u00adtures (old Jew above the corpse of a young girl).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Pedestrians<\/a>

Pedestrians in the Warsaw Ghetto walk past corpses lying on the pavement on Rynkowa Street, near the ghetto wall, Warsaw, Poland, 1940-1941.<\/p><\/div>\n

The brutality\u2014whips!\u2014the photographing, the mocking, the joyful\u00adness and obvious approval (already seen and further discussed below), these recurring features of eliminationist assaults were apparent (1) in the tourism itself (common among German bystanders where perpe\u00adtrators brutalized or slaughtered Jews), (2) in the acts of these coachloads of ordinary Germans, and, of course, (3) for all the perpe\u00adtrators in Warsaw and other places hosting such tourists to see. The regime, knowledgeable of Germans\u2019 broad solidarity with their elimi\u00adnationist project, also made films of the ghetto, showing them in Ger\u00admany. Members of the German press, so that they, the eyes of the people, could be fully knowledgeable of what the regime was doing, toured ghettos. One, named Ro\u00dfberg, wrote in a manner capturing Germans\u2019 common knowledge of this eliminationist assault\u2019s charac\u00adter, great support for it, and transmutation of ordinary emotional re\u00adsponses into their opposite upon beholding Jews:<\/p>\n

I had the opportunity to get to know the ghetto in Lublin and the one in Warsaw. The sights are so appalling and probably also so well-known to the editorial staffs that a description is presumably superfluous. If there are any people left who still somehow have sympathy with the Jews then they ought to be recommended to have a look at such a ghetto. Seeing this race en masse, which is de\u00adcaying, decomposing, and rotten to the core will banish any senti\u00admental humanitarianism.23 <\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Germans seeing people in a state ordinarily evoking compassion and pity are expected, when the people are \u201cthis race,\u201d to behold them as a physical embodiment of their true, hateful nature. We have no reason to believe they did otherwise. After the Germans had methodically de\u00adported to Treblinka\u2019s gas chambers the Warsaw Ghetto\u2019s inhabitants they had not already starved to death, the surviving Jews decided to go down fighting, rebelling in April 1943, until after a month the over\u00adwhelmingly militarily superior Germans crushed them. Many Germans celebrated the ghetto\u2019s utter destruction. Air force sergeant Herbert Habermalz, wanting to make his comrades similarly joyful, wrote his former place of employment, a farm equipment manufacturer, a letter that, as letter writers knew, was likely to circulate among the workers: \u201cWe flew several circles above the city. And with great satisfaction we could recognize the complete extermination of the Jewish Ghetto. There our folks did really a fantastic job. There is no house which has not been totally destroyed.\u201d That Habermalz wrote, without thinking he needed to explain to them anything about the \u201ccomplete extermi\u00adnation\u201d of a Jewish ghetto once containing nearly half a million Jews, merely confirms what a vast array of sources definitively show: The Jews\u2019 systematic annihilation was well known and well supported among Germans, so much so that Habermalz unabashedly termed the job done \u201cfantastic.\u201d24 <\/sup><\/p>\n

To develop a systematic and comparative understanding of the per\u00adpetrators\u2019 social existences and communal lives, and how their social embeddedness affects or reflects treatment of their victims, we need to examine the perpetrators\u2019 various communities and social relations. We must replace the fictitious general image of the frightened, atomized, isolated killer (said to exist under a regime\u2019s draconian authority, or under group pressure), with a realistic account of the perpetrators\u2019 so\u00adcial, psychological, and moral communal existences. These vary sub\u00adstantially across eliminationist assaults, and even within given eliminationist assaults when a particular eliminationist program cov\u00aders large territories or long periods.<\/p>\n

The framework for the needed extensive empirical inquiry into the perpetrators\u2019 communal lives in individual eliminations and then com\u00adparatively distinguishes five principal kinds of communities that form the social context for the perpetrators\u2019 actions. First, the community of the perpetrators themselves, including but not restricted to men serv\u00ading in the same camp, mobile killing squad, death march, and other eliminationist institutions. Second, the broader nonperpetrator com\u00admunities in which they are embedded while eliminating their victims. These consist of local cities and towns where the perpetrators are sta\u00adtioned, whether at home or abroad, and the social communities and lives their governments and institutions at times create for them. Third, their home communities, to which most of them will return, of family, friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and fellow members of their local national, ethnic, or communal groups. Fourth, related to the third, the more abstract\u2014though given the power of nationalism and ethnic or religious group membership to move people, hardly trivial\u2014larger na\u00adtional, ethnic, religious, or political communities. Fifth, far more distant and less relevant for most perpetrators, the international community, the rest of humanity.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The perpetrators\u2019 community: SS female auxiliaries and Karl H\u00f6cker, the adjutant to Auschwitz\u2019s camp commander, eat bowls of blueberries to accordion music, Solah\u00fctte retreat near Auschwitz, Poland, 1944. <\/p><\/div>\n

The perpetrators live in all or most of these communities while they kill and eliminate their victims. Their physical and social existences are continuous in some, episodic in others, and nonexistent or almost so in others. But in them all, though obviously varying substantially, the perpetrators are situated socially, psychologically, or morally, and even in those they do not physically inhabit while acting as perpetra\u00adtors, they know they eventually will have some relationship of moral accountability, psychological influence, or social or political conse\u00adquence. This knowledge is relevant, can be powerful, and should not continue to be discounted. Still, whatever is generally true about the per\u00adpetrators\u2019 various communities, including their general supportiveness, more can be said about each of them, and their interconnectedness.<\/p>\n

Working in eliminationist institutions can be utterly normal (or at least can become utterly normal after a perpetrator\u2019s initial participa\u00adtion in an eliminationist operation) when the need to carry out the elim\u00adinationist assault seems unquestionable. Even among perpetrators viewing the victims as sufficiently noxious or threatening to warrant or necessitate their elimination, including lethally, some may doubt such actions\u2019 wisdom or morality. In such circumstances, a perpetra\u00adtor\u2019s comrades\u2019 validation of the violence, or the knowledge that he op\u00aderates under the state\u2019s aegis, or as the nation\u2019s or the perpetrators\u2019 ethnic or religious group\u2019s representative and guardian, can help quell a perpetrator\u2019s lingering doubts. The eliminationist regime\u2019s character, and the specific eliminationist institution\u2019s character, can affect the per\u00adpetrators\u2019 understanding of their deeds and their lives\u2019 quality while killing, expelling, torturing, and immiserating their victims. Some regimes and killing institutions, such as the Germans\u2019, were organized and hierarchical, and relatively lax and understanding toward the per\u00adpetrators. They were also characterized by considerable off-duty com\u00adradeship and conviviality.<\/p>\n

Some, also organized and hierarchical, are harsher, as the Guatemalan mobile killing squads could be. Others have more variable, fluid, and intermittent qualities, such as that of the far less formally organized and hierarchical Hutu. The Hutu\u2019s killing operations\u2019 character de\u00adpended on whether the villagers were left on their own for a given day\u2019s killing expeditions\u2014villagers not feeling up to joining that day\u2019s hunt staying behind\u2014or they were under the supervision of the Intera\u00adhamwe, which sometimes forbade a day off. But for the reasons already established and more addressed below, the various eliminationist insti\u00adtutions\u2019 other features\u2014from their hierarchical structures, the actual or implied coercion that might exist, the normative world of support for killing and elimination\u2014have not been the perpetrators\u2019 prime movers, and could not have been given their actual conduct. Sometimes when killers speak frankly, they, in a jumble, adduce a host of factors and circumstances that composed the mass-murderous complex of their actions. But when doing so, there is an assumption, explicit or clearly implicit, of underlying consent to the deed, born of their shared con\u00adception of the targeted peoples as noxious or threatening, of deserving their fate. Some Rwandan perpetrators speak in such a logically inco\u00adherent but psychologically plausible muddle. At one moment they dis\u00adcuss how they got drunk on their greed for looting. At another moment they mention that the Interahamwe\u2014dedicated executioners\u2014would not permit them to take a day off or would reproach them for not killing an acquaintance, or would fine them for not going into the bush to kill (hardly a plausible burden as it was easily paid from their looting\u2019s proceeds), or would threaten them with death for not killing. At yet another moment the same perpetrators openly state that they and their comrades and all Hutu hated the Tutsi, thought the Tutsi were not human beings but snakes, cockroaches, and vermin who wanted to enslave all Hutu, so they believed it imperative to free their country of the Tutsi scourge, so they \u201ccut them.\u201d Elie Ngarambe, in a work camp prison when I interviewed him, also speaks in such a vein, asserting among other things that he was coerced, as were other Hutu, but then, when trying to convey to me the character of the genocide and the various facets of what really happened, says and indicates in many ways that he and ordinary Hutu, perpetrators and bystanders alike, hated the Tutsi, thought them not to be human beings, wanted to destroy them, and pursued or supported these goals with amazing and cruel vigor. When asked, \u201cWere most Hutu happy to get rid of the Tutsi in one way or another, even if they themselves didn\u2019t want to do the killing?\u201d he replies, \u201cThey felt like they should be eliminated and wiped out,\u201d explaining that Hutu shared the government\u2019s \u201cbad ideology,\u201d which told them to \u201cstart from a small child, continue with a pregnant woman, kill her with her husband, her in-laws, and all her families, eliminate them all, eat their things, after you finish everything take their land, take their cars. Think of how long they have been fighting against us.\u201d Ngarambe is emphatic. \u201cThey [the Hutu] wanted to eliminate all of them [the Tutsi]. They did not want to see anyone surviving.\u201d Ngarambe has confessed to participating in the killing of only two peo\u00adple, but similarly in the course of his own testimony (some quoted here) betrays himself, repeatedly making it clear that he was daily in the thick of the mass murder, participating in the butchery of many more.*25 <\/sup><\/p>\n

The complex interactive effects of various influences upon some per\u00adpetrators, and yet their willingness and conviction in the rightness of the principle of eliminating the targeted people and of the killing itself that are the foundation of the perpetrators\u2019 deeds and the members of their enormously supportive societies or groups\u2019 views about what ought to be done, are captured also by others. Pancrace Hakizamungili discourses in a jumble about having no choice, having hesitations including those born of what will happen should they fail (which a \u201cgood organizer\u201d can quell), and about his and the other Hutu\u2019s hatred for the Tutsi, their en\u00adthusiasm in going on the hunt, and their relief at finally ridding them\u00adselves of the Tutsi. And so, from Pancrace\u2019s mouth come words that could serve as a motto for our age\u2019s willing executioners, whether ordi\u00adnary Germans, ordinary Serbs, or ordinary Hutu, \u201cyou obey freely.\u201d26 <\/sup><\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The local community: A group of German soldiers and civilians looks on as a Jewish man is forced to cut the beard of another in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, Poland, September\u2013October 1939. <\/p><\/div>\n

The second kind of community, the communities physically encom\u00adpassing or abutting the perpetrators while at their eliminationist tasks, forms the perpetrators\u2019 immediate social context. These communities vary enormously. If the perpetrators are killing in their own country but not near home, they live as visitors or temporary residents. If in a con\u00adquered or colonial area, their government or they and their compatriots construct a local perpetrator community (the nearby victim peoples usu\u00adally being communally irrelevant). These can vary from settler commu\u00adnities, as the British had in Kenya, the Japanese founded in Korea, the Germans created in Poland, and the Chinese established in Tibet, to im\u00adperial garrison communities with impromptu human and institutional infrastructural support, as the Japanese and the Germans had in some of their conquered areas. Everyone in such communities knows about the perpetrators\u2019 deeds. They see them. They mingle with the perpetrators. They work with them. They often revel in the perpetrators\u2019 deeds. They service and supply them, and collaborate with them in nonelimination\u00adist activities. Such people are not formally perpetrators (some do cross the line), yet they implicate themselves in the deeds, or they so intimately rub shoulders with the perpetrators that they belong to the perpetrator community. Everything suggests they are consensual communities.<\/p>\n

The third community, consisting of the perpetrators\u2019 families, neigh\u00adborhoods, and towns, powerfully exists for all mass annihilations and eliminations\u2019 perpetrators, though differently depending on where the perpetrators work their violence. Perpetrators, usually sooner than later, visit or return to their families and home communities, to loved ones, friends, and others, who often, probably usually, know at least the ba\u00adsics of the perpetrators\u2019 deeds. The perpetrators must inevitably con\u00adsider how these people will judge their deeds. In many mass eliminations perpetrators operate in their home environs. As they brutalize, expel, and kill people, they, embedded in those communities day and night, do not have to wonder what their families and communities will someday say. This was true of those in Turkey attacking Armenian death marches as they trudged by impromptu perpetrators\u2019 towns, of the enormous number of Germans guarding or servicing camps in their own cities, towns, and neighborhoods, of Indonesians slaughtering communists, of Serbs in Bosnia, Tutsi in Burundi, Hutu in Rwanda, and more.<\/p>\n

Beyond their local communities is the larger reference group of the nation, the people, the political movement, the tribe, or the religious group, in whose name perpetrators act. Perpetrators kill, expel, and in\u00adcarcerate their victims to secure the future for themselves and their fam\u00adilies by reconstituting society. As we repeatedly see, they also understand themselves to be acting for their larger communities. What will be their personal legacies to their people? How do they expect their people to see and judge them, to thank and celebrate or to shun and punish them? Such considerations unquestioningly affect many perpe\u00adtrators, potentially all of them.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The national community: Austrian Nazis and local residents look on as Jews are forced on hands and knees to scrub pavement, Vienna, Austria, March-April 1938<\/p><\/div>\n

Finally, there is the international community or humanity\u2014the real human beings, not the abstraction of humanity moving many commu\u00adnists, or the Germans\u2019 and the Japanese\u2019s restricted racist conceptions of humanity, consigning peoples to subhumanity. Perpetrators facing their victims likely do not think much about the international community. Yet, as much testimony indicates, the perpetrators are aware of a larger world, which they usually understand will condemn their actual and prospective eliminationist violence. In the past several decades, the spread of telecommunications has made perpetrators increasingly aware their acts will receive international scrutiny. Nevertheless, most perpe\u00adtrators appear but tenuously connected psychologically to these distant and rather abstract community considerations. After all, when perpe\u00adtrators face the \u201cwork of demons who wage their battle against us\u201d or other putatively threatening or problematic subhumans, people across an ocean, or over a border or two, must seem irrelevant. Political lead\u00aders initiating and overseeing eliminationist assaults, however, are acutely conscious (if often ultimately dismissive) of the international commu\u00adnity. The critical issue, taken up in Chapter 11, is how to vastly increase the international community\u2019s psychological and moral centrality, and relative weight among the perpetrators\u2019 various more immediate com\u00admunities, for actual or prospective perpetrators\u2014from the man on the ground, gun or machete in his hand, to his immediate commanders, to those running eliminationist institutions, and especially to the political leaders unleashing and orchestrating the eliminationist assaults.<\/p>\n

Few, if any, perpetrators likely self-consciously disaggregate their embeddedness in various communities, or regularly assess how each community and its many members (even leaving aside the distant inter\u00adnational community) judge or will judge their deeds and ultimately them. For many, especially those working at home, no difference exists among some of their communities. For some, such as the Indonesians slaughtering communists and, even more so, Serbs in Bosnia and Hutu in Rwanda, the communities of killers, of immediate locale, of home, and even of the nation collapse into an integrated mass-murderous and eliminationist consensual community. In addition to these instances, the judgment of communities, except the international one, is obviously gen\u00aderally a non-issue for killers, expellers, and guards. The perpetrators move in overlapping or intersecting communities approving their deeds, so acute moral doubt and existential discomfort do not arise.<\/p>\n

In addition to the expressed approval and acceptance various rele\u00advant communities give them, the perpetrators know that those be\u00adlonging to their country, people, ethnic group, political movement, or religion, having been party to their society\u2019s conversation about the dehumanized or demonized victims, widely share their views. The per\u00adpetrators know they similarly believe the perpetrators\u2019 deeds are right and necessary, support them, are even thankful the perpetrators are eliminating the people they commonly hate or fear. Because the elimi\u00adnationist logic of the perpetrators\u2019 beliefs applies equally to the many others sharing those beliefs who have not been asked to act upon them, it is abundantly clear that many other people in the perpetra\u00adtors\u2019 communities and societies would also have brutalized, incarcer\u00adated, expelled, and killed the victim groups had they been asked or put in the position to do so. This, that the vast majority of ordinary Germans would have also been Hitler\u2019s willing executioners, I demon\u00adstrated for Germans during the Nazi period.27 <\/sup>Though for other elim\u00adinationist assaults the data do not lend themselves to the same methodologically inescapable, surefire generalization to the perpetra\u00adtors\u2019 societies and communities (exceptions notwithstanding), we can still say, for various reasons, that so many others from those commu\u00adnities would have willingly acted as the perpetrators did. The perpe\u00adtrators know this very well. The perpetrators do not necessarily ponder how the members of their various communities work through the logic of their beliefs and what they therefore think about the perpetrators\u2019 deeds, or what they would do if mobilized for the eliminationist as\u00adsault. Neither do soldiers in war. Absent demonstrable opposition at home, soldiers do not wonder about their countrymen\u2019s support or readiness to join them. They naturally assume both. So too the elimi\u00adnationist perpetrators, conceiving of themselves, like soldiers, to be con\u00adducting a war against their people\u2019s dangerous enemies. The public discourse\u2014more intensified, explicit, and public immediately preceding and during eliminationist assaults\u2014about the need to exterminate-the\u00adbrute or to eliminate-the-plague, merely confirms to the perpetrators what the same discourse had already prepared them and their commu\u00adnities for. When governmental organs, civil leaders, media, intellectuals, and religious leaders repeatedly publicly proclaim\u2014as they have so often done\u2014people\u2019s noxiousness and threat, and even call for their elimination, they further affirm what the perpetrators already know, having watched family, friends, and others nod in agreement or ap\u00adprovingly repeat what is in the air. \u201cThe Jews are our misfortune\u201d was one of the German public sphere\u2019s most oft-repeated phrases in the 1930s and 1940s. British colonial officials and ordinary settlers alike casually and reflexively spoke of the putatively savage, bloodthirsty, murderous Mau Mau. Ladino Guatemalans called Maya \u201canimals.\u201d Serbs as a matter of course referred to Bosnian Muslims as \u201cTurks,\u201d constructing them as the Serbs\u2019 historic and eternal enemy, and as Bosnia\u2019s rightless alien invaders. The Rwandan airwaves coursed with, and Hutu newspapers and popular publications printed, hate-filled ac\u00adcounts of the Tutsi \u201ccockroaches\u201d and calls to exterminate them. These and other commonplaces solidify the sense of a community of like-minded thought, values, hatreds, and actions among the perpetrators and those around them. As Pancrace, echoing so many others, ex\u00adplained: \u201cThe radios were yammering at us since 1992 to kill all the Tutsi,\u201d which found echoes in an activated and intensified Hutu con\u00adversation, as Christine reports: \u201cIn the cabarets, men had begun talk\u00ading about massacres in 1992\u201d with the president of their commune visiting their houses \u201cto see that the tools behind sacks of beans were well sharpened.\u201d28 <\/sup><\/p>\n

A striking feature of prejudices and hatreds, of the dehumanizing and demonizing conceptions one group\u2019s members have for another\u2019s, is their intellectual and social leveling\u2014within communities and, what\u00adever the specific beliefs\u2019 differences, across societies and civilizations.<\/p>\n

In given eliminationist communities, university professors and high school\u2013educated janitors share common murderous views about tar\u00adgeted people. The same talk animates the lecture hall and the beer hall, the principal difference being the little separating highfalutin nonsense from plain nonsense. The \u201cpeople of poets and thinkers,\u201d as the Ger\u00admans, Europe\u2019s most highly educated people, liked to call themselves, were no different from illiterate Hutu farmers (Rwanda\u2019s adult liter\u00adacy rate, at around 50 percent, was among the world\u2019s lowest). Intel\u00adlectuals, lawyers, teachers, doctors, and clergy\u2014the opinion leaders and in some cases, especially the clergy, moral leaders\u2014validate the elimi\u00adnationist beliefs and acts of their societies\u2019 ordinary members and prospectively further sustain the perpetrators\u2019 confidence in their peo\u00adple\u2019s solidarity. We have already explored how Serbian writers and in\u00adtellectuals, including the country\u2019s most influential body of thinkers, the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, laid down the common ideational foundation and even provided the political leadership for the Serbs\u2019 eliminationist assaults. German intellectuals, doctors, jurists, teachers, clergy critically contributed to spreading eliminationist anti\u00adsemitism and other racist and dehumanizing views in Germany before and during the Nazi period. Shelves of books, including some of the very early scholarly works on Nazism and the Holocaust, bear such ti\u00adtles as Hitler\u2019s Professors, The Third Reich and Its Thinkers, The Nazi Doctors, Hitler\u2019s Justice, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner.29 <\/sup>Such socially and culturally crucial people analo\u00adgously prepared the ground for our time\u2019s other mass slaughters and eliminations, including those done in the name of Marx and the prom\u00adised land he and his intellectual epigones promised. Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and others, who laid the foundation for and initiated the communists\u2019 long-term eliminationist assault on many portions of So\u00adviet society, were extremely intelligent men and authors of learned Marxist works. Pol Pot and other Khmer Rouge leaders were also rel\u00adatively highly educated, having imbibed their foundational Marxism in Paris. In Rwanda, intellectuals prepared Hutu for what was to come, as Innocent Rwililiza, a Tutsi survivor, explains: \u201cGenocide is not really a matter of poverty or lack of education. . . . In 1959 the Hutu relent\u00adlessly robbed, killed, and drove away Tutsi, but they never for a single day imagined exterminating them. It is the intellectuals who emanci\u00adpated them, by planting the idea of genocide in their heads and sweep\u00ading away their hesitations.\u201d30 <\/sup>After the fact, some perpetrators, finally seeing their deeds through the outside world\u2019s condemning eyes, reflect on how their intellectuals, elites, and clergy led them astray.<\/p>\n

Intellectuals, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and clergy are also part of their societies. They too participate in the hateful discourses, in which they are no less, and often more, embedded than the communities\u2019 other members who also create and sustain them. They too act or support the acts that follow on their logic. No significant part of the German elites thought the Jews wholly innocent and therefore dissented from the fundamentals of the eliminationist project against the Jews (though some would have preferred a nonlethal eliminationist solution). Even the leading German resistance groups to Hitler were profoundly anti\u00adsemitic, which informed their future plans for Jews. One of the resis\u00adtance\u2019s central documents, prepared by leading Protestant theologians and university professors, contained an appendix called \u201cProposals for a Solution to the Jewish Problem in Germany,\u201d which, referring to Jews, stated that a post-Nazi Germany would be justified in taking steps \u201cto ward off the calamitous influence of one race on the national community.\u201d Yet thanks to the highly effective exterminationist pro\u00adgram, they could perhaps tolerate Jews in Germany, because \u201cthe num\u00adber of Jews surviving and returning to Germany will not be so large that they could still be regarded as a danger to the German nation.\u201d31 <\/sup>German elites were active, willing, and leading participants in the an\u00adnihilationist assault on the Jews and in the Germans\u2019 other elimina\u00adtionist projects. Einsatzgruppen leaders slaughtering Jews in the Soviet Union were academically trained, as did the principal author and oth\u00aders working on the murderous and eliminationist anti-Slav General Plan for the East. Church leaders and clergy the world over, from Turkey, to Germany, to Croatia, to Indonesia, to Serbia, to Rwanda, and to the Political Islamic religious leaders and clerics in different countries, have actively and tacitly blessed mass murder. (Where, we should ask, have religious leaders opposed their countrymen\u2019s or clansmen\u2019s elimina\u00adtionist assaults? If they had, such as the Bulgarian Orthodox Church leaders who were instrumental in preventing the Bulgarian Jews\u2019 de\u00adportation, or Pastor Andr\u00e9 Trocm\u00e9, who led an effort in Le Chambon\u00adsur-Lignon in France that saved five thousand Jews, we would know and they would have prevented countless deaths. Yet we know of so few.) Local dignitaries often organized and led the Bosnian Serbs\u2019 para\u00admilitary or local killing institutions. In Rwanda, the local intellectuals were in the thick of the mass murder. Jean-Baptiste Munyankore, a Tutsi teacher and survivor, explains: \u201cThe principal and the inspector of schools in my district participated in the killings with nail-studded clubs. . . . A priest, the burgomaster, the subprefect, a doctor\u2014they all killed with their own hands. . . . These well educated people were calm, and they rolled up their sleeves to get a good grip on their machetes.\u201d32 <\/sup>Well-educated people, leading professionals of one society after the next, together with those looking up to them, have closed ranks in a community of murderous consent.<\/p>\n

After eliminationist assaults, after the massive death toll and the vast suffering the perpetrators have inflicted become clear, in country after country, in town after town, the perpetrators return to their people, whose names they have blackened in the world\u2019s eyes, but evidently not in their own. In every mass murder and elimination\u2019s aftermath, the broader community in whose name the perpetrators acted has not socially or politically rejected, let alone punished, the perpetrators. (Punishment has occasionally been meted out by those defeating per\u00adpetrators or those replacing the perpetrating regime.) The perpetrators have not been turned into outcasts, not shunned, not treated in any way as a community would ordinarily treat murderers, let alone mass murderers in their midst. It did not happen in Turkey, in Germany, in Indonesia, in Serbia or among Serbs in Bosnia\u2014who after the elimina\u00adtionist assault continued to celebrate the Bosnian Serbian elimination\u00adist architects Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107 and Ratko Mladi\u0107 as heroes\u2014in Burundi, in Rwanda among the Hutu themselves. Communities wel\u00adcome the perpetrators back and, when necessary and feasible, have pas\u00adsionately risen to defend them. The social and communal solidarity the perpetrators find in the posteliminationist era merely continues the sol\u00adidarity they experienced while assaulting their victims.<\/p>\n

We do not know the percentage of each community\u2019s people who have supported the exterminationist and eliminationist politics perpe\u00adtrators practiced in their name. Everywhere\u2014among Turks, among Serbs, among Hutu\u2014there has been some communal dissent. Even in Germany, where the evidence of broad and deep popular support for the eliminationist assault against the Jews is overwhelming, some dis\u00adsent existed. (The ready knowledge we have of it and, often by the dis\u00adsenters\u2019 own admission, of their exceptional nature and isolation, further confirms Germans\u2019 overwhelming support for the elimination.) Nevertheless, in our time\u2019s lethal and non-lethal eliminationist assaults, we find among the broader relevant national or ethnic communities lit\u00adtle credible evidence of widespread dissent from the eliminationist con\u00adceptions of the victims and the thinking underlying such politics, or of actual opposition to the eliminationist onslaughts themselves. But we have abundant evidence of active communal support and encourage\u00adment for the perpetrators, of the perpetrators\u2019 comfort within their var\u00adious communities and among their countrymen, and of the perpetrators\u2019 smooth reintegration into their accepting communities when the mass killings, expulsions, and incarcerations end<\/p>\n

*Another example<\/strong>: \u201cWe peasants, we were using our traditional weapons. It is for that reason that when you were hacking you were supposed to cut [the Tutsi] into two pieces. There was times where you would hack him and not cut him into two pieces and you hurt him only and think that he was dead. . . . Let\u2019s say that we are going in the squad that is going to kill and loot, we meet someone and we are almost five of us, one of us says, \u2018Let\u2019s see who is going to be the first to hack him.\u2019 The one who hacks the first runs, and the second one also hacks and runs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

18. Quoted in Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak <\/em>(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), p. 96.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

19. John Hughes, Indonesian Upheaval <\/em>(New York: David McKay, 1967), p. 175.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

20. Alisa MuratOau\u0161, author interview, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzego vina, July 12, 2008.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

21. Hatzfeld, Machete Season<\/em>, p. 9.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

22. Ibid., p. 93.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

23. BA Koblenz, ZSg. 101 Sammlung Brammer zur Pressepolitik des NSStaates, no. 41, pp. 55\u201357.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

24. Quoted in Alf L\u00fcdtke, \u201cThe Appeal of Exterminating \u2018Others\u2019: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,\u201d in Michael Geyer and John W. Boyer, eds., Resistance Against the Third Reich, 1933\u20131990 <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 73.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

25. Ngarambe, author interview.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

26. Hatzfeld, Machete Season<\/em>, pp. 71 and 219.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

27. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust <\/em>(New York: Knopf, 1996), especially pp. 450\u2013454.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

28. Hatzfeld, Machete Season<\/em>, pp. 219 and 170.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

29. Max Weinreich, Hitler\u2019s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in the Germany\u2019s Crimes Against the Jewish People <\/em>(New York: YIVO, 1946); L\u00e9on Poliakov and Joseph Wulf, eds., Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker <\/em>(The Third Reich and Its Thinkers) (Frankfurt, Germany: Ullstein, 1983); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide <\/em>(New York: Basic Books, 1986); Ingo M\u00fcller, Hitler\u2019s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Press, 1991); and Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner <\/em>(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

30. Quoted in Hatzfeld, Machete Season<\/em>, pp. 153\u2013154.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

31. Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler\u2019s Willing Executioners<\/em>, p. 115.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

32. Quoted in Hatzfeld, Machete Season<\/em>, p. 68.<\/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 Although significant, dissenters, both individuals and small groups, re\u00adceive disproportionate attention compared to an overwhelmingly im\u00adportant but neglected […]<\/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":[7519,7493,7505,254,1784,7532,2552,7533,7492],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-understanding-genocides","tag-book-excerpts","tag-daniel-goldhagen","tag-essays","tag-genocide","tag-holocaust","tag-humanity","tag-rwanda","tag-soviet","tag-worse-than-war"],"yoast_head":"\nUnderstanding Genocide ~ Communal Worlds | 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-communal-worlds\/43\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Understanding Genocide ~ Communal Worlds | 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. 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For more information, please visit Although significant, dissenters, both individuals and small groups, re\u00adceive disproportionate attention compared to an overwhelmingly im\u00adportant but neglected […]","og_url":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/stories-essays\/understanding-genocides\/understanding-genocide-communal-worlds\/43\/","og_site_name":"Worse Than War","article_published_time":"2010-04-13T14:01:37+00:00","article_modified_time":"2010-04-13T22:46:39+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/wnet\/worse-than-war\/files\/2010\/03\/inline-palogo.jpg","type":"","width":"","height":""}],"author":"colin fitzpatrick","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"colin fitzpatrick","Est. reading time":"35 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