Without meticulous criteria for selecting a sample, though, extrapolations to an entire population can be wildly off. A team of statisticians led by Michael Spagat and Neil Johnson found these estimates incredible and discovered that a disproportionate number of the surveyed families lived on major streets and intersections—just the places where bombings and shootings are most likely.69 An improved study conducted by the World Health Organization came up with a figure that was a quarter of the Lancet number, and even that required inflating an original estimate by a fudge factor of 35 percent to compensate for lying, moves, and memory lapses. Their unadjusted figure, around 110,000, is far closer to the battle-death body counts.70
Another team of epidemiologists extrapolated from retrospective surveys of war deaths in thirteen countries to challenge the entire conclusion that battle deaths have declined since the middle of the 20th century.71 Spagat, Mack, and their collaborators have examined them and shown that the estimates are all over the map and are useless for tracking war deaths over time.72
What about the report of 5.4 million deaths (90 percent of them from disease and hunger) in the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?73 It also turns out to be inflated. The International Rescue Committee (IRC) got the number by taking an estimate of the prewar death rate that was far too low (because it came from sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, which is better off than the DRC) and subtracting it from an estimate of the rate during the war that was far too high (because it came from areas where the IRC was providing humanitarian assistance, which are just the areas with the highest impact from war). The HSRP, while acknowledging that the indirect death toll in the DRC is high—probably over a million—cautions against accepting estimates of excess deaths from retrospective survey data, since in addition to all of their sampling pitfalls, they require dubious conjectures about what would have happened if a war had not taken place.74
Amazingly, the HSRP has collected evidence that death rates from disease and hunger have tended to go down, not up, during the wars of the past three decades. 75It may sound like they are saying that war is healthy for children and other living things after all, but that is not their point. Instead, they document that deaths from malnutrition and hunger in the developing world have been dropping steadily over the years, and that the civil wars of today, which are fought by packs of insurgents in limited regions of a country, have not been destructive enough to reverse the tide. In fact, when medical and food assistance is rushed to a war zone, where it is often administered during humanitarian cease-fires, the progress can accelerate.
How is this possible? Many people are unaware of what UNICEF calls the Child Survival Revolution. (The revolution pertains to adult survival too, though children under five are the most vulnerable population and hence the ones most dramatically helped.) Humanitarian assistance has gotten smarter. Rather than just throwing money at a problem, aid organizations have adapted discoveries from the science of public health about which scourges kill the most people and which weapon against each one is the most cost-effective. Most childhood deaths in the developing world come from four causes: malaria; diarrheal diseases such as cholera and dysentery; respiratory infections such as pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis; and measles. Each is preventable or treatable, often remarkably cheaply. Mosquito nets, antimalarial drugs, antibiotics, water purifiers, oral rehydration therapy (a bit of salt and sugar in clean water), vaccinations, and breast-feeding (which reduces diarrheal and respiratory diseases) can save enormous numbers of lives. Over the last three decades, vaccination alone (which in 1974 protected just 5 percent of the world’s children and today protects 75 percent) has saved 20 million lives.76 Ready-to-use therapeutic foods like Plumpy’nut, a peanutbutterish goop in a foil package that children are said to like, can make a big dent in malnutrition and starvation.
Together these measures have slashed the human costs of war and belied the worry that an increase in indirect deaths has canceled or swamped the decrease in battle deaths. The HSRP estimates that during the Korean War about 4.5 percent of the population died from disease and starvation in every year of the four-year conflict. During the DRC civil war, even if we accept the overly pessimistic estimate of 5 million indirect deaths, it would amount to 1 percent of the country’s population per year, a reduction of more than fourfold from Korea.77
It’s not easy to see the bright side in the developing world, where the remnants of war continue to cause tremendous misery. The effort to whittle down the numbers that quantify the misery can seem heartless, especially when the numbers serve as propaganda for raising money and attention. But there is a moral imperative in getting the facts right, and not just to maintain credibility. The discovery that fewer people are dying in wars all over the world can thwart cynicism among compassion-fatigued news readers who might otherwise think that poor countries are irredeemable hellholes. And a better understanding of what drove the numbers down can steer us toward doing things that make people better off rather than congratulating ourselves on how altruistic we are. Among the surprises in the statistics are that some things that sound exciting, like instant independence, natural resources, revolutionary Marxism (when it is effective), and electoral democracy (when it is not) can increase deaths from violence, and some things that sound boring, like effective law enforcement, openness to the world economy, UN peacekeepers, and Plumpy’nut, can decrease them.
THE TRAJECTORY OF GENOCIDE
Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend. We can readily understand why from time to time people enter into deadly quarrels over money, honor, or love, why they punish wrongdoers to excess, and why they take up arms to combat other people who have taken up arms. But that someone should want to slaughter millions of innocents, including women, children, and the elderly, seems to insult any claim we may have to comprehend our kind. Whether it is called genocide (killing people because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or other indelible group membership), politicide (killing people because of their political affiliation), or democide (any mass killing of civilians by a government or militia), killing-by-category targets people for what they are rather than what they do and thus seems to flout the usual motives of gain, fear, and vengeance.78
Genocide also shocks the imagination by the sheer number of its victims. Rummel, who was among the first historians to try to count them all, famously estimated that during the 20th century 169 million people were killed by their governments.79 The number is, to be sure, a highball estimate, but most atrocitologists agree that in the 20th century more people were killed by democides than by wars.80 Matthew White, in a comprehensive overview of the published estimates, reckons that 81 million people were killed by democide and another 40 million by man-made famines (mostly by Stalin and Mao), for a total of 121 million. Wars, in comparison, killed 37 million soldiers and 27 million civilians in battle, and another 18 million in the resulting famines, for a total of 82 million deaths.81 (White adds, though, that about half of the democide deaths took place during wars and may not have been possible without them.)82
Killing so many people in so short a time requires methods of mass production of death that add another layer of horror. The Nazis’ gas chambers and crematoria will stand forever as the most shocking visual symbols of genocide. But modern chemistry and railroads are by no means necessary for high-throughput killing. When the French revolutionaries suppressed a revolt in the Vendée region in 1793, they hit upon the idea of packing prisoners into barges, sinking them below the water’s surface long enough to drown the human cargo, and then floating them up for the next batch.83 Even during the Holocaust, the gas chambers were not the most efficient means of killing. The Nazis killed more people with their Einsatzgruppen, or mobile firing squads, which were foreshadowed by other teams of quick-moving soldiers with projectile weapons such as Assyrians in chariots and Mongols on horses.84 During the genoci
de of Hutus by Tutsis in Burundi in 1972 (a predecessor of the reverse genocide in Rwanda twenty-two years later), a perpetrator explained:Several techniques, several, several. One can gather two thousand persons in a house—in a prison, let us say. There are some halls which are large. The house is locked. The men are left there for fifteen days without eating, without drinking. Then one opens. One finds cadavers. Not beaten, not anything. Dead.85
The bland military term “siege” hides the fact that depriving a city of food and finishing off the weakened survivors is a time-honored and cost-effective form of extermination. As Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn point out in The History and Sociology of Genocide, “The authors of history textbooks hardly ever reported what the razing of an ancient city meant for its inhabitants.”86 One exception is the Book of Deuteronomy, which offers a backdated prophecy that was based on the Assyrian or Babylonian conquest:In the desperate straits to which the enemy siege reduces you, you will eat the fruit of your womb, the flesh of your sons and daughters whom the LORD your God has given you. Even the most refined and gentle of men among you will begrudge food to his own brother, to the wife whom he embraces, and to the last of his remaining children, giving to none of them any of the flesh of his children whom he is eating, because nothing else remains to him, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in all your towns. She who is the most refined and gentle among you, so gentle and refined that she does not venture to set the sole of her foot on the ground, will begrudge food to the husband whom she embraces, to her own son, and to her own daughter, begrudging even the afterbirth that comes out from between her thighs, and the children that she bears, because she will eat them in secret for lack of anything else, in the desperate straits to which the enemy siege will reduce you in your towns.87
Apart from numbers and methods, genocides sear the moral imagination by the gratuitous sadism indulged in by the perpetrators. Eyewitness accounts from every continent and decade recount how victims are taunted, tormented, and mutilated before being put to death.88 In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky commented on Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, when unborn children were ripped from their mothers’ wombs and prisoners were nailed by their ears to a fence overnight before being hanged: “People speak sometimes about the ‘animal’ cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to animals. No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel. A tiger simply gnaws and tears, that is all he can do. It would never occur to him to nail people by their ears overnight, even if he were able to do it.”89 My own reading of histories of genocide has left me with images to disturb sleep for a lifetime. I’ll recount two that lodge in the mind not because of any gore (though such accounts are common enough) but because of their cold-bloodedness. Both are taken from the philosopher Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century.
During the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–75, Mao encouraged marauding Red Guards to terrorize “class enemies,” including teachers, managers, and the descendants of landlords and “rich peasants,” killing perhaps 7 million.90 In one incident:Young men ransacking an old couple’s house found boxes of precious French glass. When the old man begged them not to destroy the glass, one of the group hit him in the mouth with a club, leaving him spitting out blood and teeth. The students smashed the glass and left the couple on their knees crying.91
During the Holocaust, Christian Wirth commanded a slave labor compound in Poland, where Jews were worked to death sorting the clothes of their murdered compatriots. Their children had been taken from them and sent to the death camps.
Wirth allowed one exception.... One Jewish boy around ten was given sweets and dressed up as a little SS man. Wirth and he rode among the prisoners, Wirth on a white horse and the boy on a pony, both using machineguns to kill prisoners (including the boy’s mother) at close range.92
Glover allows himself a comment: “To this ultimate expression of contempt and mockery, no reaction of disgust and anger is remotely adequate.”
How could people do these things? Making sense of killing-by-category, insofar as we can do so at all, must begin with the psychology of categories.93
People sort other people into mental pigeonholes according to their affiliations, customs, appearances, and beliefs. Though it’s tempting to think of this stereotyping as a kind of mental defect, categorization is indispensable to intelligence. Categories allow us to make inferences from a few observed qualities to a larger number of unobserved ones. If I note the color and shape of a fruit and classify it as a raspberry, I can infer that it will taste sweet, satisfy my hunger, and not poison me. Politically correct sensibilities may bridle at the suggestion that a group of people, like a variety of fruit, may have features in common, but if they didn’t, there would be no cultural diversity to celebrate and no ethnic qualities to be proud of. Groups of people cohere because they really do share traits, albeit statistically. So a mind that generalizes about people from their category membership is not ipso facto defective. African Americans today really are more likely to be on welfare than whites, Jews really do have higher average incomes than WASPs, and business students really are more politically conservative than students in the arts—on average.94
The problem with categorization is that it often goes beyond the statistics. For one thing, when people are pressured, distracted, or in an emotional state, they forget that a category is an approximation and act as if a stereotype applies to every last man, woman, and child.95 For another, people tend to moralize their categories, assigning praiseworthy traits to their allies and condemnable ones to their enemies. During World War II, for example, Americans thought that Russians had more positive traits than Germans; during the Cold War they thought it was the other way around.96 Finally, people tend to essentialize groups. As children, they tell experimenters that a baby whose parents have been switched at birth will speak the language of her biological rather than her adoptive parents. As they get older, people tend to think that members of particular ethnic and religious groups share a quasi-biological essence, which makes them homogeneous, unchangeable, predictable, and distinct from other groups.97
The cognitive habit of treating people as instances of a category gets truly dangerous when people come into conflict. It turns Hobbes’s trio of violent motives—gain, fear, and deterrence—from the bones of contention in an individual quarrel to the casus belli in an ethnic war. Historical surveys have shown that genocides are caused by this triad of motives, with, as we shall see, two additional toxins spiked into the brew.98
Some genocides begin as matters of convenience. Natives are occupying a desirable territory or are monopolizing a source of water, food, or minerals, and invaders would rather have it for themselves. Eliminating the people is like clearing brush or exterminating pests, and is enabled by nothing fancier in our psychology than the fact that human sympathy can be turned on or off depending on how another person is categorized. Many genocides of indigenous peoples are little more than expedient grabs of land or slaves, with the victims typed as less than human. Such genocides include the numerous expulsions and massacres of Native Americans by settlers or governments in the Americas, the brutalization of African tribes by King Leopold of Belgium in the Congo Free State, the extermination of the Herero by German colonists in South-West Africa, and the attacks on Darfuris by government-encouraged Janjaweed militias in the 2000s.99
When conquerors find it expedient to suffer the natives to live so that they can provide tribute and taxes, genocide can have a second down-to-earth function. A reputation for a willingness to commit genocide comes in handy for a conqueror because it allows him to present a city with an ultimatum to surrender or else. To make the threat credible, the invader has to be prepared to carry it out. This was the rationale behind the annihilation of the cities of western Asia by Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes.
Once the conquerors have absorbed a city or territo
ry into an empire, they may keep it in line with the threat that they will come down on any revolt like a ton of bricks. In 68 CE the governor of Alexandria called in Roman troops to put down a rebellion by the Jews against Roman rule. According to the historian Flavius Josephus, “Once [the Jews] were forced back, they were unmercifully and completely destroyed. Some were caught in the open field, others forced into their houses, which were plundered and then set on fire. The Romans showed no mercy to the infants, had no regard for the aged, and went on in the slaughter of persons of every age, until all the place was overflowed with blood, and 50,000 Jews lay dead.”100 Similar tactics have been used in 20th-century counterinsurgency campaigns, such as the ones by the Soviets in Afghanistan and right-wing military governments in Indonesia and Central America.
When a dehumanized people is in a position to defend itself or turn the tables, it can set a Hobbesian trap of group-against-group fear. Either side may see the other as an existential threat that must be preemptively taken out. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Serbian nationalists’ genocide of Bosnians and Kosovars was partly fueled by fears that they would be the victims of massacres themselves.101
If members of a group have seen their comrades victimized, have narrowly escaped victimization themselves, or paranoically worry they have been targeted for victimization, they may stoke themselves into a moralistic fury and seek vengeance on their perceived assailants. Like all forms of revenge, a retaliatory massacre is pointless once it has to be carried out, but a welladvertised and implacable drive to carry it out, regardless of its costs at the time, may have been programmed into people’s brains by evolution, cultural norms, or both as a way to make the deterrent credible.