In the 1st century CE, Tacitus wrote, “A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of a few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.” According to the political scientist Benjamin Valentino in Final Solutions, that division of labor applies to the genocides of the 20th century as well.128 A leader or small clique decides that the time for genocide is right. He gives the go-ahead to a relatively small force of armed men, made up a mixture of true believers, conformists, and thugs (often recruited, as in medieval armies, from the ranks of criminals, drifters, and other unemployable young men). They count on the rest of the population not to get in their way, and thanks to features of social psychology that we will explore in chapter 8, they generally don’t. The psychological contributors to genocide, such as essentialism, moralization, and utopian ideologies, are engaged to different degrees in each of these constituencies. They consume the minds of the leaders and the true believers but have to tip the others only enough to allow the leaders to make their plans a reality. The indispensability of leaders to 20th-century genocide is made plain by the fact that when the leaders died or were removed by force, the killings stopped.129
If this analysis is on the right track, genocides can emerge from toxic reactions among human nature (including essentialism, moralization, and intuitive economics), Hobbesian security dilemmas, millennial ideologies, and the opportunities available to leaders. The question now is: how has this interaction changed over the course of history?
It’s not an easy question to answer, because historians have never found genocide particularly interesting. Since antiquity the stacks of libraries have been filled with scholarship on war, but scholarship on genocide is nearly nonexistent, though it killed more people. As Chalk and Jonassohn point out of ancient histories, “We know that empires have disappeared and that cities were destroyed, and we suspect that some wars were genocidal in their results; but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved in these events. Their fate was simply too unimportant. When they were mentioned at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of oxen, sheep, and other livestock.”130
As soon as one realizes that the sackings, razings, and massacres of past centuries are what we would call genocide today, it becomes utterly clear that genocide is not a phenomenon of the 20th century. Those familiar with classical history know that the Athenians destroyed Melos during the 5th-century-BCE Peloponnesian War; according to Thucydides, “the Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age and made slaves of the women and children.” Another familiar example is the Romans’ destruction of Carthage and its population during the Third Punic War in the 3rd century BCE, a war so total that the Romans, it was said, sowed salt into the ground to make it forever unfarmable. Other historical genocides include the real-life bloodbaths that inspired the ones narrated in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hebrew Bible; the massacres and sackings during the Crusades; the suppression of the Albigensian heresy; the Mongol invasions; the European witch hunts; and the carnage of the European Wars of Religion.
The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of an unprecedented “century of genocide” (the 20th) is a myth. On their first page Chalk and Jonassohn write, “Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history,” and add that their eleven case studies of pre-20th-century genocides “are not intended to be either exhaustive or representative.”131 Kiernan agrees: “A major conclusion of this book is that genocide indeed occurred commonly before the twentieth century.” One can see what he means with a glance at the first page of his table of contents:Part One: Early Imperial Expansion
1. Classical Genocide and Early Modern Memory
2. The Spanish Conquest of the New World 1492–1600
3. Guns and Genocide in East Asia 1400–1600
4. Genocidal Massacres in Early Modern Southeast Asia
Part Two. Settler Colonialism
5. The English Conquest of Ireland, 1565–1603
6. Colonial North America, 1600–1776
7. Genocidal Violence in Nineteenth-Century Australia
8. Genocide in the United States
9. Settler Genocides in Africa, 1830–1910132
Rummel has fitted a number to his own conclusion that “the mass murder by emperors, kings, sultans, khans, presidents, governors, generals, and other rulers of their own citizens or of those under their protection or control is very much part of our history.” He counts 133,147,000 victims of sixteen democides before the 20th century (including ones in India, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and Russia) and surmises that there may have been 625,716,000 democide victims in all.133
These authors did not compile their lists by indiscriminately piling up every historical episode in which a lot of people died. They are careful to note, for example, that the Native American population was decimated by disease rather than by a program of extermination, while particular incidents were blatantly genocidal. In an early example, Puritans in New England exterminated the Pequot nation in 1638, after which the minister Increase Mather asked his congregation to thank God “that on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to Hell.”134 This celebration of genocide did not hurt his career. He later became president of Harvard University, and the residential house with which I am currently affiliated is named after him (motto: Increase Mather’s Spirit!).
Mather was neither the first nor the last to thank God for genocide. As we saw in chapter 1, Yahweh ordered the Hebrew tribes to carry out dozens of them, and in the 9th century BCE the Moabites returned the favor by massacring the inhabitants of several Hebrew cities in the name of their god, Ashtar-Chemosh.135 In a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita (written around 400 CE), the Hindu god Krishna upbraids the mortal Arjuna for being reluctant to slay an enemy faction that included his grandfather and tutor: “There is no better engagement for you than fighting on religious principles; and so there is no need for hesitation.... The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire.... [Therefore] you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief.”136 Inspired by the conquests of Joshua, Oliver Cromwell massacred every man, woman, and child in an Irish town during the reconquest of Ireland, and explained his actions to Parliament: “It has pleased God to bless our endeavour at Drogheda. The enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town. I believe we put to the sword the whole number.”137 The English Parliament passed a unanimous motion “that the House does approve of the execution done at Drogheda as an act of both justice to them and mercy to others who may be warned of it.”138
The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn’t happen to them. One exception was the 16th-century Spanish priest Antonio de Montesinos, who protested the appalling treatment of Native Americans by the Spanish in the Caribbean—and who was, in his own words, “a voice of one crying in the wilderness.”139 There were, to be sure, military codes of honor, some from the Middle Ages, that ineffectually attempted to outlaw the killing of civilians in war, and occasional protests by thinkers of early modernity such as Erasmus and Hugo Grotius. But only in the late 19th century, when citizens began to protest the brutalization of peoples in the American West and the British Empire, did objections to genocide become common.140 Even then we find Theodore Roosevelt, the future “progressive” president and Nobel Peace laureate, writing in 1886, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”141 The critic John Carey documents that well into the 20th century the British literary intelligentsia viciously dehumanized the teeming masses, whom they considered to be so vulgar and soulless as not to have lives worth living. Genocidal fantasies were not uncommon. In 1908, for example, D. H. Lawrence wrote:If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crys
tal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus.”142
During World War II, when Americans were asked in opinion polls what should be done with the Japanese after an American victory, 10 to 15 percent volunteered the solution of extermination.143
The turning point came after the war. The English language did not even have a word for genocide until 1944, when the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it in a report on Nazi rule in Europe that would be used a year later to brief the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.144 In the aftermath of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, the world was stunned by the enormity of the death toll and by horrific images from the liberated camps: assembly-line gas chambers and crematoria, mountains of shoes and eyeglasses, bodies stacked up like cordwood. In 1948 Lemkin got the UN to approve a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and for the first time in history genocide, regardless of who the victims were, was a crime. James Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today’s Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.145
No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution. Anne Frank’s diary, which recorded her life in hiding in Nazioccupied Amsterdam before she was deported to her death in Bergen-Belsen, was published by her father shortly after the war. Memoirs of deportations and death camps by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi were published in the 1960s, and today Frank’s Diary and Wiesel’s Night are among the world’s most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. Soon other survivors—Armenians, Ukrainians, Gypsies—began to add their stories, joined more recently by Bosnians, Tutsis, and Darfuris. These memoirs are a part of a reorientation of our conception of history. “Throughout most of history,” Chalk and Jonassohn note, “only the rulers made news; in the twentieth century, for the first time, it is the ruled who make the news.”147
Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget. At a family occasion in the 1990s, I met a relative by marriage who had spent time in Auschwitz. Within seconds of meeting me he clenched my wrist and recounted this story. A group of men had been eating in silence when one of them slumped over dead. The others fell on his body, still covered in diarrhea, and pried a piece of bread from his fingers. As they divided it, a fierce argument broke out when some of the men felt their share was an imperceptible crumb smaller than the others’. To tell a story of such degradation requires extraordinary courage, backed by a confidence that the hearer will understand it as an accounting of the circumstances and not of the men’s characters.
Though the abundance of genocides over the millennia belies the centuryof-genocide claim, one still wonders about the trajectory of genocide before, during, and since the 20th century. Rummel was the first political scientist to try to put some numbers together. In his duology Death by Government (1994) and Statistics of Democide (1997) he analyzed 141 regimes that committed democides in the 20th century through 1987, and a control group of 73 that did not. He collected as many independent estimates of the death tolls as he could find (including ones from pro- and antigovernment sources, whose biases, he assumed, would cancel each other out) and, with the help of sanity checks, chose a defensible value near the middle of the range.148 His definition of “democide” corresponds roughly to the UCDP’s “one-sided violence” and to our everyday concept of “murder” but with a government rather than an individual as the perpetrator: the victims must be unarmed, and the killing deliberate. Democides thus include ethnocides, politicides, purges, terrors, killings of civilians by death squads (including ones committed by private militias to which the government turns a blind eye), deliberate famines from blockades and confiscation of food, deaths in internment camps, and the targeted bombing of civilians such as those in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.149 Rummel excluded the Great Leap Forward from his 1994 analyses, on the understanding that it was caused by stupidity and callousness rather than malice.150
Partly because the phrase “death by government” figured in Rummel’s definition of democide and in the title of his book, his conclusion that almost 170 million people were killed by their governments during the 20th century has become a popular meme among anarchists and radical libertarians. But for several reasons, “governments are the main cause of preventable deaths” is not the correct lesson to draw from Rummel’s data. For one thing, his definition of “government” is loose, embracing militias, paramilitaries, and warlords, all of which could reasonably be seen as a sign of too little government rather than too much. White examined Rummel’s raw data and calculated that the median democide toll by the twenty-four pseudo-governments on his list was around 100,000, whereas the median death toll caused by recognized governments of sovereign states was 33,000. So one could, with more justification, conclude that governments, on average, cause three times fewer deaths than alternatives to government.151 Also, most governments in recent periods do not commit democides at all, and they prevent a far greater number of deaths than the democidal ones cause, by promoting vaccination, sanitation, traffic safety, and policing.152
But the main problem with the anarchist interpretation is that it isn’t governments in general that kill large numbers of people but a handful of governments of a specific type. To be exact, three-quarters of all the deaths from all 141 democidal regimes were committed by just four governments, which Rummel calls the dekamegamurderers: the Soviet Union with 62 million, the People’s Republic of China with 35 million, Nazi Germany with 21 million, and 1928–49 nationalist China with 10 million.153 Another 11 percent of the total were killed by eleven megamurderers, including Imperial Japan with 6 million, Cambodia with 2 million, and Ottoman Turkey with 1.9 million. The remaining 13 percent of the deaths were spread out over 126 regimes. Genocides don’t exactly fall into a power-law distribution, if for no other reason than that the smaller massacres that would go into the tall spine tend not to be counted as “genocides.” But the distribution is enormously lopsided, conforming to an 80:4 rule—80 percent of the deaths were caused by 4 percent of the regimes.
Also, deaths from democide were overwhelmingly caused by totalitarian governments: the communist, Nazi, fascist, militarist, or Islamist regimes that sought to control every aspect of the societies they ruled. Totalitarian regimes were responsible for 138 million deaths, 82 percent of the total, of which 110 million (65 percent of the total) were caused by the communist regimes.154 Authoritarian regimes, which are autocracies that tolerate independent social institutions such as businesses and churches, came in second with 28 million deaths. Democracies, which Rummel defines as governments that are open, competitive, elected, and limited in their power, killed 2 million (mainly in their colonial empires, together with food blockades and civilian bombings during the world wars). The skew of the distribution does not just reflect the sheer number of potential victims that totalitarian behemoths like the Soviet Union and China had at their disp
osal. When Rummel looked at percentages rather than numbers, he found that totalitarian governments of the 20th century racked up a death toll adding up to 4 percent of their populations. Authoritarian governments killed 1 percent. Democracies killed four tenths of 1 percent.155
Rummel was one of the first advocates of the Democratic Peace theory, which he argues applied to democides even more than to wars. “At the extremes of Power,” Rummel writes, “totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions; in contrast, many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.”156 Democracies commit fewer democides because their form of governance, by definition, is committed to inclusive and nonviolent means of resolving conflicts. More important, the power of a democratic government is restricted by a tangle of institutional restraints, so a leader can’t just mobilize armies and militias on a whim to fan out over the country and start killing massive numbers of citizens. By performing a set of regressions on his dataset of 20th-century regimes, Rummel showed that the occurrence of democide correlates with a lack of democracy, even holding constant the countries’ ethnic diversity, wealth, level of development, population density, and culture (African, Asian, Latin American, Muslim, Anglo, and so on).157 The lessons, he writes, are clear: “The problem is Power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.”158