On Genocide

Richard L. Rubenstein (2002)

[From, Carol Rittner, John K. Roth, and James M. Smith, Will Genocide Ever End? (Aegis in Conjunction with Paragon House)]

 

            There have been many attempts to define genocide since World War II. In 1944 Raphael Lemkin, an international lawyer, offered the first, defining it as “the coordinated and planned annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by a variety of actions aimed at undermining the foundations essential to the survival of a group as a group.”[1] Lemkin also noted that genocide is a “form of one-sided killing” in which the perpetrators intend to eliminate their victims who by contrast have no comparable intention. Lemkin’s definition was followed by many others such as the 1946 UN Resolution that defined genocide as “the denial of the right to exist of entire human groups, as homicide is denial of the right to live of individual…”[2]

I would like to propose an alternative definition: genocide can best be understood as the most radical method of implementing a state or communally-sponsored program of population elimination. I believe that this definition facilitates an understanding of the larger historical conditions under which populations have been targeted for elimination.[3] Genocide can be understood as the last stop on a journey of destruction that starts with the least harsh form of population elimination, namely, emigration schemes in which unwanted individuals are provided with transportation from their home community to a foreign destination, but not the means to return. For example, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, a number of English parishes sent their paupers and other “undesirables” with only a few pounds sterling to North America where they were expected to fend for themselves.[4]

            Compulsory expulsion is a harsher method of population elimination. Jews were expelled from England in 1290 and from most of France in 1306. On March 31, 1492 Spain’s Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, promulgated the Edict of Expulsion by which all Jews who had not or would not become Christian were compelled to leave Spain. There have been many large-scale population expulsions in the twentieth century. When Germany attacked Poland in 1939, western Poland was incorporated into the Reich as the Warthegau. Almost immediately, the Nazis began a monumental program of expulsion and resettlement. Ethnic Germans from the Baltic countries were “resettled” to the Warthegau and Jews were either expelled or forcibly confined to miserably overcrowded ghettos. After the war, it was the Germans’ turn. More than 12 million ethnic Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and settled largely in a truncated West Germany. There was, however, a fundamental difference. Most expelled Germans were eventually able to start new lives; the expulsion of the Jews was a prelude to genocide.

            Although they seldom, if ever, succeed completely, perpetrators of genocide seek the total elimination of the target population. The Nazis expressed this succinctly in the term “Final Solution of the Jewish Problem.” The Turks expressed their genocidal intentions with even greater frankness.  On September 15, 1915, Taalat Bey, a member of the ruling triumvirate of the Turkish government, sent a telegram to the Police Office in Aleppo, Syria announcing that the Government had

…determined completely to exterminate the Armenians living in Turkey…Regardless of the women, children and invalids, and however deplorable the methods of destruction may seem an end is to be put to their existence without paying any heed to feeling or conscience.[5]

Between 600,000 and 1,000,000 Christian Armenians were killed. The exact number cannot be determined. Whatever the number, there is a scholarly consensus that the Armenian genocide anticipated the Holocaust. Nevertheless, here again there was a fundamental difference. The Turkish genocide was aimed primarily at inhabitants of Turkish Armenia, a region that straddled the border between Turkey and Tsarist Russia. Unlike the Nazis, the Turks had no interest in hunting down all Armenians. Nazi Germany aimed eventually to exterminate all the world’s Jews. A genocide of such universal scope had never before been attempted.

            No combination of conditions will necessarily lead to genocide but there are some conditions that are likely to foster state-sponsored genocide. The most fundamental condition is population redundancy. A governing authority is far less likely to consider a program of population elimination where there is a labor shortage. For example, after World War II, with millions of Germans soldiers held as prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, Germany encouraged the immigration of “guest workers” from Muslim countries, especially Turkey, to help restart its economy. This action constituted an historic reversal of Europe’s traditional policy toward Muslim immigration. The trend continues to some extent at present because of Europe’s aging indigenous population and the need for a youthful labor force to supply the productivity necessary to finance Europe’s health insurance and old age pension system. Elsewhere, this writer has argued that, as a result of the modernization of Europe’s economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe had a crisis of overpopulation.[6] A diminishing number of Europe’s exploding population was required for agriculture. Much of this population was absorbed by the continent’s growing manufacturing base, but by no means all. Emigration and imperialist colonization provided Europe with a demographic safety valve for its population surplus. As a result, unemployment did not become a dangerous social problem until the twentieth century. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the demographic safety valve was largely unavailable.

            The terms “redundant” or “surplus” population are not absolute. Whether a society has such a population depends on how it is organized. The Nazis classified Germans of all ages with debilitating diseases as “useless eaters.” As such, they were considered surplus and were targeted for extermination. Pre-modern societies with protective extended families as their fundamental units were less likely to have surplus populations than modern societies that value productive efficiency and economic rationality, although the rootless foot soldiers of the Crusades are an indication that Europe was beginning to develop a surplus population as early as the twelfth century. Nevertheless, mass redundant populations are largely a by-product of modernity. 

            Yet another reason why genocide has been more likely to develop in the modern period has been the organization of the world into states with well-defined borders and bureaucracies capable of limiting immigration. The borders of most countries were largely closed to European Jews during the nineteen-thirties including the United States, the United Kingdom and British-controlled Palestine. The Nazis correctly concluded that there would be no practical impediment to the extermination of those who remained in their hands.

Nevertheless, even under conditions of a population surplus, no government is likely willingly to perpetrate large-scale mass murder unless its leaders are convinced that their actions are beneficial to those members of their own community whom they value. Put differently, no government will enter upon a program of mass murder absent some form of religious or moral legitimation. That was true even of the Nazis.[7] Such legitimation requires the radical demonization of the target group and its depiction as capable of inflicting significant harm on the perpetrator community. In the case of the Jews, a religious legitimation was ready at hand in the accusation that by their disbelief the Jews were collectively in every generation the murderers of God and, as such, in league with Satan. The demonization was further intensified by the identification of the Jews with Judas, the disciple who betrays Christ with a kiss. Because these identifications were inextricably woven into the heart of the Christian story, they operated at the level of pre-theoretical consciousness and were normally opaque to critical scrutiny. The congeries of demonizing accusations carried with them the implicit warning that Jews would use the powers that had allegedly enabled them to “murder” God to destroy the enemies in whose midst they dwelt. At bottom, there was a fear component in Nazi anti-Semitism.

            In the case of the Armenians, the Turks were convinced that their Christian minority would betray them to Christian Russia, their wartime and hereditary enemy, and had to be exterminated. In the early thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III regarded the Cathars, the advocates of the Albigensian heresy, as mortal enemies of the Catholic Church. When the Pope became convinced that the Cathars could not be persuaded to return to the Church, he wrote to King Phillip Augustus of France admonishing him that such an alien body within Christendom could only be cured by the knife.[8] Although it took several decades, all of the Cathars were either killed or compelled to return to the Church.

            However, demonization alone will not lead to genocide. The Jews were held in contempt for almost two thousand years before they became the target of outright genocide. In addition to demonizing a target group, a perpetrating community is likely to experience radical socio-economic and/or political stress and upheaval before embarking on such a program. Such stress may be caused by a humiliating defeat in war for which the target community is blamed. Against all rational calculation, the German right was convinced that the Jews were responsible for their country’s defeat in World War I and, if left unchecked, would plot Germany’s destruction in World War II. Turkey was defeated in the First Balkan War of 1912 by a coalition of Christian Balkan states aided by Russia and lost all of its remaining possessions in the Balkan Peninsula. As a result, its leaders were convinced that the presence of a large Christian population, the Armenians, on both sides of the Turkish-Russian frontier constituted a radical danger during World War I.

            Another example of destabilizing stress was the victory of the radically anti-Christian Bolshevik Regime in Russia in 1917. The revolution was a catastrophic upheaval and was perceived with considerable justice as a major threat to European civilization. Unfortunately, right-wing propaganda throughout Europe identified Jews with Bolshevism and portrayed them as seeking to use Bolshevism to destroy Christian civilization. In spite of the opposition of the overwhelming majority of Jews to communism, the highly visible presence of a few Jews among the Bolshevik leaders rendered the right wing accusations credible to all too many Europeans.

 

            A final ingredient necessary for the perpetration of genocide is the cover of war. Killing the enemy is considered legitimate in wartime and, if one can identify the target population as the enemy, there are few, if any, scruples left to prevent the project from proceeding.

     In conclusion, I would like to suggest that many of the same conditions are also likely to foster programs of terrorism on the part of non-governmental groups. Non-state terrorism is not likely to flourish absent a redundant population with angry males who lack either vocational slots or regard the available slots as beneath their training, competence or dignity. Like genocide, terrorism requires moral and/or religious legitimation which in turn requires the demonization of the target community. Like genocide, terrorist groups seek the disruption and ultimate destruction of the target community. There are, of course, differences; genocide cannot be successfully implemented by non-government organizations; terrorism can. Governments usually sponsor terrorist activities surreptitiously when overt military strikes carry too great a risk of punishing retaliation. Finally, although both genocide and terrorism have been practiced for many centuries, the era of high technology and globalization is especially conducive to such activities and requires heightened, sophisticated vigilance  among those who seek to diminish or eliminate them entirely.