Since the public brawl over the line I took on war crimes trials in debate surrounding The Hand that Signed the Paper, I’ve kept quiet about things like Saddam’s execution and the genocide in Darfur. I’ve still been thinking about it, though, and have decided to share a few comments now.
Let’s not make bones: behind the lynch-mob scenes at Saddam’s hanging lay the reality of genocide. He wasn’t convicted of genocide - the prosecution preferring to cherry-pick offences and only run with something for which they knew there was a mountain of evidence - but that’s what he did when power was concentrated in his hands.
Genocide has two principal sources, in my view. It requires certain prevailing economic conditions - in turn amplified by excessive government power - and it requires certain psychological traits in the minds of its perpetrators. Unfortunately, these traits are very widely distributed. Coming up with tests for so-called ‘authortarian personalities’ and such like is next to useless. It is truly a case of ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’. The most useful thing law enforcement agencies can do is catch senior perpetrators while they’re still dangerous. The most useful thing we citizens can do is keep government in its box.
Like other countries that have gone down the war crimes trials route, Australian officials gave Saddam’s execution their seal of approval, despite the death penalty imposed. Indeed, it still seems that Australia’s participation in trials of geriatric Nazis is a fait accompli. Sure, we don’t make Aussie taxpayers cough for these legal nightmares anymore. We tend to prefer foreign taxpayers coughing instead.
While I still don’t believe most of these trials serve either history or justice, they may protect us from people who are a menace to society. Of course, this latter does not include those that commentator Michael White describes as ‘the dregs of Hitler’s Final Solution’. Such trials serve only vengeance and the selective indignation so common among our elites. In that sense, I have an instrumental view of justice.
However, major war criminals still at large from recent conflicts - people like Serbian ethnic cleanser par excellence Ratko Mladic (left, at centre of a display featuring various war criminals before UN Prosecutor Carla del Ponte) - are clearly dangerous. Governments in countries once ravaged by leaders like Mladic are seldom stable. There’s always the possibility that a military coup or political volatility could restore to a ‘major perpetrator of genocide’ - what the French call a génocidaire - some or all of his power.
Génocidaires are not only a menace in their own countries. Defence Analyst Dr Carlo Kopp says they possess ‘a skill-set’ attractive to many regimes. ‘Totalitarian regimes pay top money for ballistic missile, nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology experts,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, the ability to implement a mass-slaughter, conceal the evidence and stall UN intervention falls into a similar category.’
In case you think he’s joking, recall that many génocidaires have sold their nefarious talents to the highest bidder. The role of Adolf Eichmann’s private secretary, Alois Brunner, in establishing the Syrian intelligence service is a case in point. Then there’s the skill-sharing by Death Squad commanders in South America during the seventies. Chile’s 1973 military coup came on the back of 100 years of democracy, which meant her inexperienced torturers needed tuition in the use of the parrilla, or ‘barbecue’ from Argentinean specialists, many of them Nazi trained. Since 1994, Rwandan Hutu Power génocidaires have contributed to serious instability throughout central and eastern Africa, including the current scrap in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ongoing conflict in Kosovo’s border regions has led NATO to make use of Serbian forces once implicated in genocide. ‘Once they find a new sponsor’ Kopp says, ‘they can be very hard to dislodge.’
What is it about génocidaires, though? From whence do they spring?
Typically, a genocide’s senior implementers are high IQ individuals short on empathy or ‘fellow feeling’. They are nonetheless sane, believe passionately in the rightness of their actions and - most importantly - are able to convince others to help them achieve their goals. All senior Nazi génocidaires are now dead, leaving us with footsloggers - the corporals and the Kalejses - at the bottom of the heap.
‘Viktor Arajs became a mass-murderer only because of the overall German plan to destroy the Jewish population of Latvia,’ leading Holocaust historian Ruth Bettina Birn - who works for the Canadian government’s War Crimes unit - once pointed out when discussing one of the better known footsloggers. ‘None of the people discussed here [members of the Arajs Kommando] were making policy, they all responded . . . to a given political situation.’
Worse, the passage of time is such that these footsloggers are often on the nursery slopes for alzheimers, as are eyewitnesses to their activities. The legal difficulties - principally in the area of evidence - produced by this can degenerate into farce, notably in the badly botched Demjanjuk trial. Fortunately for Demjanjuk, the extent of the botch-up became clear before he hung from the rafters.
About the only benefit we’ve gained from our continuing outrage at the Holocaust is insight into senior génocidaires’ modus operandi. Take Ivan the Terrible’s commanding officer, long dead SS-Sturmbannführer (major) Karl Streibel, for example. We now know enough about him to draw meaningful comparisons with modern génocidaires - people like Léon Mugesera, for example, the initial organiser of Rwanda’s Interahamwe.
Streibel was Kommandant of Trawniki, an SS training camp in occupied Poland. Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians were sent there to be trained as low-level functionaries in the perpetration of the Final Solution. Recruited from POW camps and from among the rural poor on the basis of ethnicity, most were teenagers. Streibel assumed - largely correctly - that as members of persecuted minorities in the Soviet Union, they would despise Russians and could be taught to despise Jews - if they didn’t already. Some were threatened with starvation if they did not ‘volunteer’. Called Hilfswillige (’willing helper’), they underwent basic training, were well fed, well paid, clothed in a smart variation of the standard SS uniform, and systematically brainwashed.
Although the Hilfswillige had a terrifying reputation, not all were relentlessly bloodthirsty. Streibel admitted after the war that he was careful to give unaggressive trainees innocuous jobs ‘guarding agricultural estates, depots and factories’. Those with short fuses, by contrast, were posted to death camps or detailed to shooting squads.
The crimes of a Hilfswillige like Ivan the Terrible are picturesque - hacking those reluctant to enter the gas chambers to pieces with a bayonet, sticking power tools up inmates’ backsides and regularly drenching himself in blood. However, while horrible, they are clearly not on a par with Streibel’s crimes. Streibel never killed with his own hands, instead teaching the poor, the poorly educated and those with poor impulse control to kill for him.
Like Karl Streibel, Rwandan Interahamwe leader Léon Mugesera and his immediate successor, Robert Kajuga deliberately recruited poor and poorly educated young men, many with a string of petty criminal convictions. They too supplied them with plentiful inducements, promoting genocide - in the words of researcher Philip Gourevitch - ‘as a carnival romp’.
‘Interahamwe youth leaders jetted around on motorbikes, sporting pop hairstyles and wearing the latest fashions’ he says. ‘They preached ethnic solidarity and civil defence at packed rallies where alcohol flowed freely. . . Paramilitary drills were conducted like the latest hot dance moves.’ Kajuga also organised the Interahamwe into small neighbourhood bands, so they could ‘draw up lists of Tutsis and go on government sponsored retreats’ to practise burning houses, tossing grenades and hacking up dummies with machetes.
Similarly, Arkan’s Tigers - a group massively involved in genocide and rape during the Bosnian War - also made use of men who (after their basic training) emerged with ‘poor impulse control’ and criminal records. Arkan - like Streibel before him and Mugesera afterwards - wanted people susceptible to the paramilitary equivalent of road rage.
I think it instructive that Karl Streibel was formally acquitted of any wrongdoing in 1976. By contrast, John Demjanjuk - not Ivan the Terrible but nonetheless still a Streibel-trained concentration camp guard - spent seven years in prison and nearly went to the gallows for his work at genocide’s coalface. Other Hilfswillige have been imprisoned or executed in various countries.
That an individual like Streibel walked free is testimony to the fact that we have been blinded by viscera to the reality of genocide: it is a meticulously planned and executed instrument of government policy. If we are going to indulge in war crimes trials, then the capture of major, recent génocidaires while the evidence is still fresh - and before they do any more damage - is essential. And if we are going to shut the gate before the genocidal horse bolts, rather than after, we need to ask ourselves some hard questions about government power.
36 Comments
Finally, a comment on the whole Saddam kerfuffle, albeit at a remove…
We know Mugabe has set up all the facilities for genocide…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/3493958.stm
…yet so far he’s been happy to demolish the city slums in an attempt to disperse the political opposition.
Is this the slippery slope of genocide in waiting and if so, how do you intervene when no one wants the expense of rebuilding a ruined national economy? Apparently all it takes is for someone to hit a switch in South Africa and Zimbabwe would have no power. Yet no one wants to.
Actually Sl , this is the few times I think we have diagreed. I think genocide is the norm in the conduct of human affairs rather than the exception. In every day Africa one tribal village is always out there trying to kill the men and steal the kids and gals for slaves. This has been with us since the dawn of man. This ball game isn’t about to end because the UN is around, is it.
The numbers have been much bigger in places outside of Africa (ex Rwanda) over the past 100 years.
In a way the prevention of genocide or genocidal acts could actually cause a far bigger mess than its prevention is supposed to bring. The Israeli/Hez conflict is a good example of that.
The Hez gave the Israelis a hard time simply because the Hez were good at using the world’s anti genocide thing as a military strategy in that it allowed them to hide amongst the civilian population while the israelis were powerless to stop it.
It’s only a matter of time before that war starts up again.
Another example: Urban fighting has become a problem primarily becasue of world public opinion. If shooting was coming out of a block of apartments or a group of buldings, in the old days you just took out the buildings.
My guess is that large number genocide will come back in fashion sooner rather than later and the mid east is the obvious place for it to make an appearance.
I don’t think we’re that far apart, JC. The characteristics required to be a genocidiere are pretty common - perhaps even universal. All you need are the right economic circumstances and an omnipotent government, and away she goes.
DEX - South Africa is complicated. A lot of the ANC leadership feels they ‘owe’ one to the Mugabe government. I also wouldn’t mind betting that - secretly - quite a few of them even agree with him. That said, the ANC are smart enough to know that if they chase the whites and Zulus away, the country will be ruined. But yes, Zimbabwe is a genocide waiting to happen.
In every day Africa one tribal village is always out there trying to kill the men and steal the kids and gals for slaves. This has been with us since the dawn of man.
This is not quite the same thing as genocide, surely? Genocide is when you want to completely wipe a particular biological group off the face of the planet (anyone mention the Armenians?) not just make them subordinate.
I agree with you that there is a natural tendency towards this. I remember reading about the natural evolution of a chimp society. When it got too big it split into two groups and the secondary one went off to find new territory. Even though there was no direct competition, the original society soon after went out to hunt them down and destroy the second community.
But then there is also a biological basis for killing your neighbour and taking his wife, but as advanced human beings we have constructed a society where we choose to overcome those ‘natural’ urges in order to enjoy the benefits of living in a higher density population. It’s not like breathing.
DEM
Yeah, you’re right, it may not be like breathing but it sure keeps repeating itself.
The african example is it seems to me a micro of the really bigger version.
I can’t recall who said it but if you want to avoid war make sure the per head GDP is over US$10,000.
What fascinates me is the occasions of a very deliberate ‘trigger’. In Rwanda, Hutus were socialised by six months of radio advertising and programming to believe it was okay to kill Tutsi. Yes the underlying class/tribal tensions were there, but they were deliberately primed right up until it exploded. I’d be fascinated to know if something similar happened in the lead up to Kristallnacht in Germany.
I can’t recall who said it but if you want to avoid war make sure the per head GDP is over US$10,000.
Except we make war as much for status as economics. Immediately after 9/11 the only course of action universally considered ‘wrong’ by Americans was doing nothing.
Very much so, DEX. The Nazis had the mojo on this type of ‘priming the pump for genocide’ caper. In every case it requires major government control of society generally - not just the local paper/tv etc. Even in a totalitarian dictatorship there are people who don’t read the paper, couldn’t give a crap about current events etc. The state has to find a way of being all-pervasive.
Well doing nothing would have been wrong.
Because it would mean that even your allies would look at you with contempt.
So the alliance would break down. No country would fear Americans more then jihadists.
And that is the path to demoralisation and failure.
What they did was too weak. They didn’t hit back at the enabling states until 2003.
And then they only Jihadist state they have stomped is Iraq.
Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran….. remained unpunished.
And the Godfather of muslims who kill Americans (Arafat) died in his bed and not at the hands of Israelis or Americans.
His hateful henchmen still live and are thought to be the better alternative government.
So all of the things I mentioned that inaction would acheive have been achieved despite all the misdirected action.
But not to the extent that doing nothing would have left the Americans and the rest of us with.
The Americans were hit……
Then suddenly you have snipers in Washington.
This is no coincidence. Yet it need not be thought that Malvo and Muhhumad were in league with any regime (thought this ought not be ruled out)….. Because it is in the way of things that you hit back or the fight comes to you whether by foreign hands or internal dissension.
If they didn’t hit back hard it would have been more snipers and worse.
It is not to be thought that domestic and international components of a war are a seperate and distinct thing.
They are really the SAME thing.
They are really aspects of the SAME war.
Well doing nothing would have been wrong.
Because it would mean that even your allies would look at you with contempt.
So the alliance would break down. No country would fear Americans more then jihadists.
And that is the path to demoralisation and failure.
But as I said, that’s war for the sake of status not economics.
GMB, I wouldn’t be so sure that the Israelis didn’t take out Arafat in France or help him along a bit beforehand.
I have to say that thought crossed my mind as well. I also kept hearing rumours that the old bugger died of AIDS, but nothing ever came of it.
AIDS? Those 72 virgins are in trouble, then.
Eeeeewww, ff. Too much information there.
I work night shifts. What’s your excuse for being up this late?
Being on holidays, although I’m heading off now.
Cheerio. Till next time, Latin-translating, other-language-speaking, varied-career-having, hearty-G’day-giving bogan intellectual.
Heh heh heh >:)
Responding to Deus Ex Macintosh | January 12th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Genocidal behaviour between chimpanzee troops is well documented and I have seen it described more than once.
Not only are victims killed, but often also tortured to death slowly.
Ergo, there is some deep and dark instinct in the unconscious which the practicioners of genocide are adept at stimulating.
It’s like that quote from Martin Amis about the Nazis finding the fastest route to the unconscious and then building an autobahn there. ‘And like all autobahns, it was beautifully designed, efficient, and conformed unobtrusively to the landscape’.
I agree that genocidaires are intelligent and lacking empathy. I think they also have a strangely compelling charisma (as Hitler apparently did).
But genocidaires are empty vessels without followers. They need people who will follow their command. I suppose people follow because they are scared to be on the receiving end. Particularly if they are also a minority, and they don’t want to end up on the bottom of the heap with the despised minority. You see the same thing in the school playground with bullies. So in SL’s example, Streibel would be the bully, and the hilfswillige would be the followers, trying desperately to prove that they did not fall into the category of Jews, gypsies etc.
I think such things also occur because of the human need to comply with authority. It must have some biological basis (a predisposed tendency to obey the silverback in the gorilla troop?)
The experiment that has always freaked me out is the Milgram experiment - the one where they persuaded 66% of participants in the experiment to administer near-fatal electric shocks to a person who was supposedly behind a screen and answering questions.
I hope that I would be one of the ones who refused. The thing that scares me is that I just don’t know; I’m sure most people think they’d refuse, but maybe they wouldn’t if it came down to it?
LE: there’s an excellent discussion of the Milgram experiment (and others like it, eg the Stanford Prison Experiment) in Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. The amazon link is here.
Browning’s book is scary and fascinating because it deals with obedience and cruelty very thoughtfully. Interestingly, the German troops only perpetrated one complete massacre from ‘go to whoa’ before starting to wig out. Their officers complained, and from then on in the authorities assigned them a detatchment of Hilfswillige to ‘help out’.
Much of the Hiwi behaviour (and its ‘creative cruelty’) seemed to have its origins in wanting to be good at something - anything - as much as obedience. Browning discusses the psychology of approval and reward in light of this fact.
SL how in heaven’s name do you gain not one but two honours degrees.
It was all in my budget to buy the necessary cornflakes packets to get my economics degree and thern say Popper!
SL says:
“The most useful thing we citizens can do is keep government in its box.”
I’m sorry to be so critical, but this is hopelessly simplistic big bad government tripe. Genocidal behaviour isn’t that straightforward nor is it monocausal. What’s more it isn’t always perpetrated by the government.
What we see in Iraq for example is mostly ethno-religious militias running amok- killing, torturing and bombing - without an effective government to restore order. Iraqis could elect a cabal of enlightened libertarians into office tomorrow and it wouldn’t make one iota of difference.
Even where government is major part of the problem, it is still necessary to analyse how that government came to power.
For example, many countries have been humiliated in wars then suffered economic misery without a government analogous to the Nazis subsequently taking power. For that reason alone it would be extraordinarily crude to attempt to explain Hitler’s Germany as simply a consequence of totalitarian government.
They’re also not engaging in genocide, Steve. That’s not for want of trying, of course, but they lack sufficient power to do the real thing. Iraq may well go down the genocide route eventually - although to be fair, separation into ethnic enclaves is more likely. At the moment they’re just being disruptive and nasty, and on the scale of things, not killing many people.
Ted, Stevie Wonder
it’s the weekend, lighten up, Mr. Happy.
For fucksake, who wants to talk about genocide on a weekend summer in OZ?
You’d drive anyone to suicide in a week, Boyo.
“They’re also not engaging in genocide, Steve.”
Really?
The Brookings Institution isn’t so sanguine:
“Both the Sunni and Shi’a armed groups regularly use threats and intimidation followed by kidnappings and murders to force people out. To make sure they do not return, they frequently rely on brutality, including the beheading of children and the use of electric drills to kill people. They have two goals - to consolidate their territory and to serve as provider and protector, thereby usurping the government’s authority. ”
http://www.brook.edu/views/op-ed/cohenr/20070104.htm
http://www.brookings.edu/views/testimony/ohanlon/20070110.pdf
I wonder where you get your information?
Mass-murder is bad.
Genocide is also bad.
But its just mixing things up to be calling mass-murder genocide.
The Americans are there and there is mass-murder going on. But there won’t be full-blown genocide while the Americans are still there.
“’m sorry to be so critical, but this is hopelessly simplistic big bad government tripe. Genocidal behaviour isn’t that straightforward nor is it monocausal. What’s more it isn’t always perpetrated by the government.”
Yes it is.
There is always a government or at the very least a tribal leadership involved at some level.
Think of a situation where that isn’t the case?
Under anarchy the killing is not so directed as all that.
For genocide you need the State in there exerting influence, and it is you and not skeptic that is being naive here.
“GMB, I wouldn’t be so sure that the Israelis didn’t take out Arafat in France or help him along a bit beforehand.”
There is some talk that the Iranians might have done him in.
But its possible that the Israelis could have hastened his death by just keeping him cloistered in those poor conditions with his surroundings bombed out.
But its not good to attempt to kill these people secretly.
For starters an open society cannot rightly keep these things a secret forever.
And the other thing is to off him secretly is a missed opportunity.
You don’t want these things to be low-profile.
You want every enemy regime-member to look at him and think to themselves “Do I really want my kids to see me die like this?”
“But as I said, that’s war for the sake of status not economics.”
No it’s ultimately war for survival and freedom. That is to say the peace of your choosing.
Having snipers in Washington, selling out your former allies, having enemy regimes planting nukes in Mexico….
These are not outcomes consistent with the maintenance of a free society.
So that therefore the war is for the peace of your choosing and that means freedom from the depredations of enemy regimes.
No English-speaking nation has been to war for primarily economic reasons for a very long time. Despite the hopelessly naive and tendentious rumours to the contrary.
While agreeing with most of this post, I disagree on some points:
(1) [Saddam's] prosecution prefer[red] to only run with something for which they knew there was a mountain of evidence
Umm, no - they preferred only to run with something that would not embarrass complicit third parties (the Saudis, the Turks, the Americans).
(2) Saddam was not a genocidaire, he was a mass murderer. He was politically, not racially, motivated - he never set out to completely eliminate any particular ethnic or racial group.
As a writer and lawyer you should know the importance of precision in words - if genocide comes to be a generic term for mass murder, how are we to characterise future Holocausts and Rwandas?
PS, having read all the comments after I commented myself, I’m appalled to find myself agreeing with GMB. I must reconsider my position forthwith!
Lemkin’s original definition took in political genocides (or ‘democides’ as modern scholars like to call them). It was only Soviet pressure that saw the political element of his definition excised. I prefer to use the definition as its inventor intended, rather than something corrupted by the Soviets.
They may have been out to protect their mates, too, DD - it wouldn’t surprise me - but as someone in the legal game, I know the value of going for something that’s going to secure a quick conviction.
And I will now have to check on what Graeme wrote!
A disturbing development:
Rusesabagina is the Rwandan Oskar Schindler, and a remarkable human being. More here.