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WORSE THAN WAR

Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity

By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

We place the Holocaust outside of history; Goldhagen embeds it in the larger, recurring pattern of genocidal killing. While noting that the Nazis were unique in the variety of victims they attacked and the means of killing they adopted, Gold­hagen points out that the institutions we associate with the Holocaust - the camps, the death marches, the mobile killing squads - recur in Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China, in colonial Kenya and Guatemala.

Belief matters; choices matter. This is Goldhagen’s wake-up call. But who, exactly, has been lulling us to sleep with denials of human agency? Goldhagen rarely identifies his intellectual adversaries. Arendt is almost a straw man; her theories rarely appear in the contemporary literature on mass atrocities. Yet Goldhagen is quite right that “structural” explanations of eliminationism have achieved a near-­consensual status. Why does it matter if you understand mass atrocities as a structural feature of the contemporary world rather than as an “ism” - eliminationism - to be analyzed in political, ideological and moral terms?

Structural accounts lead to structural solutions: new definitions of the national interest recognizing the dangers of permitting unchecked mass violence even half a world away, leading in turn to changes in policy designed to single out those perpetrators of mass violence.

Goldhagen’s moral and political account impels him, by contrast, to scorn the very idea of the “national interest” as the chief object of foreign policy. Invocations of the national interest, he observes, routinely facilitate mass murder by rationalizing a passive response. Our policy, rather, should be founded on the recognition that genocidal eliminationism, which Goldhagen argues has killed more people in recent generations than war itself, is the supreme moral problem of our time.

Goldhagen acknowledges that the number of states “likely to again commit or suffer mass murder or elimination has dropped dramatically,” but then insists that since dictatorships are by their very nature “proto-­eliminationist,” the potential for mass violence remains almost limitless. He argues as well that “political Islam” - jihadism - constitutes “the most coherent and deadly mass-­murderous ideology since Nazism.”

Yet stable, ethnically homogeneous autocracies pose little imminent threat of atrocities (especially compared with unstable, heterogeneous democracies like Pakistan). And by lumping together largely peaceful groups like the Muslim Brotherhood with Al Qaeda,  Goldhagen turns political Islam into an eliminationist bogy. Moreover, even Al Qaeda, with its ideology of mass murder, has not been able to marshal the resources of a state to attain its ultimate goals. Goldhagen’s sense of urgency causes him to demand a revolution in human affairs. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the principle known as the responsibility to protect, which stipulates that states have an obligation to safeguard their peoples from mass atrocities, and that the international community must step in when states fail to act.

So far, the United Nations has done virtually nothing to put these fine principles into action. Until it does, those few states that are committed to preventing mass murder may have to act without international approval. “Worse Than War” reminds us of the imperative to act, and of the terrible cost of our failure to prevent the mass murders of the past century. You could have the book here.

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