Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Random House, 1997). See Robert R. Shandley, ed., Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2010). Goldhagen notes that ‘even if … the initial [Nazi killing] order [on the eastern front] was to kill ‘only’ teenage and adult Jewish males … the order was still genocidal and clearly was understood by the perpetrators as such … The killing of the adult males of a community is nothing less than the destruction of that community' (Hitler's Willing Executioners, p 153). Elements of the analysis can be questioned, however. How useful is it to describe the atrocities in Darfur as the product of a ‘Political Islamist exterminationist and eliminationist onslaught’ (p 539) by ‘the Political Islamic Sudanese government’ (p 539)? The Darfuri victims of the attack are themselves nearly all Muslims—something Goldhagen does not mention—and according to most expert opinion I have consulted, the motives of the assault pertain much more to ideologies of state security and counterinsurgency than politicized religion. Also, is it ‘Political Islamic’ or ‘Political Islamist’? Here as elsewhere, Goldhagen's nomenclature has its erratic moments. (Who are the ‘non-Arabic people’ referred to on p 517? There are Arab people and Arabic-speaking people; there are no ‘Arabic people’ or ‘non-Arabic people.’) Notably as well, while emphasizing Israel's vulnerability to ‘Political Islamist’ attack, Goldhagen does not define that state's governing ideology as ‘Political Judaism,’ i.e. Zionism. Then again, he has little need to, since Zionist/Israeli crimes are essentially effaced from his analysis, alluded to in a single mildly-phrased sentence (p 16). Goldhagen refers on four occasions (pp 53, 127, 238, 253) to the Syrian Asad regime's destruction of the rebellious city of Hama in 1982, which killed up to 25,000 people. But Israel's comparably murderous assault against Lebanon, next door, in the same year—which included the Einsatzgruppen-style massacre of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Israel's Christian Maronite minions—is ignored. See, e.g., the review by John Gray in New Statesman, February 4, 2010, http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2010/02/genocide-goldhagen-mass. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘The genocidal continuum: peace-time crimes,’ in Jeannette Mageo (ed.), Power and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp 29–47. See also my adaptation of Scheper-Hughes's framing: Adam Jones, ‘“When the rabbit's got the gun”: subaltern genocide and the genocidal continuum,’ in Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones (eds), Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp 185–207. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1965); Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003 [1961]) and Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992); Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage Books, 1983 [1974]); Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986) and Roberty Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Israel W. Charny, How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide: The Human Cancer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982); Ervin Staub, Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975). See especially Chapters 3–4 on ‘War’ and ‘Riots, Pogroms and Revolutions,’ and Chapter 5's study of sexual violence against American Indian and African American women. See Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Eric A. Johnson, Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany: An Oral History (New York: Perseus Books, 2005); David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996). Robert Gellately, personal communication, 16 December 2009. Eric Johnson, personal communication, 16 December 2009. David Bankier, personal communication, 17 December 2009.

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