Genocide, You, and Me

By Crispin Sartwell

Ten years ago this month the Hutu government of Rwanda mobilized its citizenry into murder squads, and started stacking corpses toward the sky. It's thirty years since the Killing Fields, forty since the start of the Cultural Revolution, sixty since the height of the Nazi Holocaust, seventy since the forced collectivization of agriculture, a hundred since the Belgians started murdering the Congolese, five hundred since the beginnings of the African slave trade and the systematic annihilation of the native peoples of the western hemisphere.

There are various things we ought to have learned from the history of genocide. One is surely that no problem is as profound and no evil as prevalent as state power: the rise of genocide is identical to the rise of the modern political state, and every single one of these events is inconceivable without the bland bureaucracy of death.

But another is this: we - and by this I mean me and you - are deeply evil. I would like to believe that I am too good, too smart, too decent to hop on the genocide bandwagon. But I know better. It's obvious, and it's a familiar point, that average Germans, average Hutus, average Americans, have been mobilized for genocide. I am not profoundly different than these people, and if you think you are, then you are either a moral hero or you are profoundly self-deluded. Are you a moral hero?

The qualities that will lead you to participate in genocide are widely shared.

(1) Deference to authority - the state, the experts - under normal conditions. Ponder, perhaps, how you would treat a school principal or a policeman, or a president. Ask yourself whether you often believe what the authorities tell you, in virtue of the fact that they are authorities.

(2) Response to social consensus in the generation of beliefs. People are herd animals; they seek to locate and associate themselves with a consensus of their associates. If you hate being excluded by a clique, or dress in terms of trends, you are responding in this way.

(3) Willingness to respond to people as members of groups, and to hold groups, overall, to display certain qualities. I might not want to do this, and I might not on an average day believe I do this, but I do. I know a lot about gay people, for example: how they talk, where they live, what they do.

(4) Desire for your own security and that of your family and friends, to the extent that you are willing to make moral compromises to preserve it.

These are qualities found in greater or lesser degree in more or less everyone, and they're more than enough. Indeed, any one of them is liable to suffice. You, like me, are a genocidal killer, only you (probably), like me, haven't gotten the opportunity to display your enthusiasm. Your goodness, like mine, has little to do with who you are and everything to do with the social conditions you happen to find yourself in.

In Rwanda, the Hutu government claimed falsely they were under attack from Tutsis - a claim repeated incessantly on the state-run radio - and mobilized the population into "civilian self-defense forces." It created squads dedicated to "obligatory labor for the public good," and armed them with firearms or machetes ("tools"). It sent them out as "work crews" to prosecute the slaughter. It rewarded those who were zealous killers with houses or cars, punished those who hesitated, and killed those who sheltered the intended victims.

Just two months later, 800,000 people were dead.

Hitler didn't kill 6 million, or King Leopold 10. They used a bureaucracy and a media machine and finally, people just like me and you. They mobilized a whole society.

I remember staring at Rwanda on my television, reading about Cambodia in my newspaper as the killing continued. I shook my head, tut tutted, and did absolutely nothing: basically the same approach taken by the world in each instance. I fear that if the same thing were happening in my town to people "not like me" in some identifiable way, I would take the same approach.

Many decent people have.

Crispin Sartwell's latest book is "Extreme Virtue: Leadership and Truth in Five Great American Lives" (SUNY, 2003).