This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What drives us? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
Over two millenniums ago, the Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato, who incited what could be called a genocide of Rome’s rival Carthage, said it clearly: “Delenda est Carthago” or “Carthage must be destroyed.” And as early as 1919, Adolf Hitler proclaimed his solution to “the Jewish question”: “The ultimate goal must be the removal of the Jews altogether.”
The term “maniac” is often used to describe those accused of committing the most heinous crime of genocide. But after first studying the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s and then researching instances of the crime that have occurred around the world during the past 2,000 or more years, I believe most perpetrators of genocide are not deranged. Rather, they are predictable, based on a few key factors that drive all of them.
These leaders rely on a complex ideology that sanctions and even encourages their actions. They execute their carefully devised plans methodically and relentlessly. Their success in subjecting and then obliterating human groups reassures them that they are strong and virtuous, perhaps even divinely anointed to lead their own group or nation to glory. As their loyal officials pay lip service to their brilliance, they reject criticism at every step. If their actions escalate into chaos, sparking condemnation or intervention, they eschew responsibility for failure, and they label as traitors those who fail to concede the righteousness of their mission. Rather than capitulate, they become ever more ferocious.
The specific legal definition of genocide, recognized in the United Nations’ 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” sets it apart from other crimes. It is one or more “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
Its perpetrators must have a specific intent or conscious desire to eliminate a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Genocidal leaders must deliberately set out to destroy those whom they have targeted. For them, it is not enough to neutralize or defeat such a group — this is not simply warfare in which there are massive human casualties. It is a dedicated drive to expunge civilian populations whose nationality, ethnicity, race or religion is foreign to the rightful superior group. The U.N.’s definition is also notable for its inclusion of the phrase “in whole or in part,” meaning the perpetrators’ goal might not be total extermination of the group, though it may entail subjugation of the surviving members.
I have identified four cornerstones of ideology that drive leaders to such extremes while remaining convinced that their intentions are just. Racial or religious prejudice is common to nearly all genocide perpetrators. Most also embrace a cult of antiquity: the mythology that in the past their people or nation was superior to others. To return to that splendor, they must destroy those who are impure and contributed to its eclipse. Those ethnically or racially different from the original inhabitants have corrupted the polity. For example, the genocidal Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot called himself the “Original Khmer.” Cato claimed descent from hardy ancient Spartans. Hitler used Sparta as a model for Nazism.
Genocidal leaders also tend to idealize an agrarian model of society, believing that cities breed evil and greed. In Rome, Cato argued, “It is from the farming class that the bravest men and sturdiest soldiers come, their calling is most highly respected.” This tenet fits nicely with cults of antiquity. City dwellers, many of whom are immigrants or ethnic minorities, are considered corrosive to the body politic. A Turkish theoretician of the Armenian genocide, Ziya Gokalp, called Greeks, Armenians and Jews “a foreign body in the national Turkish state.” Hitler claimed that “our ancestors were all peasants,” and that “nothing is lovelier than horticulture.” Pol Pot marched urban dwellers off to rural areas to toil to their deaths on communal farms.
Finally, leaders who embrace genocide also see territorial expansion as a goal, as a way to insulate the purity of their populations and to exercise their superiority. Before the Armenian genocide, the Young Turk ideologue Yusuf Akcura dreamed of an empire of all Turkic-speaking peoples “from Peking to Montenegro.” Often, perpetrators will combine idealization of their nation’s past glory with that of its hardy peasants to argue that other racial, ethnic or religious groups misuse the coveted land. A U.S. government investigator of the extermination of Native Americans in California concluded that these massacres had been “pacific” because “it was not designed to kill any more Indians than might be necessary to secure the adhesion of the honest yeomanry.”
Certainly, many leaders who merely lament their own group’s “lost” past, or extol rural virtues, are not driven to commit genocide. And states have often pursued territorial expansion without intentions to destroy conquered peoples ethnically, racially or religiously different from their own populations. Racism and religious prejudice, too, have existed at times and places without becoming genocidal. However, in combination, at least three of these four ideological concepts have often led to genocide.
Each of the many genocides throughout history has had its own unique features. Nonetheless, they have had enough in common, and have been launched with sufficient warning, for their threat to be predicted in advance. History may not often repeat itself, but the conditions and forces that favor genocide do recur. They can be recognized, and action can be taken in time to prevent catastrophe.
Ben Kiernan, the A. Whitney Griswold professor emeritus of history at Yale University, is the author of “Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur” (2007), “The Pol Pot Regime” (1996) and “Viet Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present” (2017), and is the general editor of “The Cambridge World History of Genocide” (2023).
The post What Drives Leaders to Commit Genocide? appeared first on New York Times.
