My father, Maurice Swergold, was born in Poland. In the late 1920’s, when he was a teenager, my grandfather moved the family to Belgium to seek better business opportunities. After the Nazis invaded Belgium, and after my uncle was released from the infamous Breendonk prison (where he spent many months for being caught out after curfew), my father and his brother decided that the family should hide in the provincial towns of the Ardenne mountains where they had previously vacationed. This they did, pretending to be Christians. They rented 2 houses in two different towns, Bohan and Alle-sur-Semois, and they shuttled back and forth depending on where the Nazi SS were at any given time.
My father and his entire nuclear family all survived the war. Like most Holocaust survivors, my father barely spoke about the war and never told stories about this time. I didn’t even know that my uncle had been in Breendonk until after all my three children had been born. All I knew was that none of them had been in a concentration camp and that they had all survived. The result was that until I was in my forties I didn’t understand the deep psychological scars that my father’s nuclear family carried from their experiences evading the Nazi attempt to carry out their “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. Mistakenly, I did not consider them to be true Holocaust survivors.
Despite this serious disconnect, I did grow up in the “shadow of the Holocaust”. I was born in 1955, only 10 years after the war ended. The State of Israel was only 7 years old. The last of the DP (Displaced Person) camps only closed in 1959. My father never spoke about the war but no doubt his experiences affected his outlook and mine. Jews everywhere were grappling with the unimaginable loss of one-third of their population under the most horrific circumstances. For better or worse, the Holocaust became a defining event for Jews. The phrase “Never Again” became a rallying cry for Jews the world-over (see https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-never-again-evolved-from-holocaust-commemoration-slogan-to-universal-call/ for a discussion of the possible sources for this phrase).
During my youth I remember many ideas advanced to explain this most inexplicable event. How could such methodical cruelty have occurred in one of the most scientifically advanced and cultured societies on Earth, the birthplace of Kant, Beethoven, and Einstein? Could there be a flaw in the German people? A defect in the German character? Or perhaps there was something unique about hatred of Jews. After all, anti-Semitism is perhaps the oldest surviving hatred, the oldest conspiracy theory. The history of the Middle East and of Europe is replete with incidences of Jewish massacres.
Fast forward to 1975 and the beginning of the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. In America and the West we knew what was happening. Many called for intervention to end the mass murder, but I was shocked that more did not do so. I do not mean to call out the Jewish community for special condemnation, but I was dismayed at the time that the voices of community leaders were not louder. Did we not carry a lesson from our own recent history? Did we not believe that we had a mission to bring the lessons of a monotheistic God and morality to the nations of the world (“..and through your children shall be blessed all the nations of the world because you harkened to My voice” Genesis 17:18)? Did Jews and the rest of the world learn nothing from the Holocaust? Less than 20 years later, in 1994, came the Rwandan genocide, characterized, like the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide, by a bloodthirsty rush to cruelty and death. Some people called for intervention but none was coming. The most charitable depiction of US behavior suggests that we, and the rest of the world, turned our backs. Less forgiving descriptions have also been credibly advanced (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/09/bystanders-to-genocide/304571/). Later, in 1998, Bill Clinton admitted his mistake and apologized, at least in part (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/09/bystanders-to-genocide/304571/).
My wife Jill and I visited Cambodia in 2015. We experienced a beautiful and peaceful country. We found the Cambodian people mostly to be of relatively short stature, fine featured, respectful and personable. Our guide was an 8 year old child when the Khmer Rouge came to power. He told us stories of wanton cruelty. He told us about the Khmer Rouge drinking the bile of their victims. How could this be the same country, the same people, only 40 years later? In 2016 we visited Rwanda. Once again, we visited a beautiful and peaceful country. Rwanda has, in some ways, the most advanced society in Africa, trying hard to erase ethnic differences and hatred. The people were educated, sociable, a pleasure to spend time with. It was hard to reconcile that this was the same country in which innocent blood literally ran down the streets only 22 years before.
These events raise numerous important questions. Let’s start with the most basic. Are mass killing events rare aberrations, or are they common? For reasons I will explain later, let’s consider only events that occurred during or after the onset of the 20th century. Also, note that some events qualify as genocides (the deliberate destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group) and others as democides (the killing of a person or persons by their government). I am not convinced that there is a major difference between them but I will do my best to label them correctly. I have also excluded “civil wars” which I place in quotes because many are hard or impossible to distinguish from democides. This following partial list only includes some of largest events. Many accountings of these events provide different numbers (see, for example, the report by Gerald Scully of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a right-leaning think tank (http://www.ncpathinktank.org/pdfs/st211.pdf)).
- The Congolese atrocities, during which as many as 10 million people were killed, were ongoing at the turn of the 20th century. This was followed by:
- The Armenian Genocide (1915-1917, circa 1 million dead)
- The Holodomor in the Ukraine (4 million dead; see Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum) followed quickly by Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937 (1 million dead https://www.history.com/topics/russia/great-purge)
- The Japanese Democide (1937-1945, 6-10 million dead https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM)
- Nazi Holocaust (1933-1945, circa 17 million killed https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution)
- Mao Zedong’s purges and artificial famines in China (40-80 million dead https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/17/how-many-died-new-evidence-suggests-far-higher-numbers-for-the-victims-of-mao-zedongs-era/01044df5-03dd-49f4-a453-a033c5287bce/)
- The Indonesian mass killing (1965-66, 0.5-1.0 million dead) was both a genocide and a democide
- Democide by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia (1975-1979, 1.5-2.0 million dead)
- The Guatemalan Genocide (1960-1996, 200,000 dead)
- The Argentina “Dirty War” (1976-1983, 10,000-30,000 dead)
- Rwanda’s mass killing, (1994, 800k dead) usually considered a genocide although there is truly no racial or religious difference between the Hutus and the Tutsis
- Rohingya Genocide (2016-2017, 30,000 dead).
This partial list includes 12 events in 120 years, an average of one every 10 years.
To appreciate this frequency, imagine that you are buying a new house. If the house is located in a 500-year flood zone (i.e. estimated floods that could endanger your home might occur only once in 500 years), flood insurance would be relatively inexpensive although it is likely that your mortgage company would not require you to purchase it. On the other hand, for a house located in a 100-year flood-zone, insurance would be required to obtain financing and the cost would be substantial. Now imagine that the human species wished to buy insurance from the International Galactic Insurance Company against the occurrence of a large scale deliberate mass killing. For an event with the frequency of at least once every 10 years, the cost would be prohibitive.
A second basic question about these events is what characteristics are shared between them. It is immediately clear that many characteristics are not shared. The short list above includes events that involved the killing of one religious group by another, the killing of members of religious group by a secular group, the killing of one ethnic group by another, the killing of citizens “racially” or religiously indistinguishable from the perpetrators, killing by so-called right-leaning governments, and killing by left-leaning governments. It includes events that occurred in “advanced” first-world countries, and events that occurred in third-world countries. However, there is one thing that unites them all. They were all carried out by human beings. In each of these events, thousands, if not millions of people either participated directly or indirectly but knowingly. Mass killing is not rare and is carried out by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. These same people, and their societies, will be seen as entirely “normal” only a short time later. Mass killing is a feature of human nature, albeit one that is only expressed from time to time.
What prevents people from expressing “mass-killing” behavior more frequently?
I will explore this question, and more, in Part II.