Abstract
This article presents a theoretical reflection on genocidal processes. In the first place, we will propose the compatibility of the paradigm of permission with the paradigm of obedience, which would allow us to talk about tolerated genocidal acts, encouraged genocidal acts, and actively pursued genocidal acts. As we open up to the paradigm of permission this would lead us to challenge the explanations which regard genocidal processes as ruptures from civilization, from the moral order, and from the logic in everyday life in modern societies. It will be argued, in second place, that a paradigm of continuities would allow us to explore genocidal processes in a more accurate way. We will go on, then, in our third section, to the details of three processes which operate both in genocidal processes and in everyday life in modern societies: the categorization and construction of ‘others’, the construction of weakness, and the construction of superfluity.
The sociology of genocidal processes has undergone an important transformation in the last twenty years and is now in the hands of the third generation, which has been developing its work since the first years of the 21st century (Strauss, 2007: 476–7), following the work of the pioneers of the 1970s and the second generation of comparative studies from the 1990s. It is a field of study that has experienced a notable rise, along with, not coincidentally, the sociology of violence (Walby, 2012: 11), and it has generated new studies that have involved important displacements of some of the inherited ideas and fundamental assumptions (Finkel and Strauss, 2012; Hinton, 2012; Moses, 2002; Owens et al., 2013; Shaw, 2010; Strauss, 2007). Given the degree of maturity of both the comparative studies and the case studies, it is probably an appropriate time for some theoretical and critical reflections. Initially, we propose the compatibility of what may be called the paradigm of permission, which was created for the study of the Holocaust, and the paradigm of obedience, which is still in development although it has been initially conceptualized, and has also been applied, more or less consciously, in the study of some episodes of certain genocidal processes. This allows us to draw a conceptual distinction between tolerated genocidal acts, encouraged genocidal acts, and actively pursued genocidal acts. Taking into account these three types of genocidal acts allows us to reconcile the empirical findings of various researchers regarding different genocidal processes. Examining the paradigm of permission leads us to challenge the explanations that genocidal processes are ruptures from civilization, from the moral order, and from the logic of everyday life in modern societies. In our third section, we go into the details of three factors that operate both in genocidal processes and in everyday life in modern societies, namely, the categorization and construction of ‘others’, the construction of weakness, and the construction of superfluity. These three processes are related to inequality and to the main assumptions of the permission paradigm.
The obedience paradigm and its anomalies
The sociology of genocide has been dominated by what we call the paradigm of obedience, which may be considered as an explicit or implicit paradigm from Kuhn’s (1970 [1962]) perspective, which has dominated this field of studies since the 1970s. A few influential texts that have deeply marked this field of studies were published between the mid-1950s and the 1970s, and still, today, have a crucial influence on much of the empirical work and case studies These influential texts were obviously influenced by the Holocaust, and include the classic works of Milgram (2004 [1975]) on obedience, Arendt’s (1963) analysis of the banality of evil, and the works of Asch (1955) and Zimbardo (1971) on group pressure and the pressure of social structure and roles. The Holocaust model for the study of genocidal processes was common in the first generation of scholars (Mazower, 1994: 6; Shaw, 2015: 54) and made the paradigm of obedience prevalent (Hinton, 2012: 7, 11). The obedience paradigm is build upon the effort of trying to understand how, in certain social environments, ordinary individuals become perpetrators (Charny, 1986; Haritos-Fatourus 1988) and analysing how hierarchical authority in bureaucratic environments (Bauman, 1989; Hilberg, 1985), ‘anticipatory obedience’ (Bloxham, 2008: 212) and/or group pressure (Semelin, 2005: 403–15), ‘behavioral expectations’ and ‘punishments’ (Bhavnani, 2006: 666) lead to conformity and to the conversion of individuals into perpetrators.
We know from recent research that the paradigm of obedience, which has allowed us to see and understand a number of important features of the genocidal processes, is blind to certain genocidal acts that occur without being ordered from a central authority, that is, in what may be called, in Kuhn’s (1970 [1962]: 64) terms, an increasing ‘awareness of anomaly’. Recent studies shows that the obedience paradigm cannot explain all that happens in a genocidal process, and, also, it seems inadequate for studying all the genocidal processes that have taken place in the past or are taking place in the present. This has been made more evident as the number of historical processes which are being considered as possible genocides is increasing.
Some genocidal acts have anticipated the genocidal actions that the central authorities would subsequently begin to carry out methodically and systematically. Furthermore, regional variations are noted within the genocidal processes (Finkel and Strauss, 2012: 58–61; Owen et al., 2013: 78–80), and even more so in the processes that have occurred over decades, such as in the case of Native Americans (Madley, 2008) and Canadian First Peoples (Woolford, 2009). While these variations may be related to several factors, they are not easily explained by the paradigm of obedience. Notoriously, Lithuania, Ukraine, Croatia, and Romania followed programmes of massive and systematic killings of Jews and other unarmed civilians, which included the killing of Serbs, Jews, and Roma, sometimes before the Germans arrived, in the most brutal of ways (Levene, 2008 [2005]: 120; Mann, 2005: 285–306). In other places, not only was the permission mostly unheard, but local citizens and powers did not conform later, when direct orders were issued. In Poland (Kopstein and Wittenberg, 2011) and Rwanda, there are important local and regional variations with respect to the extent and the pace of killing (Finkel and Strauss, 2012: 60). Furthermore, in Rwanda, local perpetrators ‘did not necessarily wield formal authority before the genocide’ (Bloxham, 2008: 223). In the Armenian genocide, during the deportation marches, some villagers joined the genocidal process, stealing the precious possessions of the Armenians and/or killing them without any direct orders (Bloxham, 2008: 229; Bruneteau, 2009 [2004]: 94–100). ‘Participatory violence’ was intense in the Armenian genocide, and in Indonesia in 1965–6 (Gerlach, 2010: 87–8, 95). Some people volunteer to commit atrocities, even when no one orders them to participate (Bhavnani, 2006: 652). The absence of an order does not equate to the absence of all possible actions and inactions. Rather, these examples point to actions of implicit or explicit permission granted by the actor who possesses ‘territorially dominant power’ (Strauss, 2012: 553). This is usually, though not always, a state, even though, especially in democratic states, some branches of the state may have different goals and may also try to activate checks and balances. Permission could be granted at the same time by a state and by an international coalition of states, as in the case of Indonesia in 1965–6 (Gerlach, 2010: 77–87), or could be granted by a branch of a state and opposed by other branches of the same state (see, for example, the parliamentary discussions in Great Britain during the India famines in Davis, 2001).
The permission paradigm
The not yet well-developed permission paradigm may be able to throw light on some aspects of genocidal processes which were minimized, sidelined or not understandable when scholars were conducting their research solely using the obedience paradigm.
The action of permission is closely linked to inaction, in the form of the absence of punishment toward genocidal acts and in the form of the absence of help for groups of people, even though they are in a position, socially or spatially, to be helped. Hence, the inactions most likely result in the deaths of these groups of people. To account for these (in)actions, as well as for others that take place at the margins of a certain genocidal process, it is, therefore, necessary to demand the inclusion of what could be called a paradigm of permission. Thus, we take into consideration that once permission is granted, and once it is obvious that nothing will happen to those participating in genocidal acts, in some localities, ordinary people will commit genocidal acts. Both in the classic works of Kelman (1973) and in the most recent work of Semelin (2005), the question of permission is addressed. Kelman speaks of authorization, although ultimately his explanation leads to obedience. In this sense, his definition of authorization includes what is referred to here as permission: ‘Thus when acts of violence are explicitly ordered, implicitly encouraged, tacitly approved, or at least permitted by legitimate authorities, people’s readiness to commit or condone them is considerably enhanced’ (Kelman, 1973: 39).
However, Kelman (1973: 38–46) is clearly thinking in terms of obedience to an authority as a way to overcome moral restraint and commit violence against weak and unarmed civilians. Semelin (2005: 441) mentions the importance of permission when discussing women and children becoming perpetrators. From his perspective, in these cases, and within a genocidal process, the social norm is ‘l’autorisation au meurtre’ (authorization to murder) once impunity after the killing is guaranteed, while in his fundamental explanatory scheme (Semelin, 2005: 403–38), the processes of obedience and group pressure are the main axes. That being said, Hinton (2012: 10) goes one step further:
Viewing genocide as ‘more or less coordinated’ allows for the inclusion of cases that range from highly planned, state-sponsored genocides to those that are more haphazard and diffusely carried out. In the latter case, the state’s role might have more to do with permissibility than with intent.
These texts, along with both the empirical research on genocide in the US and Australia, and the studies stressing local variations within a genocidal process, may be taken as fundamental starting points for a more comprehensive approach to these issues. This approach, moreover, will allow us to overcome the classic problems of intention and motivation, and also allow us to avoid a purely materialistic perspective in which subjects seem to disappear into a deterministic notion of ‘relations of genocide’ (Bartra, 1987). There exists a wide world of possibilities between intention and inevitability, one of which can be found in the concept of permission. The question is not who knew what was happening. Rather, the important issue is that, for genocide to occur, it must have been authorized and/or permitted by the agent who has the legitimate monopoly of violence within a concrete territory, that is, usually a state or a branch of a state. Accordingly, the paradigm of obedience remains essential when genocidal acts are actively pursued.
Permission does not take the form of a direct order, but simply an invitation to engage in genocidal acts without any explicit order being issued by the central authorities. Such permission can be established in the cultural structure as tacit knowledge (Garfinkel, 1967) that enables certain acts towards a certain group of people and guarantees that nothing will happen to those committing the acts. It may also consist of stigmatizing people who offer assistance to the targeted group. However, permission can also adopt a more material form by being converted into laws that tolerate and/or incentivize discrimination, injustice, and violence. Examples of these laws include the declaration of martial law (in Tasmania, 1828) (Docker, 2014: 78; Madley, 2004), the Act for the Government and Protection of the Indians (California, 1850) (Madley, 2008: 312), the Act to Prevent the Sale of Fire-arms and Ammunition to Indians (California, 1852) (Madley, 2008: 313), the many National Socialist laws designed and oriented to promote the ‘exclusion of specific groups within the population’ (Nolzen, 2005: 517–18).
Permission may also consist of the criminalization of those people trying to help a targeted group through what has been called the ‘criminalization of solidarity’ (Allsopp, 2012; Derrida, 1997; Fekete, 2009). These are not what are sometimes referred to as genocidal laws that, at times come in later in the process and actually legalize a genocide; rather, they grant permission to commit genocidal acts. Even when genocides are historically state-led processes, they are not necessarily the result of a set of direct orders. Rather, a genocide may be the result of an authorization or a permission, be it implicit or explicit, and it may adopt the form of common everyday knowledge, the form of the absence of punishment of certain acts, or the form of certain laws. Thus, in certain moments and circumstances, the driving force is permission, which may be sufficient to trigger tolerated genocidal acts and/or encouraged genocidal acts. This process has more to do with ‘endorsement’ than with simple ‘legitimation’ (see Bloxham, 2008: 203 and fn 3).
We are not arguing that the permission paradigm should replace the obedience paradigm, instead what it is argued is that both paradigms seem to be, at this point, compatible. On the other hand, the permission paradigm should be more consciously and properly developed.
Tolerated, encouraged, and actively pursued genocidal acts
The paradigm of permission recognizes that there is a reality that is not explained when a paradigm of obedience is used exclusively in the analysis of a genocide and that both are, therefore, complementary and necessary when accounting for genocidal processes. Permission as an invitation that can be manifested in various ways, specifically through certain acts that are tolerated towards certain groups, that is, the ‘others’, that would not be tolerated if they were carried out towards the rest of the population. These types of genocidal acts are referred to as tolerated genocidal acts. In Australia, according to Bartra (1987: 241), during the first phases of the genocidal process, it was extremely unusual for Europeans to be ‘charged, let alone committed for trial, for assaulting or killing an aboriginal’. Moreover, before martial law was instituted in November 1828, according to Madley (2004: 174), settlers in Tasmania were practising ‘genocidal tactics’. While the absence of punishment may be well interpreted as authorization, there was nothing inevitable in these genocidal processes given that the undeniable military strength of the state easily could have stopped the violence of the settlers. From another angle, it is also argued that massive deaths caused by disease or famine may be classified as tolerated genocidal acts. For example, we agree with Shaw (2015: 87), who contends that ‘states and armies that fail to halt the spread or alleviate the effects of disease or famine – and certainly those that deliberately take advantage of them – may come to intend the destruction they initially condoned’. This model, however, strongly diverges from Shaw’s (2015: 88) concept of ‘unintentional group destruction’ for obvious reasons (see also: Shaw, 2015: 120–7).
Certain acts towards these ‘others’ may be encouraged, and the permission to engage in these acts may be expressed in the form of incentives, when a ‘group employs sanctions to induce its members to participate in attacks against rivals’ (Bhavnani, 2006: 656–7) – in other words, the genocidal acts are encouraged. In such cases, concrete measures are taken that, with complete certainty, will end in the possible deaths of numerous members of a concrete group. Accordingly, the practices of ethnic cleansing tend to encourage genocidal processes. A clear example is the case of the Herero in Namibia. When, in the middle of a genocidal process, a few survivors are expelled to the Omaheke desert where they cannot survive, although these human beings are not directly killed, the result cannot be anything other than death (Madley, 2004). Another convincing example is the massive number of deaths that resulted from the combination of imperialism, the liberal ideology of non-intervention, the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, and the phenomenon of ‘El Niño’ in colonial India, as studied by Davis (2001). However, we should also consider the encouraged genocidal acts associated with the Tasmanian genocide, beginning in 1828 with the establishment of martial law, when the killing of Indigenous peoples by the colonists, not just the army was legalized. Although it is proposed as an ultimate measure and one to be taken only as a means of self-defence, massacres begin to occur. A few months later, death squads were organized to search for, persecute, hunt and kill human beings (Madley, 2004: 174).
Actively pursued genocidal acts are those in which a central authority directs the operations of the extermination of the others. Such acts occur at some point during most genocidal processes that have been studied. Typically, military forces, police forces, former exiles, ordinary people, ‘informal’ (including ‘death squads’) and ‘semi-official’ pro-government militias (Carey et al., 2012: 251), intellectuals, journalists, politicians and political parties, are organized to commit genocide. The fact that a genocidal process transitions from being characterized as fundamentally tolerated to being encouraged and, finally, to being actively pursued is not an automatic process, nor should it be regarded or understood as a causal sequence. An historical perspective reveals that, in some places and moments within the same genocidal process, genocide is tolerated, while at other times and places, it is encouraged and, finally, at other times and places, it is actively pursued (Ribes, 2019). Thus, these three types of genocidal acts can coexist perfectly well within the same genocidal process; they can succeed one another, and they can assume the form of a genocidal act that may dominate a concrete genocidal process.
The concentration and labour camps that are recurrent in the history of modern genocides represent a combination of encouraged genocidal acts and actively pursued genocidal acts. Obviously, they did not always adopt the aim of annihilating all inmates, although, in practice, they inflicted a death sentence on enormous numbers of human beings as a result of illness, poor diet, excessive work, and continuous abuse and arbitrary attacks by the guards and/or nearby citizens. The line that separates encouragement from active pursuit is extraordinarily thin and is, perhaps, only apparent when extermination camps are established, such as those of the National Socialists, wherein the reduction of the population was no longer accomplished through a form of encouraged passive murder but was designated by a central authority and thus actively pursued.
Civilization, continuity, and ruptures
The paradigm of obedience is strongly linked with the implicit assumption that genocides are something unusual, and therefore, they need to be explained as something completely different from everyday life. The main assumption of the paradigm of permission forces us to soften this rupture.
Recent research on genocidal processes, according to Strauss (2012: 550), ‘normalizes genocides as inherent to regular processes of political development, in particular of state-building, imperialism, and even democracy’. According to previous researchers, genocides were conceived as exceptions that must be explained as radical ruptures in the progression of civilization, modernization, everyday life and everyday dynamics. This theoretical perspective is consistent with the classic narrative of Norbert Elias’s civilization theory, though this goes against all the socio-historical evidence. In this way, modern civilization would be interrupted by regressions to barbarism (Elias, 2000 [1939]) or, in more recent developments of this theoretical corpus, ‘decivilizing’ processes (Fletcher, 1995: 288). Lemkin (1933), at the Madrid Conference of 1933, attempted, at first, to bring international recognition to the crime of barbarism as something that was a departure from civilization and international law. While the concept of genocide, coined by Lemkin (1944) a few years later, was an evolution of the crime of ‘barbarism’, it was still conceived as a ‘regression to barbarism’ (Freeman, 1995: 209).
It is quite problematic to assume that the monopoly of violence by modern states has, in fact, meant a decline in violence (Malesevic, 2013). From the perspective of Elias (2000 [1939]: 445–6), there is a link between the monopoly of violence and pacification that may be extended to a global entity in the future:
We therefore feel in our own time a growing disposition to resolve future interstate conflicts by less dangerous means. But it is quite clear that, in our day, just as earlier, the dynamics of increasing interdependence are impelling the figuration of state societies towards such conflicts, to the formation of monopolies of physical force over larger areas of the Earth and thus, through all the terrors and struggles, towards their pacification.
This ‘pacification’, however, comes as a result of tremendous and massive violence, which Elias acknowledges. It can be said that momentary pacification has come at the price of genocidal violence in several places and at several times. The genocidal processes have usually been led and/or authorized by states that had accomplished or were accomplishing the monopoly of violence. To this end, the international system of sovereign territorial states itself implies the implicit authorization of the states to commit genocide, as Kuper (1982: 161) suggested, or may even be one of the roots of genocide, as Levene (2008 [2005]: 156, 164, 182–202) has recently argued.
Everyday life and civilization
It is even more problematic to consider that genocidal processes constitute an absolute rupture with respect to the development of civilization. From a paradigmatic approach that emphasizes exceptionality and rupture, the main focus is on understanding how individuals, groups, and social institutions, operating in the context of an absence of violence and located within a supposed stream of civilization processes, become genocidal and participate in the massacres of unarmed civilians. De Swaan (2001: 268–9), however, proposes an intermediate approach. Although he accepts that the process of civilization and the monopolization of violence by the state have occurred, he notes that it is possible that these processes are accompanied by a ‘bureaucratization of barbarism’ that operates through compartmentalization. In other words, a specific group of people, as determined by the state, would be subjected to violence that does not extend to the rest of the society nor to normal everyday life, thus creating archipelagos of cruelty. The problem with this model is similar to that of the previous proposal, in that it continues to separate the normal, that is, civil and civilized everyday life, from moments of barbarism, that is, the uncivil. It does this now in a synchronic way rather than in a diachronic manner.
Semelin (2005: 28) suggests that the factors that facilitate or allow genocides exist, albeit latently, in everyday life through the categorization of ‘others’, the search for scapegoats, the sometimes excessive antagonism between social groups, the promotion of the concept of friend/enemy, and the belief that murder constitutes a purifying act. The logic of identity, purity, and security are the keys to Semelin’s formulation, which tends, however, towards a pathologization of genocidal behaviour that, in some ways, obscures our capability to see the complex entanglement between genocidal processes, civilization, and modern everyday life. Thus, Semelin (2005: 84) speaks of a ‘delirious rationality’. All in all, the Semelin’s proposal is clearly of interest. If the goal is to understand how genocidal processes operate, we must explore the development of modern societies, the unfolding of the so-called civilization process, and the usual dynamics of everyday life. Levene (2008 [2005]) and Mann (2005) have addressed continuities between the international system of states and the problems of the fusion of ethnos and demos in the construction of modern states. Bloxham (2008) described how the relationship between central and peripherical authorities within the National Socialist bureaucratic apparatus dealt with the same conflicts as other bureaucratic organizations. Conformity to the central authority and innovation from the margins, including both ideological perpetrators and careerists, and both conformity and anticipatory obedience, were found (see also Mann, 2005).
Genocidal capacity
A number of studies have argued that our idealist image of the working everyday moral order is not precisely accurate. Given that genocides and mass killings are powerful events that can rarely be understood as something morally debatable, we tend to think of them as moral wrongs. This rests, as Kuper (1982: 84) states, in a assumption regarding human nature: ‘The assumption is that massive slaughter of members of one’s own species is repugnant to man, and that ideological legitimation is a necessary pre-condition for genocide.’ Participation in genocides is thus seen as something that requires a suspension of the everyday moral order, a ‘weakening of moral restraints against violence’ (Kelman, 1973: 38), or an exclusion of some group from a ‘state’s universe of obligation’ (Levene, 2008 [2005]: 194) and/or from the dynamics of ‘moral adiaphorization’ (Bauman and Donskis, 2013). However, it must be noted that moral structures may be working in another way. For example, Leach et al. (2013) determined that emotions such as guilt and shame were not always expressed when objective presentations of previous genocides were presented to the descendants of the perpetrators. The more distant the genocide was with respect to time, the greater the presence of these negative emotions. That said, individuals were safe from these negative emotions, as long as they perceived themselves as part of a moral group in the past, in the present, and in the future. That is, if their group is now moral, it could not have been immoral in the past. ‘Moral immemorial’ (Leach et al., 2013: 50) thus obscures the very basic analysis of previous genocides.
Violence is not always seen as something negative, especially when one is part of the group that has committed the violence. Hence, violence is either denied or justified, or perhaps even invisible to many citizens. The invisibility of violence, which is obviously related to the mechanisms of collective denial (Moshman, 2007: 126–30) and the understanding of state-sanctioned legitimate violence as reactive and legitimate (Schinkel, 2013: 318), is undoubtedly a central element in enabling genocide and massacres to occur. However, in the everyday life of modern societies, there are enormous episodes of violence to which individuals attend without being disturbed. Scheper-Hughes (2002: 369) referred to this through the concept of the ‘genocide continuum’, and recognized a ‘genocidal capacity’ in humans, which may be reinforced, in some places, by a necropolitical social order (Mbembe, 2003), and also, since the last decade of the 20th century, by the complex dynamics between minorities and majorities and the salience of terrorism in the global age (Appadurai, 2006: 32). The moral structure of modern societies includes three crucial elements that, when radicalized, serve as the building blocks for genocidal processes, namely: the categorization and construction of ‘others’; the construction, legitimization, and assumption of the weakness of certain individuals and groups; and the construction of the superfluity of certain individuals. These three processes intersect strongly with inequality (see Besançon, 2005: 408–9). Being considered an ‘other’ is to be considered unequal and perhaps, as Levene (2008 [2005]: 199) says, is to be considered ‘as somebody else’s’ foreign body. Labelling someone or a group of people as weak inherently assumes they are unequal, and thus they do not receive an even distribution of resources, capital, and strength. This is obviously reinforced in modern societies wherein the state holds the monopoly of violence, and it is also reinforced by specific socio-historical and cultural dynamics of exclusion and domination in every different case (see for example the case of racial/ethnic minorities in US; Steinmetz et al., 2017). Being considered superfluous is to be considered unequal, supposes an assumed inequality, and specifically means accepting that human beings are not ends in themselves but are means to achieve particular purposes, whether economic, moral, or political.
Categorization, weakness, and superfluity
An everyday life dynamic which may become problematic
The categorization of human beings is a common phenomenon that operates as a key element in the dynamics of everyday life. Definitions and classifications ‘are inescapable parts of human cognition and social life’ (Shaw, 2015: 3). The creation of categories of individuals and their groupings is an element consubstantial with modern social life (Appadurai, 2006: 41–2), and is also one of the core elements that explains how genocide and its processes develop. Modern science contributes to the essentialization of differentiation, which then legitimizes, in a final step, slavery, exploitation, and genocide (Hinton, 2002). There is no doubt, however, that, from a sociological perspective, the creation of these categorical groups is always arbitrary and changing. Shaw (2015: 22) states, ‘we should acknowledge, moreover, that the classes, kinds or sorts of people against whom genocide is targeted are defined by variable, often fantastical world-views’. Furthermore, in the genocidal process ‘the targeted group is the product of the perpetrator’s assemblage of social reality’ (Levene, 2008 [2005]: 88) and the perpetrators establish/construct the limits of the targeted group.
Even if we agree with Appadurai (2006: 47) when he writes that ‘violence, at the national level, requires minorities’, categorization and the ‘production of minorities’ do not equate to dehumanization. In order to be dehumanized, however, a group must be categorized. Kuper (1982: 86–8) considers that, for genocide to be possible, it is necessary to have an ideological process that legitimizes dehumanization and thus basically supposes the exclusion of the targeted community, the denial of a common humanity, the denial of individual significance, and the categorization of certain individuals. Indeed, dehumanization is one of the processes that is usually present in the analysis and explanation of genocide and its processes (Finkel and Strauss, 2012: 57; Kelman, 1973: 48–52; Kuper, 1982: 84–100; Semelin, 2005: 394–7, 464).
Even if categorization is always present, to a certain degree, in everyday life, and even if Appadurai’s (2006: 52–3) ‘anxiety of incompleteness’ dangerously means that ‘small numbers represent a tiny obstacle between majority and totality or total purity’, the process of dehumanization does not need to be pre-established or accepted before a genocidal process can erupt. Browning (2001 [1992]) recounts the process by which the soldiers of Battalion 101, who were ordinary citizens, became murderers simply through their participation in the massacres. Semelin qualifies Browning’s proposal by including and emphasizing the ideological elements of initiation, namely, the imagery of death and otherness, along with the group dynamics, including both obedience and group pressure, and the very act of habituation to genocide. Fundamentally, it emphasizes the procedural nature of the genocides, interpreting them as genocidal processes in which the step to the act is forged and the acts are carried out while the perpetrators participate in collective massacres (Semelin, 2005: 385, 394). Thus, according to Semelin, individuals become perpetrators as they participate in collective massacres, and they do so as a result of the establishment of an increasing psychological distance, either through drugs or ideological means, from the victims. Along these same lines, we consider Luft’s proposal (2015), which claims that the dehumanization of the victims occurs during the course of the genocidal process. Accordingly, the processes of the categorization of human beings, then, are also a part of everyday life and, in certain circumstances, these processes can become the tools for the realization of genocide. Hence, the problem lies in what other factors are related to the dynamics of categorization rather than in the later dehumanization that occurs throughout the genocidal process. Thus, the essentialization of these groups, the attribution of joint qualities, the acceptance of inequality, the acceptance of social hierarchies, and the acceptance of unlimited competition are all factors that stimulate the depth of the categorization processes and allow for the development of more rigid and impermeable social categories. The concept of social life as an endless struggle, that involves a war of all against all, either within the same society or against other societies, promotes the reinforcing of social limits as well as the differentiation and essentialization of social groups. These processes then lead to the growth of weakness and the construction of superfluity.
Unable to defend themselves
Horkheimer and Adorno (2006 [1944]: 155) note that one of the crucial elements in understanding the Holocaust was the weakness of the Jews, that is, their inability to defend themselves. Kelman (1973: 32) observed that ‘the targets of massacres belong to groups that are physically weaker than their victims’. In her very definition of genocide, Fein includes the one-sided dimension of the acts of violence and the killings, as do Dadrian (1975: 204), Chalk and Jonassohn (1990: 23), and Semelin (2005: 511). Fein (1990: 24) argues that genocide is understood as a process that is ‘sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victims’, while Shaw (2015: 49, 132) purports that genocide is qualitatively asymmetrical. Appadurai (2006), as well as Mann (2005), suggested that this supposed threat is related to the idea of the boundaries of the ‘people’ (the disturbing consequences of ‘we, the people’), and to the idea of the incompleteness of the social body.
Similar to Fein, Collins (2008: 134–90) understands weakness as a crucial element that facilitates violence in social situations of everyday life (see also Klusemann, 2010), whereas Emcke (2017: 83) stresses the crucial importance of weakness with respect to being a victim of violence within the context of contemporary hate. Sartre (1968: 38) explains that genocidal massacres were avoided, to a large extent, during the First World War because the forces were balanced among the industrialized nations. However, during the European colonial expansion after 1830, the European powers operated under a logic of ‘perpetual massacres’, which, from our understanding, can be understood as the processes of weakening others such that they lead, in some places and at some points of times, to genocidal processes, whether they be tolerated, encouraged or actively pursued. In the theoretical model of Mann (2005: 6), weakness occupies an essential space. Finally, Strauss (2012: 553) emphasizes that ‘at the time of the violence targeted groups are highly vulnerable to the violence – they are subordinate’. Accordingly, there appears to be consensus that weakness is one of the determining factors of genocide.
It is important to note, however, that weakness is a socially manufactured condition and is not, therefore, an essence. Some social groups are weaker than others because they have been marginalized, ‘isolated within society’ (Gerlach, 2010: 274) and dispossessed of their strength through processes that can last for decades. The Armenians walked towards the desert, and the Hereros were dispossessed of their lands and defeated by arms. The Jews, the communists, and the Roma who were cornered by the National Socialist regime were seen as weak and incapable of defending themselves because they were in the final stage of a process that had been operating for many years, that is, a process that had, over time, transformed them into what they had become at that particular tragic moment in history. The weakness, then, is understood as a process that requires a political design, cooperation from a state, or permission granted by central authorities who either do not intervene to redistribute power and provide access to defence or who may intervene in the process of creating a weakened group and may also generate permitted spaces, that is, tolerate and encourage the existence of spaces where the rights of the targeted group are not defended, where violence can be inflicted on this group with absolute impunity, and where their dignity is not defended.
The effective and perceived weakness of the targeted group, from the point of view of the perpetrators, is an essential ingredient in genocidal processes. However, this weakness is accompanied, paradoxically, by the supposed threat that the group defined by the perpetrators presents (Levene, 2008 [2005]: 199–202), as they are seen, sometimes, as a menacing part of a much bigger whole which awaits outside the national walls (Appadurai, 2006; Levene, 2008 [2005]). However, the group attacked is not even capable of counteracting the hate speech and the its own criminalization by the attackers.
Constructed weakness is, therefore, a dangerous result of a process. Even more horrifying is the construction of the superfluity of individuals and human groups. This is usually the last step before intense and full-fledged genocidal activity. A serious and fundamental problem exists in the normalized assumption that there are superfluous individuals and groups who are nothing but surplus in liquid modernity and are regarded as human waste (Bauman, 2004) and that there are even entire disconnected regions (Castells, 1996) of such human waste. The inability to produce, to work, to contribute something to society, whether real or perceived, is punished in modern societies in various ways. Thus, superfluity appears at the end of the processes which then lead to genocidal extermination, and appears as a part always present in the landscape of modern everyday life. It even appears to be linked with ‘exterminist’ motivations in our contemporary imagination of future societies (see Frase, 2016).
Whenever some groups of people are labelled as unnecessary
Sartre (1968: 38–9) understood that whenever a society needs the work of certain groups of individuals, restrictions are established regarding the possibility of genocide, given that the colonizers need the work of the colonized. Obviously, there could be violence and genocidal massacres, but not full genocide. This same idea is central to Kuper’s work (1982: 207), who explains the absence of complete genocides in Northern Ireland and, above all, in South Africa based on this premise. From this perspective, for genocide to arise, it is necessary to understand that the ‘others’ are perceived by the perpetrators as unnecessary and superfluous from an ideological point of view and that those ‘others’ are seen by the perpetrators as unnecessary and superfluous from a basic materialist perspective. Genocide seeks to eliminate social relations with the other, and to end any possible conversations and interactions. It is, indeed, the very negation both of humanity and social interactions. It is the application of pure divine violence. In Benjamin’s (2010 [1921]: 296–7) terms, genocide could be seen as a violence that destroys the law and does not found it, that destroys the limits and does not generate new limits, and that constitutes a purifying, fulminating, and redeeming violence. A genocide implies that, from the perpetrator’s perspective, there is no way to establish even the most odious relationship with respect to the others.
Conclusion
As genocidal processes cannot be explained exclusively by the paradigm of obedience, a full and self-conscious development of a paradigm of permission may be necessary in order to gain a more comprehensive knowledge of genocidal processes. Analysing genocidal processes from both paradigms leads us to identify tolerated genocidal acts, encouraged genocidal acts, and actively pursued genocidal acts. The difficulty in the development of a paradigm of permission is that it makes it impossible to maintain the implicit or explicit model of the rupture of civilization, of moral order, and of social logic of everyday life when we try to understand genocidal processes. Hence, it is necessary to consider the continuities. The idea of rupture can hardly explain the persistence of genocidal processes throughout modernity. For this reason, it is probably necessary to conduct a more in-depth analysis of the continuities throughout at least the last two centuries, and continuities between the moments in which the genocidal processes take place and the moments when they do not take place; continuities in the processes of civilization and genocidal processes; continuities with respect to the fundamental role of the monopoly of violence by the states; and continuities, also, in the underlying logic of everyday life in modernity, in moral order, in the categorization of human groups, in the construction and acceptance of the weakness of human groups, and in the construction and acceptance of the characterization of groups of human beings as superfluous. While raising these issues and providing some light on some of these processes has been the goal of this paper, it certainly does not end the debate, but rather, it raises many questions that may bring us closer to the possibility of understanding the genocidal processes.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
