IN 1988 AUSTRALIA CELEBRATED ITS two-hundredth anniversary. The modern nation of Australia had begun as a colony fifteen thousand miles from the home country of England. Many of the colonists were convicts sent on the eight-month voyage to Australia as punishment. They had no idea what to expect or how to survive in their new home. Two and a half years of near starvation would pass before a supply fleet arrived. Despite these grim beginnings, the settlers survived, prospered, and built a democracy. It’s no wonder Australians felt pride as they celebrated their nation’s founding.
Yet protests marred the celebrations. The white settlers were not the first Australians. Fifty thousand years earlier, the continent had been settled by the ancestors of the dark-skinned people usually called Aborigines, also known in Australia as blacks. In the course of English settlement, most of these original inhabitants were killed or died of disease. For this reason some of their modern descendants staged protests, not celebrations, to mark the two-hundredth year since the white settlers arrived. Why did Australia stop being black, and how did the courageous English settlers come to commit the crime we call genocide, a deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people?
Genocide: A Human Invention?
The white settlers in Australia were not the only ones to commit the horrendous offense of genocide. Instead, it has happened more frequently than most people realize. When they hear the term genocide, many think of Nazi Germany in the mid-twentieth century, when mass killings of Jews and other minorities took place in concentration camps during World War II. But those killings were not even the largest genocide of that century.
Hundreds of groups have been targets of successful extermination campaigns. Numerous groups scattered throughout the world are potential targets for the near future. Yet genocide is such a painful subject that we’d rather not think about it at all, or else we’d like to believe that nice people don’t commit genocide—only Nazis do. But our refusal to think about genocide has serious consequences. We’ve done little to halt the many genocides since World War II, and we’re not alert to where one might happen next.
Basic questions about genocide remain in dispute. Do any animals routinely kill large numbers of their own species, or is that a human invention? Has genocide been rare throughout human history, or has it been common enough to rank as a human hallmark, along with art and language? is genocide becoming more common, because modern weapons allow push-button slaughter at a distance, reducing our instinctive reluctance to kill? Finally, are genocidal killers abnormal individuals, or are they normal people placed in unusual situations?
Before we search for answers to these questions, it is useful to look at a case study: the extermination of the Tasmanians.
Tasmania is a mountainous island about the size of Ireland. It lies a hundred and fifty miles off Australia’s southeast coast. When Europeans discovered Tasmania in 1642, the island was home to about five thousand hunter-gatherers.
These Tasmanians were related to the Aborigines of Australia. Their technology might have been the simplest of that of any modern people. They made only a few simple stone and wooden tools. Unlike the Aborigines, Tasmanians did not have boomerangs, dogs, nets, sewing, or the ability to start a fire. Unable to make long sea journeys, they had had no contact with other people since rising sea levels separated Tasmania and Australia ten thousand years ago. When the white colonists of Australia finally ended that isolation, no two peoples on earth were less equipped to understand each other than Tasmanians and whites.
The tragic collision of these two peoples led to conflict almost as soon as British seal hunters and settlers arrived around 1800. Whites kidnapped Tasmanian women and children, killed men, trespassed on hunting grounds, and tried to clear Tasmanians off their land. By 1830 the native population of northeast Tasmania was reduced to seventy-two men, three women, and no children. In one example of violence, four white shepherds ambushed a group of natives, killed thirty people, and threw their bodies over a cliff that some Australians today call Victory Hill.
Naturally, Tasmanians fought back, and whites fought even harder in turn. The white governor tried to end the violence by ordering all Tasmanians to leave the parts of their island where whites had settled. Soldiers were authorized to kill any natives in the settled areas. A missionary rounded up the surviving Tasmanians and moved them to a small nearby island. Many Tasmanians died, but about two hundred of them, the last survivors of the former population of five thousand, reached Flinders Island. The settlement there was run like a jail, and its occupants suffered from malnutrition and illness. By 1869 only three remained alive. The last full Tasmanian, a woman named Truganini, died in 1876, although a few children of Tasmanian women by white fathers survived.
The Tasmanians were few in number, but their extermination was important in Australian history. Tasmania was the first Australian colony to solve its “native problem.” Many whites on the Australian mainland wanted to imitate the Tasmanian solution, but they also learned a lesson from it. Because the Tasmanian genocide was carried out in full view of the urban press, it drew negative comments. The extermination of the much more numerous mainland Aborigines would occur on the frontier, far from urban centers.
The shooting and poisoning of Australian Aborigines continued long into the twentieth century. in 1928, for example, police massacred thirty-one Aborigines at Alice Springs. The mainland Aborigines were too numerous to exterminate completely, as had been done with the Tasmanians. But from the arrival of British colonists in 1788 to the census of 1921, the Aboriginal population fell from about three hundred thousand to sixty thousand.
Today, white Australians’ attitudes toward their murderous past vary widely. Government policy and many people’s private views have become more sympathetic to the Aborigines. Other whites, however, deny responsibility for the genocide.
A LETTER WRITER DENIES GENOCIDE
IN 1982 THE BULLETIN, ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S leading newspapers, printed a letter that shows how some Australian whites could energetically deny that genocide ever took place in their country. Patricia Cobern, the woman who wrote the letter, claimed that the peace-loving, moral settlers ofTasmania had not exterminated the treacherous, murderous, warlike, filthy native people. The Tasmanians had died out because of their bad health practices, such as never bathing, and also because they had a death wish and lacked religious beliefs. It was just a coincidence, Cobern implied, that after thousands of years of existence, they happened to die out during a conflict with the white settlers. The only massacres were of settlers by Tasmanians, never the other way around. Besides, according to Cobern, the settlers armed themselves only in self-defense, were unfamiliar with guns, and never shot more than forty-one Tasmanians at one time.
Mass killings that can be considered genocides have occurred in many time periods and parts of the world. How exactly do we define genocide? it means “group killing.” victims are selected because they belong to a particular group, whether or not an individual victim has done something that might cause him or her to be killed. Groups have become targets of genocide because of:
* Race: One example is the killing of darkskinned Tasmanians by white Australians.
* Nationality: In 1940, during World War II, Russians massacred Polish officers in the Katyn Forest.
* Ethnic differences: The Tutsi and Hutu, two black African peoples, slaughtered each other in the nations of Burundi and Rwanda in the 1970s and 1990s.
* Religion: Christians and Muslims, for example, have killed each other in the Middle Eastern nation of Lebanon and elsewhere.
* Politics: During the 1970s, the Khmer Rouge Party of Cambodia killed thousands of Cambodians.
Must killings be carried out by governments to be considered genocide, or do private acts also count? There is no clear answer. Some genocides have been well planned and entirely official, such as the killing of Jews, Gypsies, and other groups by the Nazi Party in Germany. Others have been private killings, as when land developers in Brazil hire professional hunters to exterminate native people. Many genocides involve both official and private killings. American indians, for example, were killed by private citizens and the U.S. Army alike.
Another question concerns the cause of death. If people die in large numbers because ofheartless actions that were not specifically designed to kill them, does that count as genocide? In another example from American history, President Andrew Jackson forced the Choctaw, Cherokee, and Creek indians of the southeastern United States to move west of the Mississippi in the 1830s. Jackson did not deliberately plan for many indians to die on the way because of lack of supplies and bitter winter weather, but he did not take the steps needed to keep them alive.
What reasons or motives lie behind genocidal killings? There are four types of motives, although some killings may be driven by more than one motive.
The most common motive may arise when a militarily stronger people tries to occupy the land of a weaker people, who resist. Examples include the extermination of the Tasmanians and Australian Aborigines, the American Indians, and the Araucanian people of Argentina.
Another common motive involves a long power struggle within a society that includes different groups. One group seeks a final end to the struggle by eliminating the other group. This was the case with history’s largest known genocide: the killing of political opponents by the government of the Soviet Union, a former nation made up of Russia and a number of neighboring countries. The Soviet government killed sixty-six million of its own citizens between 1917 and 1959. An estimated twenty million died in a single ten-year period starting in 1929.
Those first two motives for genocide involve land and power. The third motive is scapegoating, in which members of a helpless minority are killed because they are blamed for the frustrations and fears of their killers. Jews were killed by fourteenth-century Christians as scapegoats for the bubonic plague. They were targeted again by Nazis during World War II as scapegoats for Germany’s defeat in World War I.
Scapegoat killings may also involve the fourth type of genocide: racial or religious persecution. The Nazis’ extermination of Jews and Gypsies was based in part on twisted ideas of “racial purity,” while the list of religious massacres is long. Christian crusaders massacred the Muslims and Jews of Jerusalem in 1099, for example, and French Catholics massacred French Protestants in 1572. Racial and religious motives often contribute to genocides based on land and power struggles as well as those involving scapegoating.
Murder and War in the Animal World
Is man the only animal that kills members of his own species? Many writers and some scientists have thought so. The famed twentieth-century biologist Konrad Lorenz argued that animals’ aggressive urges are held in check by instincts, or built-in behaviors, that keep them from murder. This balance became upset in human history when we invented weapons, because our instincts were no longer strong enough to hold back our new powers of killing.
But studies in recent years have documented murder in many, though certainly not all, animal species. Massacre of a neighboring individual or troop may benefit an animal, if the killer can then take over the neighbor’s territory, food, or females. Attacks, however, also involve risk to the attacker, who might be injured or even killed. Looking at the potential costs and benefits of murder may explain why some species, but not others, kill their own.
Animals of nonsocial species are solitary. Murders in these species involve just one individual killing another. But in social species—such as lions, wolves, hyenas, and ants—murder may take the form of coordinated group attacks. Members of one troop attack a neighboring troop in a mass killing, or “war.” The form of war varies among species. Attackers may drive off males, or kill them, sparing the females to mate with them. Sometimes, as with wolves, both males and females may be killed.
In seeking to understand the origins of genocide, we are especially interested in the behavior of our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas. Until the 1970s any biologist would have thought that humans’ ability to use tools and plan together in groups made us far more murderous than apes—if apes were murderous at all. Discoveries since that time, however, suggest that a gorilla or chimpanzee is as likely as the average human to be murdered.
Among gorillas, males fight each other over harems of females, and the winner may kill the loser’s infants as well as the loser himself. Such fighting is a major cause of death for infant and adult male gorillas. The typical gorilla mother loses at least one infant to a murderous male in the course of her life, and 38 percent of infant gorilla deaths are due to infanticide, or the murder of infants.
Chimpanzees are now known to commit murder and wage war. Jane Goodall, a pioneer in studying wild African chimpanzees, documented in detail the extermination of one band of chimps by another between 1974 and 1977. Groups of attackers, including some females, several times traveled into a neighboring troop’s territory and ganged up on individual members of that troop. At least one female in the victim troop was killed along with several males. Other females were forced to join the attackers’ troop. Similar long-term conflicts between groups have been observed for other troops of common chimpanzees, but none for bonobos.
Genocidal chimps appear to show signs of deliberate intention and basic planning— sneaking quickly, quietly, and nervously into another troop’s territory, waiting in trees, and then swiftly attacking an “enemy” chimp. Chimpanzees also share with us the trait of xenophobia. They recognize members of other bands as different from their own band, and treat them very differently.
Of all our human hallmarks—art, spoken language, drug use, and more—genocide may be the one that comes to us most directly from our animal ancestors. Common chimps carry out planned killings, exterminations of neighboring bands, wars of territorial conquest, and kidnappings of females. This behavior suggests that one major reason for our human hallmark of group living was defense against other human groups, especially once we had acquired weapons and a large enough brain to plan ambushes. We may have been our own prey, and also the predator that forced us into group living.
A History of Genocide
Even if humans are not unique among animals in our murderous ways, could our murderous ways be a sick product of modern civilization? Some modern writers, disgusted by the destruction of “primitive” societies by “advanced” societies, think that hunter-gatherer or premodern societies are the human ideal. They paint a picture of people in such societies as peace-loving “noble savages” who, at worst, commit only isolated murders, not massacres.
Certainly some premodern societies seem less warlike than others. But when we look at early written history, records show that genocide occurred frequently. The wars of the Greeks and Trojans, the Romans and the people of the African colony of Carthage, and the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians ended with the slaughter of the defeated group, or perhaps with the killing of the men and the enslavement of the women. Most people know the biblical story of how the walls of Jericho came tumbling down at the sound of Joshua’s trumpet. Not everyone remembers what happened next. Joshua obeyed the Lord’s command to slaughter the inhabitants of Jericho and a number of other cities as well.
We find similar episodes in records of the wars of the crusaders, the Pacific islanders, and many other groups. Slaughter has not always followed defeat in war, of course. But it has happened often enough that it must be seen as more than a rare exception in our view of human nature. Between 1950 and the early 1990s alone, the world saw almost twenty episodes of genocide. Two of them claimed more than a million victims (Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in the late 1970s). Four others had more than 100,000 victims each. in 1994, for example, more than 800,000 people were killed in genocidal massacres in Rwanda. Genocidal warfare in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo has led to the deaths of at least 2.5 million people since 1998.
Genocide appears to have been part of our prehuman and human heritage for millions of years. in this long history, is there something different about modern genocides? There is no doubt that Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler of Germany set new records for the number of victims. They had three advantages over killers of earlier centuries: denser population centers, improved communications for rounding up victims, and improved technology for mass killing.
A child gazes at photographs in Cambodia’s Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide. Housed in a building that was first a school, then a prison and torture center, the museum commemorates the lives lost in the 1970s during the Cambodian genocide.
It’s harder to say whether technology makes genocide psychologically easier today. Biologist Konrad Lorenz argued that it does. He reasoned that as we evolved from apes, we depended more and more on cooperation between individuals. Societies could not survive unless humans developed strong inhibitions, or instinctive feelings, against killing other humans. Throughout most of our history, our weapons killed at close range, but modern push-button weapons have bypassed our inhibitions by letting us kill from a distance, without seeing our victims’ faces. This has made it easier for us to stomach mass killings.
I’m uncertain about whether this psychological argument explains modern genocides. The past seems to have had just as frequent genocides as the present, even if the number of victims was smaller. To understand genocides further, we must consider the ethics—what we consider to be the rules of right and wrong—of killing.
Ethical Codes—and Why We Break Them
Our urge to kill is almost always held back by our ethics, our understanding that something (in this case, murder) is wrong, or immoral. The puzzle is: What unleashes the urge to kill?
One key is that we evolved to think in terms of “us” and “them.” Like chimpanzees, gorillas, and social carnivores such as lions and wolves, early humans lived in bands, each with its own territory. The world was smaller and simpler then. Every “us” knew only a few types of “them,” our immediate neighbors. That remained true for some human groups into modern times.
In New Guinea, for example, each tribe kept up a shifting network of alliance and war with its closest neighbors. A person might enter the next valley on a friendly visit (never completely without danger) or on a war raid, but there was little chance of being able to travel through a series of several valleys in friendship. The powerful rules about treatment of one’s fellow “us” did not apply to “them,” those dimly understood, neighboring enemies.
As the world grew larger and more complex for some societies, this tribal territorialism remained. Writings from ancient Greece show that the Greeks saw themselves as “us” and everyone else as “them.” The ideal was not to treat all people equally, but to reward one’s friends and punish one’s enemies. Just like hyena bands or chimpanzee troops, human groups practiced a double standard of behavior. There were strong inhibitions about killing one of “us,” but a green light to kill “them” when it was safe to do so.
Over time, this ancient double standard has become less acceptable as an ethical code. There has been a tendency toward a more universal code of behavior—one that calls for treating people more equally, toward having similar rules for interacting with different peoples. Genocide conflicts directly with a universal ethical code. So how do people who commit genocide wiggle out of the conflict between their actions and the universal code of ethics that has come to be the modern ideal? Simple. They blame the victim, using one or more of three justifications.
First, most believers in a universal ethical code still believe it is all right to defend themselves. This is useful because “they” can usually be tricked or driven into some behavior that calls for “our” self-defense. Even Hitler claimed self-defense when he started World War II. He went to the trouble of faking a Polish attack on a German border post.
Second, having the “right” religion or race or political belief, or claiming to represent progress or a higher level of civilization, is a traditional justification for doing anything, including genocide, to people on the “wrong” side or with the “wrong” belief.
Finally, our ethical codes regard humans and animals differently. Those who commit genocide in the modern world routinely compare their victims to animals in order to justify the killings. Nazis considered Jews to be subhuman lice. French settlers in Algeria called the local Muslims rats. Boers (white descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa) referred to black Africans as baboons.
Americans have used all three of these excuses to justify their treatment of the American Indian. Because we claim to believe in a universal code of ethics, our traditional attitudes and stories about the genocide say that whites killed Indians in selfdefense, that white civilization was superior and destined to keep advancing across the land, and that the victims were savage animals.
Ishi, who died in 1916, was the sole survivor of an American genocide—the extermination of his people, the Yahi Indians.
ON AUGUST 29, 1911, A STARVING, TERRIFIED Indian named Ishi emerged from a remote canyon in Northern California, where he had been hiding for forty-one years. Ishi was the last survivor of a genocide—the extermination of his people, the Yahi tribe.
Most of the Yahis were massacred by settlers between 1853 and 1870. Sixteen people survived the final massacre in 1870. They went into hiding in the Mount Lassen wilderness and continued to live as hunter-gatherers. By 1908 their number had dwindled to four. That year, surveyors stumbled on their camp and took all their tools, clothes, and winter food supply. As a result, three ofthe Yahis— Ishi’s mother, his sister, and an old man—died. Ishi remained alone for three more years until he could stand it no longer. He walked out to white civilization, expecting to be killed. Instead, he was employed by the University of California Museum in San Francisco. He died of tuberculosis in 1916.
Ishi was not just the last member of the Yahi people. He was also known as the last “wild” Indian in the United States. Fifteen years after his death, the white killers of his tribe were still publishing their accounts of the genocide. Today, however, Ishi is remembered as a survivor who, after joining white society, shared his story and his knowledge of Indian language and crafts.
What genocides can we expect from Homo sapiens in the future? Plenty of trouble spots in the world seem ripe for genocide. Modern weapons permit one person to kill ever larger numbers of victims, far from the battlefield. It is even imaginable that someone could commit universal genocide, killing the entire human race.
At the same time, I see reasons to hope that the future may not be as murderous as the past. In many countries today, people of different races or religions or ethnic groups live together, with varying degrees of social justice but at least without open mass murder. Some genocides have been interrupted, reduced, or prevented by third parties who intervened to keep the peace.
Another hopeful sign is that travel, TV, photography, and the Internet let us see people who live ten thousand miles away as human, like us. Technology is blurring the line between “us” and “them” that makes genocide possible. While genocide was considered acceptable or even admirable in the world before first contact, the modern spread of international culture and our knowledge about distant peoples make genocide ever harder to justify.
But the potential for genocide lies within all of us. As world population grows, conflicts between societies and within them will sharpen. Humans will have more urge to kill one another, and better weapons with which to do it. To listen to stories of genocide is unbearably painful. But if we turn away and do not try to understand this destructive part of human nature, when will it be our turn to become the killers, or the victims?
