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Terror in the Age of Genocide
Apr 1, 2010 – By Barry Zellen
Genocide has long been something of a taboo subject, marked
by an indelible Manichean boundary that separates those who perpetrate it
(the evil ones) from those who try to stop it (the forces of good in the
world.) The terminology that infused genocide discussions in the 1990s as
this darkest of human endeavors erupted across the fratricidal Balkan
peninsula oddly resembles that applied to the terrorism discourse post 9/11:
you’re either with us, or with the terrorists.
Indeed, until mass terror ripped a hole in the fabric of our
domestic tranquility, doing unto us what we have long done to others
during struggles that we perceived to be just causes and against
those whom we believed in our hearts were inherently evil (much as the 9/11
attackers viewed us); this was precisely how we described the Serbian ethnic
cleansers who attacked unarmed Bosniak and Croat populations with such
cruelty that it turned many a humanitarian from dove to a hawk, and created a
new cottage industry of genocide experts that mirrored the proliferation of
terrorism and homeland security experts after 9/11. That two traumatic
political events a decade apart spawned the formation of parallel,
passionate, and partisan academic and policy-analytical subfields eager not
only to probe deeper truth but to induce bolder policy action would share the
same “us vs. them” language is not surprising. Indeed, we can
learn from the parallelism, and the persistence of historical myopia when
assessing the paramount “evil” of any era, that is revealed time
and again.
That our age is preoccupied with terrorism, perhaps the
least menacing of all the threats that can harm a society, while a generation
earlier the preoccupation was with genocide, one of the most menacing of
threats that can harm a society, does not undermine the parallelism; indeed,
terrorism and genocide are birds of a feather. Genocide may be viewed from a
theoretical perspective as terrorism on a grander scale, where instead of
selectively striking civilian targets with limited political violence, the
perpetrator inflicts political violence on a mass scale, either to
obliterate, decimate, or forcibly relocate an entire population.
Terrorism is the genocide of the weak, and not, as Mao had
thought, the first step on the road to guerrilla warfare (which was itself
only the second step on the road to conventional warfare.) Once a terrorist
carves out a proper sanctuary, whether it was PLO-ruled Lebanon or Al Qaeda
central in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the worry is not that the empowered
terrorist will levy a guerrilla army and engage in a war of maneuver against
a state opponent, but rather that he will instead migrate from localized
forms of terror to mass terror, in the hopes of obliterating, decimating, or
forcibly relocating his sacred enemy on a biblical scale of destruction.
Genocide may thus be viewed either as a “weapon of mass
migration” (WMM) as described by Kelly M. Greenhill in her forthcoming
book on this topic, or as a “weapon of civil destruction” (WCD),
the people’s war counterpart to a “weapon of mass
destruction” (WMD) unleashed by a nuclear, radiological, biological,
chemical, or otherwise improvised countervalue weapons system.
Ironically, while opponents of genocide as well as
proponents of bold American action to stop genocides from being perpetrated
believe America should use its military power toward this end, American
history is full of examples of American military power being used as WMMs,
WCDs, and, at the end of World War II, WMDs, after which the bipolar
international order was sustained by a balance of terror created by the
mutual threat of massive WMD strikes upon the homelands and allied
territories of the two superpowers, the well-named delicate “balance of
terror” which promised not the threat of conventional war or even total
war, but rather that of mass terror.
Continuity in the Age of Mass Terror
While 9/11 marked the official starting point of the Age of
Mass Terror, the continuity of our time with prior eras and their recurrence
of forced mass migration (the hallmark of America’s own policies of
ethnic cleansing that stripped America of indigenous sovereignty), wanton
mass civil destruction (a hallmark of the total war era that was warmly
embraced by the architects of America’s civil war strategy), and
ultimately mass destruction itself (as the civil populations of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, who were spared the agony of Curtis LeMay’s saturation
fire-bombing, would experience when incinerated in their fiery atomic
sacrifice to the emergent world order) should not be overlooked. Terrorism,
on a mass scale, is merely a weak power, or a non-state actor, joining this
very lethal club that wages war against a people, one where America has
earned premium status as an innovator in all known categories of mass
mayhem.
This past September, I read a compelling article by
Chase Madar in The American Conservative that bravely challenged
Obama’s top genocide policy advisor, Samantha Power, for her historic
myopia, appropriately titled “Care Tactics: Samantha Power and the
weaponization of human rights.” Madar illuminates a pattern of
historical amnesia that riddles Power’s rambling, but ultimately
Pulitzer prize-winning, tome, A ‘Problem from Hell’: America
in the Age of Genocide. When I bought my copy many years ago, it was in
the overstock bin at the Harvard Bookstore, marked down to a very humbled
$3.99 per copy and looked destined for Buck-a-Book. But politics being what
it is, this rambling, historically myopic work of sub-par journalism by one
of the Balkan War’s least known writers – whom I first met
when she was a young stringer in Zagreb hustling
copy to the Boston Globe for twenty-five cents a word in 1994, and
who even then seemed less interested in objective journalism and more in
partisan politicizing – went on to win the coveted Pulitzer,
and Power’s been able to ride the genocide-gravy train ever since to
celebrity, even demeaning this darkest of human tragedies by referring to
herself, without a hint of discretion to the millions murdered in
history’s darkest moments, as the so-called “genocide
chick,” as if trying to make annihilatory acts of mass civil
destruction somehow sound sexy, just as she tried to portray the use of
American power to stop such acts a moral compulsion (much like a decade
later, the architects of the War on Terror, would deem a muscular military
response to the largely symbolic strikes of 9/11 as a necessity, when perhaps
a more calibrated, and subtle, reaction would have proven more
effective.)
That the “genocide chick” – who would
first embrace the almost comedic campaign of Wesley Clark for the democratic
nomination in the 2004 presidential campaign, thinking she had found her
prince; and who later worked closely with then-Senator Obama on his second
book, hoping to become his muse – would masterfully ride Obama-mania to
power (until imploding in her own private war against Hillary Clinton near
the end of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign), comes as no surprise.
She has nonetheless found the perfect, historically-myopic president to
serve, one who wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons (and not of evil
itself, as our last president boldly sought), and in so doing, restrain
America from doing what it does best – fighting blunt but effective
total wars against truly nasty opponents – by emasculating the American
nuclear arsenal, so much so that we may ultimately become vulnerable to
external strategic attack and lack an assured means to prevail in a global
conflict of the sort that we saw break out twice in the last century, and
which seem to take place whenever a stable imperial order enters into an
irrecoverable decline, as happened at the end of the era of British naval
supremacy, which rapidly eroded on the eve of World War I, and which two
millennia earlier left the world in chaos from Egypt to Afghanistan when
Alexander’s empire imploded, and a millennium after that, when Roman
authority collapsed, resulting in another thousand years of political
chaos.
America and the Age of Genocide: A Second
Look
Power’s many examples of historical neglect in A
Problem from Hell troubled me as I read it, and the uncritical, adoring
response to her work by media and pundits (and now a President intent on
emasculating America’s military might) was even more confusing to watch
as her work was rescued from overstock bins with its surprise Pulitzer
victory. After all, America had modernized genocide, made it national policy,
and through its ruthless centuries of Indian removal, concentration, and
annihilatory warfare policies, ethnically cleansed or exterminated millions
of indigenous, and once proudly sovereign, peoples—violating
Britain’s sacred pledge to respect indigenous sovereignty west of the
Appalachians made in its 1763 Proclamation, and unleashing domestic holy war
against America's first peoples in what was at its core a naked land grab
fueled by a lust for fertile farmlands or newly discovered mineral deposits.
In a century of American genocide, an entire continent was effectively
cleansed. And that was just the first act.
When America faced its own confederate revolt against
federal power, Washington applied the same principles of genocidal
destruction to break the will of its southern secessionists, and later
unleashed Sherman's proven total war strategy on the remaining hostile tribes
in the still unconquered West. And that was only the second act.
Once America was cleansed of its original inhabitants and it
crossed the oceans as a Great Power with imperial aspirations, putting down
revolts in various countries like the Philippines, and seizing others
outright (like Hawaii), it applied the fully digested lessons of its own long
Indian Wars: that its own superiority of arms, men, and wealth enabled it to
use the specter of genocidal annihilation to deter potential foes, and to
crush through annihilation those who would not be deterred by American power,
a lesson that permeated its own unique methods of warfighting, as revealed in
its lethally effective tactics in Japan and Germany which later Secretary of
Defense McNamara freely admitted were war crimes—applying the full
weight of state power onto the undefended civilian populace of its foes. And
this was only the third act.
During the Cold War, the entire structure of international
relations was predicated on the potential unleashing of national destruction
of our opponent: a doctrine that boils down to America’s continued
willingness to inflict genocidal destruction upon its adversaries. Granted,
it took two to tango, and America, like the Soviet Union and the lesser
nuclear powers, turned to the bomb because of its unique efficiency in laying
waste to an opponent’s homeland. We were not alone in courting the
Apocalypse to ensure the security of our republic. But that was only the
fourth act.
Now that we're fighting terrorism, insurgents, and a host of
stateless actors, we’ve refined our predisposition for truly democratic
people's war of the sort Napoleon unleashed on European soil and which
we imported a half century later in our quest to break the spirit
of the Confederate rebellion, to the fractious, sub-state realm, and along
the way we have unleashed genocidal forces (as we saw in Iraq), collateral
perhaps but nonetheless consistent with our historical willingness to engage
in annihilatory warfare to achieve our own millennial aims, no matter how
high the price paid in human terms by our opponent.
And this is thus the fifth act.
From Melos to Myopia
Madar’s critical analysis importantly sheds light on
other chapters in American foreign and military policy where America not only
stood idly by but in fact armed, trained and unleashed genocidal forces in
pursuit of its own interests, from Guatemala to Indonesia. But it is
important to consider the deep domestic roots of America’s complicity
in the very invention of genocide, since war against a people is in fact the
flip-side of total war, which since Napoleon has been understood to be a
people’s war, rooted in the mobilization of an entire nation for
war.
To Mao, this became revolutionary war, and to the Jihadists,
it’s now become Holy War. But across time and space it has been popular
war, and the passions unleashed when unlocking the populace are an order of
magnitude more destructive than those unleashed by unlocking the passions of
the demos in the inter-polis wars of Ancient Greece, where the atrocities at
Melos continue to haunt the western conscience and whose connection to modern
war and modern atrocity was eloquently argued by Lawrence Tritle in his 2000
From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival.
When I read Power’s passionate pleading that
America’s moral obligation is to never again sit on the sidelines and
allow genocide to happen—I couldn’t help but to wonder where she
draws her lessons of history from, as she’s articulated an ideology
that ignores America’s own military traditions, its own rugged frontier
experience, and its centuries-old approach to world conflict—the very
sources of its economic and military power and the very foundation of world
order, which, thanks to our values, is widely perceived to be a just order
(albeit one contested by the Jihadists, who would structure a world order
along more medieval principles.)
Genocide should not be overly politicized or
de-contextualized from its historical roots. When Serbia sought to rebalance
the ethnic composition of the remnants of Yugoslavia to create a more stable
and governable Balkan state, it was doing only what Lincoln did a century
before in a Balkanizing America, which likewise unraveled with unanticipated
rapidity, denying the aspirations for independence of the reluctant but
nonetheless constituent components of the greater state—and for which
we celebrate Lincoln now as the greatest of American heroes—even though
Lincoln’s war was one of America’s most savagely fought, and
throughout the old Confederate states, he is still viewed more as a war
criminal than hero. In the old Union states up north, Lincoln is so revered
that he enjoys not only a mighty monument in the nation’s capital, as
well as a permanent spot on the ubiquitous $5 bill and even the still
persistent penny, but even the apostle of hope that Power now serves,
President Obama, selected honest Abe to be his role model, and the bar
according to which Obama hopes history favorably compares his
presidency.
When the Germans sought in the last century to become the
pre-eminent world power, they were following in the footsteps of the British,
and the emergent American superpower, and as horrific as their excesses were,
they were no different from the actions of America as it strived to become
first a continental power, crushing hundreds of indigenous tribes for merely
being there, later destroying the Confederacy’s will to be
self-governing, and as it reached across the seas to become a world power,
imposing American sovereignty on a reluctant Hawaii, then grabbing
Spain’s colonial possessions to become a truly global power, waging
brutal wars of colonization and counterinsurgency across the seas ever
since.
Looking back to the brushfires of the Balkan wars, I wonder
if we had let the Serbs have their super-state, and tolerated the one-time
exodus of its displaced peoples to enable their raw but certainly normal (by
any historical comparison) effort at state-formation, if perhaps the cause of
peace and stability might have been better served – the departing
Bosniaks perhaps enriching neighboring Albania with its human capital much as
Hitler’s refugees so enriched America and America in turn enriched
Canada during the Vietnam exodus – perhaps restoring balance to
the troubled Balkan peninsula. And – importantly – perhaps Al
Qaeda might have tasted its first defeat at the hands of an assertive, and
unrestrained, state opponent, knocking Bin Laden’s movement off its
game at a critical moment in its development.
And then I wonder, if we had not pointed the finger and
shouted “Genocide” on a crowded continent as communism collapsed
and nationalism freely reasserted itself as we did first in Bosnia (where we
in fact tolerated genocidal retribution by the triumphant Croats and Bosniaks
in the end); and later in the phony war in Kosovo, a legitimate constituent
component of a sovereign Serbia (even after Yugoslavia’s
collapse)—a conflict waged by a phony militia, the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA), straight out of America's own counter-revolutionary insurgency
playbook as developed in Honduras a decade earlier on Negroponte’s
watch for application against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua—then perhaps
the ambition of Al Qaeda might have been blunted, and the attacks of 9/11
never executed.
Then, we might not be bogged down as we are in Afghanistan
or Iraq, unleashing genocidal fury along the way as we stumble our way
through a mess that began, indirectly, with our very first efforts in the
1990s to make genocide our foe, attacking a tactic, a symptom, and not a
cause, just as we again do in our war against terror – another tactic,
another method, decoupled from its political causal roots, vilified as our
enemy, much as President Obama now vilifies the very nuclear weapons with
which we won the peace in 1945, and which ensured a stable world order for a
half century more.
If only Power, and her decoupling of American power from
American history, did not have the ear of a President who seems intent on
abandoning the millions of Iraqis who depend upon our innovation and grit to
ensure their security, and then to rid the world of nuclear weapons which in
the end are our best last hope against genocidal madness (with his Nobel
Prize for Peace in hand).
Fighting Fire with Fire
But Power's selective historical memory, and her antiseptic
approach to American military power, in precise, seemingly painless
increments and not in its blunt and effective supremacy, remind me of the
escalation and bargaining theorists of the Vietnam era—many who like
Power resided along the Charles River while dreaming of the Potomac.
They sought to apply a similarly antiseptic approach to the
very rough and tumble process of winning a war against a determined opponent
mobilized for total war, a method that only brought America a humbling and
unnecessary defeat, diplomatic betrayal of a wartime ally, and the collapse
of order across Indochina – resulting in the annihilatory fury of the
Khmer Rouge, not a genocide per se, but a brutal class war that resulted in
both mass migration and mass civil destruction, the internment and exile of
millions of Vietnamese next door, and a precipitous decline in American power
around the world.
We must therefore remember it’s not words that we are
fighting. Not concepts. It’s not a war against terror. And it
wasn’t a war against genocide. It was a war against evil, one against
tyranny and darkness. And if lost, the results would be devastating.
But winning would require clarity of vision, a willingness
to accept history for what it was, to remember why we built nuclear weapons
in the first place, why we cleansed the Americas of its first peoples, why we
became a world power. It was to make sure that we would never again be in
danger, our values never at risk of being overrun. It was, quite simply, so
that cry of “never again” would have meaning, even if that meant
a tough, at times dirty, and never easy fight.
And that requires knowing who we are, where we came from,
and what we did to get here. Only in so doing will we maintain the will and
the capacity to make sure we don’t lose all that we have fought
for.
Whether it’s America in the “Age of
Genocide” or America in the “Age of Mass Terror,”
it’s still America in a world of chaos, aiming for order and balance,
and fighting for what is right. And using all means in its possession to make
sure darker forces don’t rise up again on our watch.
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