A century of barbarism

The notion of the Other as a threat representing alien and destructive forces unites all nationalist, authoritarian and totalitarian regimes of our time. It is a universal cultural phenomenon. No civilization has been able to resist the pathology of hatred, the contempt and destruction that various regimes have spread across all latitudes. Driven to the utmost, this disease has taken on the bleak form of genocide, one of the tragic and recurring features of our time.

Many give in to the easy and convenient temptation to look at the various chapters in the history of the genocide as many "incomprehensible" and isolated episodes. In each of them they see an explosion of collective rage. According to Karl Jasper's theory of metaphysical guilt, all these events cover us with disgrace. Therefore, we try to forget them as soon as possible and leave all this delicate and painful problem to the historians of the subject.

The genocide – built into the dynamics of society

But if we investigate genocide a little more closely, we must reject the theory of the irrational explosion. Behind every genocidal act is in reality a hatred of ideology that is spread methodically.

Our contemporary civilization has features in its character, its being and its dynamics, which under certain circumstances and situations can lead to genocidal acts.

It's a scary conclusion, an alarming ethical warning.

But when does such a danger emerge?

Precisely at the moment of a break between culture and the sacred, that is, when the spiritual component of a culture is weakened or disappears, when an ethical stiffness engages in a society, and the sensitivity to evil is paralyzed, suffocated, fallen asleep. .

The most ignored and ridiculed Christian injunction now is what prompts one to love one's neighbor. Relationships with the others have been a problem for ages. One of the oldest written texts contains this unequivocal command: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself!"

Should one believe that the rejection of the Other, even the hostility towards him, is an inherent part of human nature? The fact is that all the ideologies of contemporary hatred – nationalism, fascism, Stalinism, racism – have exploited this weakness of man, who rejects the Other and even more so the Unknown. It is a feeling that certain powers succeed in transforming into hostility and even criminal inclinations.

The consequences of these morbid traits have taken on outrageous proportions in our time, and have given power to efficient state structures equipped with the most modern technology, including murder. This is how the terrible phenomenon of industrial genocide has arisen.

Democracy – the only barrier.

The genocide is a deliberate criminal act, systematically organized and carried out to eradicate civil society, an extermination selected on the basis of criteria of nationality, race or religion.

The history of the 20th century counts at least ten episodes of genocide (the word "episode" is not the best, usually these massacres lasted a long time).

Well known and recognized is in chronological order the massacre of the Armenians of modern Turkey (1915-1916); the Holocaust initiated by the Nazis by the Jewish population (1941 to 1945) and for which the gypsies also fell victim; the destruction of the Khmer Rouge population of Cambodia (1975-1978): and the liquidation of the Tutsi community by the Hutu regime in Rwanda in 1994.

But we must add massacres of genocide such as (still in chronological order) the extermination of millions of Ukrainian peasants who starved to death during the Stalin regime (1932-1933); the extermination of the population of Nanking and surrounding areas by Japanese occupiers (1937-1938); the killings of millions of Indian Muslims and Hindus during the Indian War of Independence (1947-1948); the millions who fell victim to the so-called "culture" revolution launched by the Mao Zedong regime in China in the 1950s and 1960s; the liquidation of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists (1965); the extinction of a large part of the population in East Timor by the Indonesian army and the pro-Indonesian militias from 1975 onwards.

This list is not exhaustive. The 20th century has, by the way, been marked by countless border conflicts that are difficult to resolve easily (especially in Sudan, Sierra Leone and the Balkans). If one seeks out support points, common denominators in this labyrinth of crimes, lies and hatred, there are certain features that stand out.

They have all been organized by official governments, which legally exercise their power in the country. These have benefited from the passivity of world opinion, and so it is confirmed

the ethical crisis of sensitivity in our time.

The genocide is not the result of just one culture. The culprits have belonged to very different cultural areas. It shows how ridiculous the idea is that certain cultures should be genetically predisposed to genocide.

There is a clear connection between war and genocide. All the mentioned cases have taken place in a climate of war or war threat.

No genocide has taken place in countries with democracy in the 20th century. To date, democracy seems to be the only effective barrier against the temptations of genocide.

When the government has planned genocide, it has always begun to destroy the image of the enemy, the future victim, in its followers. The closer the victim was to society – to the family, to the village, to the city, to the community, the more dangerous he seemed. If he lived under the same roof, he could set fire to the city and poison the inhabitants. A distant and abstract enemy could not display features that were so marked and easy to imagine that they could drive people to massacres.

The enemy could be of a different origin – a different class, a different religion, a different ethnic group – but in the language of propaganda they were always given the same label: they were "enemies of the people." (Nation enemy in German, wreck narodu in Russian etc.) Throughout the 20th century, there is a burdensome threat to national existence and which is always portrayed as the greatest danger.

As Professor Zygmunt Baumann states in his work "Modernity and the Holocaust", the will to genocide has been well helped by advances in technology. With the help of it, one can now, so to speak, kill at a distance, without soiling oneself, and it frees the instigators from any pangs of conscience. But this hypothesis does not always hold. Those who organized the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, deliberately ordered their militia to kill, not with automatic rifles, but with the machete. By making them massacre with just their fists, they meant to strengthen the unity in their own ranks.

In each case, the actual outbreak of the massacre and the extinction of the persecuted social group has been preceded by a period of suffering, famine, humiliation, terror. This is how death was to be experienced by some of the victims as a liberation, a kind of act of mercy.

In all cases, the genocide has been prepared and carried out in a social context of deep economic, political and moral crisis, at a time when the religious conscience had disappeared, emotions paralyzed and the ability to distinguish good from evil reduced to nothing.

Common features in the motives of the crimes.

The theme of the disease picture of power in our time, how it degenerates into genocide in extreme cases, has led to the publication of hundreds of books, thousands of essays and a dozen documents. If we read this material, we certainly find every single murderous act observed, investigated and described, but separately, as a case in itself, without connection to similar crimes. But even though each of these episodes is distinguished by its uniqueness – we are thinking in particular of the deviant features of the German persecution of Jews – there are common features in the motives and mechanisms of the crimes.

So much so that each of them not only concerns a given group of people – religious, ethnic, social or ethical – but constitutes a collective catastrophe that afflicts the whole of society, a defeat for humanism, and ultimately a burdensome guilt that afflicts us all. Seen in a holistic and global perspective, the 20th century is usually seen as the time of the two totalitarian systems – fascism and communism – and the two world wars.

On the other hand, nowhere is it claimed that it is the century of genocide – no matter on which continent, in which era or in which culture they took place. Organized by the current government, they have been prepared and implemented again and again and have cracked down on outrageous numbers of victims. The genocides actually cost the 20th century more people than the world wars. The material damage is usually difficult to assess. Why then do we refuse to look at our time as an era that regularly and systematically, in a way that is difficult to understand, breeds such mass crimes?

Why are we not looking for the clear connection between the genocide and the cultural revolution of Mao Zedong, the extermination of millions of people in Cambodia and the hundreds of thousands who were murdered in Rwanda? Everything has taken place in the same period, in our "global village" – a universe of efficient communications, sophisticated and over-informed, a planet monitored by a network of satellites and large numbers of officials in the international organizations.

This reductionism, which consists in describing every genocide in isolation from others as if they were separated from our cruel history and especially from the abuse of power elsewhere on the planet, is not a way to avoid overly fundamental and brutal questions about our world and the threats that weigh on it? Described and fixed in the margins of history and memory, the genocides are no longer experienced as a collective experience, a common ordeal that unites us all.

Another unfortunate consequence: It is often the case that people from a civilization and a continent do not know that within another culture or ethnic whole, a social group or a people is extinct. Even a crime like the Nazi extermination of the Jews is virtually unknown in Africa or India. A massacre in a country only concerns the conscience of that country, it is rare that this feeling spreads to other cultures.

Power – and especially the stately power that commits genocide – benefits from general freedom from punishment. An exception was the Nuremberg tribunal, which nevertheless convicted only a very small proportion of Nazi criminals. Sometimes a civil servant takes a seat on the dock. As a rule, the biggest criminals are high up in the hierarchy. The higher up, the easier they escape the punishment. A subordinate executioner has great chances of ending up in the gallows. A large format executioner usually cannot be hit. It is the weak point of the international legal system, which is distinguished by its fragility, its inconsistency and its opportunism.

Evil with cold intent.

It is rare for a state whose leaders have committed organized genocide to admit guilt. Germany is the exception that confirms the rule. In most other cases, the authorities reject any suggestion of genocide or remain stubbornly silent. The Turkish government continues to deny that one and a half million Armenians were murdered under the Ottoman regime. The Russian government is silent about the ten million dead Ukrainian farmers. Beijing government rejects suspicions of massacres of twenty million people in 60s…

The saddest thing is the confusion of public opinion, the moral indifference, the inability to react to evil. We have become so used to it that it has lost all value to us as a warning. Previously it was demonized, now it is hacked. It has become irrelevant to us, deceptively common, on the verge of slipping completely into our everyday lives.

In the past, evil often belonged to phenomena such as irrational outbursts, incomprehensible outbursts of blind instincts, an unbridled urge for revenge. Now they appear more and more as a form of cold and cunning organization. We are talking about "organized crime", about "organized underworld", about "organized crimes", etc.

There is no mechanism or legal, institutional or technical barrier that can be effectively resisted against new outbreaks of genocide. The only defense that remains lies in a vigilant morality among individuals and in society: a living conscience, a powerful will to do good, a permanent and attentive will to obey the commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself! »

Ryszard Kapuscinski is a Polish journalist and author. His latest book, "Ebony", has just been published by Aschehoug. Kapuscinski received the French magazine Lire's award for best book of the year last year.

Reprinted with permission from Le Monde Diplomatique. Translated from the French by Johs. Kolltveit.