The National Interest

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault on Humanity (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009), 672 pp., $29.95.

IT IS hard to believe that the erstwhile–Harvard political scientist turned full-time moralist, pro-Israel polemicist and amateur historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen could have a more devoted admirer than, well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. In his first book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he stated baldly that explaining why the Holocaust occurred required a radical revision of “what has until now been written” and that his book was that revision. His next effort, A Moral Reckoning, claimed to expose the malign role of the Catholic Church not only during the Holocaust but pretty much from its inception, since, according to Goldhagen, the Church had been the central locus of Western anti-Semitism almost from its founding.

Having, by his own lights, first single-handedly rebutted what he called the “false paradigm” about the Holocaust, replaced its mendacities with his true rendering, before finally unmasking the Catholic Church and its clergy’s enormous “crimes and transgressions,” the historical contours of which, he has said, “no one can rightly deny,” Goldhagen has now written Worse Than War, a book whose modest goal is to “reconceptualize, understand anew, interpret differently, explain adequately, and to propose workable responses to [the] catastrophic and systematic problem of eliminationism.”

And on the seventh day, He rested.

WORSE THAN War is, depending on your point of view, either the logical conclusion of the path Goldhagen has been taking for the past fifteen years or its reductio ad absurdum. Despite Goldhagen’s extraordinary claims, he himself concedes in his unwittingly revealing afterword that he is not presenting much in the way of original research. That, however, is just fine with him since, as he puts it, the book “is not meant to be an exhaustive documentation of any individual mass murderer, let alone a history of our time’s sweep of mass murders, let alone eliminations.”

Why his decision to write books that, to use a self-description he employed at the time of the publication of A Moral Reckoning in 2003, are “primarily about morality, not history,” while simultaneously claiming for himself the authority to denounce or condescend to (condescension being a Goldhagen trope) the work of many of the finest historians working today should be just fine with us is another subject matter.

This pattern began with Hitler’s Willing Executioners, where, when he wasn’t busy laying down the moral law, Goldhagen was largely arguing against the historiographical consensus about the Holocaust (the great Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, drew his particular scorn). If he had an essentialist view of German history from the early nineteenth century to the fall of Berlin in 1945 (that essence, broadly speaking, being what he calls eliminationist anti-Semitism), Goldhagen felt equally confident in his ability to discern and lavishly praise the moral regeneration of the post-Nazi German state and society.

The problem, whether when he was doling out praise or blame, as the historian of Nazism Christopher Browning (Goldhagen’s bête noire in Hitler’s Willing Executioners) pointed out more than a decade ago, is that Goldhagen has shown a tendency in his work to claim to be blazing new trails in understanding when, in reality, his own views are not so far as he imagines from the conventional wisdom he so excoriates and about which he claims to be writing to correct and reform.

Despite what Goldhagen claimed, few historians before him had denied that “ordinary Germans” participated willingly in the murder of European Jewry. Nor did the scholars who came before him believe that those ordinary Germans killed out of fear of reprisal. In other words, the concept of Hitler’s willing executioners was the consensus view of historians long before Goldhagen turned his Harvard dissertation into a global best seller.

His follow-up effort, A Moral Reckoning, was after bigger game than historians. For all intents and purposes, Goldhagen’s claim in that book was that the Catholic Church and its clergy had done so much harm over the sweep of centuries—harm culminating in the ideological facilitation of the Holocaust—that collectively their duty was clearly to engage in the most urgent kind of what Goldhagen, echoing the catechism, called “moral repair,” based on the history he, Goldhagen, had indisputably established with his book. But had he? Again, Goldhagen took something well-known—the accusations of the Vatican’s complicity in the Holocaust—and married it to something far less debatable (and not disputed by most serious Catholic historians): the tragic strain of anti-Semitism in Church history. And, unable to resist an essentialist reading, Goldhagen made the former the exemplification of the latter, which then became the central moral fact of Church history.

Worse Than War has some of this same reinvent-the-wheel quality to it. In fact, while Worse Than War is both long and turgid, it is rather less of an accomplishment than either its length or Goldhagen’s claims for the work might lead the reader to assume.

AS WITH his analysis of what he called German eliminationist anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Willing Executioners and the Catholic Church’s systemic culpability in A Moral Reckoning, in Worse Than War, Goldhagen again makes the sweeping claim that pretty much every government, institution and even most individuals have been unwilling to face the problem of genocide forthrightly and, more crucially, to understand its real nature. Enter Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, explanatory key and, in this case, institutional responses and policy solutions in hand. The man really does give self-love a bad name.

If Goldhagen was grandiose in his earlier books, the terms of reference he lays down in “The Choice,” the stentorian title of his preface to Worse Than War, make his previous claims seem paltry by comparison. In its first sentence, he states categorically that “hundreds of millions of people are at risk of becoming the victims of genocide and related violence.” Given the fact that he bases this claim not only on the risk in countries where genocide has occurred or where the ongoing threat seems real but also on countries where, as he himself concedes, “no warning signals suggest immediate danger,” it is surprising in a way that he doesn’t put the number at a billion. After all, given such latitudinarian criteria, there is really no reason he shouldn’t choose that higher number or, indeed, one higher still. In reality, at least as stated, the number represents first and foremost an emotion—Goldhagen’s, in point of fact: legitimate grief over what has happened in too many places far too often over the past hundred years. It represents too a hyperbolic apprehension over what may happen to people living in countries governed by regimes that have been, or—more problematically—that Goldhagen believes, “are inherently prone to” engaging in mass murder.

THE FIRST nine chapters of Worse Than War, amounting to close to five hundred pages of text, attempt to lay down an interpretive framework for understanding the nature of eliminationism in history and contemporary geopolitics. There are long accounts, some narrative, some comparative, of any number of the great horrors of the twentieth century—the German genocide of the Herero in present-day Namibia at the beginning of the 1900s, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Gulag, Pol Pot, the slaughter of indigenous Guatemalans in the 1980s by the dictatorship of General Efrain Rios Montt and the genocide in Rwanda, to name only a handful of the genocidal killings Goldhagen attempts to anatomize. He does so poignantly, but these examples—however much they clearly affect him, and he clearly wants them to outrage and mobilize his readers—are always harnessed to Goldhagen’s larger project of trying to build a schema for understanding eliminationism and genocide.

Unsurprisingly, in his own eyes he has succeeded brilliantly. In an afterword entitled “Thoughts and Thanks”—which is part self-promotion, part the conventional contemporary writer’s boilerplate (thanks to nearest, dearest publishers, agents and institutions), and part childish score settling with critics and academic specialists with whom he has crossed swords in the past—Goldhagen claims to have “substantially recast our understanding of the phenomenon.”

For all Goldhagen’s prolixity, his views about how eliminationism is embedded in societies, ideologies, the discourse of rights and the character of political structures seem largely commonsensical. And the views he seeks to rebut seem more straw man–like than anything else. Goldhagen is particularly incensed by two claims. The first is that the actions of people who participate in mass murder are “determined by external forces; that [people] have little say over how they act; that free will is an illusion.” The second is that “internal drives impel people to commit mass murder”—what Goldhagen aptly calls “the Caligula that is everyman.”

The problem is that neither the vulgar materialism of Goldhagen’s first straw man nor the vulgar Freudianism of his second is in fact what most people who know anything about war or mass slaughter believe happened to, say, the Bosnian Muslims, or to the Rwandan Tutsis. To be sure, there had been comparative peace in Bosnia since 1945 (if little comity outside the urban redoubts of Sarajevo and Tuzla), and in the Rwandan countryside, killing was episodic between the expulsion of a part of the Tutsi population in the 1960s and the beginning of renewed fighting at the end of the 1980s. But no one who spoke to the Bosnian Serbs or the Rwandan Hutus while the killing and the mass rape was going on could doubt that many who murdered did so willingly and under no existential threat. By the same token, these crimes were conceived by their perpetrators—this is not speculation; journalists like me who covered both of these horrors, and many of the others that Goldhagen adduces, have the audio tapes to prove it—in political, ethnic, racial and religious terms depending on the place and time.

In the case of Bosnia, despite the conventional misuse of the term “civil society” to mean institutions liberal internationalists and human-rights activists approve of (thus, in American terms, the subsidized Human Rights Watch is a pillar of civil society, while the membership-supported National Rifle Association isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be), it always seemed to me that the Bosnian Serb government—precisely in its championing of murder and ethnic cleansing—sadly reflected very well the views of its constituents. If anything, this was truer still among the Rwandan Hutus in the run-up to the genocide in 1994.

So when Goldhagen writes, as if he has discovered something no one has been brave enough to think through before, that in order to understand genocide we must begin by accepting that “people make choices about how to act, even if they do not choose the contexts in which they make them. . . . [and according to] their own understanding of how the world is to be shaped and governed,” who would disagree? Similarly, there is nothing debatable, if also nothing particularly original, about Goldhagen’s appeal for linguistic rectitude and for calling the murderers by their right names—Germans, not Nazis, etc.—rather than taking refuge in politically correct, sanitizing appellations, even if Goldhagen himself muddies the waters a bit when, referring to Islamic terrorists, he refers not to Saudis or Kuwaitis but to Political Islamists.

And when he opines on the necessity of asking “probing questions about [the] bystanders’ critical role,” well, what serious person doesn’t do this?

Despite the exhaustive bibliography appended to Worse Than War, there are times when Goldhagen’s “default position”—basically, the conventional wisdom is “X,” but I’m here to tell you that the reality is “Y”—makes one wonder what he has actually been reading. Take, for example, his assertion—“the reverse of what is commonly held,” as he puts it—that “mass-murderous [sic] and eliminationist aspirations often initiate or broaden military conflicts for those purposes, or see others’ violent elimination as integral to the conquest or colonization of foreign territory.” But who in his or her right mind denies the latter proposition with regard to, say, the westward expansion of the United States or of the Spanish conquest of Peru? And after war after war, from Bosnia to Kosovo to Kurdistan, where the military objective was, overtly, ethnic cleansing, who would disagree with the former?

And even as he searches for a basic template for eliminationism, Goldhagen himself is forced to admit that:

Eliminationist and annihilationist campaigns produce different outcomes. The perpetrators kill different mixes of people. . . . Sometimes they kill comprehensively, sometimes selectively. . . . [and] the extent and character of the perpetrators’ cruelty, aside from the killing itself, are not constant.

Goldhagen is frankly contemptuous of what he seems to view as the blinkered nature of much scholarly work. But his tropism toward generalization leads him both to “shoehorn” phenomena, whose only real point of commonality would seem to be that innocents were slaughtered, into frameworks that they often fit badly, if at all, and to contradict himself. For example, he is adamant that “our time has been an age of mass murder.” But while he touches on it, he does not satisfactorily confront the obvious question of whether it has been more murderous than other eras.

It is not that Goldhagen doesn’t recognize that the twentieth century was hardly unique in terms of slaughter. He himself cites the Middle Passage, with its toll of 15 to 20 million African slaves. He also cites what he rightly calls the “wantonly murderous” behavior of European colonizers in Africa, though Worse Than War would have profited from a prolonged rather than a glancing discussion of the slaughter in the Congo Free State perpetrated by King Leopold II of the Belgians when that vast country was his private preserve—an event that was actually far more murderous than German General Lothar von Trotha’s extermination of the Herero in Namibia. But then Goldhagen insists that there is a fundamental difference between the slaughter of the last century and what occurred in the centuries that preceded it because colonialists did not “set out, as national policy, to systematically exterminate targeted peoples in whole or in large part,” whereas in the twentieth century, states, supported by a significant percentage of their peoples, did exactly that.

An alternative view would be that the “worse than war” phenomenon that Goldhagen is really trying to come to grips with, but is fundamentally misidentifying and misunderstanding, is the undoubted fact that war in Europe in the twentieth century (and subsequently, globally, throughout the Communist world in particular, above all in China and Cambodia) became savage in a way that colonial war had always been savage, and that it became in the United States, Australia and much of Spanish America frankly annihilationist, to use one of Goldhagen’s preferred terms. It is only by ignoring this that Goldhagen, as a demonstration of the singular murderousness of our era, can credulously cite the statistic—it originates originally, as far as I know, with the International Committee of the Red Cross—that whereas in 1900, the ratio of military to civilian deaths was nine to one, by the end of the century, nine civilians were killed for every soldier. The problem is that this is only true if the massacres of the colonized are left out of the equation.

AS THE Scottish journalist Ian Traynor used to say to colleagues in Bosnia who overtheorized about what they were seeing, “if you want to be a prophet, you’ve got to get it right.” That said, the first two-thirds of Worse Than War—so off-putting because of the inflated claims Goldhagen makes for the originality, profundity and morality of his argument—are not ridiculous. But the last third of the book, entitled—wait for it!—“Changing The Future,” most definitely is.

It begins curiously. One might have expected that after Goldhagen’s exhaustive treatment of virtually every variant of twentieth-century eliminationism in the first nine chapters of his book, that the opening of its third section would, as advertised, focus on what can be done. But instead, after some sententious throat clearing—the first sentence reads “mass murder begins in the minds of men”—and a tour d’horizon of the current eliminationist landscape (imperial eliminationism is “by and large over”; Grand Communist eliminationism is over as well), Goldhagen turns to what he seems to view as the principle eliminationist threat of today and for the foreseeable future: political jihadism. The threat is certainly real; but whether it is as important and dangerous as Goldhagen believes it to be is another matter entirely. And here, Goldhagen seems to let other concerns knock him off the plinth of his own argument. To argue, as he does, that “in the past hundred years, no major political movement, except Nazism and perhaps Imperial Japan, has equaled [the] culture of death [of political Islam]” establishes nothing about its eliminationist potential, as the use of the Japanese example should make abundantly clear. And for Goldhagen to trace the trajectory of eliminationism from General von Trotha through Hitler to Osama bin Laden—who, after all, is living in a cave at present—seems, putting it charitably, a bit over the top. Yes, Goldhagen is right to say that all three men meant what they said when they promised annihilation. But this does not mean all three were in the same position to carry out their threats (see aforementioned cave).

It is not clear to me how much his apprehensions about Political Islam are the real subtext of Goldhagen’s analysis of the contemporary landscape (as opposed to his views on General von Trotha, or Nazi Germany, or Pol Pot, or Rwanda). His home page features the lines “speaks nationally . . . about Political Islam’s Offensive, the threat to Israel, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the Globalization of Antisemitism, and more” next to his author photo and alongside the jacket of Worse Than War. And when he writes that the two major eliminationist threats of our time are Political Islam and nuclear weapons (read: North Korea and Iran, the latter being also included in the Political Islam rubric), it becomes a bit difficult to distinguish his high-flown oratory about the need to “remove eliminationist practices from politics’ normal repertoire, just as slavery was removed from social relations’ normal repertoire” from the by-now-familiar war drums of a John Bolton, a William Kristol or a Norman Podhoretz.

But let us instead take Goldhagen at his word. How, then, does he actually propose achieving what up to this point has been impossible? First, he suggests “the media must do more to create and sustain a robust anti-eliminationist discourse.” As evidence of how effective this can be, he cites the former Bosnian prime minister, Haris Silajdzic, who told him about how helpful the media was in getting the Bosnian story out, leading Goldhagen to conclude that this “shows the media’s immense power to spur action.” Again, as someone who worked as a journalist and, in this case, in Sarajevo during the siege, I must regretfully inform Mr. Goldhagen that reports of our effectiveness have been greatly exaggerated. We were pretty much all the Bosnians had, and yes, we did get the story out to some extent. But we most certainly were not the difference between intervention and nonintervention; all we did was keep the situation in the minds of at least some Western news consumers. A far more important reason for the eventual Western intervention was that the then–incoming French President Jacques Chirac told President Clinton in 1994 that he would not authorize French troops to remain in Bosnia for another winter. Faced with the prospect, under the NATO treaty, of having to commit U.S. forces to cover a fighting retreat of French UN contingents, Clinton let his chief negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, take off the gloves. This explanation is far more mundane than Silajdzic’s or Goldhagen’s, but it is far closer to reality than the author’s half-Kantian, half–George Lakoff “framing” argument.

And as usual, Goldhagen does not appear willing to consider that when he calls on the media to “lay out the facts” and “lay out the causes. . . . in language that is precise, vivid, and individuated,” that the “facts,” as he so blithely puts it, are often subject to interpretation. Worse, activists, in order to draw attention to their cause, often oversimplify what is going on to the point of caricature. The Save Darfur movement, with whose aims one would presume Goldhagen would be in sympathy, was fantastically reductive in its account, peddling the highly dubious claim that the conflict in Darfur (as in South Sudan before it—a claim Goldhagen credulously repeats) is one that can be understood as, at its core, an Arab campaign against blacks. That may be convenient if one has convinced oneself that in Darfur there are only victims and victimizers. Unfortunately, the reason we talk about morality plays is, precisely, that they are not reality. In any case, where Darfur is concerned, Goldhagen’s sense of history seems oddly hieratic. There was mass murder in Darfur in 2003; there is no mass murder in Darfur today, no matter what apocalyptic tales some activists in the United States and Western Europe are still retailing. How does one lay that out in language that is precise, vivid and individuated?

Goldhagen would doubtless consider such anxieties part of what he calls “this suffocating, mass murder-abetting cynicism and inertia” in which we find ourselves.

For a man who, whatever is wrong with his work, is haunted by the historical tragedies about which he has written, his geopolitical views are either willfully naive or idiotic.

HOW TO stop eliminationism? Well, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen is here to tell you that “in principle, it should not be difficult,” since “the world’s non-mass-murdering countries are wealthy and powerful, having prodigious military capabilities (and they can band together).” Meanwhile, the countries perpetrating mass murder “are overwhelmingly poor and weak.” What remains to be done, according to Goldhagen, is to change the current construct of crimes against humanity (under which, for example, the International Criminal Court has indicted Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir) to “war against humanity,” a statute that would basically allow, indeed obligate, outside powers to be in a “perpetual” (Goldhagen’s word) state of war with the eliminationist country until it was defeated and its leaders killed or captured (“by open or covert means,” Goldhagen can’t resist adding).

Goldhagen’s belief that the current international system virtually guarantees that eliminationist leaders can act with impunity only hardens his conviction that the entire thing needs to be rethought and reorganized. The United Nations, structured as it is to make no distinction between democratic and tyrannical states, and, in Goldhagen’s view, a place where dictators have virtual free reign, needs to be replaced. “Democratic leaders,” Goldhagen writes, “and the world’s peoples should stop perpetuating this legal, institutional, and political fiction, most glaringly at the United Nations, that tyrannical regimes and leaders represent anything aside from their own criminal, warmaking, and eliminationist interests.” How this squares with Goldhagen’s earlier insistence that eliminationism is often supported by a whole population, not imposed from above, he doesn’t say. But he certainly knows what he wants done. “Democratic leaders,” he intones, “and peoples should replace the United Nations with a new United Democratic Nations that admits only democracies.”

As Goldhagen notes, this idea is hardly new, having been suggested by Senator John McCain during the 2008 presidential campaign, not to mention being the stuff of countless think-tank pieces by writers such as Robert Kagan and Ivo Daalder. But Goldhagen wants this “league” to go much further. It should, he argues, “be democracies united against tyranny, genocide, and all eliminationist politics, and united for the world’s people.”

In this extraordinary proposal, the UN would be supplanted, not just by an organization that has declared its right to intervene militarily anywhere it believes mass murder to be taking place, but it will also exclude the dictatorships of the Global South and possibly Russia and China as well (though Goldhagen recommends making an exception in just those two cases). And then, this brand new supernational institution will—shades of George W. Bush in his “Mission Accomplished” period—restart “a devoted international push for democratizing more countries.” Goldhagen presents accomplishing this as no more than a series of “simple and effective steps to prevent future wars against humanity.” In reality it would do nothing of the sort. To the contrary, it is a program for a twenty-first century Western imperium and, were it to be realized, which, thankfully, it has no chance whatsoever of being, the beginning of war without end.

David Rieff is the author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2003) and At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention (2005). His most recent book, Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (2008), is about the death of his mother, the novelist and critic Susan Sontag.