Christopher SmithDr. Michael HoggTNDY 402A: ExtremismDecember 9, 2010Explaining Genocide: How Ordinary People Become Mass-Murderers1.

IntroductionBarbara Colaroso has estimated that genocide and mass murder in the twentieth centurykilled around 60 million people²³more than were killed in the battlefields in all the wars from1900 to 2000.´

Given the horrific nature of such violence, one question that needs to beanswered is why so many have willingly participated in carrying it out. The answer is not thatthey are crazy or dispositionally evil. A few may be, but researchers have found that theoverwhelming majority are not. Quite to the contrary, their motivations and thought processesare extraordinarily ordinary.

They seem to be rational, psychologically healthy people whodecide to participate in genocide because they believe the benefits will outweigh the costs. The present paper argues that our ancient hominid ancestors evolved the capacity for genocide as acompetitive strategy that gave them an edge over competing groups. It then turns to social psychology and rational choice theory to explain how and why instigators and perpetrators of genocide make the decision to attempt the extermination of entire social categories of people. Arange of motives are identified, including ideology, emotion, and personal or national utility.Also enumerated are the structural conditions under which opportunities to commit genocide aremost likely to arise. Both motive and opportunity must be present in order for genocide to occur.

Barbara Colaroso,

Extraordinary Evil: A Short Walk to Genocide

(New York: Nation Books, 2007), xiii.

Helen Fein,

Genocide: A Sociological Perspective

(London: SAGE Publications, 1990), 45.

In the case of perpetrators²those who actually carry out the killing²a third requirement is the presence of mechanisms for rationalization.2.

Definition of GenocideThe United Nations ³Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide´ defines genocide as ³acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, anational, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.´ This definition includes not only massmurder, but also less drastic means of extermination such as sterilizing a group¶s members or stealing their children.

Because the UN¶s definition of genocide does not include acts intendingto destroy political groups or economic classes, Barbara Harff has coined the complementaryterm ³politicide´ to describe such acts.

Other researchers have simply expanded the definition of genocide to refer to acts intended to destroy any human collectivity, regardless of its social basis.Helen Fein, for example, defines genocide as ³sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological andsocial reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threatoffered by the victim.´

Rudolf J. Rummel has gone even further, subsuming both politicide andgenocide under the all-embracing concept of ³democide,´ which refers to any intentionalgovernment killing of non-criminal and non-militarized civilians.

Of these variousconceptualizations, Fein¶s seems the most usable. Whereas genocide and politicide are largelyoverlapping phenomena with highly similar internal logics, democide includes less systematic

³Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,´ United Nations, accessed December 9,1948, http://www.un.org/millennium/law/iv-1.htm.

Barbara Harff, ³No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955,´

he American Political Science Review

, 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 58.

Fein,

Genocide: A Sociological Perspective

, 24.

Rudolf J. Rummel, ³Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass-Murder,´

Journal of Conflict Resolution

39, no. 1(March 1995): 4.

forms of violence that follow different patterns.

This argues in favor of conflating politicidewith genocide, but against conflating genocide with democide.3.

Is the Capacity for Genocide a Naturally-Selected Trait?James Waller has proposed that the ³ultimate´ causes of genocide (as distinct from the³proximate´ social-psychological causes) lie in the history of human evolution. Waller citesSigmund Freud to the effect that ³the tendency to aggression is an innate, instinctual dispositionin man,´ a view for which Waller finds much support in recent scholarship in the field of evolutionary psychology (EP). A vast body of EP research has concluded that ³human behavior is driven by a set of

universal reasoning circuits

that were

to solveadaptive problems faced by our

hunter-gatherer ancestors

.´ Each of these reasoning circuits islike a microcomputer in the brain. The human brain is comprised of hundreds or thousands of such microcomputers, each ³specialized for solving different problems.´ These circuits ³shouldnot be seen as rigid, genetically inflexible behavior patterns. . . . They are simply predispositionsto learn. . . . In this view, EP understands nature in terms of the boundaries it places on nurture.´Waller stresses that because these circuits ³are not optimally designed mechanisms,´ and because they evolved in the ancient past among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, these circuits ³willnot always necessarily generate adaptive behavior in the present. . . . Our minds, like our appendix, are adapted to a world that no longer exists.´

The key to understanding genocide from an evolutionary point of view lies in the conceptof ³group selection´. Survival in prehistoric times was often a zero-sum competition for limitedresources. Because an individual human was better able to compete when he or she cooperated

Harff, ³No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust?,´ 58-65; Rummel, ³Democracy, Power, Genocide, and Mass-Murder,´ 8, 10, 22.

James Waller,

Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing

, 2

ed. (OxfordUniversity Press, 2007), 138, 46-55, italics in original.