As
horrible as this is, I resist calling it genocide. There was an attempt in Nazi
Germany to kill all the Jews. In the Rwandan genocide, one tribe attempted to entirely
kill off the other. On the other hand, no one in China or India, neither
families nor the government, wants to rid their country of women altogether. Men
are not killing women in order to create an ideal society by removing a group
of people unsuitable for membership. Genocide is the attempt by one large group
of people to utterly exterminate another large group of people. No one in China
or India is trying to rid the world of newborn girls in an attempt to find a
final solution to the woman problem. I resist expanding the definition of
genocide to include collateral damage in time of war, vigilante action by the
Klu Klux Klan or other such atrocities because I think it important to preserve
a label specific to what happened in Rwanda and in Germany under the Nazis.
Gendercide is horrible and labeling it with a name derived from “genocide” is a
good move rhetorically. Extreme Pro-choicers in the USA are making the same
good rhetorical move when they define every abortion as “murder”.
In
China, the social and economic threat that was seen as being so dire that
something as extreme as the one-child policy could be justified as the only
effective response to over-population. Girls only became the victims of this
policy when families, forced
to decide which gender their one child should be, showed a traditional
preference for boys greatly strengthened by the limitation of being allowed
only one child. Girls were not the threat that the policy addressed. The
premeditated murder of millions of new-born females by their parents was an
unintended consequence. Perhaps this consequence was inevitable given the
preference for boys but getting girls murdered was not the result the policy
sought to achieve; it was anti-girl in practice but not by design or intent.
I would
call female infanticide in India and China both sexism and premeditated murder.
Girls are valued less than boys and are seen as more of a liability than an
asset by families who want sons to carry on the family name and work to support
their parents in old age. The adage “a son is a son forever but a daughter
becomes a wife someday” sums up the exact nature of the sexism involved in a
way that also makes clear why murdering their daughters seems simple rationality
to the millions of families who do so every year in both China and India. The
practice is so wide-spread in both countries that it would have to be thought
of as normative. These families are not rare deviants at odds with their
culture. They are doing something, murdering their daughters, which evokes no
more moral outrage in their culture than getting paid in cash for doing the
thing you do professionally for some of your acquaintances and not reporting
that income does in our culture. They are ordinary people doing something that
would be seen as so horrible in our culture that it would be hard to conceal
and as severely punished as the law allowed when discovered. Understanding how and
why ordinary parents can “murder” their girl children tells us something about
how and why genocide can happen. Extreme pro-choicers in this county would
claim that understanding how and why expectant moms can “murder” their unwanted
children tells us something about how and why genocide can happen.
As David
Moshmon points out, we have a need to preserve our own self-image be seeing
people responsible for genocide as being very different from ordinary people (Moshmon,
2005). We want to see them as motivated by a burning hatred of not just one
person but of a whole large group of people more intense than anything sane and
normal people like us and our friends and neighbors could ever feel or
understand. Most of the bystanders in Nazi Germany, the people who gave tacit
consent by neither protesting nor intervening to protect the victims, were
ordinary people no worse than the people in China who tolerate the mass murder
of a significant percentage of the girls born there every year.
In both
cases, they understood why the murders were happening. The one child policy
made some parents, given the whole complex and tangled web of values and fears
stirred up by that situation, know what they had to do if a girl child was
born. Other Chinese understood that complex and tangled web well enough not to
judge, well enough to know better than to forfeit their own tranquility by
pondering too deeply on what was happening and why. Perhaps many accepted the
one child policy as the only solution to over-population, the only road China
could take to a better future, and accepted what needed to be done. Many Germans
accepted Hitler’s conspiracy theory and saw the final solution as the only road
Germany could take to a better future, and accepted what needed to be done.
Most
Germans had been convinced to internalize a vast conspiracy theory that
scapegoated the Jews as the cause of unemployment, the hyper-inflation that
destroyed the value of everyone’s savings and all the other troubles that befell
Germany after the loss of the First World War. People who had always been
comfortable and considered themselves good respectable bourgeois actually went
hungry after their savings and their jobs disappeared. Something was
desperately wrong in their world. With the help of Hitler, the great
instigator, they found the cause of it all and made sense of what was happening
to them; the Jews were to blame. In this situation, everyone who has inclined
to strike out violently when frustrated struck out at the Jews viciously, not
just unchecked by public disapproval but, in so doing, violently expressing the
general public’s opinion of the Jews. People who did not hate felt it their
duty, sometimes painful and sometimes not, to follow the orders that had to be
given and obeyed to achieve a final solution to Germany’s problem, the problem
of the Jews.
The
Rwandan genocide began when the plane carrying the county’s president, a Hutu,
was shot down (Rwanda: The wake of a genocide, n. d.) It was later established
that the missile was launched from a Rwandan Army base by radical Hutu seeking
to create a provocation. Rwanda, at that time, was under attack by a rebel
Tutsi force operating out of Uganda and attempting to overthrow the Hutu dominated
Rwandan government. The Hutu population had largely been convinced by
instigators broadcasting mostly on radio that the Tutsi were attempting to
reestablish their ancient kingdom and enslave the Hutu. The instigators
insisted that this was a real possibility and that the Tutsi were very close to
achieving this objective.
The
Tutsi rebels were blamed with shooting down the president’s plane. The key
instigators then informed their Hutu listenership that the only way to preserve
their freedom, perhaps even their lives, was to wipe out the Tutsi minority. The
Rwandan Army and National Police along with two militant Hutu militias did most
of the actual killing. But ordinary Hutu did, in some cases, slaughter their
Tutsi neighbors, most with Machetes, and in many more cases cheered on those
who did or at least made no protest. Moderate Hutu were also being killed; perhaps
as a warning to other Hutu not to protest or interfere. Apparently, ordinary
Hutu pointed out where Tutsi were hiding and otherwise aided and abetted the
slaughter in various other ways more often than not.
70% of
the Tutsi population, comprising 20% of Rwanda’s total population, was murdered
in roughly 100 days. An environment of intense fear and foreboding had been
created and maintained for a long period of time by the instigators; they now
used the shooting down of the plane to trigger absolute panic and to channel it
into murderous rage against the Tutsi. This was easy given that they had
previously convinced most Hutu that the Tutsi were plotting to enslave them.
All that was required was to announce that the Tutsi were close to success and
that it was now, for the Hutu, a matter of them or us. Most of the Hutu, both
the bystanders and the perpetrators, were reacting as if this were true. The
instigators, both those on the radio and those who actually shot down the
president’s plane, probably were motivated initially by a murderous hatred of
the Tutsi and working from the beginning to create a situation where genocide
was possible. The vast majority of the Hutu bystanders and even most of the
perpetrators were not. They were ordinary people, no more insane, sadistic or lacking
in empathy than the general run of people in your neighborhood.
Moshmon,
D. (2005). Genocidal hatred: Now you see it, now you don’t. In R. J. Sternberg
(Ed.) The psychology of hate. (pp.
185-209). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
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