Jared Diamond - The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

We can now begin to understand better the lack of reaction of third parties to genocide. Genocide inflicts crippling and lasting psychological damage on the victims and killers who experience it first-hand. But it also may leave deep scars on those who hear about it only second-hand, such as the children of Auschwitz survivors, or the psychotherapists who treat the survivors and Vietnam veterans. Therapists who have trained professionally to be able to listen to human misery often cannot bear to hear the sickening recollections of those involved in genocide. If paid professionals cannot stand it, who can blame the lay public for refusing to listen?

Consider the reactions of Robert Jay Lifton, an American psychiatrist who had already had much experience with survivors of extreme situations before he interviewed survivors of the Hiroshima A-bomb:

. . now, instead of dealing with 'the atomic bomb problem', I was confronted with the brutal details of actual experiences of human beings who sat before me. I found that the completion of each of these early interviews left me profoundly shocked and emotionally spent. But very soon—within a few days, in fact—I noticed that my reactions were changing. I was listening to descriptions of the same horrors, but their effect upon me had lessened. The experience was an unforgettable demonstration of the 'psychic closing off we shall see to be characteristic of all aspects of atomic bomb exposure. .

What genocidal acts can we expect from Homo sapiens in the future? There are plenty of obvious reasons for pessimism. The world abounds with trouble spots that seem ripe for genocide: South Africa, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, New Caledonia, and the Middle East, to name just a few. Totalitarian governments bent on genocide seem unstoppable. Modern weaponry permits one to kill ever larger numbers of victims, to be a killer while wearing a coat and tie, and even to effect a universal genocide of the human race.

At the same time, I see grounds for cautious optimism that the future reed not be as murderous as the past. In many countries today, people of different races or religions or ethnic groups live together, with varying degrees of social justice but at least without open mass murder—for instance, Switzerland, Belgium, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, even the post-Ishi USA. Some attempts at genocide have been successfully interrupted, reduced, or prevented by the efforts or anticipated reactions of third parties. Even the Nazi extermination ofjews, which we view as the most efficient and unstoppable of genocides, was thwarted in Denmark, Bulgaria, and every other occupied state where the head of the dominant church publicly denounced deportation ofjews before or as soon as it began. A further hopeful sign is that modern travel, television, and photography enable us to see other people living 10,000 miles away as human, like us. Much as we damn twentieth-century technology, it is blurring the distinction between 'us' and 'them' that makes genocide possible. While genocide was considered socially acceptable or even admirable in the pre-first-contact world, the modern spread of international culture and knowledge of distant peoples have been making it increasingly hard to justify.

Still, the risk of genocide will be with us as long as we cannot bear to understand it, and as long as we delude ourselves with the belief that only rare perverts could commit it. Granted, it is hard not to go numb while reading about genocide. It is hard to imagine how we, and other nice ordinary people that we know, could bring ourselves to look helpless people in the face while killing them. I came closest to being able to imagine it when a friend whom I had long known told me of a genocidal massacre at which he had been a killer.

Kariniga is a gentle Tudawhe tribesman who worked with me in New Guinea. We shared life-threatening situations, fears, and triumphs, and I like and admire him. One evening after I had known Kariniga for five years, he told me of an episode from his youth. There had been a long history of conflict between the Tudawhes and a neighbouring village of Daribi tribesmen. Tudawhes and Daribis seem quite similar to me, but Kariniga had come to view Daribis as inexpressibly vile. In a series of ambushes the Daribis finally succeeded in picking off many Tudawhes, including Kariniga's father, until the surviving Tudawhes became desperate. All the remaining Tudawhe men surrounded the Daribi village at night and set fire to the huts at dawn. As the sleepy Daribis stumbled down the steps of their burning huts, they were speared. Some Daribis succeeded in escaping to hide in the forest, where Tudawhes tracked down and killed most of them during the following weeks. The establishment of Australian government control ended the hunt before Kariniga could catch his father's killer. Since that evening, I have often found myself shuddering as I recalled details of it—the glow in Kariniga's eyes as he told me of the dawn massacre; those intensely satisfying moments when he finally drove his spear into some of his people's murderers; and his tears of rage and frustration at the escape of his father's killer, whom he still hoped to kill some day with poison. That evening, I thought I understood how at least one nice person had brought himself to kill. The potential for genocide that circumstances thrust on Kariniga lies within all of us. As the growth of world population sharpens conflicts between and within societies, humans will have more urge to kill each other, and more effective weapons with which to do it. To listen to first-person accounts of genocide is unbearably painful. But if we continue to turn away and to not understand it, when will it be our own turn to become the killers, or the victims?

PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON. 'The immediate objectives are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements. It will be essential to ruin their crops in the ground and prevent their planting more.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. 'If it be the Design of Providence to Extirpate these Savages in order to make room for Cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that Rum may be the appointed means.

PRESIDENT THOMAS JEFFERSON. 'This unfortunate race, whom we had been taking so much pains to save and to civilize, have by their unexpected desertion and ferocious barbarities justified extermination and now await our decision on their fate.

PRESIDENT JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 'What is the right of the huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?

PRESIDENT JAMES MONROE. 'The hunter or savage state requires a greater extent of territory to sustain it, than is compatible with the progress and just claims of civilized life. . and must yield to it.

PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON. 'They have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition.

Established in the midst of another and a superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority or seeking to control them, they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and ere long disappear.

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN MARSHALL. 'The tribes of Indians inhabiting the country were savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn from the forest…. That law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered was incapable of application to a people under such circumstances. Discovery [of America by

Europeans gave an exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of occupancy, either by purchase or by conquest.

PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON. 'Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched