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Genocide Last century’s two most notorious examples of genocide occurred in Europe and Africa. In Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Hitler and the Nazis attempted to destroy all Jews. In the 1990s, in Rwanda, the Hutus tried to destroy all Tutsis. One of the hor- rifying aspects of these slaughters was that the killers did not crawl out from under a rock someplace. Rather, they were ordinary people. In some cases, they were even the victims’ neighbors and friends. Their killing was facilitated by labels that singled out the victims as enemies who deserved to die (Huttenbach 1991; Browning 1993; Gross 2001).

To better understand how ordinary people can participate in genocide, let’s look at an example from the United States. To call the Native Americans “savages,” as U.S. officials and white settlers did, was to label them as inferior, as somehow less than human. This identification made it easier to justify killing the Native Americans in order to take their resources.

When gold was discovered in northern California in 1849, the fabled “Forty-Niners” rushed in. In this region lived 150,000 Native Americans. To get rid of them, the white government put a bounty on their heads. It even reimbursed the whites for their bullets. The result was the slaughter of 120,000 Native American men, women, and children. (Schaefer 2004)

Most Native Americans died not from bullets, however, but from the diseases the whites brought with them. Measles, smallpox, and the flu came from another continent, and the

Native Americans had no immunity against them (Dobyns 1983; Schaefer 2004). The settlers also ruthlessly destroyed the Native Americans’ food supply (buffalos, crops). As a result, about 95 per- cent of Native Americans died (Thornton 1987; Churchill 1997).

The same thing was happening in other places. In South Africa, the Dutch settlers viewed the native Hottentots as jungle animals and totally wiped them out. In Tasmania, the British settlers stalked the local aboriginal population, hunting them for sport and sometimes even for dog food.

Labels are powerful. Those that dehumanize help people to compartmentalize—to separate their acts of cruelty from their sense of being good and moral people. To regard members of some group as inferior or even less than human means that it is okay to treat them inhumanely. This allows people to kill—and still retain a good self-concept (Bernard et al. 1971). In short, labeling the targeted group as inferior or even less than fully human facilitates genocide.

Population Transfer There are two types of population transfer: indirect and direct. Indirect transfer is achieved by making life so miserable for members of a minority that they leave “voluntarily.” Under the bitter condi- tions of czarist Russia, for example, millions of Jews made this “choice.” Direct transfer occurs when a dominant group expels a mi- nority. Examples include the U.S. government relocating Native Americans to reservations and transferring Americans of Japanese descent to internment camps during World War II.

In the 1990s, a combination of genocide and population transfer occurred in Bosnia and Kosovo, parts of the former Yu- goslavia. A hatred nurtured for centuries had been kept under wraps by Tito’s iron-fisted rule from 1944 to 1980. After Tito’s death, these suppressed, smoldering hostilities soared to the surface,

278 C h a p t e r 9 R A C E A N D E T H N I C I T Y

Amid fears that Japanese Americans were “enemies within” who would sabotage industrial and military installations on the West Coast, in the early days of World War II Japanese Americans were transferred to “relocation camps.” Note the identification (“baggage”) tags on this woman and her child as they await relocation. The photo was taken in May 1942.

compartmentalize to sepa- rate acts from feelings or atti- tudes

population transfer the forced movement of a minority group