The rise and fall of the third chimpanzee

or who commit only isolated murders rather than massacres. Erich Fromm believed the warfare of hunter- gatherer societies to be 'characteristically unbloody'. Certainly some pre-literate peoples (Pygmies, Eskimos) seem less warlike than some others (New Guineans, Great Plains and Amazonian Indians). Even the warlike peoples—so it is claimed—practise war in a ritualized fashion and stop when only a few adversaries have been killed. But this idealization does not match my experience of the New Guinea high-landers, who are often cited as practising limited or ritualized war. While most fighting in New Guinea consisted of skirmishes leaving no or few dead, groups sometimes did succeed in massacring their neighbours. Like other peoples, New Guineans tried to drive off or kill their neighbours on occasions when they found it advantageous, safe, or a matter of survival to do so. When we consider early literate civilizations, written records testify to the frequency of genocide. The wars of the Greeks and Trojans, of Rome and Carthage, and of the Assyrians and Babylonians and Persians proceeded to a common end: the slaughter of the defeated irrespective of sex, or else the killing of the men and enslavement of the women. We all know the biblical account of how the walls of Jericho came tumbling down at the sound of Joshua's trumpets. Less often quoted is the sequel. Joshua obeyed the Lord's command to slaughter the inhabitants of Jericho as well as of Ai, Makkedeh, Libnah, Hebron, Debir, and many other cities. This was considered so ordinary that the Book of Joshua devotes only a phrase to each slaughter, as if to say, of course he killed all the inhabitants, what else would you expect? The sole account requiring elaboration is of the slaughter at Jericho itself, where Joshua did something really unusual; he spared the lives of one family (because they had helped his messengers).

We find similar episodes in accounts of the wars of the Crusaders, Pacific islanders, and many other groups. Obviously, I am not saying that slaughter of the defeated irrespective of sex has always followed crushing defeat in war. Yet either that outcome, or else milder versions hke the killing of men and enslavement of women, happened often enough that they must be considered more than a rare aberration in our view of human nature. Since 1950 there have been nearly twenty episodes of genocide, including two claiming over a million victims each (Bangladesh in 1971, Cambodia in the late 1970s) and four more with over a hundred thousand victims each (the Sudan and Indonesia in the 1960s, Burundi and Uganda in the 1970s) (see map on page 258).

Thus, genocide has been part of our human and prehuman heritage for millions of years. In light of this long history, what about our impression that twentieth-century genocide is unique? There is little doubt that Stalin and Hitler set new records for number of victims, because they enjoyed three advantages over killers of earlier centuries—denser populations of victims, improved communications for rounding up victims, and improved technology for mass killing. As another example of how technology can expedite genocide, the Solomon Islanders of Roviana Lagoon in the Southwest Pacific were famous for their headhunting raids that depopulated neighbouring islands. However, as my Roviana friends explained to me, these raids did not blossom until steel axes reached the Solomon Islands in the Nineteenth Century. Beheading a man with a stone axe is difficult, and the axe blade quickly loses its sharp edge and is tedious to resharpen. A much more controversial question is whether technology also makes genocide psychologically easier today, as Konrad Lorenz has argued. His reasoning goes as follows. As humans evolved from apes, we depended increasingly for our food on killing animals. However, we also lived in societies of more and more individuals, between whom cooperation was essential. Such societies could not maintain themselves unless we developed strong inhibitions about killing fellow humans. Throughout most of our evolutionary history, our weapons operated only at close quarters, so it was enough that we be inhibited from looking another person in the face and killing him/her. Modern push-button weapons bypassed these inhibitions by enabling us to kill without even seeing our victims' faces. Technology thus created the psychological prerequisites for the white-collar genocides of Auschwitz and Treblinka, of Hiroshima and Dresden. I am uncertain whether this psychological argument really contributed significantly to the modern ease of genocide. The past frequency of genocide seems to have been at least as high as today's, though practical considerations limited the number of victims. To understand genocide further, we must leave dates and numbers and inquire about the ethics of killing.

That our urge to kill is restrained by our ethics almost all the time is obvious. The puzzle is: what unleashes it?

Today, while we may divide the world's people into 'us' and 'them', we know that there are thousands of types of 'them', all differing from each other as well as from us in language, appearance, and habits. To waste words on pointing this out seems silly: we all know it from books and television, and most of us also know it from first-hand experience of travel. It is hard to transfer ourselves back into the frame of mind prevailing throughout much of human history, described in Chapter Thirteen. Like chimpanzees, gorillas, and social carnivores, we lived in band territories. The known world was much smaller and simpler than it is today; there were only a few known types of'them', one's immediate neighbours.

For example, in New Guinea until recently, each tribe maintained a shifting pattern of warfare and alliance with each of its neighbours. A person might enter the next valley on a friendly visit (never quite without danger) or on a war raid, but the chances of being able to traverse a sequence of several valleys in friendship were negligible. The powerful rules about treatment of one's fellow 'us' did not apply to 'them', those dimly understood, neighbouring enemies. As I walked between New Guinea valleys, people who themselves practised cannibalism and were only a decade out of the Stone Age routinely warned me about the unspeakably primitive, vile, and cannibalistic habits of the people whom I would encounter in the next valley. Even Al Capone's gangs in twentieth- century Chicago made a policy of hiring out-of-town killers, so that the assassin could feel that he was killing one of'them' rather than of 'us'.

The writings of classical Greece reveal an extension of this tribal territorialism. The known world was larger and more diverse, but 'us' Greeks were still distinguished from 'them' barbarians. Our word 'barbarian' is derived from the Greek barbaroi, which simply means non-Greek foreigners. Egyptians and Persians, whose level of civilisation was like that of the Greeks, were nevertheless barbaroi. The ideal of conduct was not to treat all men equally, but instead to reward one's friends and to punish one's enemies. When the Athenian author Xenophon wanted to express the highest praise for his admired leader Cyrus, Xenophon related how Cyrus always repaid his friends' good turns more generously, and how Cyrus retaliated on his enemies' misdeeds more severely (for example, by gouging.out their eyes or cutting off their hands).

Humans, like the Mungi and Scratching Rock hyena clans, practised a dual standard of behaviour, with strong inhibitions about killing one of us', but a green light to kill 'them' when it was safe to do so. Genocide was acceptable under this dichotomy, whether one considers the dichotomy as an inherited animal instinct or as a uniquely human ethical code. We all still acquire in childhood our own arbitrary dichotomous criteria for respecting or scorning other humans. I recall a scene at Goroka airport in the New Guinea highlands, when my Tudawhe field assistants were standing awkwardly in torn shirts and bare feet, and an unshaven, unwashed white man with a strong Australian accent and hat crumpled over his eyes approached. Even before he had begun to sneer at the Tudawhes as 'black burns, they won't be fit to run this country for a century', I had begun to think to myself, 'Dumb Aussie redneck, why doesn't he go home to his goddamn sheep dip. There it was, a blueprint for genocide: I scorning the Australian, and he scorning the Tudawhes, based on collective characteristics taken in at a glance. With time, this ancient dichotomizing has become increasingly unacceptable as a basis for an ethical code. Instead, there has been some tendency towards paying at least lip-service to a universal code—that is, one stipulating similar rules for treating different peoples. Genocide conflicts directly with a universal code.

Despite this ethical conflict, numerous modern perpetrators of genocide have managed to take unabashed pride in their accomplishments. When Argentina's General Julio Argentine Roca opened the pampas for white settlement by ruthlessly exterminating the Araucanian Indians, a delighted and grateful Argentinian nation elected him president in 1880. How do today's practitioners of genocide wriggle out of the conflict between their actions and a universal code of ethics? They resort to one of three types of rationalizations, all of which are variations on a simple psychological theme, 'Blame the victim!

Firstly, most believers in a universal code still consider self-defence justified. This is a usefully elastic rationalization, because 'they' can invariably be provoked into some behaviour adequate to justify self-defence. For instance, the Tasmanians delivered an excuse to genocidal white colonists by killing an estimated total of 183 colonists over thirty-four years, while being provoked by a far greater number of mutilations, kidnappings, [apes, and murders. Even Hitler claimed self-defence in starting the Second World War, and he went to the trouble of faking a Polish attack on a German border post.

Possessing the 'right' religion or race or political belief, or claiming to represent progress or a higher level