The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,203

fighting on religious principles; and so there is no need for hesitation.... The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire.... [Therefore] you are mourning for what is not worthy of grief.”136 Inspired by the conquests of Joshua, Oliver Cromwell massacred every man, woman, and child in an Irish town during the reconquest of Ireland, and explained his actions to Parliament: “It has pleased God to bless our endeavour at Drogheda. The enemy were about 3,000 strong in the town. I believe we put to the sword the whole number.”137 The English Parliament passed a unanimous motion “that the House does approve of the execution done at Drogheda as an act of both justice to them and mercy to others who may be warned of it.”138

The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn’t think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn’t happen to them. One exception was the 16th-century Spanish priest Antonio de Montesinos, who protested the appalling treatment of Native Americans by the Spanish in the Caribbean—and who was, in his own words, “a voice of one crying in the wilderness.”139 There were, to be sure, military codes of honor, some from the Middle Ages, that ineffectually attempted to outlaw the killing of civilians in war, and occasional protests by thinkers of early modernity such as Erasmus and Hugo Grotius. But only in the late 19th century, when citizens began to protest the brutalization of peoples in the American West and the British Empire, did objections to genocide become common.140 Even then we find Theodore Roosevelt, the future “progressive” president and Nobel Peace laureate, writing in 1886, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely in the case of the tenth.”141 The critic John Carey documents that well into the 20th century the British literary intelligentsia viciously dehumanized the teeming masses, whom they considered to be so vulgar and soulless as not to have lives worth living. Genocidal fantasies were not uncommon. In 1908, for example, D. H. Lawrence wrote:If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus.”142

During World War II, when Americans were asked in opinion polls what should be done with the Japanese after an American victory, 10 to 15 percent volunteered the solution of extermination.143

The turning point came after the war. The English language did not even have a word for genocide until 1944, when the Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined it in a report on Nazi rule in Europe that would be used a year later to brief the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials.144 In the aftermath of the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, the world was stunned by the enormity of the death toll and by horrific images from the liberated camps: assembly-line gas chambers and crematoria, mountains of shoes and eyeglasses, bodies stacked up like cordwood. In 1948 Lemkin got the UN to approve a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and for the first time in history genocide, regardless of who the victims were, was a crime. James Payne notes a perverse sign of progress. Today’s Holocaust deniers at least feel compelled to deny that the Holocaust took place. In earlier centuries the perpetrators of genocide and their sympathizers boasted about it.145

No small part in the new awareness of the horrors of genocide was a willingness of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories. Chalk and Jonassohn note that these memoirs are historically unusual.146 Survivors of earlier genocides had treated them as humiliating defeats and felt that talking about them would only rub in history’s harsh verdict. With the new humanitarian sensibilities, genocides became crimes against humanity, and survivors were witnesses for the prosecution. Anne Frank’s diary, which recorded her life in hiding in Nazioccupied Amsterdam before she was deported to her death in Bergen-Belsen, was published by her father shortly after the war. Memoirs of deportations and death camps by Elie Wiesel and Primo