What Does Genocide Teach Us about You and Me?
By Clay Jones
When I first started the research for my book, Why Does God Allow Evil?: Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions, I studied genocide because I didn’t want anyone to be able to disqualify me as not having looked deeply at human evil. After all, one way to pseudo-solve the problem of evil is to portray evil as not so bad. I wasn’t going to let someone accuse me of that. One of the books I read was The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. It’s about the Japanese invasion of Nanking China in 1937. Here’s how Chang sums it up:
The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000–80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced…[1]
It was while reading Chang’s book that a revelation transformed me. I realized that those who do genocide are not inhuman monsters—they’re all too human. They are precisely human. Genocide is what the race of Adam does.
That realization drove me to read the works of one genocide researcher and genocide victim after another. I read about horrible tortures, rapes, and mass murders. What cemented my belief that genocide is precisely human was that absolutely every genocide researcher and even every genocide victim—to a person—agrees that it is the average, ordinary member of a population that commits genocide. I found no exceptions! Not one. Not. One. We would think that the natural bias of the victims would be toward thinking their victimizers inhuman, but that’s not true. What follows are some examples.
Christopher Browning, in his book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, concludes, “I could have been the killer or the evader—both were human.”[2] Similarly, sociologist Harald Welzer wrote: “We are left then with the most discomforting of all realities—ordinary, ‘normal’ people committing acts of extraordinary evil. This reality is difficult to admit, to understand, to absorb…As we look at the perpetrators of genocide and mass killing, we need no longer ask who these people are. We know who they are. They are you and I.”[3]
Holocaust survivor Fred E. Katz wrote that genocides are “carried out by plain folk in the population—ordinary people, like you and me.”[4] And it’s not just other countries! Consider that since 1973 in the United States we have suctioned, scraped, or scalded to death over 60 million unborn babies. Who keeps abortion legal? Its ordinary people like you and me. No wonder that Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel concluded, “Deep down…man is not only executioner, not only victim, not only spectator; he is all three at once.”[5] The reason that Elie Wiesel and other Jewish survivors of the Holocaust don’t think that the Germans were somehow worse people than they were is that the Holocaust absolutely could not have been perpetrated unless a huge number of Jews helped the Nazi’s evil work. Thus, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who himself suffered eight years in a Soviet gulag, asks:
Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood?
It is our own.
And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?”
It is a dreadful question if one answers it honestly.[6]
So I’ve asked my students, if your life had turned out differently, especially if you had never become a Christian, if you had been born in a different society or at a different time, could you have been a guard in Auschwitz or in a Soviet gulag? There is only one honest answer and, like it or not, we were all born Auschwitz-enabled.
Consider the sadness of historian George Kren and psychologist Leon Rappaport in their book, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior:
What remains is a central, deadening sense of despair over the human species. Where can one find an affirmative meaning in life if human beings can do such things? Along with this despair there may also come a desperate new feeling of vulnerability attached to the fact that one is human. If one keeps at the Holocaust long enough, then sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to. If it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all within the range of human possibility, and like it or not, Auschwitz expands the universe of consciousness no less than landings on the moon.[7]
Of course, many authors writing on the problem of evil will quote an egregious example of genocide as something for which God must account. But now I think many of these authors didn’t, as Kren and Rapport put it, keep at studying genocide “long enough” to get the big reveal: “sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to.” When I first realized that Auschwitz was precisely human, that it is what ordinary people do, I was different. I didn’t know how I was different, but I could tell that I was profoundly transformed. As the years went by, however, I was able to name how I was transformed. This knowledge transformed me in fourteen different ways, but I’ll just mention four.
First, as opposed to not being able to find “an affirmative meaning to life,” the knowledge of human evil actually confirms the Christian worldview—people aren’t good! As Paul said in Romans 3:12, 15: “there is no one who does good, not even one…. Their feet are swift to shed blood.” Genocide reveals that people are swift to shed blood.
Second, this knowledge partially answers the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” Once we realize that all humans are born Auschwitz-enabled, then that partially answers the problem of evil because no one ever asks why bad things happen to bad people. When Jesus said in Mark 10:18, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone,” He wasn’t making small talk. Rather, the question of why bad things happen to good people is mistaken from the start.
Third, the knowledge that ordinary people commit genocide unsettles our worldliness. Because of it I can sincerely confess that I don’t love this world.
Fourth, this knowledge increased my desire for Jesus’s return. I want Jesus to come back. Come quickly, Lord Jesus!
Notes
[1] Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1998), 6.
[2] Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), xx.
[3] Harald Welzer, “On Killing and Morality: How Normal People Become Mass Murderers,” Ordinary People as Mass Murderers: Perpetrators in Comparative Perspective, eds. Olaf Jensen and Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann (New York: Macmillan, 2008), 148-149.
[4] Fred E. Katz, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil (New York: State University of New York, 1993), 10.
[5] Elie Wiesel, The Town Beyond the Wall, trans. Stephen Barker (New York: Avon, 1970), 174.
[6] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956, trans. Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, abridged, Edward E. Ericson, Jr. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 147.
[7] George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport, The Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 126.
— Clay Jones is a visiting scholar at Talbot School of Theology and the chairman of the board of Ratio Christi. He has authored Why Does God Allow Evil? Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions and Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It. His website is www.clayjones.net
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I share your experience of being awakened to the evil of men by the accounts in the Rape of Nanking in a college course that I took a few years ago. It was one of several genocides we studied, and while it was the shortest book, it was the hardest to read.
I agree wholeheartedly that this evil is only a confirmation of what the Bible tells us about ourselves as Adam's offspring, and thank you for finding your way there in this writing. I very much enjoyed "Immortal", and look forward to getting your book on this important question.