Understanding crimes against humanity

Genocide, terrorism and human rights violations are perpetrated when there is a lack of veneration for the individual.

By LOUIS RENÉ BERES
max ernst 521 (photo credit: Max Ernst "The Horde")
max ernst 521
(photo credit: Max Ernst "The Horde")
In the third book of his philosophical romance, The New Gods, the French writer E.M. Cioran writes, "With the exception of some aberrant cases, man does not incline to the good; what god would impel him to do so?" Whether or not the good is a great, unreal force or one that exists only as a ghost of the possible, there is still one certainty: From the beginning, from that primal moment when the swerve toward evil first occurred, humankind has been the author of progressively unspeakable crimes. 
These include genocide, terrorism, and crimes against humanity.
Why? To answer, we may focus on current news. Look at Syria, Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Uganda. Try to figure out the presumptively democratic but also riotous ethos sweeping across North Africa and the Middle East. Glance, in a different direction, at the Congo. Look back and consider, in the mid-1970s, post-Vietnam War Cambodia, Argentina, and, still later, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. Examine Iran, which insistently declares, and with apparent impunity, its genocidal intent against Israel, and simultaneously dares to create a corresponding arsenal of genocidal nuclear weapons.
War and genocide are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Sometimes, war is the optimal or most efficient means by which an intended genocide can be carried out.
How has an entire species, miscarried from the start, scandalized its own creation?  Are we all potential murderers of those who live beside us?  What about enslavement? Slavery continues with growing numbers of victims, among other places, in Mali and Mauritania. Recall the murderous diamond mines of Sierra Leone and Liberia. And let us not forget an ever-widening radius of human child trafficking, an ancient and medieval practice but evident in Nigeria and Benin today.
Where, we must inquire, is "civilization?" These devastating crimes are far-reaching and conspicuously robust. Even today, in the developed and thoroughly modern 21st century, these crimes are flourishing.
The answer has several intersecting levels, and several overlapping layers of pertinent meaning.  At the level most familiar to political scientists and legal scholars, the basic problem lies in the changing embrace of power politics. Representing a transformation of traditional political "realism," the relentless deification of states has reduced billions of individuals to barely residual specks of significance. 
In such an overwhelming world, one wherein the self-determination of peoples is a very weighty value, sanguinary executions of the innocent are expected and applauded. Moreover, such executions, sometimes a thinly disguised or expressly secular form of religious sacrifice, are heralded as defiantly sacred.
But to prevent catastrophes of mass murder, nation-states must first be shorn of their presumed sacredness. Before even this can happen, individuals must first be allowed to discover alternative and equally attractive sources of belonging. In the final analysis, the original cause is not the hideously tribal glorification of particular states, or even the cowardice of powerful bystander states, but the continuing incapacity of individual persons to draw true, vital, and existential meaning from within themselves.
Although generally unseen, the core problem we face on earth is the universal and omnivorous power of the "herd" in human affairs. This is a potentially-sinister power, now applied by those who would create or control a state, but also applicable by every other organization that is based upon individual submission.
At its heart, the problem of international criminality is of distraught and unfulfilled individuals. Ever fearful of having to draw meaning from their own inwardness, most human beings, like a moth to a flame, will draw closer and closer to the nearest collectivity of non-persons. Sometimes it is identification with a class, a tribe, religion, race or the state. The aspiring state is a powerful tool in bonding the masses, as we can see so plainly in both Hamas-controlled Gaza, and Fatah-directed West-Bank.
The threat of the "herd" is the potential to spawn contrived hatreds against those viewed as dissimilar. Fostering a soundless but persistent refrain of "us" versus "them," the masses can block each person from becoming fully human and encourage each submissive member to ceremoniously celebrate the death of "outsiders."
A breeding ground that fosters such hatred can be seen in aspiring states. The individual subject-member, who lives within this state-in-waiting, would actively support voracious expansionary appetites out of a paralyzing fear to not be alone. To this end,  the individual is then indoctrinated to dispose of anyone, by any means necessary, seen as counter to the ultimate goal of the larger group.
The terrorizing figure has already chosen to renounce self in favor of the multitude, and impervious to reason, responds only to the unambiguously strong emotional advantages of "belonging." Therefore, with sacrificial dedication, it becomes a small matter to target victim populations, wherever it may exist, Tel Aviv, Sderot, London or New York.
The overriding task to counter the dangers of false loyalties to a herd must be to discover the way back to ourselves as individuals. Otherwise, we can only continue to fly with the crushing ideals of a delirious collectivism. In dutiful compliance with the larger herd, we would surrender to a suffocating life of rote conformance, an abject capitulation to "groupthink" that would make gratuitous forms of violence entirely normal. 
At its source, the unrecognized but critical human task is to migrate from the Kingdom of the Herd, to the Kingdom of the Self. In succeeding with this very nuanced and grand movement, one must first want to live in the second kingdom.  Ultimately, this is the most difficult part of the needed migration, because the Kingdom of the Herd has immense and even irresistible attractions.
The 19th century philosopher Nietzsche called the state "the coldest of all cold monsters."When this Kingdom of the Herd represents a State, there remains no worthy alternative to the herd's irreducible sovereign authority. 
Students of contemporary world politics should take note. The terminal risks of living unmindfully within the Kingdom of the State may become apparent only when it is already too late. At that eleventh-hour awakening, the lifesaving possibilities of migration to a widening community of genuine individuals would no longer exist.
It follows that we must inevitably fix the fragmented and fractionated world at the molecular level, at its individual source. Then, we can do whatever is necessary to enable our fellow human beings to finally find sufficient comfort and reassurance outside the segregating and potentially murderous herd.
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is the author of many books and articles dealing with international relations and international law. He was born in Zürich, Switzerland, on August 31, 1945. Dr. Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue.