The Only Good Trojan is a Dead Trojan. When did the Age of Exterminations Start?

This text is based on a chapter of a book titled “The Age of Exterminations” that I am slowly putting together but for which I haven’t yet found a publisher (suggestions are welcome). The gist of the book, and also of the present post, is that exterminations, and in particular “ideological” exterminations, have not been common during history. They are a modern phenomenon related to the structure of modern society.

Homer’s Iliad used to be the paradigmatic narrative of the Western way of seeing the world, influential and widely read up to recent times. The fascination with the Iliad comes from several factors: one is that, even though the story is told from the Achaean viewpoint, the Trojans are never demonized, insulted, or depicted as subhuman. You could say that the war was caused by an act of terrorism by a Trojan who abducted the wife of an Achaean king. Yet, there is no sense of moral superiority attached to the Achaean warriors in the story. Trojans and Achaeans behave much in the same way, fighting for their personal honor, for glory, and sometimes for revenge. After the fall of Troy, the surviving Trojans were not killed, and nobody thought that it was abominable that some of them managed to escape to another land and rebuild a city there.

This attitude seems to have been maintained for a long time in the galaxy of regions that provide the cultural heritage of modern Westerners. Of course, people have always been killing each other in anger, but large-scale exterminations are rare in the historical record up to relatively recent times. This is especially true for “ideological exterminations,” those events that see the exterminees as deserving their fate as being untermenschen, “inferior races,” or “human animals.”

In classical times, defeated enemies were almost never exterminated but rather turned into slaves or assimilated. Centuries of Christian hagiography saw history from the viewpoint of the exterminated by celebrating the virtues of martyrs but never suggested that revenge was an appropriate response. Even the crusades (1095 —1291), the paradigmatic war of religion, were not supposed to be about exterminating Muslims (even though it happened, sometimes) but rather to convert them to Christianity.

And then, things changed. Over the past century, we saw every war becoming a metaphysical struggle of good against evil, with the losing side fully deserving to be eradicated and eliminated. Wars are not declared anymore, peace treaties are replaced by unconditional surrender, the defeated populations are chased away from their land, their leaders are often executed with or without a semblance of a fair trial. The 20th century was a true extermination fair with some of the most bloody and extended killings of civilians ever reported in history.

The increased brutality of modern wars didn’t change the attitude of Westerners, who still see themselves as always having the upper hand in moral terms. Among those who studied 20th-century exterminations, Rudolph Rummel (1932 – 2014) provided extensive data and a term he coined, that of “democide,” to describe these events. But his conclusions were limited to the oversimplified idea that democides are something that only dictatorships engage in; democracies never do that. An interpretation tenable only by a very flexible definition of the terms “democide” and “democracy.” Others, such as Steven Pinker, examined a very limited time span and argued that exterminations are a thing of the past and will forever remain so. Yes, sure. Just like history has ended, according to Francis Fukuyama.

Let’s try to take a long-range view. We saw that in ancient times exterminations were rare and surely not supposed to be a mark of virtue for the exterminators. So, when did the current views appear? I think the turning point can be identified as the start of the witch-hunting campaigns in Europe during the 16th century. (graph from Leeson and Ross, 2018).

The crucial point of witch hunts is that witches were executed not because of something they did but because of something they were. In other words, it was not necessary for a witch to have actually committed a crime to be punished; it was sufficient to be declared a witch by a tribunal. If you think about that, it is a deep perversion of the very concept of “justice,” but it is at the basis of all exterminations, ethnical cleansings, and the like. "You are one of them, so you deserve to die.”

Indeed, the age of witch hunts seems to have been the starting point of an explosion of violence and brutality. Peter Brecke’s “Conflict Catalog” contains information on the number of victims of 3,708 conflicts going back to the beginning of the 15th century. It is not specific about extermination. But exterminations are usually the result of wars, and so we can take these numbers as a proxy for the level of violence.  

Together with my colleagues Martelloni and Di Patti, we examined Brecke’s data in detail. But, here, let me just show you the progress of lethality with time. Here is Brecke’s plot, scaled to the largest extermination in history, that of WWII.

For a better idea of what the long-term trend is, we can normalize the data to the world’s population. Here are the results.

The graph doesn’t show any periodicity, but we can interpret it as formed of two phases, one before 1600, the other after 1600. The first phase is relatively quiet (relatively!); the other shows that large wars are much more lethal. That has to be taken with some caution, because Brecke’s database is not complete it skips many ancient wars for which there are no reliable data available. But it is clear that ancient wars were much less lethal than modern ones, even when scaled to the population of the time.

The data show that the “thirty-years war” (from 1618 to 1648) is one of the first large scale wars. We also know that it is one of the first ideological extermination wars. It saw Protestants and Catholics happily killing each other in Europe: two incompatible views of the world, with each side branding the other as evil. From then on, it was all downhill. Some semblance of “honor” in fighting was maintained up to the early 20th century, and then wars were completely turned into forms of rodent control, except that the rodents are human beings.

What happened that caused this transformation? I can propose three explanations.

1. Sheer Numbers. The killing frenzy of the past few centuries coincides with the rapid increase of the human population, with Europeans moving into other continents and displacing or eradicating the native populations in search for new lands. This idea was later described as the need for lebensraum (living space), often coupled with a pseudo-scientific view that saw “superior races” having the right to replace inferior ones. This phenomenon is sometimes related to the experiments by John B. Calhoun (1917-1995) on mice in overpopulated conditions, showing that it led to a breakdown in social functions and infighting among different factions.

2. Firearms. The start of the Age of Exterminations coincides with the diffusion of firearms. The effect may not be so much a question of increased lethality but of range. Konrad Lorenz argued in his book “On Aggression” (1963) that weapons that kill at a distance disable the capability of the defeated side to send signals of submission to the winners. With that, there disappear the innate mechanisms that prevent humans from killing a defeated enemy (at least sometimes).

3. The Printing Press. In Europe, exterminations went in parallel with the development of the printing press and the diffusion of books and, later, newspapers. With these tools, the state could attain a level of control over its subjects that was unthinkable before. Then, it was quickly found that the best way to focus the state's resources on war was to whip the population into a frenzy of hate against external states or internal subgroups presented as evil. That was the beginning of modern propaganda, a technology developed to do just that on a large scale.

If these interpretations are correct, then we are in a difficult situation. All three trends are not only still valid but becoming more and more important. The human population continues to increase. The capability of killing at a distance has increased from individual firearms to aerial bombing and now to killer drones. Propaganda is becoming increasingly embedded in the Western views of the world, especially with the idea that leaders can “create their own reality,” now possible with artificial intelligence creating “deep fake” images.

So, are we going toward a further increase in the extermination trend? What we see right now in the world seems to indicate exactly that. Does that mean we are doomed? Maybe, but it is also true that everything that grows rapidly carries inside the seeds of its own downfall — it is the essence of what I call the “Seneca Effect.” The idea of “creating one’s own reality” may be already destroying itself, with increasing numbers of people simply refusing to believe anything their government tells them. (even though those who take this attitude risk to become targets for the next extermination round).

Then, the very tools needed to wage wars may be disappearing. With energy and mineral resources becoming more expensive, and with the damage produced by climate change and pollution, there is less and less surplus to be invested in wars. In addition, the human population shows signs of being close to starting a trend of rapid decline (another possible result of the “Seneca Effect.”). That makes it more difficult to wage wars, a phenomenon that we may be already seeing.

We are rolling over to the other side of the great cycle of what we (improperly) call the “Western Civilization” that spanned several centuries. While wars and exterminations were a common feature of the growing phase of the cycle, will they also be important in the declining phase? We can’t say. What we can say is that there is always a little space for human nature to survive and assert itself, even in the midst of the apparent triumph of evil.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.”
― Lucius Annaeus Seneca