When 'permanent security' means endless war
Historian Dirk Moses' important theory is gaining traction
In the 1940s, Raphael Lemkin deemed genocide as the "crime of crimes." In common memory today, the Holocaust continues to stand as a unique example of racially motivated mass murder: the Nazi program to exterminate all European Jews because the existence of even a single Jewish person was seen as a biological threat to the Aryan race — a nearly incomprehensible level of ideological fanaticism.
At the Nuremberg trials in 1947, Otto Ohlendorf was the chief defendant in the Einsatzgruppen Case. He calmly explained to prosecutors why the SS was obligated to shoot children among the 90,000 Jews murdered in southern Ukraine under his command. A committed Nazi intellectual, Ohlendorf’s testimony suggested he wasn’t motivated primarily by antisemitism. He was thinking about security.
“This order did not only try to achieve security, but also permanent security because the children would grow up and surely, being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents,” he testified.
It was a genocidal argument for anticipatory self-defense — in his eyes, rational and legitimate. The military tribunal convicted Ohlendorf of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and he met the hangman on June 7, 1951. (None of the Nuremberg defendants was tried on genocide charges, although the term appeared in the indictments. It was not yet a separate legal category.)
I learned about Ohlendorf’s murderous rationale from historian Dirk Moses, who developed a new analytical term to explain such sinister thinking in his book The Problems of Genocide (2021). How do modern states justify causing massive civilian destruction in the name of self-defense?
The Nazis were unique. The Holocaust may be unequaled in the annals of human cruelty. Europe’s Jews were absolutely no threat to Germany or anyone else; the “danger” they posed was imaginary.
Since 1945, however, we can all think of examples where hundreds of thousands (or millions) of civilians were killed in wars, civil wars, or acts of government repression or orchestrated famines that are not considered genocide and may have occurred in the context of a just war scenario, such as the Allies’ strategic bombing campaign in Germany and Japan. They may or may not have been war crimes or crimes against humanity, two separate legal categories that, in my view, describe conduct that can be just as destructive as genocide without the intent of destroying a racial or religious group “as such”.
Moses’ theory is “permanent security,” which is a policy aspiration: to eliminate any current and future threats in the name of self-defense or national security, i.e., crushing an insurrection by targeting an entire population. Permanent security thinking can fuse with other elements, such as racial or ethnic hatred, territorial expansionism, or the most visceral human urge of all, revenge. It can flow from real traumas perpetrated by one’s enemies. After all, everyone wants to be safe from attack.
In Israel’s conduct in Gaza and Lebanon, we can see the logic of permanent security playing out in real time. Israel is not merely responding to the Hamas atrocities of Oct 7, 2023, and Hezbollah’s terroristic rocket fire into northern Israel. It is attempting to achieve absolute invulnerability by making Gaza and southern Lebanon unlivable and depopulated.
For Responsible Statecraft, I wrote about how Moses’ idea is gaining traction among scholars (such as Yigal Levy in Israel), analysts, and journalists like myself.
Read the article here: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-permanent-war/
