High banks become valleys; deep valleys become hills.1
1. Human Malice and Mass Slaughter
Everything begins with Genocidal Organ, a story about mass slaughter.
Genocidal Organ depicts two instances of mass slaughter. One is the turmoil and unrest that John Paul creates in the world’s “periphery” with the “grammar of genocide”: slaughter in plain sight. The other consists of targeted operations to clear away the sources of violence in that “periphery,” led by imperial America at the world’s “core,” with Captain Shepherd himself taking part: slaughter beneath the surface. The two represent two ways of understanding mass slaughter.
One understands mass slaughter as a problem of human nature: violence and darkness are innate in human beings, and the civilizing process prevents these negative tendencies from erupting all at once. Mass slaughter is not the normal condition of modern society, but a “monstrosity” born of the failure of various safeguards, such as democratic politics. In short, it is an isolated event confined to a particular time and place—for example, the Nazi extermination of the Jews in 1938–1945. As civilization advances, we are gradually moving beyond the reach of this violent threat.
This is the prevailing explanation of mass slaughter. It banishes slaughter from our society—at least psychologically—by treating it as exceptional and marginal, thereby defending an everyday life that is peaceful, at least on the surface. Behind this explanation lies Enlightenment reason’s idea of “perfectibility”: the possibility that we can overcome our own evil tendencies and become more perfect beings. Before the nuclear terrorist attack on Sarajevo, John Paul lived by this idea—the civilizing process had “eliminated” human malice, and we were living in an age of unprecedented “peace.”
Enlightenment reason’s notion of “perfectibility” and its view of history as “development” certainly advanced beyond the Christian doctrine of original sin, with its “unchanging human nature,” and the medieval view of history as “stagnation.” Yet they, too, soon faced a challenge from the discourse of the natural sciences. As early as the nineteenth century, Lombroso, the founder of criminology, attempted to find physiological evidence for criminal behavior through phrenology. He held that behavioral tendencies were determined by immutable physiological structures, such as the shape of the skull. Like the Christian conception of humanity marked by “original sin,” this conception of “born criminals” presupposed that human nature—and especially human limitations—could not be changed.
At the opening of Genocidal Organ, the nuclear terrorist attack on Sarajevo reshapes people’s understanding of violence and civilized society. The death of John Paul’s wife and child in the attack shatters his rosy vision of civilization: human malice has not been “eliminated,” and he throws himself into the search for this propensity for evil. The “grammar of genocide,” derived from an analysis of Nazi propaganda texts, belongs fundamentally to the same natural-scientific discourse as Lombroso’s phrenology. It assumes that the human mental apparatus has certain limitations: during the long civilizing process, the functional module responsible for “killing” has not been “eliminated” but has instead lain “dormant.” Particular grammatical rules can activate it, producing mass slaughter. This is a new doctrine of “original sin” founded on Chomskyan linguistics. More than two hundred years on, the new preachers of the apocalypse no longer brandish biblical texts and crude phrenological evidence against the possibility of goodness opened up by Enlightenment reason. They have equipped themselves with sharper weapons: biology, psychology, and linguistics.
John Paul is one of them. Having lost faith in humanity’s capacity for goodness, he takes up the blade of linguistics and begins slaughtering human beings marked by “original evil.” Yet while he is lost in human malice, unable to extricate himself, another campaign of mass slaughter quietly unfolds, led by imperial America at the world’s “core.” Captain Shepherd is drawn into it, giving us another perspective from which to understand mass slaughter.
2. Modernity and Mass Slaughter
The other understanding locates the problem in modernity: mass slaughter is not a historical event but a thoroughly modern invention. The elements of modern civilization produce mass slaughter through a curious “chemical reaction.” Charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter are each unremarkable on their own, but mixed in particular proportions, they become powerful gunpowder. People cry out at the “monstrosity,” yet it is inherent in our civilization.
If we examine the history of mass slaughter carefully, we find that premodern societies indeed never carried out such methodically planned operations to “clear away” particular populations on so large a scale. War, plague, and famine took countless lives, but these were really by-products of low productive capacity. Never before had human beings stood with such elegance on one side of a pane of glass, watching their fellow human beings die in the “shower room” on the other.
To “clear away” at least six million people in seven years, or at least three hundred thousand in seven weeks, takes far more than spontaneous hatred and fanaticism. On the contrary, it must be a highly rationalized, organized operation. It requires the most intelligent minds to devise the most scientific plans, then the most efficient bureaucratic organizations—generally government departments and the military—to execute them. In this precise, painstaking work, any emotion, whether sympathy or hatred, obstructs the plan. In fact, in the account given by Hilberg, the historian of the Nazi extermination of the Jews, very few guards in the Nazi concentration camps—those bywords for terror—took pleasure in torture. More of them displayed indifference and sympathy held in check: an awareness of themselves as “rational machines.”
John Paul chose the wrong target for his revenge. Hatred as a passion is fleeting—it may have existed only during Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass” inflicted on the Jews in 1938. Hatred as a political instrument, by contrast, is intricately woven and enduring—it is what truly runs through the seven-year history of the extermination of the Jews. What caused the nuclear terrorist attack on Sarajevo was not human malice, but the entire chain of command stretching from the weapon’s manufacture to its detonation: a rationalized chain from which private feeling had been excluded.
Behind this chain, the outline of imperial America dimly emerges, along with its ambitions as a powerful political state. John Paul is one link in the chain—a link that has slipped out of control. Captain Shepherd is another—a link still under control. Now the state orders the latter to replace the broken link, and their fates begin to intertwine.
3. Rationalization and Its Possibilities
How are orders for mass slaughter issued and obeyed? What outcomes will rationalization ultimately force people to accept?
We have long believed that intense human malice lies behind mass slaughter. Hitler, for example, invariably appears in film and television as an extreme antisemite. But as we have seen, hatred alone cannot enable an individual to “infect” tens of millions of people over seven long years and mobilize a state apparatus whose defining characteristic is its high degree of rationalization. Hitler did, in fact, try to spread antisemitic sentiment among the population, but even Goebbels had to admit that few responded. The Nazi extermination of the Jews was not a campaign of mass slaughter designed in advance. It was more like one part of a vast “rational engineering project” led by the political state—an unforeseen link produced by continual revisions in practice.
In their public propaganda, the Nazis consistently proclaimed the rebuilding of a Germanic “Thousand-Year Reich.” The Jewish question was merely an insignificant part of this “national mission.” They successively employed deportation, confinement under surveillance, and prohibitions on intermarriage to manage the Jews. But as the Reich’s territory expanded, and Europe no longer had anywhere to accommodate these Jews, the most “rational” solution was to send them to the “shower rooms” to be disposed of en masse. This was not a meticulously premeditated massacre, but a conclusion Nazi officials reached through day after day of administrative planning. When old measures no longer suited changing circumstances, more efficient proposals were put on the agenda as a matter of course. Similarly, the supreme strategic objective set by Japan’s militarist government was to force Chiang Kai-shek’s government into submission. To that end, it launched an offensive in Beiping, an offensive in Shanghai, an offensive in Nanjing.
Returning to Genocidal Organ, the vast “rational engineering project” led by imperial America is absolute homeland security. With homeland security as its supreme objective, imperial America embarks on a decision-making process guided by the principle of rationalization. At home, it uses tighter surveillance and the outright taking of people’s lives to “eliminate” any potential threat of violence. Under the Leviathan machine’s omnipresent surveillance, the unarmed population is forced to give up its own capacity to use force for fear of violent retaliation by the system. “Peace” is thus achieved within the empire’s borders—in reality, “violence” has been transferred into the hands of a more powerful “other.” Abroad, it conducts targeted operations to clear away extremists in the world’s “periphery,” uprooting the sources of disorder. To this end, it will even use John Paul’s discovery, the “grammar of genocide,” to provoke protracted mutual slaughter between ethnic groups.
As Captain Shepherd’s covert operation unfolds, we can finally examine the mass slaughter John Paul creates from a higher vantage point: it is not the result of malice, but an “unfeeling” link in imperial America’s rational decision-making. Indeed, if we carefully examine Captain Shepherd’s operation in Somalia, it is easy to see that even the massacres in the “periphery” seemingly brought about by John Paul depend on conditions supplied by imperial America—for example, efficient warlord governments and large quantities of lethal weaponry. Killing begun out of hatred cannot harm very many people. Only organized, armed military forces can supply the inexhaustible driving force that keeps mass slaughter running. That force, too, comes from imperial America’s precise calculations.
John Paul is a manipulated link in the “chain of killing.” When his desire for revenge makes him unfit to serve the “rational engineering project,” imperial America issues an order for Captain Shepherd to “retrieve” him. John Paul is merely a broken “component.” Beside the ambitions of the political state and its vast “rational engineering project,” he is not worth mentioning.
4. Harmony <harmony/> and the “Society of Admedistration”
Now we know that John Paul chose the wrong target for revenge. The true culprit behind the nuclear terrorist attack on Sarajevo was not humanity’s evil nature, but imperial America and the world order it leads. At the end of Genocidal Organ, John Paul unleashes panic in North America through the “grammar of genocide.” Far from doing it the slightest harm, he strengthens administrative rationality’s overall control of society. What follows is the Foucauldian “medicalized society” of Harmony <harmony/>: the “society of admedistration.”2
Behind the political state and the “rational engineering project” it pursues lie two assumptions. The first is moral: the political state is a continuation of life in the “polis,” or city-state. Life in the “polis” means a way of living in which the public and private spheres have not yet become separate. Citizens of the “polis” are products of public life; their actions are motivated by the advancement of the common good, not private enjoyment. As a higher social entity, the “polis” demands certain “virtues” of its members, as in a Rousseauian “moral republic.” The second assumption is technical: the “rational engineering project” supplies the technical means for realizing life in the “polis.” Individuals are not born citizens of the “polis.” They are the raw material from which “citizens” are made, objects to be managed and domesticated. This resembles the “political tutelage” Sun Yat-sen describes in Fundamentals of National Reconstruction.3 Through management and domestication, the political state turns individuals into “fit persons.” The ultimate outcome of this political practice is the construction of a Harmony <harmony/> society.
The political state is the “midwife” of citizens of the “polis.” Thus, when the human essence lies in an irreducible “mind,” the political state becomes an “engineer of human souls,” shaping people’s virtues and tastes through various forms of cultural coercion. But when that essence is reduced to the body’s physical activity—as the discourses of biology, psychology, medicine, and the other natural sciences expand—the body becomes the object of the political state’s surveillance. The “society of admedistration” installs the bodily monitoring system “WatchMe” in every future citizen, and uses drug-refining devices to control their physiological responses. On each child’s seventeenth birthday, WatchMe activates automatically—and automatically makes the child a member of the “polis” community.
This is the essence of Harmony <harmony/>. Freud posits a “self”—the ego—that is private in character, always at odds with the outside world, always in a relationship of tension and repression. Mead, by contrast, posits a “self” that is public in character, bestowed by the “other” and aligned with the morals, ideals, and values of its group: inner and outer worlds in harmony.
At the end of Harmony <harmony/>, “admedistration” abolishes everyone’s self-consciousness. By making the many one, it achieves immortality for humanity as a whole—or, at the level of the individual, “no one survives.” Everyone in the new society is mindful of “other people”; everyone lives for “other people.” By destroying diversity, humanity finally achieves a harmony <harmony/> of uniformity. Is this humanity’s elevation, or its extinction? Who can say?
5. Afterword
Project Itoh’s stories offer plenty of interesting material through which to examine modern society. But I still don’t recommend either animated feature: they really are dull and uninteresting.
There is more to this story than mass slaughter, and many intellectual resources remain to be explored: Wallerstein’s “world-system,” Foucault’s “biopolitics,” Giddens’s “concentration of violence under state control.” But this piece is long-winded and tiresome enough already, so I will stop at mass slaughter rather than open up new lines of analysis.
We have to acknowledge that the many elements that make mass slaughter possible remain present in modern society, and that rigorous safeguards against them have never been put in place. Rather than confront the “terror” within everyday life, people prefer to leave this subject to sociology, thereby “clearing it away” from their minds and carrying on with life beneath the “appearance of peace.” Many have yet to recognize the enormous harm that the political state and its “rational engineering projects” do to our society. They still naively ask the state to respond, in the cultural sphere, to their spontaneous “sense of moral responsibility.” This gives the issues discussed here a little more immediate relevance. Some things require not only changes in our institutional arrangements but, more importantly, changes in the institutions that shape our thinking.
