Who We Want Dead: a Taxonomy

This essay was inspired by an NPR story on depression and other psychological disorders among college students. The story presented itself as an investigative report revealing the relative lack of counseling and mental health support services colleges and universities are able to provide in comparison to an increasing need. As serious as this issue is, it brought up a much more serious issue in my mind: we as a society clearly don’t want people to kill themselves and spend money on suicide prevention and counseling (even if it is inadequate), but at the same time, we don’t feel the need as a society to spend the money it takes to prevent people from dying of ordinary illnesses by providing everyone with health coverage. Likewise, while we don’t want people to kill themselves, we also don’t want to improve their quality of life and extend overall life expectancy by assuring a living wage, or, for that matter, adequate nutrition or clean water or breathable air to all of our citizens.

Given this seeming disconnect, I asked myself what, exactly, it was about suicide (as opposed to physical disease or simple starvation) that we find so repugnant as to merit actual economic attention. The answers I came up with led me down some disturbing pathways indeed.

Many of us object to suicide on traditionally Christian grounds. The preponderance of Catholics and conservative Protestants contend that your life does not belong to you; rather, it is a gift from God that you have no right to reject. Therefore, it is wrong to permit suicide since it is a sin, ie an affront against God. This is problematic in a secular society for a variety of more or less obvious reasons, and one wonders if perhaps the church organizations that profess these theological strictures could do more to support suicide prevention independent of government mental-health agencies. Even more disturbing is the idea brought forth by certain conservative Christians that suicide is pernicious because it is the “easy way out,” and that all human suffering is because God has a “plan” or a “reason” for it. This postulates a cruel torturer-God that may appeal to fans of Jack Bauer but has serious cosmological implications. Besides, isn’t this the God the Book of Job exists to refute? The Lord-as-Earthly-Torturer, however, does satisfy important criteria for determining in the minds of these Christians who deserves to live or die, who is worth saving and who is not, who is “guilty” and who is “innocent.” Making sure potential suicides are not able to act on their thoughts is one way of forcing people to face their perceived sins and accompanying guilt. This has little or nothing to do with why people want to commit suicide to begin with, of course, and fails to account for the psychological and neurochemical pathways to despair, but it does make those who are suffering but not suicidal more comfortable in their decision to remain alive.

In the same way, many of us not of the fundamentalist bent shore up our own right to exist by condemning large groups and often entire nations by labeling them “enemy” and waging war against them. Terrorists are the popular bogeys these days, but in times past they’ve been Communists, “gooks,” Nazis, “Krauts,” “Injuns,” rebels, Yankees, Redcoats, and many species of Other the existence of whom was considered either a threat or a pestilence or both. Enemies forfeit their right to live through incorrect thought and ideology (Communists) or through perceived behavioral problems (terrorists, “criminals”) or some combination of the two, usually resulting in the label “evil” (Nazis, terrorists again). The more not like ourselves we want the enemy to seem, the more likely we’ll label them “evil.” We reserve the term “pure evil” for those whose humanity we want to entirely revoke.

In the U.S., we claim not to desire the death of those who are simply the wrong ethnicity, class, or sexual orientation. But we have frequently acted differently, notably with our 19th Century policy of killing and displacing Native Americans. To prove our good faith, we often destroy others through abuse or neglect rather than active extermination, as we did with Africans enslaved to work our southern plantations and as we continue to do with the poor. But more on that later.

Extremes on the political Right often try to link those whose behavior they think worthy of death with ethnicity or what they see as theological or ideological perversions. This may inadvertently reveal their own inner motivations or biases, but lately there has been little attempt to hide even those. Extremists on the Right declare “Islamo-fascism” to be the motivating factor behind terrorism, or, at an even greater extreme, blame Islam itself as a hateful and violent faith that must be dealt with in a hateful and violent way. At its most extreme, this position would advocate the elimination of perhaps a billion people, about one-sixth of the the world’s population, unless those wrong-believing Muslims convert.

Attempts at conversion by the sword are nothing new, particularly when Islam and Christianity clash, and extremists on the Muslim side are no less fervent in their assumption that Christians should either follow Mohamed or die. The eschatological implications for both sides are quite dire, with the destruction of between four and five billion people at stake either through supernatural intervention or divinely inspired “holy war.”

I bring up these extreme examples in order to compare them to those who (merely) seek the destruction of others because of their perceived behavioral or character flaws. This tends to be the position of the Center-Left in the U.S. which, like most of Europe, places terrorism in the law-enforcement category and not a good candidate for war. For them, the problem is the terrorist as an individual, whose poor decision-making or because of personal issues has been led to a life of violent struggle. This approach, at least, since it is individualized, tends to lead to less killing, but seldom to none. Timothy McVeigh was a widely acknowledged terrorist the U.S. put to death, as we would Osama bin Laden if captured alive. That President Obama promises bin Laden will be “brought to justice” puts him in this camp in theory, even though his recent decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan indicates otherwise.

Most Americans, no matter our politics, share some of this view, and it arises either from the the need to enforce theological precepts of innocence and guilt or from ideas about the “proper” way to enforce “the rule of law” or “social order.” Upwards of 80% of Americans support the death penalty for certain crimes, though which crimes and what aggravating factors should trigger it vary. This leaves a mere 20% of Americans, on our most merciful day, who think that others should not be killed for their misbehavior.

Ideology continues to be a motivating factor to kill, and it was the primary reason the U.S. invaded Vietnam and Korea, and it was the professed reason Stalin killed so many of his own people—though the primary reason was no doubt simple paranoia. Poorly practiced ideology also led Chairman Mao to let millions of his own peasants die of starvation, but that event may be better placed in the neglect section below. Ideology is a clear motivating factor in the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and in some of the civil wars in Africa following decolonization. The most obvious example is Nazism, which used its ideological precepts to justify both its expansionist war and its internal genocide against Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and anyone else deemed undesirable by fascist eugenics. By a very rough estimate, between 10 and 50 million people were killed during the 20th Century alone due to ideological warfare. But, of course, these numbers could not be so large if the notion of the nation-state were not still with us. The nation-state concept ties ideology to the leadership of a country and, theoretically, as the regime goes, so goes the population. In longstanding totalitarian regimes such as North Korea, this may come close to the truth. But in practical terms, the vast majority of those targeted because of perceived ideological deficiencies hold few strong convictions and are simply unfortunate enough to have leaders whose viewpoints are seen as problematic by other leaders.

The nation-state concept also links killing because of ethnicity closely to that of killing due to ideology. We are mostly members of a nation by birth, just as we are born into an ethnicity. Despite that, recent wars in the Balkans, Rwanda, the Congo, and currently in Darfur are still waged on the premise that enemies are worthy of destruction because they are members of an undesirable ethnic group. World opinion claims that this is a poor reason to kill, but we in the developed world are not so appalled as to actually do anything about it except, as in the case of the former Yugoslavia, when it’s close to our own dominant ethnic homeland (Europe) and/or the people there look like the majority of us. This may also reveal deep-seated ethnic bias, and while we may not actively want the people in Darfur to die, neither are we sufficiently moved to try to keep them alive.

This brings us back to the other way we condemn people to death, neglect and abuse, and brings us back to the problematic question of suicide prevention that created this paroxysm of thought. In the United States, the poor are often also members of ethnic minorities, and so the decisions by the ruling classes to let them suffer and die may be based on ethnic biases. But it is also a question of ideology and bad behavior: capitalism postulates economic failure is a result of an inability to compete in the marketplace because of bad character or poor decision-making. Thus the poor are simply not fit to live, or at least not fit to thrive. The market has spoken on the matter and found them wanting. When the underclasses petition the government for redress, the successful capitalist–who has obviously done the “right” thing, made the “right” decisions, had “what it took” (ie. the right character)–feels imposed upon. He would rather these people be “taught” the “lesson” of the marketplace than be helped because it reinforces his ideological position. So in a capitalist state, the poor are deserving of neglect because, while perhaps innocent of out-and-out malice, they are guilty of not “helping themselves.”

This ideological/behavioral approach can be scaled up to the global level. Presently, some one billion people are in danger of starving to death, which from the perspective of the neo-conservative “global marketplace” is just fine. Still, I can’t help but see this as also a problem of class combined with good old-fashioned xenophobia: the world’s rich and middle-class are “us” and the poor are “them.” We haven’t really “earned” the wealth we were born into, but it defines us over and against those whose births were not so blessed.

What I find so disturbing about these thoughts is that despite all of our protestations to the contrary, nearly all of us want someone or some group of people dead, generally for reasons we could readily change if we wanted to. That we don’t want this points to either some deep-seated need to reinforce an internal viewpoint or, perhaps, some deep-seated need to justify or exercise a homicidal urge. Some argue that certain circumstances like war make it “necessary” to kill or let others die but that we find the notion personally repulsive. If that is so, then why are we not more willing to find alternative ways to meet the necessity that will spare the life? The necessity position fails unless and until every possible means, as is already the case in suicide prevention, has been exhausted first.