IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND

RESEARCH

ISSN: 1528-3488 (Print) 1532-706X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hidn20

Us and Them: Identity and Genocide

David Moshman

To cite this article: David Moshman (2007) Us and Them: Identity and Genocide, IDENTITY:
AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 7:2, 115-135, DOI:
10.1080/15283480701326034

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15283480701326034

Published online: 05 Dec 2007.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 1525

View related articles

Citing articles: 19 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=hidn20
IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 7(2), 115–135
Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Us and Them:
Identity and Genocide
David Moshman
Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Lincoln, Nebraska, USA

Genocide is commonly deemed to be either inexplicable or the result of special ha-

treds. I argue instead that genocide is an extreme result of normal identity processes.
Four overlapping phases are proposed. (1) Dichotomization elevates one dimension
of identity over others and, within that dimension, sharply distinguishes two catego-
ries: us and them. This may lead to (2) dehumanization, in which “they” come to be
seen not just as different from “us” but as outside the human universe of moral obli-
gation. (3) Destruction may result, accompanied and followed by processes of (4) de-
nial that enable the perpetrators to maintain their moral self-conceptions. These
phases are illustrated with examples from the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide in
Rwanda, the Latin American dirty wars of the 1970s and 1980s, and the European
conquest of the Americas.

Us …
… and them
And after all we’re only ordinary men
Me …
… and you
God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do

—Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the June 2005 meeting of the Jean Piaget Society in
Vancouver, British Columbia; in an October 2005 talk at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri; in a
November 2006 talk to Nebraska Citizens for Science in Lincoln, Nebraska; and as the keynote address
at the November 2006 UNL College of Education and Human Sciences Student Research Conference,
also in Lincoln. I am grateful to session organizer and discussant Michael Chandler for his thoughtful
comments following the presentation at the Piaget Society and to Michael Hulsizer, Clay Naff, and
Margaret Latta, respectively, for organizing the three subsequent presentations.
Address correspondence to David Moshman, Department of Educational Psychology, University of
Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588–0345. E-mail: dmoshman1@unl.edu
116 MOSHMAN

If you knew who I was and who you were, you would not have killed me.

—Sign outside the Nyamata, Rwanda, Catholic Church, in which 10,000 people
were killed on a single day in 1994 (Packer, 2002, p. 140).

Genocides are perpetrated by individuals acting collectively on behalf of what they

perceive to be their own group against what they perceive to be a different group.
At the heart of any genocide, then, are individuals who see themselves in ways that
enable them to act collectively on behalf of their own group against another. At the
heart of any genocide, in other words, is identity.
In attributing genocide to identity I do not mean to suggest that identity neces-
sarily leads to genocide or that no other concepts are relevant to explaining geno-
cide. I do suggest, however, that the concept of identity is crucial to any explana-
tion of genocide. In this article, looking at genocide through the lens of identity, I
propose that genocide can be understood as a process consisting of four overlap-
ping phases: dichotomization, dehumanization, destruction, and denial. I address
each of these in turn after some preliminary comments on genocide and identity.

GENOCIDE AND IDENTITY

By genocide, I mean an act or process of destruction aimed at an abstractly defined

group of people. There may be many perpetrators but their actions must be suffi-
ciently coordinated to constitute a singular act or process. The genocidal process
may include deliberate acts of mass killing, but it may also consist, entirely or in
part, of other actions undermining the biological, social, or cultural integrity of the
victim group. The acts of destruction may be aimed at individuals, but the individ-
uals are targeted on the basis of their actual or perceived association with a na-
tional, ethnic, racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, or other abstractly de-
fined group. The group must be deliberately targeted, but the process may be
deemed genocidal even if the motives of the perpetrators are complex and multi-
faceted, even if their perceptions of the victim group are wildly inaccurate, and
even if the extent of destruction is less than total.
This definition is rooted in the original conception of genocide proposed by Ra-
phael Lemkin (1944) and elaborated in a 1946 Resolution of the United Nations
General Assembly (Churchill, 1997; Moshman, in press). Although the 1948
United Nations Genocide Convention is definitive for legal purposes, it is gener-
ally seen by genocide scholars as seriously flawed (for critiques and alternatives,
see Chalk & Jonassohn, 1990; Charny, 1994; Churchill, 1997; Fein, 1993;
Moshman, 2001, in press; Totten, Parsons, & Hitchcock, 2002). The present analy-
sis of the role of identity in genocide does not hinge on details of definition but it
does assume a general conception of genocide as group destruction.
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 117

How, then, shall we explain genocide? For the most part, I suggest, we do not
want to explain it at all. What we want, especially in the most obvious and grue-
some cases, is to condemn the perpetrators and remind ourselves how different
“we” are from “them.” We resist even trying to understand why the perpetrators did
what they did because we fear this may make it more difficult to condemn them.
Such understanding may even suggest that we, under the same circumstances,
would have done the same. Instead of seeking to explain, then, we take refuge in
the mystification that genocide defies explanation. We condemn its perpetrators
and sympathize with its victims, but assume that we can never understand it. Geno-
cides, we insist, are unique evils that rend the fabric of history, black holes in the
space-time of human experience from which no meaning can ever escape. Geno-
cide is literally incomprehensible, we would like to believe, at least for good peo-
ple like us.
This reaction is psychologically understandable but scientifically unhelpful. A
guiding assumption of any social science is that human behavior⎯good, bad,
right, or wrong⎯can, at least to some extent, be explained. The role of psychology,
sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences is to seek such explanations.
Thus the scientific study of genocide must assume that genocides can and should
be explained. This does not preclude labeling and condemning particular acts,
events, or persons as evil, but it reminds us that neither labels nor condemnations
are explanations. As scientists, it is explanations we seek.
Perhaps the standard psychological explanation of genocide is that it is a crime
of hate. In contrast to simply characterizing genocide as evil, to attribute it to hate
is to hypothesize a cause. To see genocide as a crime of hate is to refer to a genuine
and relevant psychological phenomenon. People do hate, and this undoubtedly
plays a role in genocide (Sternberg, 2005). We should be wary, however, of easy
suppositions that perpetrators of genocide are driven by hate. In a recent series of
case studies (Moshman, 2005b), I looked for hatred in connection with the 1994
genocide in Rwanda, the Nazi death camp Treblinka, disappearances in Argentina,
a dirty war massacre in El Salvador, and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. One
might think these were the right kinds of places to look, but in fact hatred turned
out to be surprisingly elusive. There was less hate than I expected and strong evi-
dence for a variety of alternative motivations.
The complexity of genocidal motivation, however, is no reason to abandon the
search for explanation. On the contrary, explanation is not only possible but has to
some extent already been achieved. There is, it appears, an emerging consensus
among genocide scholars that genocides and mass killings are mostly perpetrated
by ordinary people playing social roles in groups, institutions, and practices to
which they are politically, religiously, philosophically, ideologically, morally, pro-
fessionally, economically, and/or personally committed (Arendt, 1963/1994;
Ashmore, Jussim, Wilder, & Heppen, 2001; Browning, 1998, 2004;
Maybury-Lewis, 2002; Moshman, 2004a, 2004b; Osiel, 2001; Sereny, 1983;
118 MOSHMAN

Staub, 1989, 2001, 2003; Totten et al., 2002; Waller, 2002; Weitz, 2003; Woolf &
Hulsizer, 2005). There may be a relatively small number of individuals who play
disproportionate roles in the turn toward destruction (Valentino, 2004), but they act
on behalf of the group.
Genocide, in other words, is not so much a crime of hate as a crime of identity.
By identity, I mean a conception of oneself in one’s social context that is suffi-
ciently organized, explanatory, and conscious to be deemed “an explicit theory of
oneself as a person” (Moshman, 2005a, p. 89; see also Moshman, 2004b). This
conceptualization of identity is rooted in the neo-Eriksonian paradigm of personal
identity (Moshman, 2005a), but recognizes that to see oneself as a person is to see
oneself in relation to others and in relation to various groups. Correspondingly, to
see oneself in relation to a variety of people and groups is to see oneself as an indi-
vidual with a unique pattern of social relationships, affiliations, roles, and commit-
ments. Thus social identity requires, and can be rooted in, a socially plausible con-
ception of personal identity. As an explanatory concept, identity has the advantage
that it cuts across levels of explanation and across the social sciences (Appiah,
2005; Ashmore, Deaux, & McLaughlin-Volpe, 2004; Côté, 2006; Postmes &
Jetten, 2006). Through the multidisciplinary lens of identity, we can understand
genocide as an act of group against group without relinquishing our sense that indi-
viduals are, and must be, causally and morally responsible for their own genocidal
actions.
What, then, do we see when we look at genocide as a phenomenon of identity?
The path toward genocide, I suggest, manifests a process in which identity options
are drastically narrowed to two, and then to one.

DICHOTOMIZATION

People can define themselves with respect to many dimensions⎯tribe, race, reli-
gion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, ideology, political commitments,
moral commitments, professional roles, family roles, social relations, personal
qualities, long-term goals, etc. Not every possible dimension of identity is relevant
to everyone, but people generally define themselves on the basis of multiple affilia-
tions and commitments, some of which are deemed more central than others. As a
result, everyone has a unique identity but every identity potentially overlaps with
virtually every other in one or more ways.
Dichotomization involves the construction of social and cultural understandings
that render some potential dimensions of identity so salient or even mandatory that
others become peripheral. Increasing numbers of people see themselves and others
as defined on the basis of a small number of dimensions. At the limit, one dimension
is highlighted over all others as what does or should define who everybody is, and
that dimension is reduced to two categories (Brewer, 2001; Kelman, 2001; Maalouf,
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 119

2001; Sen, 2006; Stanton, 2004). There are always some who resist dichotomization
by continuing to classify themselves and others along multiple dimensions, thus al-
lowing more diverse interconnections and lines of communication. To the extent that
dichotomization prevails, however, alternative identities are increasingly
marginalized or disparaged. In the end, those who are not us are them.
Consider the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (Dallaire, 2003; Des Forges, 1999;
Fujii, 2004; Hatzfeld, 2005; Mamdani, 2001; Melvern, 2000; Mironko, 2004;
Moshman, 2004b; Power, 2002; Stanton, 2004). In precolonial Rwanda, there was
a fluid distinction between Hutu and Tutsi based on a combination of ancestry and
socioeconomic status, including ownership of cattle. This distinction, unique to
Rwanda and Burundi, was misleadingly assimilated by the Western media to more
familiar conceptions of tribe and ethnicity. Contrary to the resulting portrayals, the
Hutu and Tutsi were not tribes or ethnic groups. Rather, they lived among each
other, intermarried, shared religious beliefs, and were integral parts of a single so-
ciety⎯Rwanda. The Hutu/Tutsi distinction, though real and important, was but
one of many dimensions along which Rwandans classified and differentiated
themselves and others.
During the period of colonial rule in the early 20th century, Belgium reified and
exploited the Hutu/Tutsi distinction to control the country by enabling the Tutsi,
operating within Belgian parameters, to solidify and enhance their traditional
domination of the Hutu. Mandatory identity cards classified everyone as Hutu or
Tutsi (or Twa, constituting under 1%), thus elevating this dimension of diversity
above all others and officially dichotomizing the population. With independence in
the early 1960s, the majority Hutu took power. Many of them believed that their
time had rightly come after centuries of Tutsi domination. Correspondingly, many
Tutsi believed that authority in Rwanda had always rightly been theirs, and should
be regained. Thus the Hutu/Tutsi distinction retained its centrality in postcolonial
Rwanda. Despite explicit warnings that the identity cards could facilitate geno -
cide⎯which they later did⎯efforts to eliminate them were unsuccessful.
Prior to the genocide, Rwandans could see themselves as Rwandan, and/or as
Hutu or Tutsi, and/or as affiliated with or committed to various religions, profes-
sions, political parties, activities, ideologies, etc. Two Rwandans chosen at random
would likely have had in common that they were both Catholic (a colonial legacy)
and speakers of Kinyarwanda (the precolonial language) and were likely to have
other potential aspects of identity in common as well. The pathway to 1994 in-
volved a narrowing of options. As Hutu Power ideology spread through radio and
other means, Rwandans increasingly came to see themselves and others as, first
and foremost, Hutu or Tutsi, with other identifications and potential connections
distinctly secondary. As the middle ground collapsed, you had to stand on our side
or theirs. And in the early days of the genocide, the victims included tens of thou-
sands of moderate Hutu who were deemed by Hutu Power to have betrayed their
Hutu identity.
120 MOSHMAN

The path to the Holocaust similarly involved an ongoing process of dicho-

tomization. Jews in early 20th century Germany generally saw themselves, and
were generally seen, as Germans with Jewish beliefs and/or ancestry who varied
among themselves in most of the ways other Germans also varied. Highly assimi-
lated, they were generally seen as having individual identities that included, but
were not defined by, their Jewishness. As Nazi ideology prevailed, however, Jew-
ish Germans became a more distinct group. Before long, they were no longer even
seen as Jewish Germans but rather as German Jews. They had been part of German
society, with rights under the German state, but they had never been, and could not
be, part of the racially defined German nation. They were Jews. They were part of
the Jewish nation, along with the millions of Polish, Russian, and other Eastern Eu-
ropean Jews who came under Nazi control in the early years of the Second World
War. Thus Germans who were Jewish among many other things became Jewish
Germans in a more fundamental sense, and then German Jews, and finally just
Jews. Jewishness became a defining quality regardless of nationality, beliefs, pro-
fession, political commitments, etc. (Browning, 2004).
Argentineans also vary along many dimensions, but during the late 1970s, in what
came to be called the ”dirty war,” the political dimension became salient and ulti-
mately dominant. Not only did people come to be defined by their politics, but poli-
tics was reduced to just two categories, patriotic or subversive (Arditti, 1999;
Bouvard, 1994; Fisher, 1989; Osiel, 2001). Parallel processes of dichotomization
took place at about the same time throughout Latin America. In El Salvador, Guate-
mala, and other Central American countries, entire villages and regions were catego-
rized as patriotic or subversive (Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999; Danner, 1994;
Sanford, 2003). Villages perceived as supporting insurgents were in a different cate-
gory than villages perceived as supporting the military governments. In the “red
zones,” moreover, all villages, and thus all people, were assumed to be supportive of
the insurgents. If you were living in a red zone, you were one of them, not one of us.
In cases of first contact between different groups, dichotomization is not a pro-
cess but a starting point. The initial encounters of indigenous peoples and European
nations in the Americas, for example, were encounters between pre-existing groups.
In cases such as these, each group is faced, perhaps quite suddenly, with the existence
of an unexpected other. This may generate questions that otherwise arise only in the
course of what is often an extended process of dichotomization. Questions about
who “they” are, moreover, entail questions about who “we” are, and the answers to
those questions guide us in determining what to do about “them.”

DEHUMANIZATION

To dichotomize is not necessarily to elevate one identity over another. One can be-
lieve, for example, that people are most fundamentally defined by their racial an-
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 121

cestry without believing that any race is superior to any other. Alternatively, one
can believe that people are most fundamentally defined by their religious commit-
ments without believing that any particular religious commitment is the right one.
As should be clear from these examples, however, people often have strong prefer-
ences for some identities over others, especially with regard to what they consider
the most fundamental set of categories and commitments. In some cases, identities
deemed inferior may be actively stigmatized or, in the extreme, dehumanized. In
dehumanization, those deemed to be members of the out-group are denied the sta-
tus of persons. Rather than being seen as members of a human community with in-
dividual identities of their own, they are construed as elements of a subhuman,
nonhuman, or antihuman collective (Woolf & Hulsizer, 2005).
In the period leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, the Tutsi
were persistently portrayed in Hutu Power propaganda as inyenzi, cockroaches.
Not only were they a group distinct from the Hutu, regardless of their individual
identity commitments, but they were increasingly construed as a group distinct
from humanity, not capable of meaningful individual identities. Thus the killing of
Tutsi was no more a violation of individual rights than the killing of cockroaches
or, in another metaphor also popularized by Hutu Power, the pulling of weeds. On
the contrary, given the threat allegedly posed by the Tutsi to the future of Rwanda,
their elimination was deemed a moral imperative.
Similarly, a key aspect of the path to the Holocaust was the relentless dehuman-
ization of Jews (Stannard, 1998, pp. 182–183). As Germans with Jewish ancestry
were increasingly seen as Jews above all else, they came to be seen as less than
fully German, and ultimately as less than fully human, part of a nonhuman mass of
Jews. For Hitler, Jews were antihuman. Weitz (2003) provides a concise summary
of the biological metaphors of Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Jews were the maggots feed-
ing on a rotting corpse, the parasites that had to be surgically removed, the sexual
predators preying on German women, a spider that sucks people’s blood, a plague
worse than the Black Death, the sponger who spreads like a noxious bacillus and
then kills his host” (p. 106). Franz Stangl, in contrast, did not share Hitler’s ani-
mosity toward Jews, but Stangl’s blander dehumanizations were sufficient to en-
able him to serve as commandant of the death camp Treblinka (Moshman, 2005b;
Sereny, 1983). To him the Jews were more like “cattle,” a mindless herd, making its
way toward the slaughterhouse where it would be transformed into “a mass of rot-
ting flesh” that “had nothing to do with humanity.” The Jews were “cargo” to be
transported and their bodies were “garbage” to be disposed of. “I rarely saw them
as individuals,” he explained. “It was always a huge mass.” (Sereny, 1983, p. 201)
In Argentina in the late 1970s, individuals who questioned the status quo or
worked with the poor ceased, at least from the perspective of the military govern-
ment, to be Argentines with leftist beliefs and/or commitments to social justice.
Now they were deemed subversives, threats to Argentina and to all true Argen-
tines. They were not simply different from other members of the diverse human
122 MOSHMAN

community. They were outside that community and in opposition to it. As General
Ramon Camps explained, “It wasn’t people that disappeared, but subversives”
(quoted in Fisher, 1989, p. 102). The same process of dehumanization operated in
Chile and elsewhere during the Latin American dirty wars.
In Central America, as noted above, entire villages and regions were deemed
subversive. The beliefs and commitments of particular persons were beside the
point. Not even the complete absence of any political consciousness, as in the case
of young children, was relevant. The villagers were perceived as the human sea in
which the guerrilla fish swam, and without which they could not operate. Inhabit-
ants of subversive villages or red zones were part of a subversive collective, not in-
dividuals with identities of their own. They were a threat to the human and moral
universe, not part of it. In Guatemala, Mayans who survived the destruction of their
villages ended up desperately seeking food, water, and shelter in the mountains,
where, increasingly forced to live like animals, they were hunted down as such. In
operations known as “hunting the deer,” multiple platoons would surround a large
forested area into which soldiers would shoot from three sides. Terrified Mayans
would flee in the only remaining direction and run into military forces ready to fin-
ish the kill (Sanford, 2003, p. 160).
In the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola, the rest of the Caribbean, and then the
mainland, the human status of the “Indians” was always a major question. Were
they people? Did they have souls? Or were they just part of the flora and fauna of
the New World? Opinions differed on these questions but perhaps the mainstream
view was that Indians were in a category of their own, or one they shared with
black Africans: They were “savages,” more human than any animal but not part of
the “civilized” world. The ubiquitous rapes of female Indians, in this regard, are
telling (Stannard, 1992, pp. 84–85). The exceptional brutality of these rapes
tempts the observation that the Spanish men treated their victims like animals, but
this is not true. They did not rape or brutalize female animals. But neither did the
Spanish men treat female Indians like Spanish women. Spanish women were not
systematically raped with impunity and ideological approval. Whatever sex dis-
crimination Spanish women suffered, they were nevertheless Spanish. They were
females within a human community, and thus women. From the Spanish point of
view, female Indians were not women; but neither were they animals. They could
be abused in a way no animal could be abused, but their violation was of no moral
consequence.
The language of dehumanization is extensive. Members of dehumanized
groups have been variously portrayed and seen as weeds, rats, vermin, dogs, cows,
viruses, maggots, microbes, parasites, plague, pests, snakes, spiders, lice, locusts,
cockroaches, cancerous cells, and malignant tumors. Less biologically, they have
been portrayed and seen as heretics, heathens, infidels, barbarians, savages, sub-
versives, or terrorists. And then there are the many specialized dehumanizing la-
bels and stereotypes for specific groups around the world. What all of these con-
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 123

ceptualizations have in common is that they restrict the moral universe to “us.”
“We” are moral individuals who acknowledge and respect our obligations to each
other. “They” are not just different but are not fully persons at all and thus not
among those to whom our moral obligations extend:

• There can be no moral obligation to cockroaches, whether they are literally

insects or the equally contemptible Tutsi.
• We have no moral obligation to the welfare of a cancer, maggot, or parasite
eating away at the body politic.
• We need not respect the human rights of lice infesting our hair, weeds over-
whelming our gardens, or vermin invading our homes.
• We cannot share a common moral ground with heretics, heathens, or infidels
who deny (what we see as) the very basis for morality.
• There is no moral limit on what can be done to (those who have been labeled)
savages, subversives, or terrorists.

Dehumanization reinforces and extends dichotomization. If “they” are some-

thing other than human, then they cannot share interests, values, or commitments
with “us.” Our own identities are diverse enough to affirm our individual humanity
but converge with regard to whatever it is we see as the fundamental difference be-
tween any of us and any of them. That difference is so fundamental, in fact, that our
moral obligations to others, which are of course obligations to other people, are not
obligations to “them.”
Thus we draw a moral circle around what we construe to be “us,” with a shared
understanding of who lies within that circle, and who lies outside it (Brewer, 2001;
Staub, 2001; Woolf & Hulsizer, 2005). Our moral obligations are obligations to
each other and to our collective identity. This need not lead to action against
“them,” provided we perceive them as keeping in their place and meeting what we
perceive as our legitimate expectations. But human groups often get in each other’s
way and fail to meet each other’s expectations. Groups often perceive each other as
threatening, whether the threat is genuine or not. Under these circumstances we
may come to feel morally obligated to join together against those who threaten or
impede us, and do what must be done. If we and they are evenly matched, the result
may be war. If not, it may be genocide.

DESTRUCTION

Consider genocide in microcosm: the 1981 massacre at El Mozote by the Atlacatl

Battalion during the dirty war in El Salvador (Danner, 1994; Moshman, 2004a).
An elite unit of the Salvadoran army trained by the United States, the Atlacatl Bat-
talion specialized in genocidal massacres. Its mode of operation was to take con-
124 MOSHMAN

trol of villages and kill everyone. On December 10, 1981, the soldiers of the
Atlacatl arrived in El Mozote, a mountain village of several hundred people. They
immediately ordered everyone to come out of their homes and lie face down in the
street. They then proceeded to kick and beat them, taking jewelry and crucifixes
and demanding information about guerrillas and weapons. Hours later, long after
dark, they sent the villagers back to their homes for the night. Before dawn the next
morning they ordered them out to the Plaza and kept them standing for hours. They
separated the men and eventually herded them into the church. There they were
bound, blindfolded, brutally interrogated, and finally decapitated or shot. They
took the women and children to a nearby house, from which the younger women
and older girls were later dragged to be raped and killed. Then they took the older
women in groups to another house, where they were shot. Later groups, seeing the
piles of bloody corpses through the doorway, had to be forced inside, screaming
and begging. Finally, the soldiers of the Atlacatl turned their attention to the hys-
terical children, smashing their heads with the butts of rifles and slashing their
throats with machetes. Then they herded those left into the tiny church sacristy and
shot them all to death.
This is the kind of behavior that leads us to see genocides as evils beyond expla-
nation, and the perpetrators of genocide as inhuman, as if they had just arrived
from another planet. If we want to explain genocidal behavior, however, we must
keep reminding ourselves, as often as necessary, that the perpetrators of genocide
are human, and that their behavior is human behavior.
What make genocidal massacres possible, I suggest, is a dichotomization of
identities and a conception of the other as less than human. In the case of the
Atlacatl Battalion, the villagers were inhabitants of what was called the “red zone,”
where “subversives” operated. The political identities of individuals within the red
zone, though diverse, were not relevant. All were part of a subversive mass that had
to be eliminated, even the children. For the soldiers of the Atlacatl, moreover, this
was a moral mission on behalf of their fellow Salvadorans and their nation: “We
are warriors,” they sang, “warriors all! We are going forth to kill a mountain of ter-
rorists!” (Danner, 1994, p. 50).
Governmental forces with similar motives destroyed hundreds of villages in El
Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere over the course of the dirty wars. In Guate-
mala, where the dirty war cost some 200,000 lives, the genocidal massacres specif-
ically targeted Mayan villages (Sanford, 2003). Many Mayans engaged in activi-
ties deemed subversive, ranging from community organizing to human rights
activism to material support for leftist guerrillas to active participation in violence.
To be indigenous came to be associated with subversion, making Maya part of
“them.” The destruction of Mayan villages was thus an integral part of the dirty
war.
The targeting of indigenous peoples by government forces, however, was not
new. On the contrary, it had by this time been going on all over the Americas for
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 125

nearly five centuries. On Hispaniola, where Columbus established Spain’s first

military outpost in the New World, his men exploited and brutalized the initially
friendly natives until they resisted. In response, as described by the Catholic mis-
sionary Bartolomé de Las Casas (1552/1992),

the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres
and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the
children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing
them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in
the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could
split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke
of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs
and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw
them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water,
“Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” (pp. 33–34).

Across Hispaniola, which now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic,
Taino villages were burned and their way of life destroyed. Many of those who
were not massacred outright were enslaved and worked to death, or died of starva-
tion, or both. Many were felled in massive epidemics by European diseases to
which they had no immunity. Many were so devastated psychologically that they
refused to procreate. Some killed their newborn children. From a 1492 population
estimated to be in the millions, the number of Taino on Hispaniola declined to zero
by the mid-1500s (Churchill, 1997; Rouse, 1992; Stannard, 1992).
The destruction of natives expanded concentrically far beyond Hispaniola in
the ensuing decades and centuries, and was widely deemed necessary and justified
not only by the Spanish but by other European powers as well. The English philos-
opher John Locke, in his Two Treatises on Civil Government, explained that rebel-
lious natives had “declared war against all mankind, and therefore may be de-
stroyed as a lion or tiger, one of those wild savage beasts with whom men can have
no society or security” (quoted in McDonnell & Moses, 2005, p. 513).
Group destruction can also be accomplished through nonlethal social practices.
A good example is the operation of Indian boarding schools in the United States
and Canada from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century (Adams, 1995;
Churchill, 2004; Lomawaima, 1994). Attended by children from dozens of tribes,
the residential schools were designed to eliminate Indian cultures by severing the
link between generations. Isolated from their families and communities, students
were issued new clothes and new names. Boys had their long hair cut, often to their
great dismay, and all children received clothing suitable for their gender in “civi-
lized” society. Indian names, usually rich with cultural meanings, were replaced
with names deemed more appropriate for students’ future lives. Luther Standing
Bear (quoted in Adams, 1995, p. 111) recalled that days after his arrival at Carlisle
126 MOSHMAN

Indian School⎯before the students could even speak, much less read, Eng-
lish⎯the interpreter said to his group, “Do you see all these marks on the black-
board? Well, each word is a white man’s name. They are going to give each one of
you one of these names by which you will hereafter be known.” Each boy was re-
quired to touch one of the names with a long pointer. The chosen name was written
out and attached to the back of his shirt. “When my turn came, I took the pointer
and acted as if I were about to touch an enemy. Soon we all had the names of white
men sewed on our backs.”
Students were expected to learn English not as a second language to supplement
their first but as a replacement for it. Accordingly they were strictly forbidden to
speak their native languages. Teacher Minnie Jenkins recalled an occasion on
which she laid 35 kindergartners across tables “like little sardines” and spanked
them all for speaking their native Mohave (quoted in Adams, 1995, p. 141). As
children learned English, the curriculum expanded. Christian beliefs and middle
class virtues were fundamental. History lessons highlighted the progress of civili-
zation in the Americas since 1492 and their good fortune to be part of that. In addi-
tion, boys were trained in agricultural and industrial skills, and girls in domestic
skills, to enable them to function in the society into which they were being
assimilated.
The success of the Indian schools was proudly illustrated in widely distrib-
uted before-and-after photos that showed young savages transformed into up-
standing Americans. As Reverend J. A. Lippincott proclaimed to students at a
commencement at Carlisle Indian School, “The Indian is dead in you. Let all
that is Indian within you die!… You cannot become truly American citizens, in-
dustrious, intelligent, cultured, civilized until the Indian within you is dead”
(quoted in Adams, 1995, p. 274, emphasis in original). “Kill the Indian, save the
man” was the motto of the residential school system. No one would literally be
killed⎯in principle⎯but “Indians” would cease to exist. Thus children were
“saved.” What was killed was the subhuman identity that would otherwise have
been theirs.
Destruction has many forms. In Rwanda, some 800,000 people out of a popula-
tion of 8 million were killed, mostly with machetes and other such implements, in
100 days. Hitler killed many millions, and Stalin and Mao even more (Rummel,
1994). But the residential schools remind us that more subtle genocidal processes,
aimed across generations, can be equally effective in destroying cultures, quietly
extinguishing entire ways of life.

DENIAL

Denial accompanies and follows genocide so routinely as to constitute its norma-

tive final phase (Woolf & Hulsizer, 2005). Ongoing dehumanization of our victims
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 127

is one method of not facing the genocidal nature of what we have done. Other
methods of genocide denial range from brute rejection of the facts to more subtle
means such as not investigating what we don’t want to know; selectively remem-
bering what we already know; gerrymandering the definition of genocide to ex-
clude our own actions; recontextualizing historical circumstances to render our ac-
tions normal, understandable, or inevitable; and educating our children with
history textbooks devised primarily for the purpose of instilling patriotism
(Chomsky, 1989; Cohen, 2001; Hulsizer, Munro, Fagerlin, & Taylor, 2004;
Loewen, 1995; Moshman, 2001, 2004a).
In many cases, it is precisely our own identity as moral agent that forces us to
deny the identities of those we destroy. The concept of moral identity has served,
especially in developmental psychology, to explain how moral motivation may be
stronger if (and to the extent that) being moral is a core identity commitment
(Bergman, 2004; Moshman, 2005a). But once we have done whatever we have
done, for whatever reason, our moral identities motivate us to deny or dispute evi-
dence and interpretations that make us look immoral. In particular, because geno-
cide is widely seen as the most terrible of all crimes, and because most of us see
ourselves as moral agents within a moral community, we are highly motivated to
deny that anything we or our group do or have done is genocidal (Hamblett, 2005;
Moshman, 2001, 2004a).
In Argentina during the dirty war, especially in the late 1970s, students and
young adults who had, or were perceived to have, leftist political commitments, in
some cases simply because they worked with the poor, were kidnapped by govern-
ment forces, tortured for months in hundreds of secret facilities around the country,
and finally killed. Sometimes their bodies were tossed from cars onto dark streets.
Often they were buried in secret graves. Many were sedated and dropped alive
from airplanes into the Atlantic Ocean. Children kidnapped with their parents or
born in prison, if not destroyed with the rest of their “subversive” family, were se-
cretly placed with childless parents to be raised as proper Argentines and Catholics
with due respect for “tradition, family, and property” (Arditti, 1999; Bouvard,
1994; Fisher, 1989; Moshman, 2005b; Osiel, 2001).
Parents of the disappeared had no knowledge of the fate of their children and were
initially as isolated as they were devastated. In time, however, some came together,
and before long there were weekly marches in Buenos Aires by those who came to be
known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Then the Grandmothers of the Plaza de
Mayo organized to seek their grandchildren⎯the missing children of their missing
children⎯arguing that only thus could the children of the disappeared reclaim their
rightful identities. In response to all inquiries and demonstrations, the government
insisted it knew nothing. The allegedly missing men, it was suggested, had left their
families to join subversive groups. The women had gone off to become prostitutes.
The alleged children did not exist. There was no missing group of people, claimed
the government, no collective identity that had been targeted for destruction (Arditti,
128 MOSHMAN

1999; Bouvard, 1994; Fisher, 1989; Mellibovsky, 1997; for a fictional account of on-
going denial sixty years later, see Moshman, 2006).
This pattern of elimination and denial, rooted in Nazi Germany’s Nacht und
Nebel (Night and Fog) program, became known as “disappearances.” The victims
were said to have been disappeared. To be disappeared is not to have something
happen to you but to have something done to you. Tens of thousands of individuals
were disappeared during the dirty war in Argentina, and tens of thousands more
elsewhere in Latin America, including Guatemala, El Salvador, and Chile. The of-
ficial view of the government was that the so-called disappeared had never existed,
and thus there was nothing to explain.
Given the prevalence of denial, most genocides are, in a fundamental sense, col-
lective disappearances. The hundreds of villages in Guatemala, El Salvador, and
elsewhere that were eliminated in the dirty wars are long forgotten, especially in
the United States (Archdiocese of Guatemala, 1999; Sanford, 2003). Through a
fortuitous set of events, the massacre at El Mozote was reported on the front pages
of the New York Times and the Washington Post in January 1982. Nevertheless, it
was still successfully denied by the Reagan Administration in its request to Con-
gress for continuing aid to the Salvadoran military (Danner, 1994; Moshman,
2004a). In part, the denial relied on a mentality of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The Ad-
ministration knew less than it could have found out, reported less than it knew, and
relied on Congress not to want more information. In addition, the denial involved
misleading processes of contextualization. Although the Salvadoran government
and its affiliated death squads were responsible for the overwhelming proportion
of killings in El Salvador, including genocidal massacres such as that at El Mozote,
the Administration presented governmental atrocities as if they were an expected,
and declining, piece of a larger context of violence for which the government was
mostly not responsible. Some members of Congress denounced the Administra-
tion’s testimony as Orwellian, but Congress as an institution did not challenge ad-
ministrative evidence and interpretations. And so, not only was El Mozote gone,
but with it the knowledge that it had ever existed. The many other Central Ameri-
can communities destroyed in genocidal massacres are even less remembered.
They have been disappeared from the face of the earth.
Preparation for subsequent genocide denial often begins while destruction is still
in progress. A particularly systematic example of preparing for genocide denial is
Operation Reinhard, arguably the core of the Holocaust (Arad, 1987). The Nazis
considered it a secret of the highest order. In the three death camps of Operation
Reinhard⎯Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka⎯more than 1.5 million Jews were
gassed to death in less than two years. The cover-up, in preparation for future denials,
included the burning of all the bodies. This was a change in policy, necessitating the
exhumation for burning of hundreds of thousands of bodies that had earlier been bur-
ied. The annihilation of the Jews was seen by the Nazis as a necessary and noble un-
dertaking, but one for which they, and future generations of Germans, might not wish
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 129

to take responsibility. German moral identity had to be protected. Thus Operation

Reinhard ended with a systematic effort to eliminate itself and its victims from his-
tory. In Treblinka, after the transports, gassings, and cremations had ceased, the last
thirty Jewish slave laborers spent each night in freight cars on the railway spur until
they were shot by three SS men in late November 1943, five at a time, each group cre-
mating the corpses of the prior group. The final group was cremated by Ukrainian
guards. Treblinka was then demolished, as were Belzec and Sobibor. At the site of
each former death camp a small farm was created, and arrangements were made for
each farm to be occupied by a former Ukrainian guard and his family.
Denial is also important to bystanders as a basis for not intervening. In the case
of Rwanda, denial was a collaborative international effort led by the United States.
At the time of the genocide, the United Nations had a peacekeeping force of sev-
eral thousand soldiers in Rwanda under the command of Lieutenant-General
Roméo Dallaire. Dallaire made a convincing case, fervently and repeatedly, that
with a few thousand additional troops and an expanded mandate he could halt the
genocide in its tracks. From the US point of view, however, Rwanda was a small
central African country with no special resources and no strategic importance.
With the “Black Hawk down” debacle in Somalia still fresh in mind, there was a bi-
partisan consensus that intervention in Rwanda was out of the question. But as a
matter of American moral identity, not intervening in genocide was also unaccept-
able. After the Holocaust and the United Nations Genocide Convention, “never
again” is seen as a moral imperative, and Americans, like most groups of people,
see being moral as central to who they are. Thus it was critical to maintain that
what was happening in Rwanda was civil war, not genocide. All evidence was in-
terpreted accordingly. Use of “g-word” in public statements was eschewed. Ac-
ceding to American pressure, the United Nations not only failed to provide Gen-
eral Dallaire with the reinforcements and authority he requested, but instead
withdrew most of his troops. Only after hundreds of thousands of Tutsi and tens of
thousands of moderate Hutu had been killed, with the genocide nearly complete,
did the US acknowledge that “acts of genocide” had taken place (Dallaire, 2003;
Des Forges, 1999; Melvern, 2000; Power, 2002; Stanton, 2004).
Among Rwandans, however, the denial had only begun. It remains to this
day⎯and will remain for years to come⎯a work in progress (Hatzfeld, 2005;
Mamdani, 2001; Mironko, 2004). Although some perpetrators lie to protect them-
selves, most acknowledge the reality, scope, and genocidal intent of the killings in
which they and their Hutu compatriots participated. Their memories, however,
continue to reflect the dehumanizing conceptions that enabled their participation.
They remember the genocide as a series of daily hunting expeditions, a group pro-
ject in which they and their colleagues flushed Tutsi out of hiding, chased them,
herded them, and finally slashed them to death with machetes. Many of the perpe-
trators continue to see this as “work” that, unfortunately, had to be done, given the
existential threat posed by the Tutsi to the Hutu and Rwandan nation. Years later,
130 MOSHMAN

however, outside the context of the hunt, it is more difficult to see the hunted as ani-
mals, and thus to justify the killing. Not only must perpetrators now decide what to
tell to whom; they wrestle also, at the edge of consciousness, with recurring issues
of what to acknowledge to themselves. “Even in your heart of hearts,” said Ignace
Rukiramacumu, who hunted and killed Tutsi daily for a period of weeks, “it is risk-
ier to remember than to forget. Therefore I try to keep quiet with myself” (quoted
in Hatzfeld, 2005, p. 163).
Finally, on a scale of denial far beyond anything yet discussed, the nations of the
Americas remain virtually oblivious to their emergence from a series of genocides
that were deliberately aimed at, and succeeded in eliminating, hundreds of indige-
nous cultures (Barkan, 2003; Churchill, 1997; Stannard, 1992). History, we assume,
is a story of “progress.” Seeing the rise of “civilization” in the replacement of “bar-
barian” cultures with our own, we fail to see destruction all around us. Instead, we
speak of “vanishing” natives and cultures as if such vanishing were a natural process
for which no one is responsible, least of all us. Notions of “manifest destiny” gener-
ate visions of history as the inevitable unfolding of what was always meant to be, ob-
scuring the choices made by our predecessors and the options now available. In these
and other ways the nations of the Americas and most of their citizens do not see what
they do not want to know. Our national identities intertwine with our moral identities,
and no one wants to identify with a nation founded in genocide.
But even if there are nations not founded in genocide, it is doubtful there are
many without genocides in their history or without corresponding processes of
genocide denial. Denial is often easy to spot when our enemies do it, but our perva-
sive self-deceptions are all too successful. Sometimes we lie, but for the most part
we really do believe that they were less worthy than us; that they were a threat to
us; that we were faced with exceptional circumstances, with an enemy like no
other; that we intended no more harm than necessary; and that our crimes, if any,
have been exaggerated. What we did is what had to be done, what anyone would
have done. Even they must recognize that what happened is what had to happen.
Perhaps there were some unfortunate incidents, but such excesses are inevitable,
and we were not the only ones responsible. Now, in the name of peace, responsibil-
ity must be shared so we can all work together to achieve closure and move on.
Whatever the truth of our complex and tragic history, the time has come to forgive,
to join in reconciliation, to put the past behind us for the sake of the future.
Thus we forget⎯if we ever knew⎯what we do not want to know. Not seeing
genocide is often a challenge, but human cognition is up to the task.

CONCLUSION

The concept of identity, I have suggested, helps us see the pathway to genocide,
helps us understand how we come to do what we would not have thought possible,
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 131

and helps account for the aftermath, in which we deny what we have done. Dynam-
ics of identity initiate, guide, and extend the process of genocide. Dichotomization
enables dehumanization, which in turn enables destruction, after which we main-
tain our moral identities through processes of denial.
As we have seen, however, these phases are substantially overlapping. They are
not qualitatively distinct stages emerging in a stair-step progression. Dehumaniza-
tion reinforces the initial dichotomization that, by constituting the other as differ-
ent, makes dehumanization possible. Participation in destructive processes rein-
forces and enhances the dichotomization and dehumanization that enable and
justify destruction. As we join in doing what we know should not be done to peo-
ple, it becomes increasingly difficult to see our victims as people. Instead we see
them in ways that make it easier to destroy them and, ultimately, to justify having
done so. Thus dehumanization may accompany and follow destruction. Denial
typically accompanies and cloaks destructive practices and then takes on a life of
its own. Ongoing denial of what we have done⎯the denial that our victims ever
even existed⎯extends the dehumanization and completes the destruction.
Dichotomization can be seen in many contemporary situations. In the case of
Israel/Palestine, for example, the dichotomization is so severe that the inhabitants
and former inhabitants of the geographical area in question cannot even be desig-
nated without two names separated by a slash, as if to represent two worlds that
cannot be reconciled. “In a sense,” wrote Rashid Khalidi (1997, p. 17), “each party
to this conflict … operates in a different dimension from the other, looking back to
a different era of the past, and living in a different present, albeit in the very same
place.” Dichotomized identities generate divergent histories, which in turn gener-
ate divergent conceptualizations of the present conflict.
Dichotomization does not necessarily lead to genocide, but in strong forms it is
cause for serious concern, especially when it is accompanied by dehumanization.
Almost by definition, for example, those we label terrorists in the current “war on
terror” are seen as a group not just different from us but utterly beyond human rea-
son. The only way to deal with them is to destroy them. As in the case of the dirty
wars, whose targets were also labeled terrorists, there is considerable ambiguity as
to who is to be destroyed. But the moral logic seems clear. If those we destroy are
terrorists, and terrorists can only be destroyed, then those we destroy can only be
destroyed. We are doing what must be done.
It is not only our enemies, then, who slip easily into genocidal thinking. We all
do. Does it help to know that? Is there anything we can do about it? More generally,
what should we do about genocide? Does a conception of genocide as a crime of
identity provide any real guidance? I think it does, but what it tells us is not always
what we want to hear.
For one thing, a conception of genocide as a crime of identity reminds us that to
understand genocide we must see the victims, and the acts of genocide, from the per-
spective of the perpetrator. This is not only an intellectual challenge but an emotional
132 MOSHMAN

and moral challenge as well. To understand genocide, we must understand why the
perpetrators did what they did, which means seeing the world from their point of
view. And we must face the possibility that, if we are serious about this, their point of
view may turn out to be more understandable than we wanted it to be.
Second, a conception of genocide as a crime of identity helps block our natural
tendency to see ourselves and our groups as fundamentally different from the per-
petrators of genocide. It reminds us that we all have what it takes to commit geno-
cide: identities. It is easier to say this than to really believe it. We would rather
think that genocide is committed by people who are uniquely evil or hateful. We
must come to grips with the fact that genocides are committed⎯and denied⎯by
people like us, whoever “we” may be. It is not only our enemies who should reflect
on what they have done, and what they are doing.
Finally, a conception of genocide as a crime of identity makes it clear that there
is no simple means to eliminate genocide. If genocide were rooted in hatred we
could seek to eliminate hate, and we might at least manage to mitigate it. But we
cannot eliminate identity, nor would we want to try. What we might do instead is to
promote multidimensional identities rooted in the active coordination of multiple
affiliations and commitments rather than the simple recognition of one’s group and
incorporation of its beliefs and values. This is consistent with the Eriksonian un-
derstanding that achieved identities are preferable to foreclosed identities. But we
should not expect that we will eliminate genocide by making sure everyone has the
right kind of identity. Indeed, as we have seen in the case of the Indian schools, ef-
forts to shape identity may themselves turn genocidal.
To recognize that genocide is rooted in identity, then, is to recognize that the po-
tential perpetrators of genocide include all of us, individually and in our countless
collectivities. At our worst, wielding our identities, we categorize to the point of
dichotomizing, stigmatize to the point of dehumanizing, and deny, even to our-
selves, responsibility for destruction, past and present. At our best, we recognize
and counter these processes, and we can learn to do so more consistently and effec-
tively. But even if we could eliminate genocide from the world, the accomplish-
ment might only be temporary. As surely as we will always form identities, the po-
tential for genocide remains and with it the ongoing challenge to resist the forces of
dichotomization, dehumanization, and denial.

REFERENCES

Adams, D. W. (1995). Education for extinction: American Indians and the boarding school experience,
1875–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Appiah, K. A. (2005). The ethics of identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Arad, Y. (1987). Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard death camps. Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press.
Archdiocese of Guatemala. (1999). Guatemala: Never again! Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 133

Arditti, R. (1999). Searching for life: The grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the disappeared chil-
dren of Argentina. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Arendt, H. (1994). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin. (Origi-
nal work published 1963.)
Ashmore, R. D., Deaux, K., & McLaughlin-Volpe, T. (2004). An organizing framework for collective
identity: Articulation and significance of multidimensionality. Psychological Bulletin, 130, 80–114.
Ashmore, R. D., Jussim, L., Wilder, D., & Heppen, J. (2001). Conclusion: Toward a social identity
framework for intergroup conflict. In R. D. Ashmore, L. Jussim, & D. Wilder (Eds.), Social identity,
intergroup conflict, and conflict reduction (pp. 213–249). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Barkan, E. (2003). Genocides of indigenous peoples: Rhetoric of human rights. In G. Gellately & B.
Kiernan (Eds.), The specter of genocide: Mass murder in historical perspective (pp. 117–139). Cam-
bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bergman, R. (2004). Identity as motivation: Toward a theory of the moral self. In D. K. Lapsley & D.
Narvaez (Eds.), Moral development, self, and identity (pp. 21–46). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bouvard, M. G. (1994). Revolutionizing motherhood: The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Wilmington,
DE: SR Books.
Brewer, M. B. (2001). Ingroup identification and intergroup conflict: When does ingroup love become
outgroup hate? In R. D. Ashmore, L. Jussim, & D. Wilder (Eds.), Social identity, intergroup conflict,
and conflict reduction (pp. 17–41). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Browning, C. R. (1998). Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.
New York: HarperPerennial.
Browning, C. R. (2004). The origins of the Final Solution: The evolution of Nazi Jewish policy, Septem-
ber 1939–March 1942. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Chalk, F., & Jonassohn, K. (1990). The history and sociology of genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Charny, I. W. (1994). Toward a generic definition of genocide. In G. J. Andreopoulos (Ed.), Genocide:
Conceptual and historical dimensions (pp. 64–94). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Chomsky, N. (1989). Necessary illusions: Thought control in democratic societies. Boston: South End
Press.
Churchill, W. (1997). A little matter of genocide: Holocaust and denial in the Americas, 1492 to the
present. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Churchill, W. (2004). Kill the Indian, save the man: The genocidal impact of American Indian residen-
tial schools. San Francisco: City Lights Books.
Cohen, S. (2001). States of denial: Knowing about atrocities and suffering. Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press.
Côté, J. (2006). Identity studies: How close are we to developing a social science of identity? Identity, 6,
3–25.
Dallaire, R. (2003). Shake hands with the devil: The failure of humanity in Rwanda. Toronto: Random
House Canada.
Danner, M. (1994). The massacre at El Mozote. New York: Vintage.
Des Forges, A. (1999). Leave none to tell the story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights
Watch.
Fein, H. (1993). Genocide: A sociological perspective. London: Sage.
Fisher, J. (1989). Mothers of the disappeared. Boston: South End Press.
Fujii, L. A. (2004). Transforming the moral landscape: The diffusion of a genocidal norm in Rwanda.
Journal of Genocide Research, 6, 99–114.
Hamblett, W. C. (2005). Guilty of innocence or nobody remembers the Armenians. Journal of Geno-
cide Research, 7, 129–144.
Hatzfeld, J. (2005). Machete season: The killers in Rwanda speak. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
134 MOSHMAN

Hulsizer, M. R., Munro, G. D., Fagerlin, A., & Taylor, S. P. (2004). Molding the past: Biased assimila-
tion of historical information. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34, 1048–1074.
Kelman, H. C. (2001). The role of national identity in conflict resolution: Experiences from Israeli-Pal-
estinian problem-solving workshops. In R. D. Ashmore, L. Jussim, & D. Wilder (Eds.), Social iden-
tity, intergroup conflict, and conflict reduction (pp. 187–212). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Khalidi, R. (1997). Palestinian identity: The construction of modern national consciousness. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Las Casas, B. (1992). The devastation of the Indies: A brief account. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press. (Originally published in 1552.)
Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment.
Loewen, J. W. (1995). Lies my teacher told me: Everything your American history textbook got wrong.
New York: Touchstone.
Lomawaima, K. T. (1994). They called it Prairie Light: The story of Chilocco Indian School. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Maalouf, A. (2001). In the name of identity: Violence and the need to belong. New York: Arcade.
Mamdani, M. (2001). When victims become killers: Colonialism, nativism, and the genocide in
Rwanda. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Maybury-Lewis, D. (2002). Genocide against indigenous peoples. In A. L. Hinton (Ed.), Annihilating
difference: The anthropology of genocide (pp. 43–53). Berkeley: University of California Press.
McDonnell, M. A., & Moses, A. D. (2005). Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas.
Journal of Genocide Research, 7, 501–529.
Mellibovsky, M. (1997). Circle of love over death: Testimonies of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press.
Melvern, L. R. (2000). A people betrayed: The role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide. London: Zed.
Mironko, C. (2004). Igitero: Means and motive in the Rwandan genocide. Journal of Genocide Re-
search, 6, 47–60.
Moshman, D. (2001). Conceptual constraints on thinking about genocide. Journal of Genocide Re-
search, 3, 431–450.
Moshman, D. (2004a). False moral identity: Self-serving denial in the maintenance of moral self-con-
ceptions. In D. K. Lapsley & D. Narvaez (Eds.), Moral development, self, and identity (pp. 83–109).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Moshman, D. (2004b). Theories of self and theories as selves: Identity in Rwanda. In C. Lightfoot, C.
Lalonde, & M. Chandler (Eds.), Changing conceptions of psychological life (pp. 183–206).
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Moshman, D. (2005a). Adolescent psychological development: Rationality, morality, and identity (2nd
ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Moshman, D. (2005b). Genocidal hatred: Now you see it, now you don’t. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The
psychology of hate (pp. 185–209). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Moshman, D. (2006). The daughters of the Plaza de Mayo. New York: iUniverse.
Moshman, D. (in press). Conceptions of genocide and perceptions of history. In D. Stone (Ed.), The his-
toriography of genocide. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Osiel, M. J. (2001). Mass atrocity, ordinary evil, and Hannah Arendt: Criminal consciousness in Ar-
gentina’s dirty war. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Packer, G. (2002). Justice on a hill. In N. Mills & K. Brunner (Eds.), The new killing fields: Massacre
and the politics of intervention (pp. 129–153). New York: Basic Books.
Postmes, T., & Jetten, J. (Eds.). (2006). Individuality and the group: Advances in social identity. Lon-
don: Sage.
Power, S. (2002). “A problem from hell”: America and the age of genocide. New York: Basic Books.
Rouse, I. (1992). The Tainos: Rise and decline of the people who greeted Columbus. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press.
 IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 135

Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Sanford, V. (2003). Buried secrets: Truth and human rights in Guatemala. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Sen, A. (2006). Identity and violence: The illusion of destiny. New York: Norton.
Sereny, G. (1983). Into that darkness: An examination of conscience. New York: Vintage.
Stannard, D. E. (1992). American holocaust: The conquest of the New World. Oxford, UK: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Stannard, D. E. (1998). Uniqueness as denial: The politics of genocide scholarship. In A. S. Rosenbaum
(Ed.), Is the Holocaust unique? Perspectives on comparative genocide (pp. 163–208). Boulder, CO:
Westview.
Stanton, G. H. (2004). Could the Rwandan genocide have been prevented? Journal of Genocide Re-
search, 6, 211–228.
Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Staub, E. (2001). Individual and group identities in genocide and mass killing. In R. D. Ashmore, L.
Jussim, & D. Wilder (Eds.), Social identity, intergroup conflict, and conflict reduction (pp.
159–184). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Staub, E. (2003). The psychology of good and evil. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (2005). The psychology of hate. Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
Totten, S., Parsons, W. S., & Hitchcock, R. K. (2002). Confronting genocide and ethnocide of indige-
nous peoples: An interdisciplinary approach to definition, intervention, prevention, and advocacy. In
A. L. Hinton (Ed.), Annihilating difference: The anthropology of genocide (pp. 54–91). Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Valentino, B. A. (2004). Final solutions: Mass killing and genocide in the 20th century. Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press.
Waller, J. (2002). Becoming evil: How ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Weitz, E. D. (2003). A century of genocide: Utopias of race and nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Woolf, L. M., & Hulsizer, M. R. (2005). Psychosocial roots of genocide: Risk, prevention, and inter-
vention. Journal of Genocide Research, 7, 101–128.