EIGHT THESES RECONSIDERED

Murderous cleansing has been modern. In earlier times it sometimes resulted when conquerors seized the land but did not require the labor of the natives, while monotheistic salvation religions later attempted forced conversions. But the pace of murderous ethnic cleansing quickened greatly when modern people sought to establish rule by the people in bi-ethnic environments. “The people” came to have a dual meaning – as the demos of democracy and as the ethnos or ethnic group. Modern ethnic cleansing is the dark side of democracy when ethnonationalist movements claim the state for their own ethnos, which they initially intend to constitute as a democracy, but then they seek to exclude and cleanse others. There was also a dark side of socialist versions of democracy. The people was equated with the proletariat, and after the revolution cleansing of classes and other enemies might begin.

Yet the relationship with democracy has been a dynamic process, not a static correlation. Definitionally, perpetrating regimes cannot be democracies. Some were ethnocracies, democratic only within the ethnos, like settler regimes. Some began the slide into murderous cleansing by attempting to democratize, but then became authoritarian party-states, as in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Bolshevik Russia. The Young Turks began with democratic aspirations but slid simultaneously into authoritarianism and ethnic cleansing. Some began the slide as authoritarian party-states, with democratic processes already subverted during the preceding years, as in the Nazi, Chinese, and Cambodian cases.