In his much-praised History of the Jews, Paul Johnson reminds us that through the ages European "anti-Semitism was fueled not just by vulgar rumor but by the deliberate propaganda of intellectuals." This was a pattern that reached its apogee in the murderous mind of the Nazis, whose genocidal impulse was amply decorated and abetted by a phalanx of "scientific" and intellectual justification. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that the Holocaust still exerts a dark fascination over us, for it represented a "civilized" barbarity on a scale that had hitherto been thought impossible.
The phenomenon is not merely historical, nor is it limited to Europeans and Jews. Sub-Saharan Africa is today the site of genocides recently attempted, as well as those in what may be their planning stages. But, it is widely assumed, these matters are different-primitive "tribal" affairs, carried out with spears or garden tools, not gas chambers. While, certainly, there are differences, there are also striking similarities. Conspicuous among these is the key role played by intellectuals, and the active complicity of the most sophisticated strata of several African societies in fomenting, planning, supporting, and participating in mass murder.
This should not surprise us. Barrington Moore pointed out thirty years ago that, under approximately similar social conditions, proto-fascist ideas and their institutional attire could be found in less industrialized societies as well as in modern Western ones. He pointed to the Black Hundreds movement of czarist Russia, the Nohon-shugi movement in turn-of-the-century Japan, and similar, if more feeble, movements in imperial China and colonial India.
