Util frames must be renounced – they justify the exploitation of indigenous communities in desire for Western gain

Genocide is almost always a premeditated act calculated to achieve the ends of its perpetrators through mass murder. Sometimes, however, genocidal consequences precede any conscious decision to destroy innocent groups to satisfy one's aims. This is most often the case in the early phases of colonial domination, where through violence, disease, and relentless pressure indigenous peoples are pushed toward extinction. With the recognition of the consequences of one's acts, however, the issue is changed: to persist is to intend the death of a people. This pattern of pressure, recognition, and persistence is typically what happened in the nineteenth century. Today, however, when indigenous groups come under pressure, the intention to destroy them is present from the outset; there are few illusions about the likely outcome. The distinction, then, between premeditated and unpremeditated genocide is not decisive, for sooner or later the genocidal is transformed into genocide. Rather than being simply an expression of passion, genocide is a rational instrument to achieve an end. While these ends have varied from perpetrator to perpetrator and, to a large extent, by historical period, they have typically included the following: revenge, conquest, gain, power, and purification/salvation. From these we can construct a grammar of motives which, in effect, asks the perpetrator: What are you trying to do and why is it so important that you are willing to sacrifice thousands, even millions of lives (including those of children) to achieve it? Formal, but nevertheless useful, answers to these questions are contained in the different types of genocide, arranged in terms of the grammar of motives. Classified in this manner, the pure types of genocide are retributive, institutional, utilitarian, monopolistic, and ideological. Retributive Genocide. Retribution may play a role in all genocide, but it does so mainly as a rationalization: it is a way of blaming the victim. Though it draws from the vocabulary of justice and of judicially administered punishment, genocide destroys persons most often for what they are rather than for anything they have done. In this sense, retribution flows from the dehumanization that has been fastened to the victims before they are attacked. As a principal motive in genocide, retribution is rare, but it does seem to figure prominently in accounts of conquerors like Chingis-khan (Genghis Khan).9 Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how the "Conqueror of the World," as he called himself, differed in his actions when inspired by revenge than he and others did when they engaged in the institutional genocide associated with warfare until about the fifteenth century. Institutional Genocide. Institutional genocide was the major source of politically sanctioned mass murder in the ancient and medieval worlds. The massacre of men, the enslavement of women and children, and, often, the razing of towns and the destruction of the surrounding countryside, were universal aspects of conquest: genocide was embedded in the very notion of warfare.10 As such, no explicit decision had to be made to commit genocide -it had become routinized. In part, institutional genocide was motivated by the desire to create terror, to display one's power, and to remove the possibility of future retaliation. But it was also due to a failure of political imagination: genocide was a substitute for politics. Instead of ruling a city or territory, extracting tribute from it, and perhaps even incorporating it into one's own system of power and authority, the society was devastated. By the late medieval period this practice had largely ended in the West (indeed, it had begun to change with the Romans, who understood that only through politics could one build an empire), yet it became a prominent part of the Crusades and was made all the more deadly because of religious passion.11 In any case, institutional genocide continued in the East with figures like Timur Lenk until the fifteenth century. For some 500 years thereafter, the genocide of conquest disappeared. It is possible, however, that both guerrilla warfare and the use of nuclear weapons signify a revival of this early form of genocide. If the means are different, the motives seem not that dissimilar, and the consequences include both widespread devastation and the massive taking of innocent life by those in authority. Utilitarian Genocide. If utility played a role in institutional genocide, it became particularly prominent in the genocide of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, when colonial domination and exploitation of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Tasmania, parts of Africa, and elsewhere became pronounced. It has continued in the twentieth century, especially in Latin America, where Indians [indigenous people] have been subjected to genocidal attacks in the name of progress and development. Apart from the more sadistic aspects of this kind of destruction, the object has been Indian land-for the timber it contains, the minerals that can be extracted, and the cattle it can feed-and, at the turn of the century, Indian labor to harvest, under conditions of forced labor, the sap of the rubber tree.12 Richard Rubenstein has recently argued that development leads to a population "surplus," which in turn leads to programs to eliminate the superfluous population.13 What is happening with the remaining indigenous population of Latin America, and what was the fate of millions in various areas of the world earlier, has nothing, however, to do with a surplus population (whatever that is, for Rubenstein never defines his basic term). They are being killed, were killed, because of a combination of ethnocentrism and simple greed. The basic proposition contained in utilitarian genocide is that some persons must die so that others can live well. If that proposition no longer claims a large number of lives, it is because the previous genocide was so effective and the remaining tribes so small, with at most a few thousand members each. Yet precisely because of the tenacity of the assaults against them, and the small size of the groups, utilitarian genocide, although somewhat rare in the twentieth century, tends to be total.