>> Ben Valentino: I was especially pleased when I heard
that the theme of the TEDx Conference this weekend was
going to be "You might not realize," and that's
because there's many things you might not realize about the sort
of thing that I study: Organized violence in our world,
things like war and ethnic conflict and even genocide.
And maybe that's not so surprising actually
when you think about it because our society is amazingly
insulated from this kind
of violence even though that's not true
in any other parts of the world.
Think about it.
Right now the United States is involved in two separate wars,
most of the fighting and dying
and killing is happening thousands of miles away
from here where we don't see it.
We have 200,000 men and women fighting in Iraq
and Afghanistan right now, and that might seem like a lot,
but that adds up to just about six one-hundredths
of one percent of the American population.
And partly because we've been so insulated from this kind
of violence, I don't think we pay very much attention to it,
especially when it's happening in other parts of the world.
So if I were to ask you to name the most violent conflict
of the last 20 years, how many of you would have been able
to name the conflict -- the civil war that happened in Congo
in Central Africa from 1998 to 2003?
That conflict killed between two and four million people,
which is five to ten times more than died
in the genocide in Darfur.
In fact, another thing people don't tend to realize
when it comes to this kind of organized violence is
that actually most of it doesn't occur during war,
and most of it's not targeted against soldiers but instead
against innocent civilians.
So, in fact, by my estimate,
about a hundred million civilians have died in episodes
of intentional violence against civilian populations,
and that compares -- in the last 100 years --
and that compares to about 40 million soldiers who died in all
of the wars of the twentieth century and the first ten years
of the twenty-first century combined.
And because we're so removed from this kind of violence,
I think even those of us who do pay attention,
and maybe got some of those earlier questions right,
sometimes suffer from pretty serious misconceptions
about why it happens.
So if you ask Americans why did countries like Rwanda, Sudan,
or Bosnia descend into genocide and mass killing,
the answer you get's pretty simple:
People in those countries simply hated each other.
And it's not just the public that tends
to see things this way.
In fact, when Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger was asked
in 1992 if he could explain why Bosnia had then descended
into a genocide and ethnic violence,
he said pretty much the same thing.
He said, "There's no rationality at all about ethnic conflict.
It's gut, it's hatred, it's not for any common set
of values or purposes.
It just goes on."
Now, this story about the causes
of mass violence I think is an easy one to understand,
makes a lot of sense, but there's a real problem
with looking for the causes of mass violence in hatred
between groups in society, and it's not that problem --
the problem isn't that people in places in Rwanda
or Yugoslavia didn't hate each other,
because, of course, they did.
The problem is that if you look around the world,
you can almost always find groups that hate each other
in almost every society.
Right? And just because you hate somebody it doesn't mean
that you have to kill them.
In fact, if you begin to think
about all the different ethnic groups, social groups that exist
in all the different societies around the world,
conflict between those groups starts
to look quite rare let alone full-scale genocide.
Now, we tend to think about these hatreds or attitudes
as something that maybe only exists in the uncivilized world.
Right? It's not something that we think about here
in Western-developed democracies.
But, in fact, when you see a set of polls like this,
you see that attitude itself is probably ethnocentric,
the idea that it's only them that have these kinds of hatreds
and attitudes about minority groups.
Right? Disrespect and the thought
that minority groups are inferior, that exists here just
as much as almost anywhere else.
Still, despite these really depressing poll numbers,
I don't think a lot of people are particularly worried
about an impending genocide of Albanians, say, in Italy;
just not something we're worried about.
Why not? Because the fact of the matter is that these kinds
of attitudes are simply too common to be the main cause
of something as uncommon as genocide or mass killing.
Well, maybe it's just that the attitudes have
to be more widespread, more intense in the societies
where we see this kind of violence
than in the societies where we don't.
And that's an interesting hypothesis, too,
that seems to make some sense.
But when you begin to look at the places where this kind
of violence happens, what's so surprising is
in many ways they don't look all that different from other types
of multiethnic societies,
places where different ethnic groups maybe didn't get along
very well but nevertheless managed to coexist
without killing each other in huge numbers.
In fact, another thing you might not realize is that if you look
at intermarriage rates in places like Rwanda and Yugoslavia prior
to when the violence broke out,
those intermarriage rates were higher there between victims
and perpetrators than they are between African Americans
and whites today in the United States.
Maybe even more revealing when we think
about it this way is the cases of mass violence
that we can see happening in countries
where there's really little history of hatred
or discrimination between the groups that fell on either side
of the violence, and maybe the best examples here are the mass
killings that took place in communist countries
in the twentieth century,
places like the Soviet Union or China or Cambodia.
Again, another thing people don't realize,
these were the bloodiest episodes
of mass killing in human history.
Just those three countries probably account
for about 50 million dead in three countries alone,
almost all we're talking
about civilians killed outside of war -- civil war.
So, again, doesn't seem like in these countries
where the victims were not primarily
from different ethnic groups but instead were members
of the same social ethnic and cultural groups
as their killers, the hatred could really be the explanation.
In fact, tens of thousands of victims in each
of those countries came from the Communist party itself.
Right? Hard to say that it was preexisting differences
that caused that violence.
Now, if you think about it,
the converse is also true of this story.
We can think about lots of societies that existed
for long periods of time with relatively intense levels
of hatred and discrimination within them
but still didn't result in large-scale violence,
and maybe the best example of this I think comes
from our own not-too-distant past in this country.
Take the Jim Crow Era South.
Right? I think that's got to be
by almost any objective measure one
of the most openly racist societies
that existed during the twentieth century.
Remember this is place where blacks
and whites can't use the same bathrooms,
can't ride on buses next to each other,
can't sit at the same lunch counter, and, of course,
where blacks are routinely denied the right
to vote despite being citizens of this country.
You have to see that's much, much worse actually
than the way things would have looked if you'd looked
at Yugoslavia in the 1980s before the genocide there,
or in Rwanda in the 1980s before the genocide there.
None of this kind of stuff was happening in those places,
yet they saw violence and we saw, of course,
not a very peaceful society --
we wouldn't call the Jim Crow Era South one
of the most peaceful parts of American history --
but no organized mass violence on the scale
that I've been talking about.
Now, of course, these are just some historical examples I've
been giving you, but when we look across all countries
at the same time using sort
of large cross national statistical studies,
we find pretty much the same thing, that all of our measures
of ethnic differences in society don't correlate well
with whether the country ultimately has a mass killing
or genocide or whether it does not.
So now you might be asking yourself, why not?
because it does seem like common sense, doesn't it?
that where we would expect mass violence to take place
between groups is in the sickest societies,
those with the deepest cultural, ethnic,
religious divisions between groups.
Well, I think the reason
that these seemingly commonsense factors really don't tell us
that much about where violence occurs and where it might not is
because of another thing you might not realize
about this kind of conflict, and that is, unfortunately,
mass violence is simply much easier to carry
out than most of us think.
Most of us probably imagine when you think about violence
on the scale of what happened in a place like Yugoslavia
or Darfur or Cambodia, that this was half
of society turning on the other half.
Right? How else could
that conflict have been so amazingly bloody?
But actually when you begin to look closely,
you see that assumption is wrong.
Violence like this is almost never
that neighbor-killing-neighbor story that we read
about so often in the press or that occupies our minds
when we think about this kind of violence.
On the contrary, the more you look closely
at how this violence is carried out, the more you realize
that it's carried out by shockingly small numbers
of people; usually specialists in violence, people who are
in the military or paramilitary groups or sometimes groups
who are specifically recruited from criminal gangs or groups
of thugs, right, because they don't have moral scruples
about killing innocent men, women, and children.
All told, these groups almost never make up more
than about one or two percent of the adult male population
in the countries where mass violence takes place.
And just to put that in a little perspective for you:
In the United States today about five percent
of the adult male population is currently
in jail or on probation.
All right?
So less than that is what it takes
to carry out mass violence.
Let me give you a couple examples here
from the real world so you can see how this happens.
Here we have Cambodia.
Cambodia in 1975 the Khmer Rouge took power.
At that time they numbered about 70,000 soldiers
and an additional thousand or so political cadre,
the people who told those soldiers who to kill.
All right?
They took control of a country of eight million people,
and four years later,
two million of those people were dead.
At the most infamous Khmer Rouge political prison,
a place called S-21, there were about 300 people working there,
not all of them even involved in violence, some of them simply
over seeing the violence.
Yet at that one prison, 14,000 people were killed, most of them
in the space of less than two years.
In Yugoslavia, this group was one
of the most feared armed gangs in the war.
"Arkan's Tigers" they were called,
and they probably killed several thousand people on their own,
and ethnically cleansed tens of thousands of additional people.
Yet, again, most estimates of Arkan's group suggest
that he never had more than about 500,
at most 1000 people working for him at any given time.
Lastly, these are the Janjaweed, the infamous group responsible
for most of the violence in Darfur today, probably killed
about half a million people
and ethnically cleansed three million people during the course
of that war.
But again, the Janjaweed probably never numbered more
than about 20,000.
That's less than one tenth of one percent
of the population of Sudan.
And so if all that's right, then it's probably a mistake to go
around trying to generalize from what these people did, right,
and what they thought and felt, to what was happening
in the rest of society.
There's no more reason to believe
that they're representative of the societies
in which they acted than our prison population is
representative of our societies.
So now you might be asking yourself:
How can such small groups cause so much trouble?
How can they be responsible for so much bloodshed?
The thing to keep in mind here is that when we're talking
about mass killing as opposed to traditional warfare
between groups, the balance in numbers between perpetrators
and victims really doesn't matter that much,
because here we're talking about one-sided violence,
and when the perpetrators don't have to worry
about defending themselves from the other side, then the numbers
of people that they can kill just boils
down to a mathematical calculation, a simple one.
Right? How many killers are there?
How long do they have?
And how quickly do they do their work?
And if you begin to think about that mathematical calculation,
the numbers add up pretty quickly.
So if there were just 10,000 killers,
each of them killed just two victims a week,
at the end of the year that would be more
than a million people killed.
And so if that's true, then what we really want
to ask ourselves is not why some societies devolve
into mass killing and genocide and some don't,
because mass killing and genocide might not be something
that societies as a whole even do.
It's not a broad social phenomena.
And that's where we want to ask ourselves instead,
why is it that some groups or societies are better able
to keep the small radical, unrepresentative groups
who actually do do this violence in check while some cannot?
So the title of my talk came
from a famous quote by Edmond Burke.
Those of you who don't know,
Edmond Burke was a British statesman
and political theorist, and he has this very famous quote
which I think speaks to what I've been saying.
He says, "When bad men combine, the good must associate;
or else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice
in a contemptible struggle."
So the problem, in other words, when we think about this kind
of violence is not that the bad men outnumber the good men.
It's that the bad men are better armed and better organized
than the good ones are.
And so maybe this perspective can also help us understand why
it is that small groups of bad men, like, say, these guys,
don't manage to do more damage than they already do
in our society or other societies like ours.
Right? It's not because they don't have enough numbers.
Today the KKK probably numbers about 5000 individuals
in the United States; at their peek in the 1920s,
over two million people were members of the KKK.
So if you believe what I've been telling you,
that's more than enough to do an astonishing amount of bloodshed
if they were unopposed.
But, of course, in the United States today groups
like this are opposed by the military, the police,
the National Guard, and they stop these groups
from doing what they might otherwise do
if they were left to their own devices.
Now, in places like Yugoslavia or Rwanda or Sudan,
it's not as if everybody who is a member
of those societies was a member of the Klan --
that's the mistake, right?
-- weren't members of the equivalent of the Klan.
That's a mistake we make.
But it was as if the Ku Klux Klan controlled the government
and the military and the police and there was nobody else
to stand in their way.
All right?
And if that's right, then what the bad men need from us,
they don't need us to participate in the violence,
they don't even need our sympathy for it.
All right?
All they need is for us to stand aside and let it happen.
And I think it's here that actually those everyday hatreds,
stereotypes, and discrimination that I talked
about at the beginning of this talk begin to come into play,
right, because while those hatreds aren't enough to get us
to rise up and kill our neighbor, they might be more
than enough to prevent us from rising
up to protect our neighbors from the small groups
of determined bad men who actually do do the killing
in these kinds of cases.
Thanks.
[ Applause ]