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About 150 years ago, the grey wolf (Canis lupus) was distributed throughout the contiguous United States, except for in southeastern US from central Texas to the Atlantic coast, where the red wolf (Canis rufus) occurred. Conflict with agricultural interests resulted in government-supported eradication campaigns beginning in colonial Massachusetts in 1630. Over the next 300 years, the campaigns were extended throughout the US resulting in the near extermination of both species. In recent decades, efforts to recover the red and grey wolf were carried out. This chapter summarizes extermination and recovery efforts for both species in the contiguous US.

By the Revolution, public opinion universally accepted the idea that the death penalty should be used rarely, that it should involve as little pain as possible, and that the bulk of crimes should be punished by incarceration or forced labor. There remained some disagreement, however, as to whether the death penalty should be applied for all egregious crimes, or whether it should be used only as a last resort, when the state itself was in danger. Abandoning the old regime's spectacle of pain, representatives of the National Assembly like Guillotin insisted on humane and painless punishments. The legislative reforms which they enacted would put in place a new kind of death penalty, one which, although it was meant to be vaguely deterrent and therefore necessarily public, was first and foremost predicated on the extermination, or excision, of offending individuals from the social body, as discretely and unspectacularly as possible.

Nazi war was a means to Nazi racial extermination. Most Germans were indifferent or hostile to Jews due to traditional attitudes reinforced by Nazi propaganda. Germans also had modern concerns about their own health and illness that were now aggravated by the demands and dangers of a nation at war. This preoccupation with the self and its body was also intensified by the monolithic Nazi fantasy of ‘the Jew’ as an internal morbid enemy of the people's ‘body’ rather than just an external mortal one. Nazi ‘euthanasia’ of mental patients was undertaken under the cover of war, but the German public was well aware of it. This too further reminded the populace of escalating wartime threats to individual well-being and thus pre-empted active concern for the fate of those officially designated as ‘others’. Jews in the ghettos and camps suffered catastrophic incidence of sickness in advance of extermination. Even some Nazi murderers experienced physical and mental stress and breakdown from their ‘work’. And German fear of disease—especially typhus—was occasionally exploited by Europeans, even Jews, subject to Nazi persecution.

This book examines the European roots of humanitarian intervention as a concept and international practice during the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the politics and policies of Great Britain and France. It challenges two assumptions: first, that humanitarian intervention is a phenomenon of international relations that appeared after the end of the Cold War and second, that it emerged abruptly during the nineteenth century. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, the book investigates when, where, who, how, and for what reasons a humanitarian intervention was undertaken from 1815 to 1914. It argues that the primary motivation of humanitarian intervention is to end massacre, atrocity, and extermination or to prevent the repetition of such events, to protect civilian populations mistreated and unprotected by the target-state government, agents, or authorities. This introduction discusses the concept of rights, including natural rights, before the nineteenth century and provides an overview of the questions, assumptions, and issues raised in the book.

This chapter examines the international context of humanitarian interventions during the nineteenth century in order to understand why humanitarian intervention emerged as an international practice in the Ottoman Empire. It also sets the geopolitical context of humanitarian intervention, when Ottoman Christians were victims of massacre, atrocities, and extermination. The chapter begins with a discussion of the concept and practice of intervention in nineteenth-century international relations, explaining the term “intervention.” It then provides a brief overview of the history of the Eastern Question—the question of the survival or the death of the “sick Man of Europe”—before contextualizing the meaning of “massacre,” “atrocity,” and “extermination.” It also distinguishes between the Capitulations and intervention and concludes with an analysis of the extent to which military interventions against massacre built on the Capitulations.

Indian subcontinent experienced a major resource crunch between the fourth to tenth centuries of the Christian era. Caste society had developed an elaborate system of the diversified use of living resources that greatly decreased inter-caste competition, and frequently assured that a single caste group had monopoly over the use of any specific resource from a given locale. Different caste populations traditionally moderated or largely removed inter-caste competition through diversifications in resource use and territorial exclusion. The interpretation of the caste system as a form of ecological adaptation may be employed to show the two different paths by which conflicts between different modes of resource use are resolved: path of extermination and path of selective incorporation. The geographical diversity of the Indian subcontinent and the productivity of hilly and forested areas enabled the continuance of hunting-gathering and shifting agriculture in large expanses where the plough could not penetrate.

This chapter discusses how the conquest of the New World gave rise to vast manhunts that continued for almost four centuries and took place all over the Americas. This was a massive phenomenon with its specially trained dogs, professional hunters, weapons, and culture. As a social phenomenon, Indian hunting was indissolubly a large-scale economic activity, a way of life, and a cruel pleasure, a macabre form of sport—and this was so from the beginning of the conquests. Acquisition hunts were intended to take future slaves. Extermination hunts were entirely different; their main goal was the eradication of the population in order to conquer the territory. These hunts of conquest had to be provided with legitimations, with theories. How could the hunts for Indians be justified? That is where, very early on, philosophers made their entrance.

 An eliticide or ‘national ‘decapitation’ – a systematic and deliberate targeting and mass extermination of a nation’s ‘ruling minority’– is a form of organised and state-perpetrated mass violence that, until recently, has been escaping the attention of historians and social scientists. Eliticides emerged in the 20^th century as tools of social engineering and political conquest, primarily by Stalin and Hitler. The 1939-45 eliticide in Poland, conducted by the Nazi and Soviet invaders, not only weakened the resistance movement and undermined the social, political and moral order (thus opening the way for social pathologies), but also increased vulnerability to Soviet take over and fatally hindered the post-war social reconstruction of Poland. It resulted in the formation of a politically dependent and socially deracinated ‘quasi-elite’ with limited capacity for governing.

The chapeau elements discussed in the previous chapter represent the general requirements which any criminal act must meet before qualifying as a crime against humanity. In addition, the underlying offence which forms the basis of the charges against the accused must be one of the acts listed in Article 5 and Article 3, respectively, of the statutes of the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, namely: murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation; imprisonment; torture; rape; persecutions on political, racial and religious grounds; other inhumane acts. The perpetrator need not bear principal responsibility for any of these offences to be found guilty of a crime against humanity; it is enough that he participated in any manner specified in Article 7 and Article 6 of the statutes of the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals, respectively.

Genocide is often viewed as the ultimate crime against humanity, but they are in fact legally distinct. First, crimes against humanity and genocide have a different mens rea. Second, the range of underlying offences which may qualify as genocidal is more restricted in scope than those that may qualify as crimes against humanity. Third, crimes against humanity must be committed in the context of an armed conflict, whereas genocide may be committed in time of peace as well as in time of war. Fourth, the definition of genocide unlike that of crimes against humanity does not require that the acts of the accused occur in the context of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. Fifth, whereas a crime against humanity may only be committed against civilians, genocide can be committed against any member of the targeted group, whether combatants or civilians. This chapter also discusses the distinction between genocide and persecution and between genocide and extermination.

Like commentators under the Old Regime and the first four years of the Revolution, revolutionaries of the Year II characterized terror as a property of the law, deeming it exemplary, restraining, and “salutary.” They also employed a familiar pattern of characterizing terror as a legitimate resource to be directed against “enemies” and even represented themselves as the terror of those enemies, elaborating on a trope that had once been reserved for kings but now belonged to the sovereign nation. Yet they also attached meanings to the word “terror” that were absent during the earlier days of the Revolution. They associated terror with vengeance and even extermination, thereby skipping over their revolutionary forebears and drawing on biblical imagery. Their descriptions of a “holy Mountain” casting thunderbolts at the nation’s foes further presented terror as a sacred, divine force. It also recalled elements of the sublime and associated terror with fresh air and health, much as the medical literature of the Old Regime had sometimes presented terror as beneficial to the human organism. Revolutionaries imagined terrified enemies largely to reassure themselves. The idea that the enemy experienced terror was comforting to revolutionaries who themselves were frightened or even terrified.

In addition to the parameters established by the legal definition of genocide, this chapter also considers meanings ascribed to the term “ethnic cleansing” as starting points for a discussion of the warring logics intrinsic to events of mass extermination. The chapter then turns to Dominique Janicaud's insightful account of the way in which rationality is currently configured as it bears upon, even if it fails fully to capture, the character of the warring logics at work in genocide. The chapter interprets “logic” as a complex of interpretive indicators or perspectives that arise within the sphere of events. In the case of genocidal acts, these logics are exhibited as the modus operandi of the acts themselves. The first of these warring logics is best described as the rationality of unencumbered replicability, the sensed multiplication of individuals so that vast numbers are seen as indistinguishable from one another. This absence of distinctiveness gives rise to a second logic, the logic of indiscernibles, which the chapter explicates in terms of Emmanuel Levinas's concept of the il y a.

This book tells the tragedy of the Sonderkommando, work units of prisoners, composed almost entirely of Jews, who were forced by the Nazis to aid with the disposal of masses of Jews killed in gas chambers in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Holocaust. Sonderkommando members did not participate directly in the killing; their primary responsibility was to carry out various tasks related to all phases of the mass extermination enterprise. Those who were unable or unwilling to do their work had only one way of avoiding it: by committing suicide. An event known as the “Sonderkommando uprising” took place on October 7, 1944, at Crematoria I [II] and III [IV] in Birkenau, resulting in the death of 451 Sonderkommando prisoners. The thoughts, emotions, concerns, and sufferings endured by the Sonderkommando prisoners during their work at the extermination facilities are contained in the contemporary materials known as the “secret writings of the Sonderkommando,” which consist of diaries and other historical and literary texts, and written mainly in Yiddish.